Unveils the metaphoric and theoretical possibilities of fabric in the films of Luchino Visconti. In Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, Joe McElhaney situates Visconti's films as privileged and deeply expressive instances of a trope that McElhaney identifies as the "cinema of fabric": a reoccurrence in film in which textiles—clothing, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets—determine the filming process. An Italian neorealist, Visconti emerges out of a movement immediately following WWII wherein fabric assumes crucial functions, yet Visconti's use of fabric surpasses his colleagues in many ways, including its fluid, multifaceted articulations of space and time. Visconti's homosexuality is central to this theory in that it assumes metaphoric potential in addressing "forbidden" sexual desires that are made visible in the films. Visconti's cinema of fabric gives voice to desires not simply for human bodies draped in fabric but also for entire environments, a world of the senses in which fabric becomes a crucial method for giving form to such desires. McElhaney examines Visconti's neorealist origins in Ossessione, La terra trema, and Rocco and His Brothers, particularly through fabric's function within literary realism and naturalism. Neorealist revisionism through the extravagant drapings of the diva film is examined in Bellissima and Senso whereas White Nights and The Strangerare examined for the theatricalizing through fabric of their literary sources. Visconti's interest in German culture vis-à-vis The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig, is articulated through a complex intertwining of fabric, aesthetics, politics, and transgressive sexual desire. Finally, Visconti's final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, assess through fabric both the origins of Italian fascism and the political tensions contemporaneous with the films' productions. Fabric in Visconti is often tied to the aesthetic impulse itself in a world of visionaries attempting to dominate their surrounding environments and where a single piece of fabric may come to represent the raw material for creation. This book will tantalize any reader with a keen eye and strong interest in film and queer studies.

Scholars of film studies will appreciate this daring and inventive collection, and readers with a general interest in film studies will enjoy its accessible style.

Marxism and Art is a collection of basic readings in Marxist criticism and aesthetics. Marxism and Art is a book of basic readings in Marxist criticism and aesthetics. Maynard Solomon, through his selections and critical introductions, shows connections between the arts and society, between imagination nd history, and between art and revolution. He selects from thirty-six authors to reveal the range of opinion from dogma to heresy, beginning with excerpts from the works of Marx and Engels that are pertinent to an understanding of Marxist philosophy. The book traverses a wide range of subjects from the origins of art to the nature of creativity, the aesthetic experience, the dialectics of consciousness, the psychology of art, and the evolution of art forms. The sources of art in ritual, in the labor process, in the play drive, and in social conflict are explored.

This book is the first collection of essays to offer detailed examinations of the role that close attention to individual films plays in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema. In the last two decades, Deleuze's two books on film have had an enormous influence on Film Studies, profoundly affecting thinking about movement, time, history, and other topics. Theoretically ambitious and philosophically rich but clearly written by a broad range of established and emerging international film scholars, the chapters in this volume will both contribute to, and in places challenge, the vibrant field of Deleuzian film studies. Topics covered range from the relationship of Deleuze to film criticism; the role of theories of movement; and studies of works by major filmmakers including Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Vincente Minnelli, and Orson Welles. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Deleuze but to anybody engaged with the close study of film and its philosophical ramifications.

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm—who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways—Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. Through analyses of fiction, documentary, and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. She shows that by affectively mediating with the ever-shifting folded relations within the cosmos, it is possible to build “soul-assemblages” that challenge information capitalism, colonialism, and other power structures and develop new connections with the infinite. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

A journey to the Italian cinema that overturns established views and opens up new perspectives and interpretations. Its itinerary is organized in four stages. The first is an analysis of the theories of Cesare Zavattini on neorealism which overturns widely accepted positions both on Zavattini and on neorealism. The second confronts a key film of the post-war Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, by examining the nature of its realism. The third is dedicated to Luchino Visconti: to questions of the use of language exemplified in his La terra trema, the use of settings, costume and light as agents of meaning in his Il Gattopardo and Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa. The final voyage of the film is to the physical and symbolic construction of heaven and earth in the work of Pasolini. Particular attention is given to the representation of the body in his last four films: the grotesque and mythical bodies in popular tradition in his Trilogia di vita and the tortured bodies destroyed by the mass media in Salò.

The Death of Classical Cinema uncovers the extremely rich yet insufficiently explored dialogue between classical and modernist cinema, examining the work of three classical filmmakers—Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Vincente Minnelli—and the films they made during the decline of the traditional Hollywood studio system. Faced with the significant challenges posed by alternative art cinema and modernist filmmaking practices in the early 1960s, these directors responded with films that were self-conscious attempts at keeping pace with the developments in film modernism. These films—Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Hitchcock's Marnie, and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town—were widely regarded as failures at the time and bolstered critics' claims concerning the irrelevance of their directors in relation to contemporary filmmaking. However, author Joe McElhaney sheds new light on these films by situating them in relation to such acclaimed modernist works of the period as Godard's Contempt, Fellini's La dolce vita, Antonioni's Red Desert, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. He finds that these modernist films, rather than being diametrically opposed in form to the work of Hitchcock, Lang, and Minnelli, are in fact profoundly linked to them.

Since its beginning and during periods of great transformations, movie-going for both men and women was akin to going to a fashion parade. Before the explosion of digital technology and its enchanted world, access to fashion was only accessible on the big screen. Fashion and style became reachable for the masses through cinema. And, with the genre of the fashion film, this continues today. Focusing on a number of crucial films and directors from the silent era to the present, this study will offer, for the first time, an in-depth exploration of the interaction between fashion and Italian cinema. The study, however, will privilege the golden age of Italian cinema, especially the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s during which, through the marriage of fashion and film, Italian fashion and style were launched globally. Through the lens of fashion, the study will revisit the films of some of Italy's most important film-makers, such as Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and others and films as old as Mario Oxilia's silent Rapsodia Satanica (1917) to Luca Guadagnino's I am Love (2009).

"This study considers Italian filmmaking during the Fascist era and offers an original and revealing approach to the interwar years. Steven Ricci directly confronts a long-standing dilemma faced by cultural historians: while made during a period of totalitarian government, these films are neither propagandistic nor openly "Fascist." Instead, the Italian Fascist regime attempted to build ideological consensus by erasing markers of class and regional difference and by circulating terms for an imaginary national identity. Cinema and Fascism investigates the complex relationship between the totalitarian regime and Italian cinema. It looks at the films themselves, the industry, and the role of cinema in daily life, and offers new insights into this important but neglected period in cinema history." -- Book cover.

This is the first book in English exclusively devoted to the long take, one of the key elements of film style. Increasingly visible in contemporary international media, the long take currently attracts a good deal of attention in criticism and commentary. There are also significant strands of film theory in which duration has become a recurrent concern. In keeping with the approach of Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, this collection is devoted to the detailed critical analysis of specific long takes, explored in terms of how they function within their contexts, how they shape the visual field, the meanings they generate and the effects they create. The Long Take: Critical Approaches brings together essays by established and emerging scholars (all but one essay commissioned for this volume) in an exciting collection that analyses works from a range of filmmaking traditions, from the 1930s to the present day, selected to represent varied long take practices and to explore associated debates.