Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 192
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-0-7425-3950-1 • Hardback • October 2007 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-0-7425-3951-8 • Paperback • October 2007 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
Ira Jaffe is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Media Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is co-editor of Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World and author of essays about Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Errol Morris, and Orson Welles. He founded UNM's International Cinema Lecture Series and Latin American Film Festival as well as the Department of Media Arts.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 1 Fact and Fiction
Chapter 3 2 Gangster and Warrior
Chapter 4 3 Melodrama and Teen Romance
Chapter 5 4 Tragicomic Accidents
Chapter 6 5 Global Parallels
Chapter 7 Bibliography
Chapter 8 Selected Filmography
Jaffe looks at film with scrupulous intelligence and provides revelatory frame-by-frame formal analyses. At the same time, he places these films and their directors in the broadest social, historical, and aesthetic contexts. . . . After reading this book, you'll view all films with greater clarity, and with deeper appreciation of the art and magic of filmmaking.
— Peter Walch, University of New Mexico
Anyone who wants to understand . . . more about the cutting edge of contemporary artistic creativity will find that Jaffe gives definition to what we are living through in some of our most dynamic cinematic moments.
— Allan Casebier, Emeritus Faculty, University of Southern California
Jaffe demonstrates the 'both/and' nature of our cultural reality and . . . the importance of dialogue—in this case dialogue between the interdisciplinary nature of the past century's avant-garde practices and how they have played out . . . in Hollywood films that are not only popular, but artistically important as well.
— Christopher Shultis, University of New Mexico
An engaging, adventurous study that seeks to break down the boundaries of genre—precisely, in short, as Hollywood is doing today. This interesting book could also serve as a text for a survey course on film genre. Recommended.
— Choice Reviews
Jaffe's prose is elegant and easily accessible, recapturing the delicate art of film analysis at its finest.
— Eric Patrick, Northwestern University
:
-Spotlights films widely regarded as artistically significant, rather than as noteworthy only commercially or generically
-Focuses on individual filmmakers—figures such as Tarantino, Almodóvar , Lynch, Haynes, and the Coen brothers—for whom genre mixing is a central artistic as well as commercial impulse
-Explores selected films in great detail
-Highlights films' cinematic as well as thematic concerns, including specific choices of images and sounds and distinctive usesof editing, camera, light, and color
-Includes an historical survey of U.S. and foreign cinema since 1900, encouraging the reader to probe connections between past and present
-Stresses connections between hybrid cinema and hybrid aspects of human experience and identity
-Includes a filmography and bibliography for further exploration and film stills