Overview

The American television commercial has an aesthetic and historical dynamic linking it directly to cinematic and media cultures. Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial establishes the complex vitality of the television commercial both as a short film and as an art form. Through close and comparative readings, the book examines the influence of Hollywood film styles on the television commercial, and the resulting influence of the television commercial on Hollywood, exploring an intertwined aesthetic and technical relationship. Analysing key commercials over the decades that feature new technologies and film aesthetics that were subsequently adopted by feature filmmakers, the book establishes the television commercial as a vital form of film art.

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9781474460699

Table of Contents

Reviews

"It's rare to find an introductory text on a truly emerging or ignored film studies topic. [...] Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer provide a detailed introduction to an unlikely and welcoming subject.--Matthew Sorrento, Rutgers University ""Film International 2021"" Rhodes and Singer should be congratulated on this fascinating new volume. For some reason, advertising has been a blind spot in audiovisual scholarship and they make a convincing argument for its importance in relation to film, and vice versa. The book provides an absorbing insight into the relationship between TV advertising and Hollywood, in an extremely readable and engaging study that breaks new ground and underlines the crucial relationship of the artistic and the financial that can be lost from sight in discussions of cinema and television.--Professor K.J. Donnelly, University of Southampton This fascinating book explores the rich relationship between the TV commercial and Hollywood, and makes a persuasive case for the television commercial as a valid art form in its own right.--Matthew Rolston, artist, photographer, filmmaker and television commercial director Having spent 30 years making advertising film, I feel that Rhodes and Singer's new book, Consuming Images, has allowed me to understand how the making of advertising films crosses over and is connected to film making, I'm looking forward to their new book as I have begun to understand the intricacy and detail, via their understanding, of this thing I attempt to do.--Leslie Dektor, filmmaker, author and award-winning television commercial director"

It's rare to find an introductory text on a truly emerging or ignored film studies topic. [...] Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer provide a detailed introduction to an unlikely and welcoming subject.--Matthew Sorrento, Rutgers University ""Film International 2021"" Rhodes and Singer should be congratulated on this fascinating new volume. For some reason, advertising has been a blind spot in audiovisual scholarship and they make a convincing argument for its importance in relation to film, and vice versa. The book provides an absorbing insight into the relationship between TV advertising and Hollywood, in an extremely readable and engaging study that breaks new ground and underlines the crucial relationship of the artistic and the financial that can be lost from sight in discussions of cinema and television.--Professor K.J. Donnelly, University of Southampton This fascinating book explores the rich relationship between the TV commercial and Hollywood, and makes a persuasive case for the television commercial as a valid art form in its own right.--Matthew Rolston, artist, photographer, filmmaker and television commercial director Having spent 30 years making advertising film, I feel that Rhodes and Singer's new book, Consuming Images, has allowed me to understand how the making of advertising films crosses over and is connected to film making, I'm looking forward to their new book as I have begun to understand the intricacy and detail, via their understanding, of this thing I attempt to do.--Leslie Dektor, filmmaker, author and award-winning television commercial director

Author Information

Gary D. Rhodes is Professor of Media, Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012), and The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018). He is a founding editor of Horror Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). Robert Singer, Professor of Liberal Studies, CUNY Graduate Center [ret]. He received a Ph.D. from New York University in Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include literary and film interrelations, interdisciplinary research in film history and aesthetics, and comparative studies. He is the ReFocus: American and International Film series co-editor for Edinburgh University Press. He has written and directed several independent short films and co-produced the animated film, Ulalume (2022). Among his more recent publications are Consuming Images: Film Art and the Television Commercial (EUP, 2020), co-authored with Gary Rhodes, and “A View from the Boardwalk: The W.P.A. New York City Guide and Coney Island Hypertext,” in Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, ed. Sara Rutkowski, (2022).

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