Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema

In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological developments that films have undergone, Warning Shadows travels through time and across genres to explore the impact of the industry's most famous classics and forgotten gems. Essays such as "Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!," "Edward G. Robinson, See," and "Prestige and Pretension (Pride and Prejudice)" capture the wit and magic of classic cinema. Each chapter--ranging from the horror films of Hitchcock to the fantastical frames of Disney--provides readers with engaging analyses of influential films and the directors and actors who made them possible.

Author: Gary Giddins
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 04/19/2010
Pages: 418
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.54h x 6.58w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9780393337921

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/08/2010 pg. 37
New York Times Book Review 08/22/2010 pg. 17
Choice 01/01/2011

About the Author
Giddins, Gary: - Gary Giddins is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He was the Village Voice jazz columnist for over 30 years and remains a preeminent jazz critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; Warning Shadows; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting.