Film history, theory or criticism Books

This book presents a lucid, comprehensive, and entertaining narrative of culture and society in late 19th- and early 20th-century Maharashtra through a perceptive study of its theatre and cinema. An intellectual tour de force, it will be invaluable to...

What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini,...

In Projecting a Camera, film theorist Edward Branigan offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding film theory. Why, for example, does a camera move? What does a camera "know"? (And when does it know it?) What is the camera's relation to the subject...

How do works from film and literature--Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example--imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and...

Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean...

The excitement of possible futures found in science fiction has long fired the human imagination, but the genre's acceptance by academe is relatively recent. No longer marginalized and fighting for respectability, science-fictional works are now...

Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations...

The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but...

Amid the instability and violence of turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization Russians embraced a revolutionary art form to reflect the aspirations and motivations of a new class. In The Magic Mirror Denise Youngblood portrays a newly...

The years 1907-1913 mark a crucial transitional moment in American cinema. As moving picture shows changed from mere novelty to an increasingly popular entertainment, fledgling studios responded with longer running times and more complex storytelling. A...

One of the world s leading film theorists, Rudolf Arnheim has been well known to readers of English since the publication of his classic Film as Art in 1957. This is the first English translation of another of his important books, Kritiken und Aufsatze...

Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all stripes have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form is most often used to capture the lives of others, Jim Lane turns his lens on those media makers who...

The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social...

In the years since the Second World War, Australia has seen a period of literary creativity which outshines any earlier period in the nation's literary history. This creativity has its beginnings in the arguments and alignments which emerged at the end...

What the Pluck? is a study of the harp as a powerful visual cue in the cinema. From Walt Disney to the Marx brothers, Gone with the Wind to The Wedding March and Small Time Crooks, this ancient instrument has acted as a symbol of immortality,...

Hollywood Remembrance and American War addresses the synergy between Hollywood war films and American forms of war remembrance. Subjecting the notion that war films ought to be considered ʻthe war memorials of today' to critical scrutiny, the book...

This book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the frequently conspiratorial speculations that arise whenever people die in cars. Looking at fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile through...

When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know?Explorations in Communication and History addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of...

Fifty Hollywood Directors introduces the most important, iconic and influential filmmakers who worked in Hollywood between the end of the silent period and the birth of the blockbuster. By exploring the historical, cultural and technological contexts in...

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls' school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring...

By meticulously compiling the details of how movies have been made and financed since the medium′s inception, chronicling their performances at the box office, and offering expert commentary about the most important trends of the last one hundred years,...

For some of us, moviegoing is an occasional pleasure. Kevin Murphy made it his obsession, and he did it for you.Mr. Murphy, known to legions of fans as Tom Servo on the legendary TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, went to the movies every day for a...

Political Communication and Social Theory presents an advanced and challenging text for students and scholars of political communication and mass media in democracies. It draws together work from across political communication, media sociology and...

During the last year of the Roaring Twenties, when the use of sound in motion pictures was in its nascent stages, Director Henry King selected Tampa, Florida as the proving ground for an audacious and innovative cinematic experiment. His vision was to...

Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in...

Upon its first publication, Loving with a Vengeance was a groundbreaking study of women readers and their relationship to mass-market romance fiction. Feminist scholar and cultural critic Tania Modleski has revisited her widely read book, bringing to...

This new AFI Film Reader is the first comprehensive collection of original essays on the use of color in film. Contributors from diverse film studies backgrounds consider the importance of color throughout the history of the medium, assessing not only...

In this important and path-breaking book, esteemed scholar and public intellectual Richard Falk explores how we can re-imagine the system of global governance to make it more ethical and humane.

In recent years, film has been one of the major genres within which the imaginaries involved in mapping the geopolitical world have been represented and reflected upon. In this book, one of America's foremost theorists of culture and politics treats...

This book looks at social representations of romantic love as portrayed in films and interpreted by their audiences, using cinema as a means for analysing the state of romantic love today, and the touchpoints and disconnects between its representation on...

Examines motion pictures produced or sponsored by Ford Motor Company from a rhetorical perspective, demonstrating how the films reveal a long-term rhetorical project that has helped embed corporations into many of the social systems guiding societies...

The first comprehensive collection of empirical research devoted to the social science of cinemaTop scholars from psychology, economics, sociology, business, and communications tackle key questions about the film experienceFrom a movie's creation to the...

Watching Michael Moore in action--passing off manipulating facts in Bowling for Columbine, spinning statistics in Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country?, shamelessly grandstanding at the Academy Awards, and epitomizing the hypocrisy he's made a...

Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to...

The potential of films to educate has been crucial for the development of cinema intended to influence culture, and is as important as conceptions of film as a form of art, science, industry, or entertainment. Using the concept of institutionalization as...

Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic focuses on a recurrent motif that is fundamental in the Gothic-the double. This volume explores how this ancient notion acquires tremendous force in a region, Latin America, which is itself defined by...