Reading Cinemas

Watching Pages, Reading Pictures: Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy
$89.99
Italian cinema is internationally well-known for the ground-breaking experience of neo-realism, comedy 'Italian-Style', Spaghetti Westerns, and the horror movies of the seventies. However, what is rather unfamiliar to wider audiences is Italian cinema's crucial and enduring affair with literature. In fact, since the very beginning, literature has deeply influenced how Italian cinema has defined itself and grown.This book provides an empirical approach to this complex and fruitful relationship. The aim is to present discussions dealing with significant Italian film adaptations from literary materials which greatly exemplify the variety of styles, view-points, and attitudes produced by such an alliance, throughout the different periods. Among the adaptations discussed, are those that have followed trends and critical debates, making them, at times, rather problematic.

Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Cinema and Modernity Series)
$35.00
Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
??????????? Tracing this preoccupation through the period¡Çs films?as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts?Andriopoulos pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one¡Çs will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist¡Çs seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, Andriopoulos also develops an innovative reading of Kafka¡Çs novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.
??????????? Blending theoretical sophistication with scrupulous archival research and insightful film analysis, Possessed adds a new dimension to our understanding of today¡Çs anxieties about the onslaught of visual media and the expanding reach of vast corporations that seem to absorb our own identities.
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Readings in Contemporary Chinese Cinema: A Textbook of Advanced Modern Chinese (Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese)
$45.00
Using film to teach Chinese language and culture is an innovative approach. The 10 movies included in this textbook are good choices that describe different aspects of contemporary Chinese society. For each movie, the authors stated that there were first a synopsis and a critique or, in some cases, there was a combination of a synopsis with a critique, and then they added segments of the movie dialogue. These two parts were followed by a list of vocabulary explanation and/or a list of sentence structure explanation. The last part for each movie was an exercise section.
What is confusing to me is the inconsistency in the authors' attempt and the format presented in the book. For the majority of the movies, the first part is a combination of synopsis and reflection on Chinese culture based on the movies, sometimes the reflection precedes the synopsis, and the reflection is not a critique of the movie. Furthermore, the instructions in the exercises are mostly in simplified Chinese but they were in English for one movie. Composition is a good exercise for advanced learners but it is missing for some movies.
For a foreign language textbook using film as the text, I am disappointed to find that there is no DVD that includes at least some segments of the movies to go with the written text. A DVD will make language and culture learning much more vivid and interesting.

The Films of Su Friedrich: Vol. 3 - Sink or Swim (Institutional Use)
$250.00
A contemporary classic and a landmark in autobiographical filmmaking, "Sink or Swim" is an unflinching account of the highly charged relationship between a daughter and her father. Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl chronicles the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. This formally complex and emotionally intense film is fraught with tension, ambivalence and love.DVD contains bonus films:"Cool Hands, Warm Heart" (16 mins, 1979), a study in performance, voyeurism and the spectator. Private acts become public spectacles on a stage in a crowded street as women perform the familiar rituals of daily life."Scar Tissue" (6 mins, 1979), uses two sets of images--of men and women in midtown Manhattan and is structured so as to reproduce what is essential in the original event but also to undermine the original event.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.