Lone Scherfig S Italian For Beginners Nordic Film Classics

Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Entitled Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners), Scherfig's Dogme film transformed this already accomplished filmmaker into one of Europe's most noteworthy women directors. Danish and international critics lavished praise on Scherfig and her film, and their reactions harmonized with those of festival juries. Battered by life, but by no means defeated or destroyed, the characters in Italian for Beginners are all in touch at some deep intuitive level with the truth that is the film's basic message: that happiness and a sense of self-worth are sustained by love--whether romantic love or that of a community of like-minded people. The film struck an important chord with viewers precisely because it took Dogme in a new direction, one that reflects Scherfig's sensibilities and preferences as a woman. The book includes the Dogme manifesto and draws on interviews with the filmmaker as well as with the cast and crew. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk7SGfrIHGA

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This is a book for cinephiles, pure and simple. Author and filmmaker, Jim Piper, shares his vast knowledge of film and analyzes the most striking components of the best movies ever made. From directing to cinematography, from editing and music to symbolism and plot development, The Film Appreciation Book covers hundreds of the greatest works in cinema, combining history, technical knowledge, and the art of enjoyment to explain why some movies have become the most treasured and entertaining works ever available to the public, and why these movies continue to amaze viewers after decades of notoriety. Read about such classic cinematic masterpieces as Citizen Kane, Gandhi, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, True Grit, Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, as well as more recent accomplishments in feature films, such as Requiem for a Dream, Munich, The King’s Speech, and The Hurt Locker. Piper breaks down his analysis for you and points out aspects of production that movie-lovers (even the devoted ones) would never recognize on their own. This book will endlessly fascinate, and by the time you get to the last chapter, you’re ready to start all over again. In-depth analysis and thoughtful and wide-ranging film choices from every period of cinema history will ensure that you never tire of this reading companion to film. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

If there is one film in the canon of Carl Theodor Dreyer that can be said to be, as Jacques Lacan might put it, his most �painfully enjoyable,� it is Gertrud. The film's Paris premier in 1964 was covered by the Danish press as a national scandal; it was lambasted on its release for its lugubrious pace, wooden acting, and old-fashioned, stuffy milieu. Only later, when a younger generation of critics came to its defense, did the method in what appeared to be Dreyer's madness begin to become apparent. To make vivid just what was at stake for Dreyer, and still for us, in his final work, James Schamus focuses on a single moment in the film. He follows a trail of references and allusions back through a number of thinkers and artists (Boccaccio, Lessing, Philostratus, Charcot, and others) to reveal the richness and depth of Dreyer's work--and the excitement that can accompany cinema studies when it opens itself up to other disciplines and media. Throughout, Schamus pays particular attention to Dreyer's lifelong obsession with the �real,� developed through his practice of �textual realism,� a realism grounded not in standard codes of verisimilitude but on the force of its rhetorical appeal to its written, documentary sources. As do so many of the heroines of Dreyer's other films, such as La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Gertrud serves as a locus for Dreyer's twin fixations; written texts, and the heroines who both embody and free themselves from them. Dreyer based Gertrud not only on Hjalmar Soderberg's play of 1906, but also on his own extensive research into the life of the �real� Gertrud, Maria van Platen, whose own words Dreyer interpolated into the film. By using his film as a kind of return to the real woman beneath the text, Dreyer rehearsed another lifelong journey, back to the poor Swedish girl who gave birth to him out of wedlock and who gave him up for adoption to a Danish family, a mother whose existence Dreyer only discovered later in life, long after she had died.

With more than 250 images, new information on international cinema—especially Polish, Chinese, Russian, Canadian, and Iranian filmmakers—an expanded section on African-American filmmakers, updated discussions of new works by major American directors, and a new section on the rise of comic book movies and computer generated special effects, this is the most up to date resource for film history courses in the twenty-first century.

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere introduces a new concept to Nordic film studies as well as to other small national, transnational and world cinema traditions. Examining overlooked 'elsewheres', the book presents Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic and geographically dispersed, from their beginnings in the early silent period to their present 21st-century dynamics. Exploring both canonical works by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, as well as a wide range of unknown or overlooked narratives of movement, synthesis and resistance, the book offers a new model of inquiry into a multi-varied Scandinavian cultural lineage, and into small nation and pan-regional world cinemas.

How have the dramatic events of the Second World War been viewed in the Nordic countries? In this book leading Nordic historians analyse post-war memory and historiography. They explore the relationship between scholarly and public understandings of the war. How have national interpretations been shaped by official security-policy doctrines? And in what way has the end of the Cold War affected the Nordic narratives? The authors not only present the overarching themes that set the Nordic experience of the Second World War apart from other European narratives, but also describe the distinctive post-war characteristics of Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. Key concepts such as national identity, memory culture, and the moral turn are placed in their Nordic context. Bringing new nuance to the post-war history of Europe, this is the first work to focus on Nordic narratives of the war, and is valuable reading for students, academics, and all who have an interest in the historiography of the Second World War or modern European history.

"Kipen's new heresy topples the old orthodoxy by studying the careers of screenwriters past and present in a witty, two-pronged attack: in part one, he dismantles the auteur theory and presents a convincing argument that screenwriters are the guiding creative geniuses behind the best films. In part two, he offers a compendium of mini-biographies of great screenwriters past and present. Who wrote Casablanca? Who wrote Twelve Monkeys? Who wrote Dead Girls Don't Tango? What else did they write?" "It all makes The Schreiber Theory an engaging read and a one-of-a-kind reference for movie lovers and film students alike."--Jacket.