Film history, theory or criticism Books

Transnational films that represent intimacy and inequality produce new experiences that result in the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today's global audiences. The Proximity of Other Skins...

Le livre ""Le�����ons de Cin�����matique: Profess�����es ������ la Sorbonne (1897)"" de Gabriel Koenigs est une �����uvre importante dans l'histoire de la cin�����matique. Ce livre est une transcription des le�����ons donn�����es par Koenigs ������ la...

Discussing such classic films as Sergeant York, Air Force, and All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as more modern blockbusters like Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan, this outstanding volume focuses on Hollywood and its production of war films...

In the fifties British cinema won large audiences with popular war films and comedies, creating stars such as Dirk Bogarde and Kay Kendall, and introducing the stereotypes of war hero, boffin and comic bureaucrat which still help to define images of...

Much analysis of gangster movies has been based upon a study of the gangster as a malign figuration of the American Dream, originally set in the era of the Depression. This text extends previous analysis of the genre by examining the evolution of...

Introduction PART ONE: REPRESENTATION, EXPRESSION AND PHANTASY Representation, Depiction and Portrayal in Film Expression, Projection and Style in Film Phantasy PART TWO: ADRIAN STOKES - CARVING AND MODELLING Stokes: The Carving and Modelling Modes A...

This new addition to the AFI Film Readers series brings together original scholarship on animation in contemporary moving image culture, from classic experimental and independent shorts to digital animation and installation. The collection - that is also...

Contemporary media authorship is frequently collaborative, participatory, non-site specific, or quite simply goes unrecognized. In this volume, media and film scholars explore the theoretical debates around authorship, intention, and identity within the...

This study argues that neorealism's visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism's complex visual processing of two...

German National Cinema is the first comprehensive history of German film from its origins to the present. In this new edition, Sabine Hake discusses film-making in economic, political, social, and cultural terms, and considers the...

In recent years, with the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Archive and growing scholarly interest in the history of Hong Kong cinema, previously neglected historical documents and difficult-to-access films have offered new research materials. As Hong...

From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in...

Now published in a revised second edition, The Matter of Images searches through the resonances of the term 'representation', analysing images in terms of why they matter, what they are made of, and the material realities they refer to. Richard Dyer's...

Big-budget, spectacular films designed to appeal to a mass audience: is this what - or all - blockbusters are? Movie Blockbusters brings together writings from key film scholars, including Douglas Gomery, Peter Kramer, Jon Lewis and Steve Neale, to...

Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now a central feature of contemporary film studies, as well as primary concerns for film-makers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey,...

This study of urban identity and community looks at selected twentieth century literary and film texts in the contexts of theorizations modernism, postmodernism, post-coloniality and globalization. Brooker draws on Beck and Giddens and Rem Koolhasas,...

Dennis Potter was a most remarkable, idiosyncratic, and influential screen playwright, writing such shows as "The Singing Detective" and "Pennies From Heaven" for British TV during the last half of the 20th century. In dramatizing the anxiety of his own...

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in...

Film theory no longer gets top billing or plays a starring role in film studies today, as critics proclaim that theory is dead and we are living in a post-theory moment. While theory may be out of the limelight, it remains an essential key to...

Public and academic debate about 'porn culture' is proliferating. Ironically, what is often lost in these debates is a sense of what is specific about pornography. By focusing on pornography's mainstream - contemporary commercial products for a...

From domestic goddess to desperate housewife, What a Girl Wants explores the importance and centrality of postfeminism in contemporary popular culture.

Ivan IV, the 16th-century tsar notorious for his reign of terror, became an unlikely national hero in the Soviet Union during the 1940s. This book traces the development of Ivan's positive image, placing it in the context of Stalin's campaign for...

Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and...

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema.Ideologies of the...

Before turning to filmmaking, Francois Truffaut was a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950's. This book makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals. He discusses films by such...

The philosophical systems of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek are formidable in their own right. Lacanian psychoanalysis has had a long history of developmental application to cinema studies, Žižek being one of its primary exponents...

Analyzes film forms, narratives, history, and major interpretative approaches within the comedy genre, particularly French comedies in their cultural context and the aesthetics of French film.

Drawing on both theoretical and practical case studies, Community Media moves from developing attempts at local media to case studies and on to cyber-examples. Alphabetically, its more than two dozen cases include reports on the Asian Pacific region,...

Focuses specifically on video as a central medium for both archiving events and experimenting with modes of representation and reception, and studies not only on how artists and documentarians record political, social, and economic conditions, but also...

"Imaging Religion in Film offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film, one that foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions. Specifically, the...

Interdisciplinary and engaging, Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema is the first scholarly work to link visual representations of heterosexual masculinities to the neo-liberal transformations in Argentina. Rocha critically examines...

The idea that pain can be a pleasure is a troubling one, and yet it informs cultural practices ranging from extreme sports to BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism). This book considers how mainstream cinema borrows...

Recent years have seen a striking surge in the production of literary biopics. Writers turned cinema subject in recent films include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lillian Hellman, Allen...

An all star cast of academic experts offer an important and timely analysis of the pursuit of autonomy. They argue that it is key to move beyond the primarily normative debate about the rights or wrongs of autonomous regions on the basis of cultural...

What are cyborgs? How have they been represented in cinema? And why have they generated such an astonishing degree of critical and popular interest? These are the questions that underpin this book. It asks what relevance the cyborg has in exploring the...

Michael Mann's films receive a detailed analysis as existential dramas, includingHeat, Collateral, The Last of the Mohicans and Public Enemies. Thebook demonstrates that Mann's films perform critical engagement with existentialism, illustrating the...

A refreshing insight into a previously neglected area of popular British cinema - the holiday film - including historical information about the British holiday and analyses of key films from the 1800s to the recent past.