Bøger i SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema serien

"What makes something funny? Some take this question to be effectively unanswerable, while others turn to comic theory. Funny How? offers a new approach, showing how humor can be analyzed without killing the joke. Alex Clayon writes that the brevity of a sketch or skit and its typical rejection of narrative development make it comedy concentrate, providing a rich field for exploring how humor works. Focusing on a dozen or so skits and scenes, Clayton shows precisely how sketch comedy appeals to the funny bone and engages our philosophical imagination. He posits that since humor is about persuading an audience to laugh, it can be understood as a form of rhetoric. Through vivid, highly readable analyses of individual sketches, Clayton argues that Aristotle's three forms of appeal-logos, the appeal to reason; ethos, the appeal to communality; and pathos, the appeal to emotion-can form the basis for illuminating the inner workings of humor. He draws on both popular and lesser-known examples from the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, across film and television, from Monty Python's Flying Circus to Key and Peele, via Saturday Night Live, Airplane!, and Smack the Pony"--

Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium--from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them--the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.

Explores the "torture" of mannered behavior and the prevalence of etiquette as a theme in classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema.

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai¿i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept-the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional-that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.

Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.

Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music's original subversive energy.