Bøker i SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema-serien

The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.

"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"--

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

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.

Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief.

An expanded edition of a classic work of film criticism, with a provocative and eloquent new chapter on Marnie, Hitchcock's most heartfelt--and most controversial--film.

Makes the case that philosophy has an essential role to play in the serious study of film.

Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.

How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones.

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.

Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism's precarious state in the early twenty-first century.