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By Rosie Thomas

SUNY Horizons of Cinema Books

Showing 50 of 71 books in this series
Cover for Cavell on Film
ISBN: 791464318

Stanley Cavell's most important writings on cinema, collected together for the first time in one volume. This extensive collection offers a substantially complete retrospective of Stanley Cavell's previously uncollected writings on film. Cavell is the only major philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition who has made film a central concern of his work, and his work offers inspiration and new directions to the field of film studies. The essays and other writings in this volume, presented in the order of their composition, range from major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films or filmmakers to occasional pieces, all of which illuminate Cavell's practice of philosophy as it has developed in the more than three decades since the publication of The World Viewed. All periods of Cavell's career are represented, from the 1970s to the present, and the book includes many previously unpublished essays written since the early 1990s. In his introduction, William Rothman provides a useful and eloquent overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.

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Cover for Rebel Without a Cause

Assesses the layered meanings and persistent global legacy of an American film classic. Five decades after the production and initial release of Rebel Without a Cause, this book examines both the complicated historical moment in which the film was made as well as its continuing and pervasive influence on film today. The contributors track how the film continues to speak to diverse audiences as a touchstone for imagined anxieties over adolescence and coming-of-age, traditional values of family and community, threats from abroad, and the provocations of mass or consumer society. Although the specific sources and motivations for rebellion have shifted, what has persisted is the film's singular power to represent rebellion in what could otherwise be seen as the everyday, and to move viewers to ponder its causes.

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Cover for The Death of Classical Cinema

A study of three classical filmmakers and the films they made at the cusp of the modernist movement in cinema. The Death of Classical Cinema uncovers the extremely rich yet insufficiently explored dialogue between classical and modernist cinema, examining the work of three classical filmmakers-Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Vincente Minnelli-and the films they made during the decline of the traditional Hollywood studio system. Faced with the significant challenges posed by alternative art cinema and modernist filmmaking practices in the early 1960s, these directors responded with films that were self-conscious attempts at keeping pace with the developments in film modernism. These films-Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Hitchcock's Marnie, and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town-were widely regarded as failures at the time and bolstered critics' claims concerning the irrelevance of their directors in relation to contemporary filmmaking. However, author Joe McElhaney sheds new light on these films by situating them in relation to such acclaimed modernist works of the period as Godard's Contempt, Fellini's La dolce vita, Antonioni's Red Desert, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. He finds that these modernist films, rather than being diametrically opposed in form to the work of Hitchcock, Lang, and Minnelli, are in fact profoundly linked to them.

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Cover for Apocalyptic Dread
ISBN: 791470431

The power and presence of dread in recent American cinema. In Apocalyptic Dread, Kirsten Moana Thompson examines how fears and anxieties about the future are reflected in recent American cinema. Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and War of the Worlds, Thompson argues that a longstanding American apocalyptic tradition permeates our popular culture, spreading from science-fiction and disaster films into horror, crime, and melodrama. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of dread-that is, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence about existential choice and the future-Thompson suggests that the apocalyptic dread revealed in these films, and its guiding tropes of violence, retribution, and renewal, also reveal deep-seated anxieties about historical fragmentation and change, anxieties that are in turn displaced onto each film's particular "monster," whether human, demonic, or eschatological.

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Cover for Seoul Searching
ISBN: 791472256

Korean cinema as industry, art form, and cultural product. Seoul Searching is a collection of fourteen provocative essays about contemporary South Korean cinema, the most productive and dynamic cinema in Asia. Examining the three dominant genres that have led Korean film to international acclaim-melodramas, big-budget action blockbusters, and youth films-the contributors look at Korean cinema as industry, art form, and cultural product, and engage cinema's role in the formation of Korean identities. Committed to approaching Korean cinema within its cultural contexts, the contributors analyze feature-length films and documentaries as well as industry structures and governmental policies in relation to transnational reception, marketing, modes of production, aesthetics, and other forms of popular culture. An interdisciplinary text, Seoul Searching provides an original contribution to film studies and expands the developing area of Korean studies.

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Cover for Exile Cinema
ISBN: 791473775

Offers a cross section of international fringe cinema. Outside the shrinking American film-culture market there is a vast movie-crazed world where madmen, geniuses, and apostates roam freely, subject to a relatively minimal degree of corporate industry and spin control. In Exile Cinema, prominent film critics profile the oeuvres of working, thriving international filmmakers-from Bela Tarr to Judith Helfand, from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Guy Maddin to Chantal Akerman and Michele Soavi, from Chris Marker to the newest thresholds of contemporary film. These filmmakers battle the greatest odds a modern artist can face: the opposition of mass culture at large and a medium that requires enormous expenditures in every stage of production and distribution. Naturally, the average American moviehead rarely gets a chance to see these marginalized directors' work and often knows about them only through dazzled rumors and rhapsodic hearsay. Whimsical and deeply subjective, the viewpoints and evangelisms in Exile Cinema will serve as salve for the cineaste's lonesome fury.

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Cover for Now Playing
ISBN: 791474178

Locates the origins of the mass audience and the emergence of everyday moviegoing in the culture of cities. Winner of the 2009 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize presented by the Canadian Communication Association Using Toronto as a case study, and focusing on a period from the opening of the first theaters showcasing moving pictures in 1906 to the end of World War I, Now Playing locates the origins of our present-day mass audience in the culture of cities. Paul S. Moore examines the emergence of everyday moviegoing and its regulation through neglected details like fire safety, newspaper ads, serial films, and amusement taxes, connecting them to more familiar themes of studio ownership of theaters, censorship, and journalism. In Toronto-a foreign city inside the American mass market-patriotism ultimately comes to the fore as civic forms of showmanship turn the simple act of "going to the movies" into a form of citizenship.

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Cover for Ecology and Popular Film

Ecocritical takes on popular film. Ecology and Popular Film examines representations of nature in mainstream film while also looking at film itself as a form of nature writing. Considering a selection of mainstream movies that embrace a wide variety of environmental themes, from the Lumières' Oil Wells of Baku (1896) to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Murray and Heumann explore such themes as environmental politics, eco-terrorism, ecology and home, tragic and comic eco-heroes, the spectacular, and evolutionary narrative, in a manner that is both accessible and fun. Other films discussed include The River (1937), Soylent Green (1971), Pale Rider (1985), 28 Days Later (2002), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). The book also includes a comprehensive filmography of films that deal with environmental themes and issues.

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Cover for Three Documentary Filmmakers

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers' philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality. Film study has tended to treat documentary as a marginal form, but as the essays in Three Documentary Filmmakers demonstrate, the films of Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Errol Morris call for, and reward, the sort of criticism expected of serious works in any medium. However, critical methods that illuminate what makes Citizen Kane a great film are not adequate for expressing what it is about Rouch's The Funeral at Bongo: The Old Annaï, McElwee's Time Indefinite, and Morris's The Fog of War that makes them-each in its own way-great films as well. Although these filmmakers differ strikingly from one another, their films are deeply philosophical and personal, and explore the paradoxical relationships between fantasy and reality, self and world, fiction and documentary, dreams and film, filming and living. It is a challenge to find terms of criticism capable of illuminating such works, and the essays in this book rise to that challenge.

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Cover for Second Takes
ISBN: 1438430299

The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel. Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of figurehead of Hollywood's commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film sequel's industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.

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Cover for Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination

"Best moving pictures I ever saw." Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema's first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless film courses. In Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination , leading film scholars examine Méliès's landmark film in detail, demonstrating its many crucial connecions to literature, popular culture, and visual culture of the time, as well as its long "afterlife" in more recent films, television, and music videos. Together, these essays make clear that Méliès was not only a major filmmaker but also a key figure in the emergence of modern spectacle and the birth of the modern cinematic imagination, and by bringing interdisciplinary methodologies of early cinema studies to bear on A Trip to the Moon , the contributors also open up much larger questions about aesthetics, media, and modernity. In his introduction, Matthew Solomon traces the convoluted provenance of the film's multiple versions and its key place in the historiography of cinema, and an appendix contains a useful dossier of primary-source documents that contextualize the film's production, along with translations of two major articles written by Méliès himself.

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Cover for Hitchcock at the Source

Considers the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock adapted and transformed a variety of literary works―novels, plays, and short stories―into film. The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather than examining the processes by which a particular author has been adapted into a diversity of films by different filmmakers, the contributors in Hitchcock at the Source consider the processes by which a varied range of literary sources have been transformed by one filmmaker into an impressive body of work. Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock transformed a variety of literary sources-novels, plays, short stories-into what is arguably the most coherent and distinctive (narratively, stylistically, and thematically) of all directorial oeuvres. After an introduction surveying the nature and diversity of Hitchcock's sources and locating the current volume in the context of theoretical work on adaptation, nineteen original essays range across the entirety of Hitchcock's career, from the silent period through to the 1970s. In addition to addressing the process of adaptation in particular films in terms of plot and character, the contributors also consider less obvious matters of tone, technique, and ideology; Hitchcock's manipulation of the conventions of literary and dramatic genres such as spy fiction and romantic comedy; and more general problems, such as Hitchcock's shift from plays to novels as his major sources in the course of the 1930s.

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Cover for Hitchcock, Second Edition

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. First published in 1982, William Rothman's Hitchcock is a classic work of film criticism. Written in an engaging style that is philosophically sophisticated yet free of jargon, and using over nine hundred images from the films to illustrate and back up its critical claims, the book follows six different Hitchcock films as they unfold, moment by moment, from first shot to last. In addition to a thoughtful new preface and the original readings of The Lodger (1927), Murder! (1930), The 39 Steps (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Psycho (1960), this expanded edition includes a groundbreaking new chapter-now the book's longest-on Marnie (1964), Hitchcock's most heartfelt yet most controversial film. Hitchcock never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde's line, "And all men kill the thing they love." Dark moods therefore prevail in the five original chapters, culminating in the reading of Psycho , but in demonstrating how Marnie overcomes, or transcends, the murderous aspect of Hitchcock's art, this new chapter balances the scales and gives an important new dimension to the book. With exemplary precision, Hitchcock, Second Edition shows how Hitchcock films express, cinematically, serious thoughts about such matters as the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage, and theater-and about their own medium. In so doing, it keeps faith with the idea that Hitchcock was a master, perhaps the master, of what he called the "art of pure cinema." However, insofar as it investigates philosophically the conditions of authorship in the medium of film, it is an auteurist study unlike any other. By attending to the films themselves and to the ways we experience them, rather than allowing some theory to dictate what to say about them, the book proves the fruitfulness of an approach that is open and responsive to the ways serious films are capable of teaching us how to think seriously about them.

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Cover for Native Recognition
ISBN: 1438443978

Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking. In Native Recognition , Joanna Hearne persuasively argues for the central role of Indigenous image-making in the history of American cinema. Across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences, yet both the specificity and range of this Native participation have often been obscured by the on-screen, larger-than-life images of Indians in the Western. Not only have Indigenous images mattered to the Western, but Westerns have also mattered to Indigenous filmmakers as they subvert mass culture images of supposedly "vanishing" Indians, repurposing the commodity forms of Hollywood films to envision Native intergenerational continuity. Through their interventions in forms of seeing and being seen in public culture, Native filmmakers have effectively marshaled the power of visual media to take part in national discussions of social justice and political sovereignty for North American Indigenous peoples. Native Recognition brings together a wide range of little-known productions, from the silent films of James Young Deer, to recovered prints of the 1928 Ramona and the 1972 House Made of Dawn , to the experimental and feature films of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre. Using international archival research and close visual analysis, Hearne expands our understanding of the complexity of Native presence in cinema both on screen and through the circuits of film production and consumption.

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Cover for Hollywood's New Yorker
ISBN: 9781438445717

A fresh look at the director's career. When Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for The Departed , it was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of a remarkable film career. But what it also represented was an acceptance by Hollywood of a man who became a prestigious auteur precisely because of his status as an outsider from New York. For someone with a high-culture reputation like Scorsese's, this middlebrow sign of respectability was not about cultural standing; rather, it was about using and even sacrificing his distinctive outsider status for a greater share of industry authority within the world of Hollywood. In Hollywood's New Yorker , Marc Raymond offers a fresh look at Scorsese's career in relation to the critical and social environment of the past fifty years. He traces Scorsese's career and films through his association with various cultural institutions, from his role as a student and instructor at New York University, to his move to Hollywood and his relationship with the studio system, to his relationship with prestigious institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. This sociological approach to film authorship provides analysis of previously overlooked Scorsese projects, particularly his documentary work, and gives importance to the role his extracurricular activities in the film preservation movement have played in the rise of his reputation. Hollywood's New Yorker places Scorsese and his films firmly within the various time periods of his career and compares the director with his peers, from fellow New Yorkers like Brian De Palma and Woody Allen to New Hollywood movie brats such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. The result is a complete picture of Scorsese and the post–World War II American film culture he has both shaped and been shaped by.

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Cover for Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground

A range of approaches to the director's life and work. The director of such classic Hollywood films as In a Lonely Place , Johnny Guitar , and Rebel Without a Cause , Nicholas Ray nevertheless remained on the margins of the American studio system throughout his career, and despite his cult status among auteurist critics and cinephiles, he has also remained at the margins of film scholarship. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground offers twenty new essays by international film historians and critics that explore the director's place in the history of the Hollywood industry and in the larger institution of cinema, as well as a 1977 interview with Ray that has never before been published in its entirety in English. In addition to readings of Ray's most celebrated films, the book provides a range of approaches to his life and work, engaging new questions of his cinematic authorship with areas that include history and culture, politics and society, gender and sexuality, style and genre, performance, technology, and popular music. The collection also looks at Ray's lesser-known and underappreciated films, and devotes attention to the highly experimental We Can't Go Home Again , his recently restored final film made in the 1970s with his students at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Rediscovering what Ray means to contemporary film studies, the essays show how his films continue to possess a vital power for film history and criticism, and for film culture.

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Cover for B Is for Bad Cinema
ISBN: 143844995X

Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics. B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other "low" genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of "bad"-that is, aesthetically, morally, or commercially disreputable-cinema. While some of the essays share a kinship with recent discussions of B movies and cult films, they do not describe a single aesthetic category or represent a single methodology or critical agenda, but variously approach bad cinema in terms of aesthetics, politics, and cultural value. The volume covers a range of issues, from the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of low-budget production through the terrain of audience responses and cinematic affect, and on to the broader moral and ethical implications of the material. As a result, B Is for Bad Cinema takes an interest in a variety of film examples-overblown Hollywood blockbusters, faux pornographic works, and European art house films-to consider those that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability.

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Cover for Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors

Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children. Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward-and even hatred of-children.

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Cover for Bombay before Bollywood

This book offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Bombay cinema. Eschewing the conventional focus on India's social and mythological films, it foregrounds the subaltern genres of fantasy, costume and stunt films popular in the B- and C-circuits in the decades before and immediately after independence. It explores the influence of this 'other' cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before 'Bollywood' erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s. The book reminds us that a significant stream of Bombay cinema has always revelled in cultural hybridity, engaging with global popular culture and transcultural flows of cosmopolitan modernity and postmodernity.

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Cover for Binghamton Babylon
ISBN: 1438458894

Documents a volatile and productive moment in the development of film studies. In Binghamton Babylon , Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of films and videos but went on to invigorate the American media scene for the next half-century. Drawing on interviews with faculty, students, and visiting artists, MacDonald weaves together an engaging conversation that explores the academic excitement surrounding the emergence of cinema as a viable subject of study in colleges and universities. The voices of the various participants-Steve Anker, Alan Berliner, Danny Fingeroth, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, J. Hoberman, Ralph Hocking, Ken Jacobs, Bill T. Jones, Peter Kubelka, Saul Levine, Camille Paglia, Phil Solomon, Maureen Turim, and many others-tell the story of this remarkable period. MacDonald concludes with an analysis of the pedagogical dimensions of the films that were produced in Binghamton, including Larry Gottheim's Horizons ; Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son ; Gehr's Serene Velocity ; Frampton's Critical Mass ; and Nicholas Ray's final film, We Can't Go Home Again .

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Cover for Ghost Faces
ISBN: 1438460074

Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey s and Gilles Deleuze s paradigms and offering close readings grounded in psychoanalysis and queer theory, David Greven examines several key films and genre trends from the late 1990s forward. Movies considered range from the slasher film Scream to bromances and beta male comedies such as I Love You, Man to dramas such as Donnie Darko and 25th Hour to Rob Zombie s remake of the horror film Halloween . Greven also traces the disturbing connections between torture porn found in such films as Hostel and gay male Internet pornography.

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Cover for Encounters with Godard

A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard's later work, and a major intervention in the study of film and ethics. Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

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Cover for Invented Lives, Imagined Communities

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American. Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini , Patton , The Great White Hope , Bound for Glory , Ed Wood , Basquiat , Pollock , Sylvia , Kinsey , Fur , Milk , J. Edgar , and Lincoln , and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character.

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Cover for Doing Time
ISBN: 1438460856

Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer. Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study-film temporality and film philosophy-to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here it is traced across a range of fascinating case studies from Hollywood and the global art cinema, uncovering each film's characteristic way of "doing time." Throughout, the ambiguities of filmic time are held as powerful attractions as they modulate film viewing: such pauses, gaps, repetitions, and stretches of time illuminate a living field that extends from viewing activity. Drawing on the writings of French film critic and theorist André Bazin, as well as the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee Carruthers forwards a claim about the value of cinematic time for thinking. She also raises the tasks of film analysis and interpretation to renewed visibility. By prioritizing the viewer's experience of filmic temporality, and offering a rich vocabulary for describing this exchange, Carruthers articulates a new sphere of theoretical inquiry that invites film viewers (and readers) to participate.

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Cover for Looking with Robert Gardner

Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner's achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (1925–2014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genre's conventions-conventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as one of the world's most extraordinary independent filmmakers, working in a unique border area between ethnography, the essay film, and poetic/experimental cinema. Richly illustrated, Looking with Robert Gardner assesses the range and magnitude of Gardner's achievements not only as a filmmaker but also as a still photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. The contributors give critical attention to Gardner's most ambitious films, such as Dead Birds (1963, New Guinea), Rivers of Sand (1975, Ethiopia), and Forest of Bliss (1986, India), as well as lesser-known films that equally exemplify his mode of seeking anthropological understanding through artistic means. They also attend to his films about artists, including his self-depiction in Still Journey OnM (2011); to his roots in experimental film and his employment of experimental procedures; and to his support of independent filmmakers through the Harvard Film Study Center and the television series Screening Room , which provided an opportunity for numerous important film and video artists to present and discuss their work.

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Cover for Regarding Life
ISBN: 1438462492

Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships. As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc. , the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life , Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science. While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including Grizzly Man ; Food, Inc. ; Sweetgrass ; Our Daily Bread ; and Darwin's Nightmare , the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.

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Cover for John Huston as Adaptor
ISBN: 9781438463735

Argues that understanding Huston's film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker. John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston's identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston's thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking. The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston's most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston's films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker.

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Cover for Hitchcock's Moral Gaze
ISBN: 9781438463858

Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock's films. In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train , Rear Window , Vertigo , North by Northwest , and Frenzy , the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral-if not amoral or immoral-world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker's moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.

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Cover for American Stranger
ISBN: 1438464118

Reconstructs how Ray became a "rebel auteur" in cinema culture. How does cinema culture imagine one of its favorite figures, the rebel? The reputation of the American director Nicholas Ray provides a particularly notable example. Most famous for Rebel Without a Cause , Ray has since been canonized as a "rebel auteur" and celebrated for seeking a personal vision and signature style under the industrial pressures of Classical Hollywood during its late studio period. In American Stranger , Will Scheibel reconstructs how Ray's reputation developed over time, analyzing the different historical practices of modernism that set new horizons for artistic rebellion in postwar cinema. Drawing on biographical legends, interviews, film reviews, articles in both national newspapers and international film magazines, and star promotion and publicity, Scheibel examines the contexts in which Ray's reputation was constructed. These include the consolidation of director-based film criticism and the rise of film studies as an academic discipline; star performances and personifications of the rebel male in Ray's films; the counterculture in which Ray promoted himself as a teacher and worked as a political avant-gardist; and the art cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch, each of whom were influenced by Ray. In addition to Rebel Without a Cause , Scheibel also analyzes such classic films as The Lusty Men and In a Lonely Place , as well as collaborative, less-examined films from his later career outside of Hollywood, We Can't Go Home Again and Lightning Over Water . Reconstructing the evolution of Ray's place in cinema culture, this intellectual history measures the standards for both rebellion and convention, for the vanguard and the establishment, that determine an artistic reputation.

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Cover for Brechtian Cinemas
ISBN: 1438463634

Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht's ideas on the practice and study of cinema. In Brechtian Cinemas , Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage-a principal source of artistic estrangement ( Verfremdung ) in earlier Brechtian films-has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.

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Cover for Gestures of Love
ISBN: 1438465513

Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen. Gestures of Love considers the viewer's enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema's most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Using the classical genres of screwball comedy, film noir, and the family melodrama as touchstones, Rybin places the depiction of romance in films into dialogue with the viewer's own emotional bond to the actors on the screen. In doing so, he offers rich new analyses of such classic films as Bringing Up Baby , The Thin Man , Twentieth Century , Laura , To Have and Have Not , Tea and Sympathy , Written on the Wind , and more.

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Cover for Passionate Detachments

Investigates the cultural value of film violence. Passionate Detachments investigates the rise of graphic violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the popular aesthetics and critical responses this violence inspired. Amy Rust examines four technologies adopted by commercial American cinema after the fall of the Hollywood Production Code: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms. Approaching these technologies as figures , as opposed to mere tools, Rust traces the encounters they mediate between perception ( what one sees, hears, and feels) and representation ( how those sights, sounds, and feelings make meaning). These technologies, she argues, lend shape to film violence while organizing viewers' on- and off-screen relationships to it. The result proves meaningful for an era self-consciously and perilously preoccupied with bloodshed. The post-Code period found Americans across the political spectrum demanding visual-and increasingly violent-demonstrations of presumably "authentic" realities. Corroborating fantasies of authenticity from military to counterculture, these technologies challenge them as well, pointing, however unwittingly, to the violently classed, gendered, and racialized blind spots such fantasies harbor. More broadly, the technologies answer concerns that films control violence too much or too little. Offering neither mere discourse nor mere thrills, they recover sense and sensation for all, not some, or even most, depictions of bloodshed. As figures, the devices also remediate vision and violence for film theory, which exhibits distrust for each in spite of the complexities phenomenology and psychoanalysis have brought to cinematic perception and pleasure.

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Cover for Are You Watching Closely?

Identifies a new genre―misdirection films―and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences. Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of "misdirection films," a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Inception (2010), were both commercial and critical successes. Seth Friedman examines this genre in its sociocultural, industrial, and technological contexts to explain why it has become more attractive to producers and audiences. The recent popularity of misdirection films, Friedman argues, is linked to new technologies that enable repeat viewings and online discussion, which makes it enticing to an industry that depends increasingly on the aftermarket, as well as to historically specific cultural developments. That is, in addition to being well suited for shifting industrial and technological conditions, these films are appealing because they suggest that it remains possible to know what "actually" occurred and who was "really" responsible for events at a time when it is also becoming increasingly recognized that "truth" is relative. Are You Watching Closely? shows how Hollywood's effective strategies for these changing circumstances put it at the forefront of a storytelling trend that has increasingly become important across media. Through close analyses of how misdirection films have been designed, marketed, and received in relation to their contexts, Friedman demonstrates the ways in which they epitomize a kind of narrative experimentation that has become a crucial facet of twenty-first-century audiovisual storytelling.

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Cover for Rx Hollywood
ISBN: 1438468512

How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones. Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquiry-therapist/patient dynamics, female "frigidity" and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confession-Michael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community. Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the "there and then" of past feelings and experiences and embraced the "here and now" of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging. Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie , The Boston Strangler , The Chapman Report , Carnal Knowledge , Divorce American Style , Diary of a Mad Housewife , Guess Who's Coming to Dinner , and Five Easy Pieces , DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.

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Cover for Queer Art Camp Superstar

The first book-length study of Trecartin's artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media. Hailed as "the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties," American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin has received numerous accolades for his kaleidoscopic, multilayered movies and multimedia installations. However, there exists to date no comprehensive study of this prolific artist's work. Queer Art Camp Superstar compensates for this absence of sustained critical analysis of Trecartin's work by looking closely at a selection of his most significant movies in order to discern the artist's artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media. Examining Trecartin's substantial body of work, spanning from his early, pre-YouTube era series Early Baggage (2001–2003) to Temple Time (2016), Ricardo E. Zulueta adheres to a faithful chronological order, thus inviting readers to witness the ways thematic and formal concerns have evolved from Trecartin's earliest movies to his more recent multimedia cinematic installations. Through precisely chosen screen captures extracted directly from the movies, Zulueta demonstrates the serious attention paid to camera angles, mise-en-scène, and shot transitions, thus revealing and reflecting on the concepts that underwrite and are underwritten in these narratives. Giving careful attention to Trecartin's network of layered references to the grotesque and abject, carnivalesque and ludic, and camp imagery, Zulueta illustrates and explains how the artist takes on reality television, technology, fashion, consumption, and cyberspace.

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Cover for Immanent Frames
ISBN: 1438470177

Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief. For some time now, thinkers across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly called into question the once-dominant view of the relationship between modernity and secularism, prompting some to speak of a "postsecular turn." Until now, film studies has largely been silent about this development, even though cinema itself has been a major vehicle for such reflection. This fact became inescapable in 2011 when Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia were released within days of each other. While these two audacious and controversial films present seemingly opposite perspectives-the former a thoughtful meditation on faith, the latter a portrayal of nontriumphalist atheism-together they raise critical questions about transcendence and immanence in modern life. These films are, however, only the most conspicuous of a growing body of works that call forth similar and related questions-what this collection aptly calls "postsecular cinema." Taking the nearly simultaneous release of The Tree of Life and Melancholia as its starting point and framing device, this pioneering collection sets out to establish the idea of postsecular cinema as a distinct body of films and a viable critical category. Adopting a film-philosophy approach, one group of essays examines Malick's and von Trier's films, while another looks at works by Chantal Akerman, Denys Arcand, the Dardenne brothers, and John Michael McDonagh, among others. The volume closes with two important interviews with Luc Dardenne and Jean-Luc Nancy that invite us to reflect more deeply on some of the central concerns of postsecular cinema.

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Cover for Rule, Britannia!
ISBN: 1438471114

Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British. Winner of the 2019 SAMLA Studies Book Award for Edited Collections presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Rule, Britannia! surveys the British biopic, a genre crucial to understanding how national cinema engages with the collective experience and values of its intended audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how screen biographies of prominent figures in British history and culture can be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity. The contributors engage with the vexed concept of British nationality, especially as this sense of collective belonging is problematized by the ethnically oriented alternatives of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nations. They explore the critical and historiographical issues raised by the biopic, demonstrating that celebration of conventional virtue is not the genre's only natural subject. Filmic depictions of such personalities as Elizabeth I, Victoria, George VI, Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch, and Jack the Ripper are covered.

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Cover for Welcome to Fear City

Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life-in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute , The French Connection , Detroit 9000 , Death Wish , and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three , Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture.

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Cover for Rumble and Crash
ISBN: 143847279X

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013).

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Cover for From El Dorado to Lost Horizons

Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood. The era known as the Hollywood Renaissance is celebrated as a time when revolutionary movies broke all the rules of the previous "classical" era as part of the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet many films during this era did not overtly smash the system but provided more traditional entertainment, based on popular genres, for a wider audience than the youth culture who flocked to more transgressive fare. Ken Windrum focuses on four genres of traditionalist movies-big-budget musicals, war spectacles, "naughty" sex comedies, and Westerns. From El Dorado to Lost Horizons shows how even seemingly innocuous, family-oriented films still participated in the progressive aspects of the time while also holding a conservative point of view. Windrum analyzes representations of issues including gender roles, marriage, sexuality, civil rights, and Cold War foreign policy, revealing how these films dealt with changing times and reflected both status quo positions and new attitudes. He also examines how the movies continued or deviated from classical principles of structure and style. Windrum provides a counter-history of the Hollywood Renaissance by focusing on a group of important films that have nevertheless been neglected in scholarly accounts.

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Cover for Sounds Like Helicopters

Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music's original subversive energy. Classical music masterworks have long played a key supporting role in the movies-silent films were often accompanied by a pianist or even a full orchestra playing classical or theatrical repertory music-yet the complexity of this role has thus far been underappreciated. Sounds Like Helicopters corrects this oversight through close interpretations of classical music works in key modernist films by Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Beginning with the famous example of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now , Matthew Lau demonstrates that there is a significant continuity between classical music and modernist cinema that belies their seemingly ironic juxtaposition. Though often regarded as a stuffy, conservative art form, classical music has a venerable avant-garde tradition, and key films by important directors show that modernist cinema restores the original subversive energy of these classical masterworks. These films, Lau argues, remind us of what this music sounded like when it was still new and difficult; they remind us that great music remains new music. The pattern of reliance on classical music by modernist directors suggests it is not enough to watch modernist cinema: one must listen to its music to sense its prehistory, its history, and its obscure, prophetic future.

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Cover for Brute Force
ISBN: 1438476612

Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship. It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force , Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong , Jaws , The Grey , Them! , Arachnophobia , Jurassic Park , Snakes on a Plane , An American Werewolf in London , and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration-and appreciation-of cinema's many bad beasts.

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Cover for Tuitions and Intuitions

Makes the case that philosophy has an essential role to play in the serious study of film. William Rothman has long been considered one of the seminal figures in the field of film-philosophy. From his landmark book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze , now in its second edition, to the essays collected here in Tuitions and Intuitions , Rothman has been guided by two intuitions: first, that his kind of film criticism is philosophy; and second, that such a marriage of criticism and philosophy has an essential part to play in the serious study of film. In this book, he aspires, borrowing a formulation from Emerson, to "pay the tuition" for these intuitions. Thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated, and provocative, the essays included here address a wide range of films, including classical Hollywood movies; the work of "auteur" directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Yasujirō Ozu, and Woody Allen; performances by John Barrymore and James Stewart; unconventional works by Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman, Terrence Malick, and the Dardenne brothers; the television series Justified ; and documentaries by Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Robert Gardner. All the essays address questions of philosophical significance and, taken together, manifest Rothman's lifelong commitment when writing about a film, to respect the film's own ideas; to remain open to the film's ways of expressing its ideas; and to let the film help teach him how to view it, how to think about it, and how to discover what he has at heart to say about it.

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Cover for The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period. This is the definitive account of how America's film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. He traces the development of the war's memory in films dealing with combat on the ground and in the air, the role of women behind the lines, returning veterans, and through the social problem and horror genres. Hammond first examines movies that dealt directly with the war and the men and women who experienced it. He then turns to the consequences of the war as they played out across a range of films, some only tangentially related to the conflict itself. Hammond finds that the Great War acted as a storehouse of motifs and tropes drawn upon in the service of an industry actively seeking to deliver clearly told, entertaining stories to paying audiences. Films analyzed include The Big Parade , Grand Hotel , Hell's Angels , The Black Cat , and Wings . Drawing on production records, set designs, personal accounts, and the advertising and reception of key films, the book offers unique insight into a cinematic remembering that was a product of the studio system as it emerged as a global entertainment industry.

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Cover for Slapstick Camera, The

Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium. Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium-from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them-the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.

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Cover for Miraculous Realism
ISBN: 1438477333

An authoritative study of this postsecular film movement from the French-Belgian border region that rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century. At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, two movies from northern-Francophone Europe swept almost all the main awards. Rosetta by the Walloon directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Golden Palm, and L'humanité by the French director Bruno Dumont won the Grand Prize; both won acting awards as well. Taking this "miracle" of Cannes as the point of departure, Niels Niessen identifies a transregional film movement in the French-Belgian border region-the Cinéma du Nord or "cinema of the North." He examines this movement within the contexts of French and Belgian national cinemas from the silent era to the digital age, as well as that of the new realist tendency in world cinema of the last three decades. In addition, he traces, from a northern perspective, a secular-religious tradition in Francophone-European film and philosophy from Bresson and Pialat, via Bazin, Deleuze, and Godard, to the Dardennes and Dumont, while critiquing this tradition for its frequent use of a humanist vocabulary of grace for a secular world. Once a cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the Franco-Belgian Nord faced economic crisis for most of the twentieth century. Miraculous Realism demonstrates that the Cinéma du Nord's rise to prominence resulted from the region's endeavor to reinvent itself economically and culturally at the crossroads of Europe after decades of recession.

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Cover for Funny How?
ISBN: 1438478291

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele , to probe how humor works. What makes something funny? This book shows how humor can be analyzed without killing the joke. Alex Clayton argues 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 suggests 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 illustrates 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. Drawing on both popular and lesser-known examples from the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere- Monty Python's Flying Circus , Key and Peele , Saturday Night Live , Airplane! , and Smack the Pony -Clayton reveals the techniques and resonances of humor.

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Cover for Letters from Hollywood

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created. Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system to illuminate an art that is also a multibillion-dollar business. He connects currents in French film criticism and theory with an unfolding account of American cinema past and present, offering penetrating insights into directors and their work. Beginning with Allan Dwan, who learned how to make movies before Hollywood was born by watching D. W. Griffith, Krohn presents a panorama that encompasses Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone, Star Wars and I Love Lucy . He covers everything from gangsters to gremlins, from blockbusters to no-budget cult films like Moon Over Harlem and Plan 9 from Outer Space , in a style that is accessible to anyone who loves movies, or has a passion for writing about them.

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Cover for Giallo!
ISBN: 1438480334

Traces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon. Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"- reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels-these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.

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Cover for Mind Reeling
ISBN: 1438481012

Across a variety of genres, shows how mental disorders are depicted in cinema. Mind Reeling investigates how cinema displays and mirrors psychological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, amnesia, psychotic delusions, obsessive compulsive behavior, trauma, paranoia, and borderline personalities. It explores a range of genres, including biopics, comedies, film noirs, contemporary dramedies, thrillers, Gothic mysteries, and docufictions. The contributors open up critical approaches to audience fascination with film depictions of serious disturbances within the human psyche. Many films examined here have had little scholarly attention and commentary. These essays focus on how cinematic techniques contribute to popular culture's conception of mental dysfunction, trauma, and illness. This book reveals the complex artistic and generic patterns that produce contemporary images of psychopathology in cinema.

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