Screen Writings : Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of 'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time. Implicitly theoretical as much as it is unashamedly practical, this book is a model not only of text analysis, but also of the enlightened deployment of cultural studies in the service of film study. The book includes re-considerations of such classic films as I vitelloni, Grand Illusion, Winter Light, and Tokyo Story; it features genre examinations of the war film (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima), farce (Some Like It Hot), the road film (The Rain People), the New York-centered movie (Manhattan), and avant-garde pictures that privilege narrative (3-Iron and Eternal Sunshine of the Classic Mind); and 'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' concludes with a searching investigation of the rise of the New American Cinema during a tumultuous decade of social change - from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.