Search Results

The Business of Movies

Joseph McBride

in Hawks on Hawks

This chapter discusses the correlation between Hawks’ personal taste in films and the commercial success of films. He describes the editing and producing films as well as the economics of ... More

This chapter discusses the correlation between Hawks’ personal taste in films and the commercial success of films. He describes the editing and producing films as well as the economics of filmmaking—distribution, unions, previewing, concerns about running time, and cutting scenes. He also comments on filmmaking today.Less

Directed by Johnnie To

Stephen Teo

in Director in Action

This chapter covers A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU (an acronym for Police Tactical Unit) and Breaking News which carry Johnnie To's name as the solo director. A Hero Never ... More

This chapter covers A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU (an acronym for Police Tactical Unit) and Breaking News which carry Johnnie To's name as the solo director. A Hero Never Dies marks the phase in the Milkyway company where the credit “Directed by Johnnie To” re-appears after a brief period in which To functioned as the chief executive overseeing the production of Milkyway's films rather than merely directing the films. Running out of Time and The Mission were both released in 1999 in the wake of the HKIFF tribute, and both films had the effect of confirming To's newly found status as a stand-alone auteur. PTU and Breaking News, released in 2003 and 2004 respectively, are mature examples of To's work in the genre and they show a tendency towards formalism — a sign that To was taking his status as auteur more seriously. To is considered a craftsman auteur, one able to craft superb sequences and integrate them seamlessly into the narratives.Less

The Uneven Auteur

Stephen Teo

in Director in Action

This chapter explores a selection of Johnnie To's works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur. It specifically describes Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running ... More

This chapter explores a selection of Johnnie To's works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur. It specifically describes Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, and Throw Down, another group of five films which constitutes an “uneven pentad” from the point of view of genre and To's direction. Though the nucleus of this study is the gunplay action film with a concentration on the gangster film or the cops-and-robbers thrillers, it also reviews To's contribution to the Hong Kong genre cinema in toto as much as possible. All of these films contain unequal measures of excellence and flaws which result from the effort to integrate different qualities.Less

Conclusion: Place and the Politics of Nation Branding

Dennis Lo

in The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding ... More

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding that commoditize cultural signs in line with the states’ soft power objectives. Drawing from examples of recent location-shot film and media, including En Chen’s Island Etude, Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty, and Zhejiang TV's Keep Running, I demonstrate how location shooting since Taiwan’s membership in the WTO has been institutionalized within the discursive contours of the “Love Taiwan” movement, a process which can be compared with the PRC’s marketing of the “Chinese Dream” to domestic tourists via convergent and place-based film and televisual media. While the resulting national brands could not appear more different, these discourses operate on the shared assumption that for place identities to be readily consumable and exportable, they must be coherent within a global “experience economy” that circulates images of distinctive yet fixed cultural identities. This reduction of place into readily consumable cultural signs can be contrasted with the enigmatic representation of Shanghai found in Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, which fashions on-screen Doreen Massey’s notion of the “progressive place,” a poststructuralist reinterpretation of place that focuses on conflicting sociocultural processes that imbue spaces with richly layered meanings. Building on Massey's concept of the progressive place, this chapter argues that location-shot film and media in China and Taiwan, more than offering diversely themed experiences, have untapped potential in cultivating alternative public cultures through reflexive, minor, and performative modes of place making.Less

Running and the Brain: Neurogenesis

Jay Schulkin

in Sport: A Biological, Philosophical, and Cultural Perspective

Begins with some of the conditions that set the stage for the act of running, and then look at neurogenesis, brain expansion, and longer-term consequences of running within a context of specific ... More

Begins with some of the conditions that set the stage for the act of running, and then look at neurogenesis, brain expansion, and longer-term consequences of running within a context of specific morphological features and diverse information molecules that participate in our capacity for running and sport. Running itself promotes cell proliferation in the hippocampus, in part through the induction of endorphins or diverse neuronal growth factors. Running and neurogenesis are linked to forms of basic adaptation; running easily transitioned from joint coordination to play, and eventually to sport.Less

Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Janet Neary

in Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives

This chapter reads William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) as an emblematic text that depends upon a series of complex interactions between the Crafts’ cultivation of their image ... More

This chapter reads William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) as an emblematic text that depends upon a series of complex interactions between the Crafts’ cultivation of their image and their use of dialogue and narration in different contexts. Examining how the visual image Ellen cultivates is juxtaposed with the couple’s use of double entendre, the chapter argues that William Craft places the ambivalence of language and the ambivalent language of skin color side by side to unsettle popular notions of racial identity and identification. The narrative illustrates that phenotypical characteristics such as complexion are not facts with fixed meanings, but, rather, are discursively defined social symbols that can be manipulated to various ends. I argue that Craft turns this revelation back on the authenticating requirements of the slave narrative, offering interpersonal recognition as a mode of visuality which counters the objectifying gaze of slavery.Less

Ecopoetics of Pleasure and Power in Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running

Molly Nichols

in The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics

In this chapter, Molly Nichols explores the ways in which Oonya Kempadoo’s novel Tide Running (2001) reflects, challenges, and complicates the sexualization and eroticization of Caribbean bodies and ... More

In this chapter, Molly Nichols explores the ways in which Oonya Kempadoo’s novel Tide Running (2001) reflects, challenges, and complicates the sexualization and eroticization of Caribbean bodies and environments. Examining the impact of tourism on the region, the chapter shows how Kempadoo’s depictions of landscape and sexuality reveal the ways these sites have been produced to facilitate exploitation. The analysis is grounded in a consideration of neoliberalism and sexual labour in Tobago. Tide Running creates a space for depicting the beauty of landscape and the pleasure of sex; but, as this chapter demonstrates, it also reveals how the production of nature and of sexual difference is always enmeshed in relations of class power.Less

The Reason Why

Alan K. Rode

in Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

Curtiz was assigned a horror programmer, The Walking Dead, that he turned into a highly credible film.This picture beganhis association with Irving Rapper as a dialogue director. Rapper became a ... More

Curtiz was assigned a horror programmer, The Walking Dead, that he turned into a highly credible film.This picture beganhis association with Irving Rapper as a dialogue director. Rapper became a respected director who considered Curtiz his professional mentor. Wallis and Curtiz finally had it out during the production of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936).Curtiz continued to defy Wallis by eschewing close-ups while using an excess amount of camera movement and foreground composition in his setups. Wallis eventually threatened to fire Curtiz, who acquiesced to filming more to the producer’s desired style. The chapter includes a detailed account of the alleged mistreatment of horses during the charge sequences,whichErrol Flynn and David Niven blamed on Curtiz.Author’s research revealed that these stories were grossly exaggerated; Curtiz was not even present when some horses were injured and put down. Despite a wave of bad publicity, the picture was another hit. Curtiz endured a separation from Bess and divorce proceedings that ended abruptly when the couple reconciled. He also achieved his long-sought-after American citizenship, even though he lied about the existence of his European children.Less

Killer Books: The Representations and Politics of Violence in Gang Memoirs

Josephine Metcalf

in The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

This chapter presents four decades in the history of street gang violence — the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — in order to map the setting in which the narrators of street gang memoirs describe and ... More

This chapter presents four decades in the history of street gang violence — the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — in order to map the setting in which the narrators of street gang memoirs describe and justify their violent pasts. It explains that the main narrative action of the memoirs Always Running, Blue Rage, and Monster, revolves around tales of violence: the narrators’ violence toward other gang members and the violence committed against them by the authorities. The chapter further describes how, in 1960s California, violence was already embedded in the culture of the state, but it became more oppressive in Los Angeles in the succeeding decades. In the discussions of state power in Always Running, it notes that police brutality in the 1960s was not exclusively toward street gangs, but also toward Mexican political demonstrators.Less

Celebrity and Vulnerability in Three Documentaries by Barbara Kopple

Heather McIntosh

in ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple

This chapter examines the role of emotion, specifically vulnerability, in three of Kopple’s recent films that focus on representations of women and their experiences. In Running from Crazy (2013), ... More

This chapter examines the role of emotion, specifically vulnerability, in three of Kopple’s recent films that focus on representations of women and their experiences. In Running from Crazy (2013), Kopple explores with Mariel Hemingway the mental illness and suicide that permeate the Hemingway family history and Mariel's struggles to understand them. Miss Sharon Jones! (2015) chronicles the funk and soul singer's diagnosis and battle with pancreatic cancer just as her career reaches new heights. This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous (2017) is a portrait of Gigi Lazzarato, a transgender YouTube star who struggles for identity, happiness, and acceptance in transphobic worlds both online and offline. Drawing theories of documentary representation, trauma, and witnessing, this chapter demonstrates how Kopple deftly balances the witness and her story of each portrait within the demands of nonfiction filmmaking.Less

Exposing the Lethal Gaze in Shut Up & Sing! and Running from Crazy

Jaimie Baron

in ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple

This chapter examines Shut Up and Sing! and Running from Crazy to consider the ways in which Kopple’s use of archival footage contributes to the construction of biography. It poses the question of ... More

This chapter examines Shut Up and Sing! and Running from Crazy to consider the ways in which Kopple’s use of archival footage contributes to the construction of biography. It poses the question of what recordings of a person from different—but always selective—moments in their lives may tell us about what it means to represent an individual and a life through recorded traces. In these two films, Kopple trains her eye on women who have lived in the media spotlight and draws on existing recordings of them in order to try to understand how the cameras that previously recorded them have helped shape the course of their lives. In doing so, the chapter explores how she reveals something about the gaze of those cameras, the ways in which their act of recording has had lethal—or at least menacing—effects on their subjects.Less

Kopple and her Critics

Gregory Brown

in ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple

Barbara Kopple’s considerable portfolio of work has consistently garnered critical attention, both positive and negative. Through their reviews, critics reveal fundamental themes and characteristics ... More

Barbara Kopple’s considerable portfolio of work has consistently garnered critical attention, both positive and negative. Through their reviews, critics reveal fundamental themes and characteristics found in her films. Among those issues explored are her commitments and abilities to expose injustice and crises, her varied approaches to covering celebrities, how successfully she hits the heart of a story, and her cultural contextualization or ability to translate the experiences of one group to another. This chapter examines the critical response to many of her films in relation to common themes and issues, and suggests that the success of her earlier, award-winning films about labour and social injustice may have influenced critical reviews of her later films such as celebrity profiles and forays into reality television.Less

Was It a Profitable Business?

Ralph Davis

in The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This penultimate chapter attempts to answer whether or not merchant shipping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a profitable enterprise. It first quantifies the costs of operating ships, ... More

This penultimate chapter attempts to answer whether or not merchant shipping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a profitable enterprise. It first quantifies the costs of operating ships, including wages, earnings, and profit, by analysing the account books of shipmasters and various other contemporary sources. It divides running costs into four sections: wages and crew costs; repairs and stores; port charges, pilotage and lighthouse dues; and miscellaneous expenses; and explores each in turn. After determining the cost of operations and of ships themselves, it then considers capital charge rates per annum. It asserts that voyage estimates alone cannot determine the profitability of shipping, and so turns to examine rates of financial ruin; increases in flow of capital into the industry; and the nature of fluctuating returns inherent to long-distance shipping. It concludes that these factors caused profit to vary, but stresses that it was not merely financial gain that led people to a career at sea, but an affection for ships and the appetite for adventure as much as enterprise, which renders financial gain less imperative.Less

Exercise

Charlotte Bates

in Vital Bodies: Living with Illness

The second chapter, Exercise, considers the rhythm of our bodies in motion and the complicated relationships between exercise and illness, as both a necessity and a joy. Like eating, the significance ... More

The second chapter, Exercise, considers the rhythm of our bodies in motion and the complicated relationships between exercise and illness, as both a necessity and a joy. Like eating, the significance of exercise is redefined by illness, and the body is maintained, challenged, and re-known through it. Exercise regimes can provide control, treatment and an alternative form of medication so that through physical activity bodies feel strong, independent, and free in spite of illness. But ill bodies are prone to overexertion, and exercise can reinforce their dependence and vulnerability as well as their strength. For Anna, who has depression, exercise has become a form of self-medication. Running and cycling regularly make her feel less depressed, so she tries to be physically active at least four times a week. Disruption to this routine can cause her mood to plummet quickly, showing the dependence that she has on her body.Less

Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how ... More

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how the Ondaatje brothers translated their similar journeys to Sri Lanka into intricate palimpsests of texts and voices. It suggests that both texts illustrate how textuality interlocks with globalization and travel and contends that while they share common genealogies and thematic concerns, they employ radically different textual strategies.Less

Nonlinear and non-Gaussian signal processing

Max A. Little

in Machine Learning for Signal Processing: Data Science, Algorithms, and Computational Statistics

Linear, time-invariant (LTI) Gaussian DSP, has substantial mathematical conveniences that make it valuable in practical DSP applications and machine learning. When the signal really is generated by ... More

Linear, time-invariant (LTI) Gaussian DSP, has substantial mathematical conveniences that make it valuable in practical DSP applications and machine learning. When the signal really is generated by such an LTI-Gaussian model then this kind of processing is optimal from a statistical point of view. However, there are substantial limitations to the use of these techniques when we cannot guarantee that the assumptions of linearity, time-invariance and Gaussianity hold. In particular, signals that exhibit jumps or significant non-Gaussian outliers cause substantial adverse effects such as Gibb's phenomena in LTI filter outputs, and nonstationary signals cannot be compactly represented in the Fourier domain. In practice, many real signals show such phenomena to a greater or lesser degree, so it is important to have a `toolkit' of DSP methods that are effective in many situations. This chapter is dedicated to exploring the use of the statistical machine learning concepts in DSP.Less

Integrating Experience and Epistemology: Ivone Gebara’s Pragmatic Ecofeminism

Christopher D. Tirres

in The Aesthetics and Ethics of Faith: A Dialogue Between Liberationist and Pragmatic Thought

This chapter forges a dialogue between the ecofeminism of Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara and the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. The author looks especially at the ways in which both thinkers ... More

This chapter forges a dialogue between the ecofeminism of Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara and the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. The author looks especially at the ways in which both thinkers connect their theory of experience to a liberating ethics through the medium of human intelligence. The chapter underscores the pragmatic aspects of Gebara’s work and shows how Dewey’s work in metaphysics can help to make some of her central claims even more explicit.Less