Books

Film Directing: Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen (Michael Wiese Productions)

Average customer rating:

Useful, pleasurable
Learning the Rules Before You Break Them
Good book
Great technical information, very useful resource
Visualizing

Film Directing: Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen (Michael Wiese Productions)
Steven Katz
Manufacturer: Michael Wiese Productions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Setting Up Your Shots: Great Camera Moves Every Filmmaker Should Know
The Five C's of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques
Film Directing: Cinematic Motion, Second Edition
The Filmmaker's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age, Completely Revised and Updated
Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film & Television

ASIN: 0941188108

Amazon.com

Film Directing Shot by Shot offers a good introduction to the rudiments of film production. Steven D. Katz walks his readers through the various stages of moviemaking, advising them at every turn to visualize the films they wish to produce. Katz believes that one of the chief tasks of filmmaking is to negotiate between our three-dimensional reality and the two-dimensionality of the screen. He covers the number of technical options filmmakers can use to create a satisfying flow of shots, a continuity that will make sense to viewers and aptly tell the film's story. Katz provides in-depth coverage of production design, storyboarding, spatial connections, editing, scene staging, depth of frame, camera angles, point of view, and the various types of stable compositions and moving camera shots.

Book Description

A complete catalogue of motion picture techniques for filmmakers. It concentrates on the 'storytelling' school of filmmaking, utilizing the work of the great stylists who established the versatile vocabulary of technique that has dominated the movies
since 1915. This graphic approach includes comparisons of style by interpreting a 'model script', created for the book, in storyboard form.

Customer Reviews:

Useful, pleasurable.......2007-05-07

I'm a college student, not at film school, who makes videos as a serious hobby. I thought this book was much better than other titles in the same market, because it's so specific. Instead of telling you what anyone with common sense knows, like "keep continuity" and "composition can affect the mood of a scene," this film lays it all out in detail. I recommend this for everyone who wants to improve. Even if you're not particularly interested in storyboarding, you'll learn how to think about your sequences in advance much better.

Learning the Rules Before You Break Them.......2007-01-13

Even though many of the great filmmakers may have not utilized storyboards, every one of them has pre-visualized their films.

Pre-visualization is the essence of what it means to be a director. A director can only be effective if he/she properly prepares for each scene. Even if one does not have every shot precisely planned out, they will still have an idea of the look and the flow of the process.

There are certainly many people who feel directing should be intuitive, that there should be no structure to the process or else creativity is stifled. This is a valid point from the perspective of the artist.

What is wonderful about this book is that it gives extensive insight into WHY one should cover a scene in a certain way. Directing as a profession requires a certain amount of preparation and PROOF that you have a handle on the film. Producers want reassurance that you have a vision worth pouring tens of millions of dollars into. Armed with the ability to properly express yourself in regard to your vision, you will have a much easier time convincing others to follow you.

So, in the end, if you are interested in studying the language of film and the methodology behind classic film composition and editing, then this book and the accompanying Film Directing: Cinematic Motion are essential.

Good book.......2007-01-11

This book goes a little overboard with all the storyboard info in it, but its still a highly educational book for novices. This book really wants you to develope technique for visualizing your film before you start shooting. That is beneficial for writers and filmmakers alike. I also have Katz' "Cinematic Motion" which a very good film directing book as well. I recommend buying them as a combo.

I wish the books were more aimed at video instead of film, but it really dont make much difference. The rules still apply.

Great technical information, very useful resource.......2006-06-01

This book covers everything you need from the technical aspects of setting up shots and planning your action. It uses storyboards as an effective teaching device to convey the basic and some more advanced concepts and does a better job than most of explaining the 180 degree rule. Negative reviews of this book state that it is too focused on the technical aspects of filmmaking and not as much on the people skills needed, which is true, but can a book really teach you how to talk to people? A great addition to any filmmaking library but would need resources for the non-technical aspects of film. You could make a great looking film based just on what is in this book, but it might not be the most thrilling. The writer does a good job of focusing on the work and not in telling his own stories.

Visualizing.......2006-03-05

This book is the only one I have found that goes extremely in depth into shot composition. Great book. However, if you are looking for a book that will take you step by step into how to acctually produce the movie, this isnt what you are looking for. This book is all about properly translating your vision to the screen, what works and what doesnt. Overall, this book was an amazing resource.

Screen World Volume 57: Cloth Edition (Screen World)

Average customer rating:

Movie Reviews
collection complete
A Yearbook to Remember
A Wonderous Annual of Movies!
A 'must' foundation pick for any in-depth film library holding

Screen World Volume 57: Cloth Edition (Screen World)
John Willis , and Barry Monush
Manufacturer: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Screen World Volume 56: 2005 Cloth Edition (Screen World)
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Screen World, Vol. 54, 2003 Film Annual

ASIN: 1557837066

Book Description

The 2006 edition of Screen World highlights the surprise Academy Award-winner for Best Picture, Crash, featuring Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, and Sandra Bullock, which also won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing; the groundbreaking gay love story Brokeback Mountain, winner of three Academy Awards, with Oscar-nominated performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal; the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which earned a Best Actress Academy Award for Reese Witherspoon and a Best Actor nomination for Joaquin Phoenix; Philip Seymour Hoffman's uncanny, Oscar-winning Best Actor impersonation of Truman Capote in Capote; Best Supporting Actress winner Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener; plus George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, and Syriana, the former bringing him Oscar nominations as director and writer, the latter the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Screen World's outstanding features include: A color section of highlights and a comprehensive index. Full-page photograph s of the four Academy Award-winning actors as well as photos of all acting nominees; A look at the year's most promising new screen personalities; Complete film information: cast and characters, credits, production company, date released, rating, capsule plot summary, and running time; Biographical entries: a priceless reference on over 2,400 living stars, including real name, school, and date and place of birth; Obituaries for 2005; The top box office stars and top 100 box office films. Includes over 1000 color and black and white photos.

Customer Reviews:

Movie Reviews.......2007-06-27

Screen World 57 is a valuable collectors item for the movie buff to the film afficiaado. It contains reviews of every major film released in the U. S. and abroad. I have purchased this book every year since 1972. I wonder what this collection could be worth?

collection complete.......2007-05-10

In one printing or another, this latest edition bring my collection
up to date.

A Yearbook to Remember.......2007-04-11

If movies are your thing (and they are mine) this is the book to get to remind you of the past year in movies. We are talking indies, foreign, b movies and of course Academy Award winners. Volume 57 already? Can't wait for #58!

A Wonderous Annual of Movies! .......2007-03-27

The 2006 edition of the Screen World Film Annual is a wonderful treat for anyone crazy about movies. The book is beautifully laid out with statistics and over 1,000 photos of movies released in 2005. Screen World includes domestic and foreign film releases, promising new actors, biographical data and obituaries. This is the 57th volume and I am proud to say I have every edition. I highly recommend Screen World, it's the best film annual there is!

A 'must' foundation pick for any in-depth film library holding.......2007-03-12

SCREEN WORLD V. 57 celebrates the major productions of 2005, is a 'must' foundation pick for any in-depth film library holding, and includes both American and foreign films released in the U.S. in 2005. This is more than just a listing - film credits, biographical notes on actors, and black and white photos from Academy Award-winning productions and actors all blend to make for an exceptional film reference.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Average customer rating:

A Wonderful Book
This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging.
Great book!
Terrible, bug-infested book...
Exploit the web with power and ease

Perl & LWP
Sean M. Burke
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Spidering Hacks
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ASIN: 0596001789

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Perl & LWP sets out to unwrap the Library for the Web in Perl (LWP), which is a collection of modules that make it easier to access and pick apart Web pages (and FTP-accessible files, and outgoing e-mail messages) from within your Perl programs. The book succeeds wonderfully, not only in conveying the technical aspects of LWP programming, but in making clear the fun of doing work that's very well suited to Perl. Sean Burke assumes that his readers know something about Perl, albeit not much, and a similar amount about HTML. He does a great job of explaining how LWP functions fit into Perl programs, and how you can use them to make reference to Internet resources far more easily than before.

Burke's narrative takes the form of a guided tour in which he introduces his readers to aspects of the LWP modules one by one. His tone is generally straightforward (sharp commentary alternates with brief code listings, with occasional passages of reference material), but there's sometimes an undercurrent of exuberance that makes the reader want to get going with his or her own programming right away. Overall, the emphasis is on teaching both LWP and Perl itself to the extent necessary to do LWP work. Because of the concise and nicely indexed code modules, though, you'll find this book useful as a reference after you're under way with LWP. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to program with LWP and Perl itself. All of LWP's strong points--including HTML parsing (with tokens and trees as well as with regular expressions), HTML generation and modification, manipulation of HTML forms, and the operation of spiders--are covered. This book has more of a tutorial tone than any similar reference material on the Internet.

Book Description

Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages. The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site. Perl & LWP covers:

Understanding LWP and its design
Fetching and analyzing URLs
Extracting information from HTML using regular expressions and tokens
Working with the structure of HTML documents using trees
Setting and inspecting HTTP headers and response codes
Managing cookies
Accessing information that requires authentication
Extracting links
Cooperating with proxy caches
Writing web spiders (also known as robots) in a safe fashion

Perl & LWP includes many step-by-step examples that show how to apply the various techniques. Programs to extract information from the web sites of BBC News, Altavista, ABEBooks.com, and the Weather Underground, to name just a few, are explained in detail, so that you understand how and why they work. Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the web can pick up this book and be immediately productive. Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators, Perl & LWP is the authoritative guide to this powerful and popular toolkit.

Customer Reviews:

A Wonderful Book.......2006-08-18

I bought this book to get information automatically on japanese stocks(for example, charts, price, volume, PER, PBR, ROE, ROA, News, messages on Yahoo! Japan BBS for stocks) from the WEB every day.

Somehow this book has not yet translated into Japanese language.
I think this book would sell very well if translated into Japanese. Many demands.

This book is self-contained about the WEB, so you need little Perl programming rules and don't have to have knowledge on the Internet Protocols(HTTP) at all.

In most cases, all you need to do is to modify an example program on this book for your use very little.

This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging........2003-07-12

If you aren't yet comfortable using object-oriented Perl modules, the multitude of examples will at least allow you see how it's done even if you're a bit fuzzy on what's happening 'underneath' when you call object methods. If you're comfortable learning how to do something without knowing exactly why it works, then the author's clear step-by-step explantions and numerous progressively more powerful examples should make this book accessible even to relatively innexperienced Perl programmers.

More experienced programmers will understand better why things work, but any Perl programmer will set this book down feeling empowered to turn the web into their own valet. No longer do you need to check multiple sites looking for interesting information. Instead, you can readily author code to do that for you and alert you when items of interest are found. You can use these tools to free up personal time, to harvest information to inform business decisions, to automate tedious web application testing, and a zillion other things.

The author's clear exploration of the relevant Perl modules leaves the reader with a good depth of understanding of what these modules do, when you might want to use which module, and how to use them for real world tasks. Before reading the book, I knew of these modules, but they were a rather intimidating pile. I'd used a few of them on occasion for rather limited projects, but was reluctant to invest the time required to read all of the documentation from the whole collection. Mountains of method-level documentation do not a tutorial make. This book takes all of that information, selects the most important parts, and ensures that those parts are covered in progressively more powerful and/or flexible examples.

If you know Perl and you're sick of 'working the web' to get information and you want the web to work for you instead, then you need this book. I had a personal project that was on the back burner for a couple of years because it just sounded too hard. The weekend after I finished this book, I wrote what I had previously thought to be the hard part of that project and it was both easy and fun. This book makes hard things not just possible, but actually easy.

-matt

Great book!.......2003-03-16

If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.

To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.

Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.

Terrible, bug-infested book..........2002-11-06

I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....

Exploit the web with power and ease.......2002-09-02

Disclaimer: The author is an online-type-friend and I used to work with the author of the foreword. I even got my copy for free.

If the above hasn't totally disqualified me from commenting, I just wanted to note some things most reviewers have ignored.

The book is an excellent resource for two kinds of people.

Many people scan technical books looking for little scripts and thingies; a few lines changed and BOOM! They have the program they always wanted. Sean provides those in abundance.

It is also a good resource for a complete novice to learn about the hodgepodge of technologies we call the web - the ... wire protocol, markup languages, tree-based parsers, and encodings, to name just a few. The author is an expert in all of these, but has restrained himself to provide just enough information to get a programmer going. I was impressed time and again with how he manages to give the reader exactly enough knowledge to get their tasks done, with short but accurate explanations and pointers on where to learn more.

Best of all, this is a funny technical book. Usually if a technical book has pretensions to humor, it jabs you in the arm repeatedly with lots of groaner puns and dumb cartoons, in order to fill the space between bland code sections. But Sean has sprinkled the *code sections* with his dada sense of humor, which also highlights the difference between mere placeholder data and the concept being illustrated. And then the text gets right back to the point.

This is a slim work (242 pages, no thicker than my thumb) but packs a lot of value for your money. So buy it already.

Book Description

"We the Media, has become something of a bible for those who believe the online medium will change journalism for the better." -Financial Times

Big Media has lost its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet. Now that it's possible to publish in real time to a worldwide audience, a new breed of grassroots journalists are taking the news into their own hands. Armed with laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras, these readers-turned-reporters are transforming the news from a lecture into a conversation. In We the Media, nationally acclaimed newspaper columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make--and consume--the news.

Gillmor shows how anyone can produce the news, using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, email, and a host of other tools. He sends a wake-up call to newsmakers-politicians, business executives, celebrities-and the marketers and PR flacks who promote them. He explains how to successfully play by the rules of this new era and shift from "control" to "engagement." And he makes a strong case to his fell journalists that, in the face of a plethora of Internet-fueled news vehicles, they must change or become irrelevant.

Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media oligarchy that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it.

Dan Gillmor is founder of Grassroots Media Inc., a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach. The company's first launch is Bayosphere.com, a site "of, by, and for the San Francisco Bay Area."

Dan Gillmor is the founder of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enable and expand reach of grassroots media. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

Customer Reviews:

A neat topic.......2007-03-18

The book was a good guide to citizen media and gave some great examples of places where citizen media would work.

I enjoyed the examples thoroughly and found the book a useful guide. I can't wait for an updated version.

Very Sensible and Interesting.......2006-10-15

Dan Gilmor here presents the attitude toward technology & journalism that any journalist will need to have if he/she will survive long in this new era. They need to embrace, or at least reckon with, the new media.

Here Gilmor gives an enlightening look at the changing face of journalism and the negative and positive changes it makes.

I'm not a professional journalist, but I found this book to be fascinating and informative. I credit it with helping me to stick with blogging, and seeing it as something more significant than a passing fad. All journalists should read this, I believe!

Interesting read about the changes occurring in journalism..........2006-07-16

If you ever wondered what is changing in journalism, then this book is for you. It not only describes the logging phenomenon, but also describes why the big media might not last.

A Journalist Passionately Embraces the Internet.......2006-06-21

Many people blame the Internet for accelerating the long-term decline of newspaper circulation, and think that the Internet is crippling the future of American journalism.

Don Gillmor believes that the Internet has the potential to dramatically improve American journalism and widen its appeal.

Gillmor is no naive innocent. He demonstrates that he has an extraordinarily detailed command of the interrelationships and applications of the many internet and software technologies and journalism. I met Gillmor in April, 2004, at the BloggerconII conference organized by Dave Winer and held at Harvard Law School. He held the attention of his audience of bloggers through his mixture of detailed knowledge and passionate advocacy for the worth of blogging and the value of it becoming an income-generating activity.

No journalist should fail to read this book. Nor should any citizen consumer of journalism who participates online. Only a small part manifesto, this book is a detailed roadmap of the future of journalism for those informed enough and bold enough to take it. Those in business and government who are the subjects of journalism would also do well to read it.

The future of journalism, Gillmor says, will be much more participatory in the future than it has been in the past. The many to many communications style of the Internet will become the style of successful journalism. Journalism will less about lecturing and more about leading a discussion. The "eat your spinach" school of civic advocacy will be replaced by a greater connection between readers and journalists in which readers will influence both the definition of news and the content of individual news stories.

The proliferation of tens of millions of blogs means that the separation of news producers and news consumers is far less than it used to be. Everyone can produce news in the blogosphere. One duty of journalists is to sift the through the blogosphere and find out what is relevant. Another duty of journalists is to actively engage the public in the news gathering process. The definition of what professionalism in journalism is will be rapidly changing.

What is now at the edges, Gillmour says, will and should be moved to the center. Public concerns that once were marginal now will become mainstream.

As a Pennsylvania state legislator, I believe that this will have significant public policy effects--especially the areas of taxation and public welfare expenditures. For the first time, those with average and below average incomes are able to communicate their concerns to a mass audience. The more the digital divide in Internet access erodes, as the divide in telephone and television access has eroded, the greater the erosion will be of the upper middle class dominance of the political process. The stakes for putting the brakes on the trends Gillmor describes will get increasingly large in the years ahead.

This is not just a book for journalists and the subjects of journalism, or even just a book for currently active internet participants. The detailed accounts of the consumer applications of various technologies of what he calls the "the read-write web" or "technology that makes we the media possible" are alone worth the effort to get through this book.

Others may understand individual technologies better than Gillmor, but it is unlikely that anyone has a better understanding of how they all--HTML,mail lists and forums,weblogs, wikis, SMS, mobile connected cameras, internet "broadcasting," peer to peer, RSS,Technorati, API, and many others--come to together to create a radically different architecture of information, news, personal reach, and circle of potential friends and allies for many millions of Americans.

This is not a book to be read and put aside. Gillmor clearly struggled to get his text into 241 pages, plus 36 pages of acknowledgements, websites, and detailed notes. While there is occasional redundancy, on the whole a longer book would have been clearer in some respects.

This is a book to be carefully studied and used as a springboard to continued learning about new applications, new technologies, and new interrelationships as they emerge.

The idea of the public as part of the media is not totally new.
Going back at least to the 1940's, public opinion research focused on the stages of influence: the mass media first influenced the opinion leaders in a community, who then influenced others by word of mouth.

What is new is the dramatically improved publishing capacity for the individual citizen, regardless of whether he or she had the community stature and web of influence to have been a community leader--formal or informal--in the past.

The media had been steadily eroding the influence of opinion leaders, by influencing more and more people directly, but now the opinion leaders are back in record-high numbers and with greatly expanded spheres of influence.

"I hope I've helped you understand how this media shift--this explosion of conversations--is taking place and where it is headed," Gllmour says on the last page of his book. "Most of all, I hope I've persuaded you to take up the challenge yourself.

"Your voice matters. Now, if you have something to say, you can be heard.

"You can make your own news. We all can.

"Let's get started."

Journalism in the 21st century is changing .......2006-05-21

Any interested in the future of new media must have WE THE MEDIA: GRASSROOTS JOURNALISM BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE: a survey of how common folk are producing more meaningful news coverage using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, and email as their delivery tools. Journalism in the 21st century is changing - and will be quite different from the media-controlled presentations we know today. To find out just how different, you have to consult WE THE MEDIA: it comes from a journalist and founder of the very grassroots media making big changes.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

Ravenloft Campaign Setting (AD&D 2nd Ed. Fantasy Roleplaying, 2 Books, 2 Maps, World Posters, Tarokka Deck, DM Screen)

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Ideal supplement for dramatic role-playing
A Collecter's Item

Ravenloft Campaign Setting (AD&D 2nd Ed. Fantasy Roleplaying, 2 Books, 2 Maps, World Posters, Tarokka Deck, DM Screen)
TSR Staff
Manufacturer: TSR Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Domains of Dread (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft, Campaign Setting/2174)

ASIN: 1560769424

Customer Reviews:

Ideal supplement for dramatic role-playing.......2000-05-02

Here's the most comprehensive, engaging view of Ravenloft ever created. The set includes 288 pages (!) of roleplaying materials, with rules for horror and madness, curses, magic, treasures, characters, settings, and much more; a beautiful poster, enormous world maps, and best of all, the beautifully crafted tarot deck (complete!) that becomes invaluable for atmospheric storytelling. A tour de force of dramatic roleplaying!

A Collecter's Item.......2000-02-25

The Ravenloft Campaine Setting is one of the first to have come to the AD&D world. The 2nd Edition Box Set is a rare collecter's item and should be in any Ravenloft lover's hands.

Screen World 2000, Vol. 51 (Screen World)

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Screen World 2000, Vol. 51 (Screen World)
John Willis
Manufacturer: Applause Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Screen World, Vol. 52, 2001 Film Annual
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ASIN: 1557834318

Book Description

John Willis' Screen World has become the definitive reference for any film library. Each volume includes every significant U.S. and international film released during that year as well as complete filmographies, capsule plot summaries, cast and characters, credits, production company, month released, rating, and running time. You'll also find biographical entries - a prices reference for over 2,000 living stars, including real name, school, place and date of birth. A comprehensive index makes this the finest film publication that any film lover could own.

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Screen World 1976, Vol. 27
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Manufacturer: Crown
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ASIN: 0517525836
Release Date: 1988-12-12

Capitalscapes: Folding Screens And Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto

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Capitalscapes: Folding Screens And Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto
Matthew Philip McKelway
Manufacturer: University of Hawaii Press
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Fertility And Pleasure: Ritual And Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan

ASIN: 082482900X

Book Description

Following the destruction of Kyoto during the civil wars of the late fifteenth century, large-scale panoramic paintings of the city began to emerge. These enormous and intricately detailed depictions of the ancient imperial capital were unprecedented in the history of Japanese painting and remain unmatched as representations of urban life in any artistic tradition. Capitalscapes, the first book-length study of the Kyoto screens, examines their inception in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the political motivations that sparked their creation.

Close readings of the Kyoto screens reveal that they were initially commissioned by or for members of the Ashikaga shogunate and that urban panoramas reflecting the interests of both prevailing and moribund political elites were created to underscore the legitimacy of the newly ascendant Tokugawa regime. Matthew McKelway's analysis of the screens exposes their creators' masterful exploitation of ostensibly accurate depictions to convey politically biased images of Japan's capital. His overarching methodology combines a historical approach, which considers the paintings in light of contemporary reports (diaries, chronicles, ritual accounts), with a thematic one, isolating individual motifs, deciphering their visual language, and comparing them with depictions in other works.

Book Description

An inquiry into emergent media's rich lineage, Devices of Wonder explores the artful machines humans have used to augment visual perception.

The encyclopedic cabinet of curiosities serves as a model for this study of the archaic instruments lurking in state-of-the art technology. Featured in Devices of Wonder are android automata, lunar landscapes, perspective theaters, vues d'optique, microscopes, magnetic games, magic lanterns, camera obscuras, boxes by Joseph Cornell, Lucas Samaras's Mirrored Room, Suzanne Anker's Zoosemiotics, Mark Tilden's UniBug 3.1, panoramic works by Jeff Wall and Giovanni Lusieri, paintings by Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Joseph Wright of Derby, projections by Diana Thater and James Turrell, and a pop-up book by Kara Walker.

Barbara Stafford's introduction weaves these fascinating artifacts into a provocative narrative analyzing the complex links between old and new media. Her wide-ranging investigation is complemented by thirty-one short essays in which Frances Terpak tracks the often surprising connections among individual items. Like the cabinet of curiosities, Devices of Wonder functions as an analogical instrument, reframing the beautiful "eye machines" that continue to mediate our encounters with the world.

This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Getty from November 13, 2001, through February 6, 2002.

Customer Reviews:

Devices of Wonder: playful, engaging, instructive........2001-11-22

The book, "Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen", is the catalog for an exhibition that has just opened. The first two reviews provide perspectives and understanding that are quite different from those offered in the preceding review from Publishers Weekly.

Leah Ollman (LA Times, 11/18/01) comments that, "We want to know the world and have experiences beyond the ordinary. We want to extend our vision beyond its familiar capacity. These are timeless desires, born with the species. They thrive on wonder, ... 'Devices of Wonder' traces those impulses and the technologies designed to act on them during the past 400 years. Full of serious toys, marvelous instruments and art resonant with the theme of discovery, the show [and catalog] track a history of visual thinking, 'from the world in a box to images on a screen,'..."

...

Devices of Wonder: playful, engaging, instructive........2001-11-22

Speaking of both the exhibition and the catalog, the hard-nosed and insightful reviewer, Christopher Knight (Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2001) remarks that, "The Wunderkabinett is back, their show asserts--bigger, now nearly ubiquitous and considerably more far-reaching than any Baroque prince could ever have dreamed. Today's Wunderkabinett is sitting on your desk at home or in the office, or perhaps it's resting in your briefcase or on your lap." "Looking at wondrous things in a Wunderkabinett becomes the launch pad for the wonders of looking. Sight connects with insight. Mirrors facilitate reflection. Images are themselves ideas. ... Playful and unexpected connections get drawn. ... The show [and the catalog] is filled with these sorts of surprising delights, which can send your mind off in unexpected directions." (...)

White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side
Average customer rating:
White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side
James Snead
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (Rutgers Depth of Field Series)

ASIN: 0415905745

Book Description

Hollywood's representation of blacks has been consistently misleading, promoting an artificially constructed mythology in place of historical fact. But how, James Snead asks, did black skin on screen develop into a complex code for various types of white supremacist discourse? In these essays, completed shortly before his death in 1989, James Snead offers a thoughtful inquiry into the intricate modes of racial coding in Hollywood cinema from 1915 to 1985.
Snead presents three major methods through which the racist ideology within film functions: mythification, in which black images are correlated in a larger sceme of semiotic valuation where the dominant ``I' needs the marginal ``other' in order to function effectively; marking, in which the color black is repeatedly over-determined and redundantly marked, as if to force the viewer to register the image's difference from white; and omission--the repetition of black absence from positions of autonomy and importance.

White Screens/Black Images offers an array of film texts, drawn from both classical Hollywood cinema and black independent film culture. Individual chapters analyze Birth of a Nation, King Kong, Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel, Mae West in I'm No Angel, Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, Bette Davis in Jezebel, the racism of Disney's Song of the South, and Taxi Driver. Making skillful use of developments in both structuralist and post-structuralist film theory, Snead's work speaks not only to the centrality of race in Hollywood films, but to its centrality in the formation of modern American culture.

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