Designing Russian Cinema
Title | Designing Russian Cinema PDF eBook |
Author | Eleanor Rees |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | 281 |
Release | 2022-12-15 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1350246379 |
This book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema's connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers' memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost ́, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.
Contemporary Russian Cinema
Title | Contemporary Russian Cinema PDF eBook |
Author | Vlad Strukov |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Total Pages | 304 |
Release | 2016-04-12 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 147440765X |
Analysing films by established directors such as Sokurov and Zel'dovich, as well as lesser-known filmmakers like Balabanov and Kalatozishvili, this book explores the particular style of film presentation that has emerged in Russia since 2000, characterised by its use of highly abstract concepts and visual language.
Cinema by Design
Title | Cinema by Design PDF eBook |
Author | Lucy Fischer |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Total Pages | 335 |
Release | 2017-03-14 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0231544227 |
Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890s through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadent cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau's long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement's enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Fischer begins with the portrayal of women and nature in the magical "trick films" of the Spanish director Segundo de Chomón; the elite dress and décor design choices in Cecil B. DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921); and the mise-en-scène of fantasy in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Reading Salome (1923), Fischer shows how the cinema offered an engaging frame for adapting the risqué works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Moving to the modern era, Fischer focuses on a series of dramatic films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), that make creative use of the architecture of Antoni Gaudí; and several European works of horror—The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Deep Red (1975), and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)—in which Art Nouveau architecture and narrative supply unique resonances in scenes of terror. In later chapters, she examines films like Klimt (2006) that portray the style in relation to the art world and ends by discussing the Art Nouveau revival in 1960s cinema. Fischer's analysis brings into focus the partnership between Art Nouveau's fascination with the illogical and the unconventional and filmmakers' desire to upend viewers' perception of the world. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.
Stenberg Brothers
Title | Stenberg Brothers PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Mount |
Publisher | ABRAMS |
Total Pages | 104 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Antiques & Collectibles |
ISBN |
The exhibition Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design, organized by Christopher Mount, Assistant Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, is the first critical survey of the work of these two seminal figures in the history of twentieth-century graphic design.
Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema
Title | Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema PDF eBook |
Author | Birgit Beumers |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 226 |
Release | 2017-11-22 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1317194705 |
This book, based on extensive original research, examines how far the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a threshold that initiated change or whether there are continuities which gradually reshaped cinema in the new Russia. The book considers a wide range of films and film-makers and explores their attitudes to genre, character and aesthetic style. The individual chapters demonstrate that, whereas genres shifted and characters developed, stylistic choices remained largely unaffected.
Russia on Reels
Title | Russia on Reels PDF eBook |
Author | Birgit Beumers |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | 232 |
Release | 1999-12-31 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 075560590X |
This is the first book to deal exclusively with Russian cinema of the 1990s. It introduces readers to the currents and common interests of contemporary Russian cinema, offers close studies of the work of filmmakers like Sokurov, Muratova and Astrakhan, reviews the Russian film industry in a period of massive economic transformation, and assesses cinema's function as a definer of Russia's new identity.
The Art of Film
Title | The Art of Film PDF eBook |
Author | Ian Christie |
Publisher | Wallflower Press |
Total Pages | 194 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN |
John Box had one of the most continuously productive design careers in British cinema, winning a record for Academy Awards and four BAFTAs. After learning his craft in the 1950s, he shot to fame with Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Directors from David Lean and Carol Reed to Norman Jewison and Michael Mann have valued his experience, as he brought `a vocabulary of life' to bear on the new challenges posed by each film. Whether creating Chaina in Wales for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), revolutionary Russia in Spain for Dr. Zhivago (1965), or Dickensian London for Oliver! (1968), imagining the mythic past in First Knight (1995) or the future in Rollerball (1975). Box shaped screen worlds across five decades, helping to establish the traditions of British production design which continue today. His greatest wish was that his career should encourage others by example. Based on interviews with John Box and the co-operation of some of his key collaborators, this lavishly colour-illustrated book focuses on solutions to design problems and provides a unique insight into the production designer's role in the collaborative business of filmmaking. --Book Jacket.