The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only
The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only
The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpreta
In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of "delayed cinema" to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Na
American film directors from the late 1930s to the early 1960s instigated a renaissance of original artistic works that helped reinvigorate and renew American culture. During a time of unprecedented danger from anti-democratic forces both abroad and at home, the most imaginative and creative films of these directors - John Ford, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, George Stevens - articulated issues, themes, and realities at the core of the American experience. In this lively and original book, Sam Girgus offers a fresh look at films such as The Searchers, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, High Noon, and On the Waterfront. He shows how these films are part of the cultural and historic debate that examines, structures, and questions what modern America means to its people, the world, and history.
In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relatio
In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relatio
The Films of Woody Allen was the first full-length work to examine the director as a serious filmmaker and artist. Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness, challenging our notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus argues that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work. The union between Allen's public and private selves that created a special 'aura' about him remains intact despite the director's concerted efforts to separate his private life from his screen image. Allen now assumes a postmodern moral relativism and 'sensual realism' that differs profoundly from the moral sensibility of his earlier work.
In America on Film, first published in 2002, Sam Girgus examines a selection of films made in the last quarter of the twentieth century in an effort to trace how the notion of 'American' has changed drastically from that portrayed in American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Mississippi Masala, Lone Star, Malcolm X, Raging Bull, When We Were Kings, and Bugsy he finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals, and conflicts; and a transformation in the relationship of American identity and culture to race and ethnicity, as well as to sexuality, gender, and the body. America on Film charts these changes through analysis of cinematic tensions between fiction, documentary, and modernism. An art form that combines fragments of reality with imagination, film, Girgus maintains, connects the documentary realism of the photographic image to the abstraction and non-representation of modernism.
In this title, first published in 1978, the authors survey the historical and contemporary research relating to two-dimensional visual-geometric illusions. They summarise and evaluate theories of
