Film history, theory or criticism Books

Book SynopsisTrade Review"This thoughtful study offers a worthwhile critical perspective on Werner Herzog, one of the world's great living film artists." --The Arts Fuse”From the fascinating films of Werner Herzog, Joshua Lund crafts a striking book that sheds light on the political significance of a range of aesthetic issues. Behind Herzog's films stands the ghost of America, confronting us with the tragic powerlessness of her heroes and meditating on the historical failure of her cultural-economic model. We have never seen Herzog's films with greater clarity.”—Luc Vancheri, author of Psycho: La leçon d'iconologie d'Alfred Hitchcock"This is a book that was written to be read. With a view to shedding light on Herzog’s notoriously hard-to-pin-down politics, Lund focuses on the idea of “America” as it figures in Herzog’s oeuvre, treating it as a broad and privileged category for reflecting on capitalist modernity. Each of the main chapters of Werner Herzog centers on a single film, tracing the arc of its plot, elegantly interweaving observations about other Herzog films, unusual historical and literary material, and commentary on the growing critical literature. It does all this without devolving into an easily forgotten scholasticism. Lund’s concerns go to the heart of what is so powerful and disorienting about Herzog’s work. By the end of each chapter, one has been expertly led along an unpredictable path to a fresh apprehension of the films. The book has everything what one wants from film criticism: excellent writing; suspense and surprise; erudition; and most of all, a strong and irreverent critical voice, worthy of Herzog’s own renegade sensibility."—Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, author of The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor

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Book SynopsisFrom The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell's A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck's work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress's off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell's montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America. Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.Trade Review"Russell has positioned her concise, structurally adventurous contribution to 'Stanwyck studies' to reflect the expanding range of cultural approaches to women in media published during the past decade. . . . The twenty-six bite-sized essays cover themes of work, gender, sexuality, ageing, misogyny, class and race." --Times Literary Supplement"Catherine Russell's The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck adds illuminating dimension to the actress's complex life story and equally vaunted career. Her meticulously researched and thoughtful analysis brings a fresh perspective to Stanwyck' s legacy, and captures the enduring power and charm of the classical Hollywood movie star." --Cineaste"The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck makes the choice to refuse to simplify Stanwyck’s career. It underscores Stanwyck’s importance, but it doesn’t pretend like she, the films, or the era that created them are something they’re not. As a result, Russell has put together an unflinching work of criticism that must be acknowledged as the definitive work on the subject. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in Stanwyck or the era of film she headlined." --NewCity“Catherine Russell’s inventive study of Barbara Stanwyck’s long, fascinating career as a ‘working star’ offers a tantalizing model for other feminist histories of women’s work in the film industry. Achronological and essayistic, Russell’s approach weaves back and forth between Stanwyck’s onscreen roles, her star persona, and her working life to document what Russell calls ‘the structural misogyny of the industry.’”--Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood and Movie-Struck Girls“A deeply creative and insightful critical study of Barbara Stanwyck’s agency and labor as a performer, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is a stunning blend of feminist historiography, archival research, star-studies, biography, and film analysis--a rewarding and immensely pleasurable read.”--Julie Grossman, author of The Femme FataleTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction to Stanwyck Studies A All I Desire: Pastiche and Performance B The Barbara Stanwyck Show: Everyday Melodrama C Crimes of Passion: A Destructive Character D Dion the Son, and Barbara the Bad Mother E Edith Head: Clothing Makes the Woman a Woman F Forty Guns and The Furies: Angry Women G Gambling Ladies: Playing Games H William Holden: Making Men I Illicit: How to be Ultramodern J Jungle Films/White Women K Kate Crawley: Cross-Dressing in the Archive L The Lady Eve: Performativity and Melancholia M Fred MacMurray: Kissing and Playing N No Man of Her Own: Double Women and the Star O Annie Oakley: A Girl and a Gun P Paranoia, Abjection, and Gaslighting Q The Queen R Riding, Falling, and Stunts S The Stella Dallas Debates T Theresa Harris: Black Double U Union Pacific: Unmaking History V Voice, Body, Identity W Working Women and Cultural Labor X Exotica and Bitter Tears Y You Belong to Me: Archives and Fans Z Zeppo Marx: Comedy and Agency Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFilms like Shoplifters and After the Storm have made Kore-eda Hirokazu one of the most acclaimed auteurs working today. Critics often see Kore-eda as a director steeped in the Japanese tradition defined by Yasujiro Ozu. Marc Yamada, however, views Kore-eda’s work in relation to the same socioeconomic concerns explored by other contemporary international filmmakers. Yamada reveals that a type of excess, not the minimalism associated with traditional aesthetics, defines Kore-eda’s trademark humanism. This excess manifests in small moments when a desire for human connection exceeds the logic of the institutions and policies formed by the neoliberal values that have shaped modern-day Japan. As Yamada shows, Kore-eda captures the shared spaces formed by bodies that move, perform, and assemble in ways that express the humanistic impulse at the core of the filmmaker’s expanding worldwide appeal.Trade Review“Marc Yamada reveals how Kore-eda’s films connect to global audiences through their focus on figures like children suffering from neglect and families surviving at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Yamada provides new approaches towards understanding Kore-eda’s work in terms of a broader critique of neoliberalism.”--Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s"A close read of the works of one of the world’s most deeply human writer-directors. The section studying 2018’s Shoplifters is especially strong. But his entire corpus is shown to be well worth analyzing. " --Film StageTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Shared Spaces of Filmmaking Beyond Ozu and Loach: Kore-eda Hirokazu in Japanese and World Cinema Nonorganized Labor and Shared Spaces of Collaboration in Kore-eda’s Early Documentaries Grifter Families and Networks of Exchange in Shoplifters Reimagining Masculine Bodies in Hana; Like Father, Like Son; and The Third Murder Body Moving: The Dynamics of Placemaking in Our Little Sister, Still Walking, and After the Storm Private and Public Bodies of Memory in After Life, The Truth, and Distance Interviews with Kore-eda Hirokazu Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExamines the suppression of radical political activity in the film industry from the days of the Great Depression through the tumultuous House Un-American Activities Commission era to the waning days of the infamous blacklist. This book traces the history of political struggle in Hollywood back to the formation of the Screen Writers Guild in 1933.Trade ReviewAdvance Praise: "The Inquisition in Hollywood is a classic text that refuses to be outdated: it tells the inside story of Hollywood radicals and their victimization, one of the least understood and least appreciated episodes in the history of American art. The scrupulous research, the lucid commentary and hard-hitting conclusions make The Inquisition in Hollywood a major contribution." -- Paul Buhle, coauthor of Tender Comrades: A BAckstory of the Hollywood Blacklist

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Book SynopsisFeatures how the "dark continent" of blues and jazz provided Hollywood with a resonant resource to construct and negotiate the boundaries of American cultural identity. This book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, and more.Trade Review"This is a unique volume in that the author confirms the overlap of American cultural forms and racial and gender practices. . . . Appealing as much to cultural historians as to students and scholars of film and musicology, this volume is a must read for those interested in US cultural studies. Essential."--Choice"[An] absorbing and convincing account of white America's fraught, imitative, fascinated, repressive and denial-ridden relationship with black culture."--The Wire"Body and Soul is [Stanfield's] incisive report back from the field of Hollywood films - melodramas, crime films, musicals, comedies - that use, sometimes centrally but more often in crucial but taken-for-granted ways, jazz and blues-inflected music to figure and probe American identity."--Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisFollows Pedro Almodovar's career chronologically as he moves from amateur to international celebrity, and understands the films' complexity in terms of the director's central themes and the Spanish film tradition from which he comes. This work is of interest to new film students and specialists alike.Trade Review"For fans and film students alike, D'Lugo's contribution to the Contemporary Film Directors series celebrates the director's camp aesthetic and artistic sensibilities with insight and elan."--Publishers Weekly "[D'Lugo] significantly extends the critical discourse on Almodovar's work by focusing on the cluster of ambiguities and polarities that sustain the most controversial aspects of Almodovar's authorship."--Screening The Past "Providing a thoroughly researched synthesis of the many years of study of Almodovar's work by other scholars in both Spanish and English, D'Lugo nevertheless makes the narrative his own through contrasting Almodovar's early films to the films that inspired the director and the ones he seemed to revile and react to, and by emphasizing the auteur's own role in the creation of his personality as a celebrity-author ... With such a thorough and well-written book as D'Lugo's, a full appreciation of ... the genius of its creator has become a lot easier and more enjoyable."--European-films.netTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix PEDRO ALMÓDOVAR AND HIS CINEMA 1 Low-Level Melodrama 1 Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Friends of Pedro 16 Migration and Melodrama 29 Thrillers 45 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown59 Transnational Repositioning after Women on the Verge 67 The Flower of My Secret 85 Live Flesh 93 All about My Mother 99 Talk to Her and Bad Education 105 INTERVIEW WITH PEDRO ALMODÓVAR 131 SELF-INTERVIEW 145 Filmography 153 Bibliography 159 Index 165

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"This is crucial work. What we find here is a scholar at the top of her form paying attention to her field, in its broadest contours and attempting to make sense of it at a key moment of transition. In terms of feminist writing on cinema, there is nobody else in de Lauretis's league." --B. Ruby Rich, author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement"De Lauretis's work is stimulating, innovative, and groundbreaking. Readers from a wide range of audiences will be grateful to have in a single volume the works of one of the most important feminist theorists working today." --Judith Mayne, Distinguished Humanities Professor, French and women's studies, Ohio State University

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Book SynopsisA new take on an eclectic and controversial directorTrade Review"The dizzying ups and downs of Polanski's career, Morrison observes, are representative of the vagaries of international cinema during the past half century."--Booklist"A valuable addition to the already substantial field of Polanski studies. It is insightful and richly informative not only about Polanski's trailblazing, difficult-to-classify films, but also the cultural context of the past few decades."-Times Literary Supplement "A very personal, insightful book, which sheds welcome new light on the career of a major talent, while at the same time highlighting the complexities of transnational film culture."--Scope"In this outstanding book, James Morrison makes a strong case for Polanski as an intriguing example of film authorship. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Foucault, Morrison examines the breaks in his career and several cinematic modes he has explored while discovering a surprising unity in the filmmaker's preoccupations and aesthetic."--Cynthia Erb, author of Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture

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Book SynopsisAs the first full-length study on Paul Schrader''s films, this book examines the different styles of his work and the multiple influences on which it draws. A defining feature of Schrader''s career is his capacity to engage in a range of collaborations and production contexts while returning to a consistent set of themes, character types, and dramatic scenarios. Going beyond the affirmation of a directorial vision, Schrader creates a cinema driven by issues of obsession, memory, and the difficult nature of experience. Representative of a new generation of American writer-directors of the 1970s, Schrader''s films highlight the tension between old and new ways of telling a story and between the maintenance of commercial formulas and openness to individual expression.George Kouvaros draws on a personal interview conducted with Schrader and the director''s prior commentary to trace common motivations and impulses behind such well-known films as Light Sleeper, AmericaTrade Review"A good book for film students and Schrader enthusiasts, and it provides ample springboards for further discussion of the director's oeuvre."--Pop Matters "Across an impressive series of writings, George Kouvaros has been one of our ablest commentators on the performance of self by both film directors and their fictional characters on-screen. With his sharp and concise study of Paul Schrader, Kouvaros productively and compellingly brings these critical talents to bear on a complex, contradictory body of films in trenchant and far-reaching fashion."--Dana Polan, professor of cinema studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University"Schrader was a big part of the American film renaissance of the 1970s—which produced films that challenged and provoked, although they sometimes failed to find an audience—and Kouvaros offers a good argument as to why his films matter."--Library Journal "A much-needed source for those interested in Paul Schrader. This stimulating and engaging work illuminates his career and provides incisive analysis of his films, making it an especially valuable contribution to the field."--Cynthia Lucia, author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film

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Book Synopsis As the first collection of new work on sound and cinema in over a decade, Lowering the Boom addresses the expanding field of film sound theory and its significance in rethinking historical models of film analysis. The contributors consider the ways in which musical expression, scoring, voice-over narration, and ambient noise affect identity formation and subjectivity. Lowering the Boom also analyzes how shifting modulation of the spoken word in cinema results in variations in audience interpretation. Introducing new methods of thinking about the interaction of sound and music in films, this volume also details avant-garde film sound, which is characterized by a distinct break from the narratively based sound practices of mainstream cinema. This interdisciplinary, global approach to the theory and history of film sound opens the eyes and ears of film scholars, practitioners, and students to film''s true audio-visual nature. Contributors are Jay Beck, John BTrade Review “An excellent collection of essays which reveals much about the state of play of soundtrack studies and offers many fresh and original insights. It will certainly be of value to students and scholars of film sound.”--Music, Sound, and the Moving Image "A substantial and important book, Lowering the Boom includes work from both established scholars and emerging voices in the field and is a welcome addition to auditory culture and sound studies."--Steve J. Wurtzler, author of Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media“[Lowering the Boom reclaims] cinema as an “audiovisual” object, demonstrating conclusively that whatever the relative importance of the “audio” and “visual” parts, neither can be ignored . . . . I hope Lowering the Boom is widely read.”--Jump Cut"A central text for the study of sound in media. Lowering the Boom's wide range of topics joins history and critical debates and will be useful and appealing to scholars and students of sound design, media studies, and film theory."--Donald Crafton, author of The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Future of Film Sound Studies 1Jay Beck and Tony GrajedaPart 1: Theorizing Sound 1. The Phenomenology of Film Sound: Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped 23John Belton 2. The Proxemics of the Mediated Voice 36Arnt Maaso 3. Almost Silent: The Interplay of Sound and Silence in Contemporary Cinema and Television 51Paul Theberge 4. The Sounds of "Silence": Dolby Stereo, Sound Design, and The Silence of the Lambs 68Jay BeckPart II: Historicizing Sound 5. Sonic Imagination; or, Film Sound as a Discursive Construct in Czech Culture of the Transitional Period 87Petr Szczepanik 6. Sounds of the City: Alfred Newman's "Street Scene" and Urban Modernity 105Matthew Malsky 7. Film and the Wagnerian Aspiration: Thoughts on Sound Design and the History of the Senses 123James LastraPart III: Sound and Genre 8. Asynchronous Documentary: Bunuel's Land without Bread 141Barry Mauer 9. "We'll Make a Paderewski of You Yet!": Acoustic Reflections in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T 152Nancy Newman 10. Paul Sharits's Cinematics of Sound 171Melissa Ragona 11. "Every Beautiful Sound Also Creates an Equally Beautiful Picture": Color Music and Walt Disney's Fantasia 183Clark FarmerPart IV: Film Sound and Cultural Studies 12. "A Question of the Ear": Listening to Touch of Evil 201Tony Grajeda 13. "Sound Sacrifices": The Postmodern Melodramas of World War II 218Debra White-Stanley 14. Real Fantasies: Connie Stevens, Silencio, and Other Sonic Phenomena in Mulholland Drive 233Robert MiklitschPart V: Case Studies of Film Sound 15. Selling Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard History of Technical Trademarks 251Paul Grainge 16. (S)lip-Sync: Punk Rock Narrative Film and Postmodern Musical Performance 269David Laderman 17. Critical Hearing and the Lessons of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up 289David T. Johnson 18. Rethinking Point of Audition in The Cell 299Anahid Kassabian Works Cited 307 Contributors 327 Index 331

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Book SynopsisInvaluable, illuminating interviews with South African filmmakersTrade Review“This engaging and very readable book is an original and important contribution to the fields of film studies, African studies, and the sociology of race. It addresses the current state of cinema in South Africa, in which the filmmakers see cinema as a metaphor for their newly formed society as it emerges from the apartheid system.”--Manthia Diawara, author of We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World“An extremely important work, The Devil You Dance With is the first comprehensive study of South African filmmaking in the critical post-apartheid period. This book gives vital insight into how globalization actually impacts a non-Western society that has few defenses beyond the awareness and canniness of the artists involved. Strongly recommended to anyone interested in film.”--Peter Davis, director of award-winning documentary films Winnie Mandela and In Darkest Hollywood: Cinema and Apartheid"Filled with rich insights. . . . It is a gold mine for African film scholars."--CineasteTable of ContentsAcknowledgments - ix Introduction - 1INTERVIEWS Beathur Baker - 21 Pascal Mzwandile Damoyi - 27 Mike Dearham - 33 Mickey Madoba Dube, Sechaba Morojele, Akin Omotoso - 38 Ingrid Gavshon - 48 Angus Gibson - 52 Kevin Harris - 61 Letebele Masemola Jones - 67 Ntshaveni wa Luruli - 75 Norman Maake and Tongai Furusa - 84 Kgafela oa Magogodi - 94 Teboho Mahlatsi - 103 Zola Maseko - 112 Khalo Matabane - 120 Teddy Errol Mattera - 130 Jyoti Mistry - 139 Palesa Letlaka-Nkosi - 150 Akin Omotoso - 159 Bhekiziziwe Peterson - 166 Dumisani Phakathi - 175 Bridget Pickering - 183 Maganthrie Pillay - 192 Isabelle Rorke and Dumisani (Dumi) Gumbi - 196 Xoliswa Sithole - 207 Motshabi Tyelele - 217Partial List of Theatrical and Other Selected Released in South Africa, 1994-2008 - 225Bibliography - 229Index - 231

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Book Synopsis Disappearing Tricks revisits the golden age of theatrical magic and silent film to reveal how professional magicians shaped the early history of cinema. Where others have called upon magic as merely an evocative metaphor for the wonders of cinema, Matthew Solomon focuses on the work of the professional illusionists who actually made magic with moving pictures between 1895 and 1929. The first to reveal fully how powerfully magic impacted the development of cinema, the book combines film and theater history to uncover new evidence of the exchanges between magic and filmmaking in the United States and France during the silent period. Chapters detailing the stage and screen work of Harry Houdini and Georges Méliès show how each transformed theatrical magic to create innovative cinematic effects and thrilling new exploits for twentieth-century mass audiences. The book also considers the previously overlooked roles of anti-spiritualism and presentational peTrade Review Received the Best Moving Image Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, 2011. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2011."Along with intriguing insights into the early development of film, Disappearing Tricks is a reminder that magic and movies involve playing with perceptions and making the appearance of reality seem malleable."--ExpressMilwaukee.com"Students of magic history, film history, the intersection of both, and of Houdini's film career in particular, will all find much to enlarge their insight and understanding of these subjects."--GENII "A sharp, sophisticated, and fascinating read."--Magicol "Conjuring up an amazing trick of his own with this engaged scholarship, Solomon provides a fresh, fascinating display of theory applied to film history. This is one of the most succinct, scintillating books of the year. Essential."--Choice"A truly important and impressive book, the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of the interaction between magicians and cinema that anyone has offered or is likely to offer.”--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and ModernityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction; 1 An Anti-Spiritualist Medium: Stage Magic and the Beginnings of Cinema; 2 The Death of Magic? Presentational Performance and Early Film; 3 Behind the Curtain: Melies at the Theatre Robert-Houdin; 4 Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film; 5 Houdini's Actuality Magic: Escaping the "Ghost House" with Moving Pictures; 6 Lost in Transition: Sensational Fiction and the Limits of Narrative Integration Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index

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Book SynopsisA sophisticated comparison of U.S. and Cuban reactions to Cuban revolutionary filmsTrade Review"Truly groundbreaking. Amaya's provocative and illuminating analysis uses a Cuba-U.S. framework to address film criticism as a way of exercising political citizenship, providing a glimpse into the cultural and political effects of the Cold War."--Ana López, coeditor of The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts “Screening Cuba joins a new generation of writings about Cuban culture and cultural politics. An original contribution to cinema reception studies."--Michael Chanan, author of Cuban Cinema "[A] clearly organized, well-written comparative study. . . . Recommended."--Choice Table of ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionPart I: Staging Film Criticism: The Cuban and American Historical and Political Backgrounds1. Cuban Culture, Institutions, Policies, and Citizens2. The Cuban Revolutionary Hermeneutics: Criticism and Citizenship3. The U.S. Field of Culture4. U.S. Criticism, Dissent, and HermeneuticsPart II: Performing Film Criticism5. Memories of Underdevelopment6. Lucia7. One Way or Another8. Portrait of TeresaConclusion: Film Criticism in Cuba and the United StatesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA Hollywood director who blends substance with the mainstreamTrade Review"A smart, enthusiastic analysis of an artist and his considerable oeuvre. Baker's textual analysis of Soderbergh's films is spot on."--Jon Lewis, author of American Film: A History"By having a foot in both worlds, Soderbergh has produced a number of films that follow classical Hollywood narratives, yet often carry non-traditional visual cues and meta-commentaries. Baker creates an accessible work for those who often dismiss half of his work, whichever side that may be."--Film MattersTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments | ix THE FILMS OF STEVEN SODERBERGH | 1 Relational Independence 1 Remade by Steven Soderbergh: The Underneath, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven, Solaris 16 Star Actors: Julia Roberts, Michael Douglas, George Clooney 28 Cinema of Outsiders: Alienation and Crime 39 Critical Violence and Out of Sight 42 Words as Weapons: The Limey and Ocean's Eleven 53 Independent Form 60 Experiments in Digital Video: Full Frontal, K Street, Bubble 75 Class Conflict in High Definition: Che and The Girlfriend Experience 86 Music and Authorship in Ocean's Eleven and The Limey 90 INTERVIEWS WITH STEVEN SODERBERGH | 97Filmography | 115Bibliography | 123Index | 129

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Book Synopsis As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world''s perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Céline et Julie vont en bateau--Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret défense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty. In this study of Rivette, Mary M. Wiles provides a thorough account of the director''s career from the burgeoning French New Wave to the present day, focusing on the theatricality of Rivette''s films and his explorations of the relationship between cinema and fine arts such as painting, literature, music, and dance. Wiles also explores the intellectual interests that shaped Rivette''s approach to film, including Sartre''s existentialism, Barthes''s structuralism, and Trade Review “A riveting study of an often-overlooked director.”--Library Journal "A very useful and thoughtful book. In this critical study of Jacques Rivette, Mary M. Wiles situates Rivette within many strands of French culture and makes his films more legible. Wiles's discussion is well-informed, provocative, suggestive, and reliable, and her fanaticism about Rivette is contagious."--Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition "A perceptive volume, on a filmmaker whom studies are thin on the ground."--Film International "Wiles puts forth an original work which never relies on a compilation of other's analyses and review. . . . Wiles reinforces Rivette's credibility as experimental filmmaker while reaching out to audiences of adaptation and film studies."--French Review

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Book Synopsis Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror, as well as his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970''s suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009''s Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. While considerations of Argento''s films often describe them as irrational nightmares, L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films'' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento''s oeuvre. Approaching the films Trade Review "Contained in these pages are innumerable facts that illuminate the production, content, and backstory of these films and their maker. A thoroughly well researched book."--Film Matters"Cooper's text is deep and probing, throwing light onto the darkness and the bloodletting of Argento's world."--PopMatters.com "A novel and interesting approach to Argento's oeuvre. Cooper's interrogation of authorial style and theoretical readings of the films are thorough, insightful, and astute." --Brigid Cherry, coeditor of Twenty-first-century Gothic

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Book SynopsisShows how cinema both reflects and engenders interzones that explore the important questions of Europe's social order: imperialism and nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; "first contact" between former adversaries (such as East and West Germany) following World War II and the Cold War.Trade Review"An original and ground-breaking view of the post-Wende central European landscape, drawn from a remarkable abundance of sources. Halle's writing is intelligent and even amusing--I couldn't put the book down until I had read it to the last page." --Janina Falkowska, author of Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema "Fascinating. The book's meticulous, insightful, and effective writing, which illuminates the ideational spaces of cinematic interzones from a European context, should have no trouble finding several imaginative communities of active readers."--Council For European Studies "An intelligent and innovative study."--Journal of Contemporary European StudiesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Idea of Bridges and the Image of Roads: Culture and Space1. The Film Apparatus2. Interzone History3. Contiguous: The German-Polish Interzone4. Interzone Dis/continuous: The Borders of Europe5. "Outside" Europe6. Interzone Xperimental: Migration and Moving ImagesConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisCalled the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies made his reputation with modern classics like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, personal works exploring his fractured childhood in Liverpool. His idiosyncratic and unorthodox narrative films defy easy categorization, as their seeming existence within realism and personal memory cinema is undermined by an abstractness that makes the way he lays bare personal pain come across as distant, even alien. Film critic Michael Koresky explores the unique emotional tenor of Davies''s work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director''s oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space. Through these contradictions, the films'' intricate designs reveal a cumulative, deeply personal meditation on the self. Koresky also analyzes hTrade Review"A significant contribution to the field. Koresky is able to both chart the development of Davies' cinema, while convincingly conveying the coherence and continuity of both theme and style at the heart of this very singular auteur." --Duncan Petrie, author of Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry"Britain's finest living director finally gets the analytic overview and close reading that he deserves. . . . Koresky is especially perceptive. Recommended."--Choice"Michael Koresky's study of Davies is above all attuned to the contradictions that define his life and inform his work, namely 'beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis.' Koresky unpacks the paradoxes intrinsic to Davies's project with clarity and rigor, dividing his aesthetic among the fiction of autobiography (refraction of personal memories for poetic effect), the elation of melancholy (sensually pleasing depictions of excruciating events), the radical traditional (classical themes embedded in avant-garde constructions), and the suspension of forward motion."--Film Comment"Koresky. . . . regards Terence Davies’s work as 'one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker,' and his monograph in the University of Illinois Contemporary Film Directors series is both informative and insightful."--Sight and Sound

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Book SynopsisEmir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe''s most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works. On the way he won acclaim and widespread popularity while showing a genius for adjusting his poetic pitch--shifting from romantic realist to controversial satirist to sentimental jester. Leading scholar-critic Giorgio Bertellini divides Kusturica''s career into three stages--dissention, disconnection, and dissonance--to reflect both the historic and cultural changes going on around him and the changes his cinema has undergone. He uses Kusturica''s Palme d''Or winning Underground (1995)--the famously inflammatory take on Yugoslav history after World War II--as the pivot between the tone of romantic, yet pungent critique of the director''s early works and later journeys into Balkanist farce marked by slapstick and a self-consciouTrade Review"Bertellini is admirably succinct and evocative in discussing Kusturica's aesthetic management and no less insightful in discussing critical perspectives on the sociocultural, political thematic underpinnings of his major films." --Daniel Goulding, author ofLiberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001"Enter Giorgio Bertellini with this remarkable study of Kusturica, his films, and their cinematic, cultural, and political implications and dimensions. . . . This is one of those rare film studies books that actively engages those who have seen and appreciated Kusturica's work as well as those just coming to these unusual films for the first time."--Slavic Review

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016— A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016Table of ContentsCoverTitleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Nullius in Verba: Acting on Silent Film2. Hamlet: A Short Film, 19003. Camille: The Ladies of the Camellias4. Queen Elizabeth: A Moving Picture, 19125. Sarah Bernhardt at Home: Cinema and the Home, ca. 19156. Mothers of France: World War I, Film, and PropagandaConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisCelebrated as Pixar''s 'Chief Creative Officer,' John Lasseter is a revolutionary figure in animation history and one of today''s most important filmmakers. Lasseter films from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story and Cars 2 highlighted his gift for creating emotionally engaging characters. At the same time, they helped launch computer animation as a viable commercial medium and serve as blueprints for the genre''s still-expanding commercial and artistic development. Richard Neupert explores Lasseter''s signature aesthetic and storytelling strategies and details how he became the architect of Pixar''s studio style. Neupert contends that Lasseter''s accomplishments emerged from a unique blend of technical skill and artistic vision, as well as a passion for working with collaborators. In addition, Neupert traces the director''s career arc from the time Lasseter joined Pixar in 1984. As Neupert shows, Lasseter''s ability to keep a foot in both animation and CGI allowed him to thrTrade Review"Richard Neupert's monograph provides an insightful analysis of the career and artistry of John Lasseter, the most successful and influential animation auteur in the world today. Neupert casts Lasseter as a new sort of collegial auteur who not only embodies his ideas in the films he writes and/or directs but also infuses them in the other films made by Pixar and Disney. At the same time, he fosters a communal creative atmosphere among his colleagues where everyone’s ideas and suggestions are taken seriously. Neupert further expands auteur studies by examining in detail how media reporting and critiques (as well as Lasseter's own comments in interviews and conference presentations) have helped construct John Lasseter for the industry and for the public at large as a genius, an auteur, and even the avatar of Pixar and, by extension, of CGI animation in general."--Richard J. Leskosky, past president, Society for Animation Studies"Neupert does an excellent job of analyzing the aesthetics, storytelling, technology, and business involved in the production of Lasseter's works, in so doing offering a rich context for his dissection of Lasseter's lighthearted films. Highly recommended."--Choice "John Lasseter is one of the most important figures in contemporary film history ”this book explains how that came to be. It focuses on his student films from CalArts, Pixar shorts, commercials, and features, setting them in a broad context and including analysis of the works as well as discussion of their technical components. Richard Neupert's research includes interviews of key figures as well as a thorough survey of reviews and critical commentary. The author's understanding of technology adds to the full picture of Lasseter, the Pixar studio, and the development of computer animation as a whole."--Maureen Furniss, author of Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics"The scholarship here is just extraordinary. This is not the kind of gushing fan hagiography that we so often get in the writing about animation. Rather, this is an incredibly nuanced historical work, one that provides a model for all writing about directorial careers, as well as an industrial history of the first order."--Eric Smoodin, editor of Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom"Just as John Lasseter is more than a director, Neupert's volume is much more than a director study. While knowledgeably surveying the history of computer animation, it offers a thorough background on Pixar's development, keen insights into Lasseter's style, and an appreciation of his creative leadership at the largest media and entertainment company, Disney."--J. P. Telotte, author of Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Possesses the potential to alter the entire field. An unimpeachable reference book to be dipped into at need and taken in toto as a substantial, sustained, and original interpretation of its subject. Miklitsch is profoundly (and charmingly) collegial, but his scrupulous tone should not obscure the challenge to received wisdom his book poses."--Ann Douglas, author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s"Miklitsch's extended mediation on 1950s noir will entertain and intrigue both film scholars and movie fans." --Journal of American Culture"An interesting piece of work that highlights a commonly neglected period of American film noir."--Pop Culture Shelf “In this recommended read, [Miklitsch] finds something fresh to say about a familiar film topic.”--Library Journal"Highly Recommended."--Choice"Robert Miklitsch shows once again why he is one of the most interesting and knowledgeable critics of film noir. These readings of key '50s releases sparkle with insight, wit, and the enthusiasm of the committed cinephile."--R. Barton Palmer, author of Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir?

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Book SynopsisIf size counts for anything, Michael Bay towers over his contemporaries. His summer-defining event films involve extraordinary production costs and churn enormous box office returns. His ability to mastermind breathtaking spectacles of action, mayhem, and special effects continually push the movie industry as much as the medium of film toward new frontiers. Lutz Koepnick engages the bigness of works like Armageddon and the Transformers movies to explore essential questions of contemporary filmmaking and culture. Combining close analysis and theoretical reflection, Koepnick shows how Bay''s films, knowingly or not, address profound issues about what it means to live in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. According to Koepnick''s astute readings, no one eager to understand the state of cinema today can ignore Bay''s work. Bay''s cinema of world-making and transnational reach not only exemplifies interlocking processes of cultural and economic globalization. It urgeTrade Review"Compelling. The brilliance of this new book lies in the way that it grasps Bay's cinema not as the diametrical opposite, but rather as the dialectical counterpart, of 'slow cinema.' Exemplary in the way that it takes full measure of its subject without naive enthusiasm, but also without critical condescension."--Steven Shaviro, author of Post Cinematic Affect"This book is for everyone who loved the film classes they took in college, then watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and thought 'I give up.' Lutz Koepnick’s study of Michael Bay is a clear-eyed assessment of the oeuvre of Hollywood's hyperkinetic trash-virtuoso, but it is also a joyful demonstration of what film criticism and film theory can accomplish when they don't capitulate before the new cinema of confetti-cuts and incessant franchise service. The thinking person's guide to Bayhem."--Adrian Daub, coauthor of The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

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Book SynopsisWomen held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists'' pasts that relates their aTrade ReviewA Choice Outstanding Title, 2018 "An intellectually dense and enlightening intervention in the never-to-be-concluded discussion of how we frame history and how we navigate time." --Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television"Pink-Slipped is a momentous contribution to the interdisciplinary field of feminist media history in its embrace of 'unknowability' as a critical stance." --NECSUS "Pink-Slipped weaves an extraordinarily intricate complex of issues and impasses surrounding history and historiography." --Screen"An eye-opening look at these innovative film pioneers and their relevance today, supported by extensive research and in-depth presentation and an insightful examination of the historiographical process itself. This scholarly narrative is an informative addition to film, cultural, and feminist history collections, prompting additional study and discussions."--Library Journal"[Gaines's] work should not be missed by those interested in the intersection of critical theory, feminism, and film." --Publishers Weekly"Complex and well researched." --H-Net Review"Gaines's study is of crucial importance to feminist film critics and historians, and its meditations on history and politics are relevant to many contemporary fields of study. Essential." --Choice"Gaines' book is an engaging and rich examination of the 'knowability' of the past." --Gender & History "A valuable reflection on the processes of history-making, and an interrogation of the blind-spots that such practices create." --Synoptique "A preeminent and provocative feminist historian of early cinema, Jane Gaines has always balanced empirical research with philosophical interrogation of how 'history' as an object of knowledge is itself historically conceived, practiced, and legitimated. She goes even further in Pink-Slipped, developing a 'melodramatic theory of historical time' that should be read by every historian, whatever their focus. A groundbreaking and brilliant book!"--Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture "This is not simply a book about the historiography of early film history or women's place in it. Gaines's larger argument is more ambitious, as she attempts to trouble, complicate, and inject some skepticism into the historical project in which she and others are engaged."--Patrice Petro, author of Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s "Jane Gaines has been our great pioneer of feminist film history, blazing a trail into the neglected terrain of women filmmakers, particularly during the silent era. In this complex new work she traces a path into controversial areas of the theory of history and the goals of feminist film studies. This is a book that questions assumptions and will agitate our field."--Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph

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Book SynopsisJohn Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA), 2020 In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new--though incoherent--sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation. Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women's same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of timing, Potter stages scenes of the erTrade Review"If one is able to do as Potter asks and suspend contemporary sexual knowledge for the duration of one's reading, Queer Timing is a welcome return to familiar objects, histories, and concepts, one that will likely inspire readers to similarly return to their own objects of study with fresh eyes." --Journal of the History of Sexuality“Susan Potter offers a counterhistory of queer representation by examining films and extrafilmic archival materials from the late nineteenth century to the late 1920s. . . . Queer Timing provides a provocative approach to tracing queer sexuality in early cinema." --Women's Studies in Communication "Queer Timing represents an exceptional example of film scholarship and early cinema history grounded in queer theory. It provides a necessary queer complication to historiographical understandings of early cinema and spectatorship." --Synoptique "Complicating the critical consensus, Queer Timing foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality." --Film History "Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema is an important contribution in the fields of film and queer temporality studies. . . . All in all, [it] is a very thorough analysis." --Feminist Media Studies "Susan Potter provides a necessary complication of early cinema studies by taking seriously both the particularities of early cinema and the radical alterity of the sexualities that--though fleeting--indelibly informed it. While film historical writing deeply aligned with both queer theory and the history of sexuality remains all too rare, Queer Timing might be the first study to so thoroughly pursue its project of lesbian emergence in precisely these terms."--Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America"Queer Timing is notable for its careful delineation of the objects it analyzes. Readers encounter especially thoughtful and well-grounded historical claims." --Choice"A virtuosic exploration of the sexual opacity of early cinema, Queer Timing centers the figure of the modern lesbian in order to decenter everything we thought we knew about her."--Heather K. Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

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Book SynopsisEschewing the idea of film reviewer-as-solitary-expert, Jonathan Rosenbaum continues to advance his belief that a critic's ideal role is to mediate and facilitate our public discussion of cinema. Portraits and Polemics presents debate as an important form of cinematic encounter whether one argues with filmmakers themselves, on behalf of their work, or with one's self. Rosenbaum takes on filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Richard Linklater, Manoel De Oliveira, Mark Rappaport, Elaine May, and Béla Tarr. He also engages, implicitly and explicitly, with other writers, arguing with Pauline Kaeland Wikipediaover Jacques Demy, with the Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviewers of Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, with David Thomson about James L. Brooks, and with many American and English film critics about misrepresented figures from Jerry Lewis to Yasujiro Ozu to Orson Welles. Throughout, Rosenbaum mines insights, pursues pet notions, and invites readers to join the fray.Trade Review"Challenging, probing, illuminating, Jonathan Rosenbaum's work is a beacon for other cinephiles. His new collection shows him engaging with an exhilaratingly wide range of films and filmmakers throughout the world and causing us to think about them in fresh ways."--Joseph McBride, author of How Did Lubitsch Do It?"Like a well-composed musical score, Rosenbaum’s magnificent Portraits and Polemics erupts with fresh, incisive, and dynamic sketches of essential cineastes and their works, interlacing tales, energetic rhythmic effects, and vibrant poetic matches: bold, impassioned, cadenced, dialectical, always surprising."--Tami Williams, coeditor of Global Cinema Networks "An excellent collection. Highly recommended." --Choice"Rosenbaum has passed a lifetime of cinephilia to me. A few scribbles in the margins I return." --Cineaste

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Book SynopsisFilms like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema''s premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved.Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz''s themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz''s uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters reject any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema. It also reflects both Solondz''s declining box office fortunes and the changing economics of independent film in an Trade Review"Todd Solondz, the dark horse of independent American cinema, has somehow escaped critical appraisal—until now. With this theoretically innovative and eminently readable volume, Julian Murphet has reframed Solondz's inimitable brand of cinema as a social document that comes closer to capturing the experience of late capitalism in the United States than the work of any other living filmmaker. Murphet's achievement is to show unequivocally that this world, a deracinated junk space filled with pedophiles and perverts, is our own. This book will be an indispensable guide to all of us that wonder about the hideously kitsch and just plain hideous aesthetic that has evolved over the duration of Solondz's career, and perhaps why it all feels so nauseatingly familiar."--Mark Steven, author of Splatter Capital: A Guide for Surviving the Horror Movie We Collectively Inhabit"Julian Murphet’s penetrating intelligence meets its match in Todd Solondz’ depthless abjection; surprisingly and superbly, it is a match made in heaven. Or perhaps in hell, the hell of the present that we must trust our most intrepid thinkers to explore, to challenge, and to discover within it not salvation but a livable world glowing with the possibility that we can survive it and enter the next world alive."--Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings "Julian Murphet's Todd Solondz (published by the University of Illinois Press) makes me willing to at least give the director another look. Murphet defines the filmmaker as a satirist; Solondz isn't just trying to be disgusting but composes his bleak humor as a critique of a disgusting society." --Shepherd Express

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“This insightful book restores filmmaker Su Friedrich’s key role in American experimental cinema, along with the New York feminist and lesbian cultural and activist contexts that shaped it. Friedrich’s associative style, personal content, and precision editing remind us that formalism has politics and politics has form. This comprehensive account challenges existing histories of American experimental film.”--Patricia White, author of Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary FeminismsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments A Politics of the Personal in Experimental Filmmaking Auteurism Expanded Scratching and Cutting Counter Memories The Politics of Being Lesbian Digital Embodiments An Interview with Su Friedrich Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the West Indian experience in Paris and LondonTrade Review"In these expansive, fresh, adroit interpretations of Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Zadie Smith-White, and Andrea Levy, the author exposes the stark reality that race, and the prejudices attached to it, is a barrier to unequivocal assimilation. This study affirms that a diasporic duality persists as creolization slowly alters the metropole. Overall, an interesting read. " —Choice"Creolizing the Metropole is a significant contribution to scholarship." —New West Indian Guide"[This] book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the conceptof creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study." —Research in African Literatures"An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once ethnic, national, and fluid." —Renée Larrier, Rutgers University"[T]he depth of analysis and rich detail provided through literary illustrations make this book a worthwhile read. It is highly recommended for advanced students and scholars studying Caribbean migrations and associated concerns of identity, citizenship and nationhood." —Social & Cultural GeographyTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Caribbean Diaspora and the Metropoles1. Caribbean Diasporic Identity: Between Home and Away2. Beyond a Boundary: Constructing Anglo-Caribbean and Franco-Antillean Identity3. Migration Pluralizes the Metropole: How a Small Island Revealed its White Teeth4. Creolizing the Hexagon: Periphery and Place in Desirada and Exile According to Julia5. Playing at Integration: Confrontation and Conflict in the Metropolitan SuburbsConclusion: (Re)Colonizing the MetropoleNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisProvides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.Trade ReviewOverall, Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian is quite simply a brilliant book, a sustained meditation on Godard's approach to history and his Histoire(s) du cinema, but also an extraordinary summation of Godard's entire career. * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Witt provides a thorough account of Histoire(s) du cinéma's genesis and an erudite yet highly readable exegesis of its manifold narratives and ramifications * French Studies *Witt tackles his subject, in what is his first sole-authored book, in such an unfussy manner and without the elliptical quality tainting much Godard commentary—artsy, complicated prose trying to compensate for a kernel of confusion—that the experience of reading Cinema Historian is like a door swinging open. * New Left Review *[T]here is little to find fault with in Witt's methodically argued, rigorously researched and compellingly written text. It almost seems as if he has left no stone unturned in attempting to decipher Histoire(s) du cinéma, even if the futile nature of such an endeavour is freely admitted: there will always, in Godard's work, be elements that remain impenetrable to his exegetes. * Senses of Cinema *What Witt communicates nicely . . . is the richness and depth of Godard's project. Histoire(s) du cinéma is a work that needs to be engaged with on its own terms, but its complexity and strength are only enhanced by the kind of detailed analysis that Witt and others have begun to provide it with. * Film Quarterly *There has been a slew of important books lately devoted to post-60s Godard [] But none seems quite as durable—either a beautiful object or as a user-friendly intellectual guide—as Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian, Witt's superbly lucid jargon-free book about Histoire(s) du cinéma. Copiously illustrated with frame enlargements that complement the text without ever seeming redundant, this examination of the philosophical, historical and aesthetic underpinnings of Godard's masterwork isn't only about a four and-a-half-hour video; it's also about the work's separate reconfigurations as a series of books, a set of CDs and a 35mm feature of 84 minutes. * Sight & Sound *Highly recommended. * Choice *Michael Witt's Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian . . . [is] one of the most vital film books of recent memory. * Spectrum Culture *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Godard's Theorem1. Histoire(s) du cinéma: A History2. The Prior and Parallel Work3. Models and Guides4. The Rise and Fall of the Cinematograph5. Cinema, Nationhood, and the New Wave6. Making Images in the Age of Spectacle7. The MetamorphosesEnvoiWorks by GodardNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisFrom yellow-face performance in the 19th century to Jackie Chan in the 21st, this book examines articles of clothing and modes of adornment as a window on how American views of China have changed in the past 150 years. It provides a cultural history of three iconic objects in theatrical and cinematic performance.Trade ReviewProfessor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the 'Sino/American interface' that marks political and cultural investments in America's views of China and Chinese Americans. * New Books in Asian American Studies *Chinese Looks is a sophisticated and well-researched publication that sheds light on how our appearances are tools for expressing identity, culture, politics, and issues that cross these complex boundaries. * Costume *Cultivating both a careful examination of cinematic technique and a broad theoretical understanding of global cultural exchange, Metzger does an especially good job of putting the cultural industries of China and North America into conversation. * The Drama Review *This is an important work that should be of interest to scholars in the fields of theatre, performance, cinema, queer studies, art history, costume design, and visual culture. * Modern Drama *A welcome addition to theatre and performance studies, film studies, Asian American studies, fashion theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Chinese Looks is poised to provide entree into future conversations about China's continued rise in geopolitics, the next chapter in the Sino/American interface. * Journal of American Drama and Theatre *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I. The Queue 1. Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish 2. Screening Tails Part II. The Qipao 3. Anna May Wong and the Qipao's American Debut 4. Exoticus Eroticus, or the Silhouette of Suzie's Slits during the Cold War 5. Cut from Memory: Wong Kar-Wai's Fashionable Homage Part III. The Mao Suit 6. An Unsightly Vision 7. Uniform Beliefs? 8. Mao Fun Suits Epilogue: The TuxedoNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisFrom yellow-face performance in the 19th century to Jackie Chan in the 21st, this book examines articles of clothing and modes of adornment as a window on how American views of China have changed in the past 150 years. It provides a cultural history of three iconic objects in theatrical and cinematic performance.Trade ReviewProfessor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the 'Sino/American interface' that marks political and cultural investments in America's views of China and Chinese Americans. * New Books in Asian American Studies *Chinese Looks is a sophisticated and well-researched publication that sheds light on how our appearances are tools for expressing identity, culture, politics, and issues that cross these complex boundaries. * Costume *Cultivating both a careful examination of cinematic technique and a broad theoretical understanding of global cultural exchange, Metzger does an especially good job of putting the cultural industries of China and North America into conversation. * The Drama Review *This is an important work that should be of interest to scholars in the fields of theatre, performance, cinema, queer studies, art history, costume design, and visual culture. * Modern Drama *A welcome addition to theatre and performance studies, film studies, Asian American studies, fashion theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Chinese Looks is poised to provide entree into future conversations about China's continued rise in geopolitics, the next chapter in the Sino/American interface. * Journal of American Drama and Theatre *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I. The Queue 1. Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish 2. Screening Tails Part II. The Qipao 3. Anna May Wong and the Qipao's American Debut 4. Exoticus Eroticus, or the Silhouette of Suzie's Slits during the Cold War 5. Cut from Memory: Wong Kar-Wai's Fashionable Homage Part III. The Mao Suit 6. An Unsightly Vision 7. Uniform Beliefs? 8. Mao Fun Suits Epilogue: The TuxedoNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExamines the major works of leading Indian film director Kumar Shahani and explores the reaches of modernist film aesthetics in its international form.Trade Review"It is a rare gift of intuition and understanding for a scholar to bestow on the artist who is her object of study the same beauty and elegance of expression that attracted her to the artist's work in the first place. Such is the gift that Laleen Jayamanne has bestowed on the oeuvre of Indian filmmaker, Kumar Shahani." -Sumita Chakravarty, author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 "What would cinematic thought be like refracted through the master filmmakers of Asia? As dazzling in performance as it is daring in conception, this breathtaking book weaves a response by working through the very fabric of Shahani's cinema and his affinities with other visionaries such as Baz Luhrmann. Giving us epic as living tradition and cinema as heritage for the future, Jayamanne is a rare, primary critic at the top of her creative powers. A landmark work for 21st century cinema studies." -Meaghan Morris, University of Sydney "Laleen Jayamanne allows herself to be (as she says) 'led astray' by one of cinema's most challenging contemporary practitioners to produce an entirely original interpretative frame for Kumar Shahani. She sees Shahani's work through material practices drawn from the South Asian subcontinent, even as she places him in a cinema peopled by such unlikely compatriots as Rocha and Pasolini, Kubrick and Paradyanov, and even Baz Luhrmann. Throwing light on this practice are concepts drawn as much from Eugenio Barba and Suely Rolnik as from D.D. Kosambi. Jayamanne's 'epic cinema' is revealed as deeply paradoxical, but capable of astonishing connections, relays of meaning and associations of ideas." -Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society "This very personal book, rich in cinematographic crossreferences, will hopefully awaken the American film public to the unique experimental work of Kumar Shahani, scarcely known here, which opens film to some of its unexplored possibilities." -Fredric R. Jameson, Duke UniversityTable of ContentsPreface1. To Arrive at the Station: trains of thought2. To Leave the Factory: with cloth & film3. To Derail Thought: of infinity as motif or walking4. In the Beginning was Sound Nad: Tarang (Wave)5. Lapidary Dynamisms: river, stone, icon6. A Second Nervous system: Acting and Thinking7. Shahani and others8. Modulating Avatars: Shahani's Unit9. Memory of the World: Archive FeverNotesFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade Review Italian Fascismâs Empire Cinema restores [empire films] to Italian and international film history and offers a case study of the intertwining of war and cinema and the unfolding of imperial policy in the context of dictatorship. * Film History *In bringing this cinematic history back to life, Ruth Ben-Ghiat treads a path of uncompromising empiricism and subtle textual analysis, which connects the multiple spaces of history and film and significantly advances our understanding of Fascist Italy. * H-Nationalism *A pathbreaking study of Fascist-era films set in Italian colonies in North and East Africa, Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema represents a major contribution to multiple fields, from the history of Italian Fascism and interwar European cultural politics to the history of colonialism and film history. * Journal of Modern History *The first comprehensive scholarly study of films made in or about the African and Balkan colonies of Mussolini's fascist empire, this book is genuinely groundbreaking and exceptionally insightful. . . . A balanced, judicious historian, [Ben-Ghiat] displays her wealth of archival knowledge and interpretive skills in a clear, straightforward narrative that proves utterly enthralling. . . . Essential. * Choice *Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema is the most subtle and detailed examination we have of a crucial element of the cultural practice of 'totalitarian' dictatorship, Italian-style.5/28/15 * Times Higher Education Supplement *Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema contributes to an important rethinking of an understudied aspect of Italian history. . . . One hopes that this provocative work is only the beginning of an overdue conversation, and that future contributions will move beyond the doors of Italian archives to consult voices/sources/documents from the colonies themselves. * H-Italy *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Empire Cinema: Frames and Agendas2. Italian Cinema and the Colonies to 19353. Mapping Empire Cinema, 1935-394. Coming Home to the Colonies5. Imperial Bodies I: Italians and Askaris6. Imperial Bodies II: Slaves of Love, Slaves of Labor7. Film Policies and Cultures, 1940-19438. The End of EmpireEpilogueFilmographyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis invaluable resource by one of the world's leading experts in French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th century and its place and function in French society. Each filmography includes 101 films listed chronologically (Volume 1: 19291939 and Volume 2: 19401958) and provides accessible points of entry into the remarkable world of 20th-century French cinema. All entries contain a list of cast members and characters, production details, an overview of the film's cultural and historical significance, and a critical summary of the film's plot and narrative structure. Each volume includes an appendix listing rewards earned and an extensive reference list for further reading and research. A third volume, covering the period 19581974, is forthcoming.Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I. 1940–19451. La Fille du puisatier (released Paris, 24 April 1941)2. Premier Rendez-vous (14 August 1941)3. L'Assassinat du père Noël (15 October 1941)4. Nous les gosses (2 December 1941)5. Les Inconnus dans la maison (16 May 1942)6. Le Lit à colonnes (9 July 1942)7. La Nuit fantastique (10 July 1942)8. Le Mariage de Chiffon (6 August 1942)9. L'Assassin habite au 21 (7 August 1942)10. Le Voile bleu (18 November 1942)11. Les Visiteurs du soir (5 December 1942)12. Pontcarral, colonel d'Empire (11 December 1942)13. Goupi Mains-Rouges (14 April 1943)14. Marie-Martine (11 May 1943)15. Lumière d'été (26 May 1943)16. Les Anges du péché (23 June 1943)17. Adieu Léonard (1 September 1943)18. L'Inévitable Monsieur Dubois (22 September 1943)19. Le Corbeau (28 September 1943)20. L'Éternel Retour (13 October 1943)21. Jeannou (10 November 1943)22. Voyage sans espoir (15 December 1943)23. Le Ciel est à vous (2 February 1944)24. Le Voyageur sans bagages (23 February 1944)25. Premier de cordée (23 February 1944)26. Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (26 April 1944)27. Les Enfants du paradis (22 March 1945)28. Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (21 September 1945)29. Boule de Suif (17 October 1945)30. Sortilèges (5 December 1945)Part II. 1946–195131. La Bataille du rail (27 February 1946)32. Sérénade aux nuages (6 March 1946)33. La Fille du diable (17 April 1946)34. L'Idiot (7 June 1946)35. La Symphonie pastorale (26 September 1946)36. Le Père tranquille (11 October 1946)37. Un revenant (18 October 1946)38. La Belle et la bête (29 October 1946)39. Macadam (27 November 1946)40. Les Portes de la nuit (3 December 1946)41. Panique (15 January 1947)42. Farrebique (11 February 1947)43. Le Silence est d'or (21 May 1947)44. Le Diable au corps (12 September 1947)45. Quai des Orfèvres (3 October 1947)46. Antoine et Antoinette (31 October 1947)47. Monsieur Vincent (5 November 1947)48. Le Printemps de la liberté (never released)49. Les Dernières Vacances (24 March 1948)50. Dédée d'Anvers (3 September 1948)51. Impasse des Deux Anges (3 November 1948)52. Les Parents terribles (1 December 1948)53. La Danse de mort (8 December 1948)54. Une si jolie petite plage (19 January 1949)55. L'École buissonnière (8 April 1949)56. Le Silence de la mer (22 April 1949)57. Jour de fête (4 May 1949)58. Les Paysans noirs (5 May 1949)59. Retour à la vie (14 September 1949)60. Au-delà des grilles (16 November 1949)61. Rendez-vous de juillet (6 December 1949)62. Manèges (25 January 1950)63. La Beauté du diable (17 March 1950)64. Justice est faite (20 September 1950)65. La Ronde (27 September 1950)66. Orphée (29 September 1950)67. Meurtres (10 October 1950)68. Le Journal d'un curé de campagne (7 February 1951)69. Juliette, ou la clé des songes (18 May 1951)70. L'Auberge rouge (24 October 1951)Part III. 1952–195871. La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (13 February 1952)72. Le Plaisir (29 February 1952)73. Casque d'Or (16 April 1952)74. Jeux interdits (9 May 1952)75. Nous sommes tous des assassins (21 May 1952)76. Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (4 June 1952)77. Les Belles de Nuit (14 November 1952)78. La Fête à Henriette (17 December 1952)79. Manon des Sources (16 January 1953)80. Le Carrosse d'or (27 February 1953)81. Le Salaire de la peur (22 April 1953)82. La Môme vert-de-gris (27 May 1953)83. Madame de . . . (16 September 1953)84. Les Orgueilleux (25 November 1953)85. Si Versailles m'était conté (10 February 1954)86. Touchez pas au grisbi (17 March 1954)87. L'Amour d'une femme (28 April 1954)88. Le Rouge et le noir (29 October 1954)89. Du rififi chez les hommes (13 April 1955)90. French Cancan (27 April 1955)91. Les Grandes Manœuvres (26 October 1955)92. Lola Montès (23 December 1955)93. Cela s'appelle l'aurore (9 May 1956)94. Le Mystère Picasso (18 May 1956)95. La Traversée de Paris (26 October 1956)96. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (11 November 1956)97. Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (28 November 1956)98. Porte des Lilas (25 September 1957)99. Mon oncle (10 May 1958)100. L'Eau vive (13 June 1958)101. Les Tricheurs (10 October 1958)Appendix: Festivals and Prizes for French Personnel and ProductionsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBy delving into the mise en scène, editing practices, and 'theatricality' of largely unseen works of French 1930s cinema, Crisp reveals the richness of different genres and pushes back against the critically sanctioned masterpieces of, say, Marcel Carné, in favour of inclusivity and diversity. * French Studies *In these introductions and in the coverage of the individual films . . . , Crisp displays a truly remarkable ability to condense sensitive, original insights into succinct prose and yet leave readers feeling well nourished. . . . Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The French Cinema in the 1930sPart I. The Introduction of Sound19301. Prix de beauté (released 25 April)2. Sous les toits de Paris (2 May)3. L' ge d'or (2 October)4. Le Chemin du paradis (10 October)5. Le Roi des resquilleurs (14 November)6. La Petite Lise (4 December)19317. L'Opéra de quat'sous (19 February)8. David Golder (6 March)9. Le Million (3 April)10. Marius (7 October)11. La Chienne (20 November)12. À nous la liberté (18 December)193213. Le Sang d'un poète (20 January)14. Les 5 Gentlemen maudits (10 February)15. Croix de bois (17 March)16. L'Atlantide (8 June)17. Les Gaietés de l'escadron (16 September)18. Vampyr (23 September)19. Poil de carotte (4 November)20. Boudu sauvé des eaux (11 November)21. L'Affaire est dans le sac (25 November)Part II. The Great Depression193322. Quatorze juillet (13 January)23. L'Homme à l'Hispano (24 March)24. Théodore et Cie (7 April)25. Zéro de conduite (7 April)26. La Maternelle (1 September)27. Cette vieille canaille (3 November)193428. La Rue sans nom (26 January)29. La Croisière jaune (18 March)30. Ces messieurs de la Santé (23 March)31. Le Grand Jeu (27 April)32. L'Atalante (14 September)33. Si j'étais le patron (1 October)34. Angèle (26 October)35. L'Hôtel du Libre Échange (9 November)193536. Pension Mimosas (18 January)37. Le Bonheur (8 February)38. Toni (22 February)39. Justin de Marseille (5 April)40. Quelle drôle de gosse (17 May)41. Crime et châtiment (17 May)42. La Bandera (20 September)43. Princesse Tam-Tam (18 October)44. L'Équipage (25 October)45. La Kermesse héroïque (1 December)Part III. The Rise of Poetic Realism193646. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (24 January)47. Razumov or Sous les yeux d'Occident (20 March)48. La Terre qui meurt (24 April)49. La Vie est à nous (12 November 1969)50. L'Appel du silence (1 May 1936)51. La Belle Équipe (15 September)52. Jenny (16 September)53. Le Roman d'un tricheur (18 September)54. César (13 November)55. Une partie de campagne (8 May 1946)193756. Pépé le Moko (28 January)57. Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir (4 February)58. L'Homme de nulle part (19 February)59. Marthe Richard au service de la France (16 April)60. La Grande Illusion (4 June)61. Sarati le terrible (29 July)62. Un carnet de bal (9 September)63. Gribouille (10 September)64. Gueule d'amour (16 September)64. Gueule d'amour (9 October)66. Drôle de drame (20 October)67. Regain (28 October)68. Désiré (3 December)69. Abus de confiance (3 December)70. Naples au baiser de feu (17 December)71. L'Alibi (22 December)193872. Mollenard (26 January)73. La Marseillaise (9 February)74. Prison sans barreaux (17 February) and Prisons de femmes (13 October)75. La Tragédie impériale (30 March)76. Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (13 April)77. L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (4 May)78. Quai des brumes (18 May)79. La Femme du boulanger (7 September)80. Tricoche et Cacolet (7 September)81. La Maison du Maltais (21 September)82. Entrée des artistes (5 October)83. Monsieur Coccinelle (22 October)84. Carrefour (26 October)85. Le Drame de Shanghaï (26 October)86. La Route enchantée (30 November)87. Le Joueur d'échecs (30 November)88. Remontons les Champs-Élysées (30 November)89. Hôtel du Nord (14 December)90. Trois Valses (14 December)91. La Bête humaine (23 December)193992. Métropolitain (8 February)93. La Fin du jour (24 March)94. Le Jour se lève (7 June)95. La Règle du jeu (5 July)96. Circonstances atténuantes (26 July)97. Sans lendemain (December)Filmed 1939, released 1940 and later98. Menaces (11 January 1940)99. Battement de cœur (8 February 1940)100. Remorques (27 November 1941)101. Macao, ou L'Enfer du jeu (9 December 1942)Appendix: Prizes and AwardsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewRice sets out how the propagandist power of the Klan has always lay in its spectacle; in its regalia, and hoods, and fiery crosses . . . Within it, for the careful reader, lies a lesson on how extremists spread their hatred under other banners today. * The Guardian *Indeed, the book could not be timelier, given the nativist and racist rhetoric inflaming discourse among Republican Party presidential hopefuls as the 2016 American presidential campaign gathers steam. . .White Robes, Silver Screens provides an essential historical perspective on these phenomena, with lessons we would all do well to heed. * PopMatters *Rice is alive to the irony of the Klan's simultaneous antimodernist response to film and the embrace of this influential new medium when it suited the organization . . . Rice's volume is a masterful, definitive account of this underexplored phenomenon, and it is written with a confident grasp of the complex and often contradictory forces that shape films and their place in American social history. * Southern Jewish History *Rice offers a stimulating and fresh approach to the subject that will be of interest to scholars of the Ku Klux Klan, public memory, and the interwar period more broadly.October 2016 * H-Slavery *The Klan recognised film as a powerful medium capable of shaping public behaviour as early as the late teens; Rice provides a well-written, coherent account of the incorporation of cinema in the organisation's politics. What is brought to the forefront by this landmark work is the pivotal role played by moving pictures in elevating the Klan to prominence in 1920s, as well as in facilitating its subsequent decline in the following decades. * Early Popular Visual Culture *Tom Rice's fascinating book, White Robes, Silver Screens, demonstrates that the engagement between the 1920s Invisible Empire and the nascent culture of film was deeper, longer-lasting, and more complicated than an evanescent spark of inspiration from popular culture that energized an emerging social movement. Rice . . . brings the perspective of his discipline along with deep and wide-ranging research in Klan and film industry sources to assemble the first comprehensive history of the place of film in the second Ku Klux Klan period from 1915 until the dissolution of the hooded order in 1944. * Civil War Book Review *Rice's study of the complex, mutual development of the modern Ku Klux Klan and the American film industry, visual culture, and politics is a benchmark example of the contribution film studies can make to our understanding of American history. * Indiana Magazine of History *Rice makes good use of film-related archives. He also has done impressive research in dozens of small-town newspapers, culling information about advertising, the exhibition of moving pictures, and reception in diverse communities. Rice also thoroughly examines the Klan's print media that warred against Hollywood and aligned the hooded order with mainstream censors who wanted to 'clean up' the film industry. * Journal of American History *White Robes, Silver Screens redefines our understanding of the relationship of the Ku Klux Klan to film . . . essential reading for anyone interested in the Klan of the 1920s. * The Journal of American History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsPreface1. Re-Birth: The Birth of a Nation and the Growth of the Klan2. The Battle: Censorship, Reform, and the Klan's Campaign against the Film Industry3. Klan Cinema: The Klan as Producer and Exhibitor4. On Mainstream Screens: The Film Industry's Response to the KlanEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Very rich argumentation that progressively constructs its object, shifting with much skill from the conceptual elaboration of its global perspective to the various concrete examples of works approached so to give it flesh and blood." -Raymond Bellour, film critic, theorist, and author of The Analysis of FilmTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Changing Configurations in Theories of Fictive Representation2. Why Does Fictive Representation Exist?3. The Wellsprings of Fictive Creativity4. The Materials of Fictive Invention5. The Informing Role of Fantasy6. The Shaping of Fictive Scenarios by the Author: Motivations, Strategies, and Outcomes7. The Exploitation of Generic Templates and Intertexts as Vehicles for Affect-Regulation8. Theories of Reception in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries9. A Neuropsychoanalytic Theory of Reception10. Intersubjective Attunement, Filiation and the Re-creative Process: Jules and Jim—from Henri-Pierre Roché to Francois Truffaut11. The Conversion of Autobiographical Emotion into Symbolic Figuration: William Shakespeare's Hamlet12. Tracking a Personal Myth through an Oeuvre: the Films of François OzonConclusionFilmographySelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"One of the most unappreciated and oft-mocked genres of the 1960s, the Italian sword-and-sandal films are generally given the short shrift by critics, historians, and film fans alike. Therefore, anytime an entire book is devoted to the films of Hercules and his godlike brethren it is cause for celebration. [... Rushing] presents a fascinating historical overview of the genre." * Cinema Retro *Despite the broad swath of the cultural terrain covered, the book presents a meaningful analysis of the peplum genre's longitudinal engagement with nationalist ideologies. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on Film Titles and Foreign Language CitationsIntroduction: Descended from Hercules: A Peplum Genealogy1. Nos Morituri: Time in the Peplum2. Pre/Post: Sexuality in the Peplum3. Skin Flicks: The Haptic Peplum4. Immune Systems: The Peplum as Biopolitical GenreConclusion: Biopolitical FantasyFilmographyWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisMuscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, these films instill the hero's vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero's body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. Thesesword and sandal films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the spectator an imagined form of the male bodyone free of illness, degeneracy, and the burdens of povertythat defends goodness with brute strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal citizenry.Robert A. Rushing traces these epic heroes from Maciste in Cabiria in the early silent era to contemporary transnational figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, and to films such as Zach Snyder's 300.Rushing explores how the very tactile modes of representation cement the genre's ideological grip on the Trade Review"One of the most unappreciated and oft-mocked genres of the 1960s, the Italian sword-and-sandal films are generally given the short shrift by critics, historians, and film fans alike. Therefore, anytime an entire book is devoted to the films of Hercules and his godlike brethren it is cause for celebration. [... Rushing] presents a fascinating historical overview of the genre." * Cinema Retro *Despite the broad swath of the cultural terrain covered, the book presents a meaningful analysis of the peplum genre's longitudinal engagement with nationalist ideologies. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on Film Titles and Foreign Language CitationsIntroduction: Descended from Hercules: A Peplum Genealogy1. Nos Morituri: Time in the Peplum2. Pre/Post: Sexuality in the Peplum3. Skin Flicks: The Haptic Peplum4. Immune Systems: The Peplum as Biopolitical GenreConclusion: Biopolitical FantasyFilmographyWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDeacampo's book is a much-needed addition to the field of early cinema. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Beginnings of Cinema in Asia / Nick Deocampo1. Early Asian Cinema and the Public Sphere / Wimal Dissanayake2. Nationalism, Contradiction, and Identity: or, A Reconsideration of Early Cinema in the Philippines / Charles Musser3. Film's Initial Reception in China during Its Period of Infancy / Ritsu Yamamoto4. Hong Kong's Cinematic Beginnings, 1896-1908 / Wai-ming Law5. How Cinema Came and Stayed in Taiwan / Daw-ming Lee6. One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Film Industry and Culture in 1910s Japan / Aaron Gerow7. Distributing Scandinavia: Nordisk Film in Asia / Nadi Tofighian8. The Civilizing Cinema Mission: Colonial Beginnings of Film in Indochina / Tilman Baumgartel9. A National Cinema takes Root in a Colonial Regime: Early Cinema in India / P. K. Nair10. Colonial Beginnings of Cinema in the Philippines / Nick Deocampo11. From Shadowplay to the Silver Screen: Early Malay(sian) Cinema / Hassan Abdul Muthalib12. Iranian Cinema: Before the Revolution / Shahin Parhami 13. Royalty Shapes Early Thai Film Culture / Anchalee Chaiworaporn14. "I was born but": Some Thoughts on the Origins of Cinema in Asia / Stephen Bottomore15. Before Moana: Early Cinema of the Pacific / Stephen Bottomore16. Early Cinema in Central Asia: The Start of an Ascent / Stephen BottomoreAppendix: Chronology of Film Beginnings in Asia / Nick DeocampoSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDeacampo's book is a much-needed addition to the field of early cinema. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Beginnings of Cinema in Asia / Nick Deocampo1. Early Asian Cinema and the Public Sphere / Wimal Dissanayake2. Nationalism, Contradiction, and Identity: or, A Reconsideration of Early Cinema in the Philippines / Charles Musser3. Film's Initial Reception in China during Its Period of Infancy / Ritsu Yamamoto4. Hong Kong's Cinematic Beginnings, 1896-1908 / Wai-ming Law5. How Cinema Came and Stayed in Taiwan / Daw-ming Lee6. One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Film Industry and Culture in 1910s Japan / Aaron Gerow7. Distributing Scandinavia: Nordisk Film in Asia / Nadi Tofighian8. The Civilizing Cinema Mission: Colonial Beginnings of Film in Indochina / Tilman Baumgartel9. A National Cinema takes Root in a Colonial Regime: Early Cinema in India / P. K. Nair10. Colonial Beginnings of Cinema in the Philippines / Nick Deocampo11. From Shadowplay to the Silver Screen: Early Malay(sian) Cinema / Hassan Abdul Muthalib12. Iranian Cinema: Before the Revolution / Shahin Parhami 13. Royalty Shapes Early Thai Film Culture / Anchalee Chaiworaporn14. "I was born but": Some Thoughts on the Origins of Cinema in Asia / Stephen Bottomore15. Before Moana: Early Cinema of the Pacific / Stephen Bottomore16. Early Cinema in Central Asia: The Start of an Ascent / Stephen BottomoreAppendix: Chronology of Film Beginnings in Asia / Nick DeocampoSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAmateur Movie Making is Visual History at its best. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *At first blush, Amateur Movie Making's subtitle, Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960, might suggest a narrowly defined field of inquiry with limited appeal to a broader audience. But readers would be remiss to dismiss such a delightful and expansive volume that resonates far beyond the realm of amateur film. One of Amateur Movie Making's greatest strengths is its addition of materials that animate the films in surprising ways. * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *An invaluable contribution to the study of previously overlooked nontheatrical films, Amateur Movie Making is a welcome addition to the overall field of media studies. Its focus on the everyday aspects of the material culture of the past along with its highly accessible and engaging writing will appeal to experts and non-experts alike. * Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Edited Collection Award Committee. (2018 award winner) *[I]t is the love of cinema that shines through in these essays and the films themselves, making this book a must read for all of us. * UCLA Film & Television Archive *Table of ContentsAccessing Moving Images Foreword / Alice T. FriedmanAcknowledgmentsIntroduction / Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon Part 1: Locating Contexts: Archive, Material, History, Place 1. A Place for Moving Images: Thirty Years of Northeast Historic Film / Karan Sheldon2. The Technologies of Home Movies and Amateur Film / Dino Everett 3. A Region Apart: Representations of Maine and Northern New England in Personal Film, 1920-1940 / Libby Bischof4. A Strange Familiarity: Alexander Forbes and the Aesthetics of Amateur Film / Justin WolffPart 2: Creative Choices: Recovering Value in Amateur Film Reflection 1. The Task at Hand: The Films of Ernest Stillman / Whit Stillman5. Midway Between Secular and Sacred: Consecrating the Home Movie as a Cultural Heritage Object / Karen Gracy6. "All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures": Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking / Charles Tepperman 7. Comedic Counterpoise: Landscape and Laughs in the Films of Sidney N. Shurcliff / Martha J. McNamara Part 3: Everyday Lives: Home and Work in Amateur FilmReflection 2. Perspectives on the Home Movies of Charles Norman Shay, Penobscot Elder / Jennifer Neptune8. Not-at-Home Movies / Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed 9. The Boss's Film: Expert Amateurs and Industrial Culture / Brian JacobsonPart 4: Families: Private and PublicReflection 3. "The Ring of Time" in the E. B. White Home Movies / Martha White10. Opening the Can: Home Movies In the Public Sphere / Melissa Dollman 11. Layers of Vision in Amateur Film / Mark Neumann and Janna Jones Selected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAmateur Movie Making is Visual History at its best. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *At first blush, Amateur Movie Making's subtitle, Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960, might suggest a narrowly defined field of inquiry with limited appeal to a broader audience. But readers would be remiss to dismiss such a delightful and expansive volume that resonates far beyond the realm of amateur film. One of Amateur Movie Making's greatest strengths is its addition of materials that animate the films in surprising ways. * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *An invaluable contribution to the study of previously overlooked nontheatrical films, Amateur Movie Making is a welcome addition to the overall field of media studies. Its focus on the everyday aspects of the material culture of the past along with its highly accessible and engaging writing will appeal to experts and non-experts alike. * Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Edited Collection Award Committee. (2018 award winner) *[I]t is the love of cinema that shines through in these essays and the films themselves, making this book a must read for all of us. * UCLA Film & Television Archive *Table of ContentsAccessing Moving Images Foreword / Alice T. FriedmanAcknowledgmentsIntroduction / Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon Part 1: Locating Contexts: Archive, Material, History, Place 1. A Place for Moving Images: Thirty Years of Northeast Historic Film / Karan Sheldon2. The Technologies of Home Movies and Amateur Film / Dino Everett 3. A Region Apart: Representations of Maine and Northern New England in Personal Film, 1920-1940 / Libby Bischof4. A Strange Familiarity: Alexander Forbes and the Aesthetics of Amateur Film / Justin WolffPart 2: Creative Choices: Recovering Value in Amateur Film Reflection 1. The Task at Hand: The Films of Ernest Stillman / Whit Stillman5. Midway Between Secular and Sacred: Consecrating the Home Movie as a Cultural Heritage Object / Karen Gracy6. "All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures": Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking / Charles Tepperman 7. Comedic Counterpoise: Landscape and Laughs in the Films of Sidney N. Shurcliff / Martha J. McNamara Part 3: Everyday Lives: Home and Work in Amateur FilmReflection 2. Perspectives on the Home Movies of Charles Norman Shay, Penobscot Elder / Jennifer Neptune8. Not-at-Home Movies / Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed 9. The Boss's Film: Expert Amateurs and Industrial Culture / Brian JacobsonPart 4: Families: Private and PublicReflection 3. "The Ring of Time" in the E. B. White Home Movies / Martha White10. Opening the Can: Home Movies In the Public Sphere / Melissa Dollman 11. Layers of Vision in Amateur Film / Mark Neumann and Janna Jones Selected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a 'sensory revolution' to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.Trade ReviewThis study will be of great value to those researching topics such as affect, texture, and pattern (faktura); gesture; and the body in the Soviet cultural context. * Choice *Socialist Senses shows remarkable range and matching ambitions...Widdis sets as her goal to reimagine the history of early Soviet film entirely: to tell a story as new and upending as its objects of study. * The Russian Review *Widdis's rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema. * Kritika *Wonderfully illustrated, Socialist Senses will engage all scholars of the period: not only does Widdis add to the growing list of studies on Soviet senses, her work is the first to investigate touch and feeling and how they materialized on the Soviet screen. * Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema *In Socialist Senses, Widdis provides an arresting take on Soviet cinema that pushes Russian/Soviet film criticism beyond the critical frameworks of auteurism and formalism where it has long remained. * InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) *The author's often dazzling analysis opens readers' eyes—and senses—to the vivid textures and material of the period, so much so that some might find it difficult to look at and experience early Soviet cinema in the same way again. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgementsNote on Translation and TransliterationIntroduction: Feeling Soviet1. Avant-Garde Sensations2. Material Sensations3. Textile Sensations 4. Socialist Sensations5. Primitive Sensations6. Modern Sensations7. Socialist Feelings8. Socialist Transformations9. Socialist PleasuresConclusion: The Death of SensationGlossary of Russian TermsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCosmopolitan Film Cultures is a timely revision of current debates in theeld of Film Studies. It offers a new understanding of moving images in Latin America as the result of negotiations of national agendas, cosmopolitan impulses and transnationalows of cultural commodities and capital. * Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: The Silent Era: Between Global Capitalism and National ModernizationPrimary text: "The Lumière Cinematograph," El Monitor Republicano (Mexico City), August 16, 1896 1. Gabriel Veyre and Fernand Bon Bernard, Representatives of the Lumière Brothers in Mexico / Aurelio de los Reyes Primary text: Tic Tac (Carlos Villafañe), "The Show on June 15th," Películas (Bogotá), June 19192. Films on Paper: Early Colombian Cinema Periodicals, 1916-1920 / Juan Sebastián Ospina León Primary text: Enrique Méndez Calzada, "The Lover of Rudolph Valentino" from And Christ Returned to Buenos Aires (1926)3. Manipulation and Authenticity: The Unassimilable Valentino in 1920s Argentina / Giorgio Bertellini Part II: The Interwar Period: Between Hollywood and the Avant-GardePrimary text: Felipe de Leiva, "Memoirs of an Extra," Cinelandia, (Hollywood) November/December 19274. Mediating the 'Conquering and Cosmopolitan Cinema:' Latin American Audiences and U.S. Film Magazines in Spanish, 1916-1948 / Rielle NavitskiPrimary text: Octávio de Faria, "Russian Cinema and Brazilian Cinema," O Fan (Rio de Janeiro), October 2, 19285. Parallel Modernities: the First Reception of Soviet Cinema in Latin America / Sarah Ann WellsPrimary text: Guillermo de Torre, "The Cineclub of Buenos Aires," La Gaceta Literaria (Madrid), April 1, 1930 6. A Gaze Turned Towards Europe: Modernity and Tradition in the Work of Horacio Coppola / Andrea CuarteroloPart III: The Golden Age of Latin American Film Industries: Negotiating the Popular and the CosmopolitanPrimary text: John Alton, "Motion Picture Production in South America," International Photographer (Hollywood), May 19347. John Alton in Argentina, 1932-1939 / Nicolas Poppe8. The Golden Age Otherwise: Mexican Cinema and the Mediations of Capitalist Modernity in the 1940s and 1950s / Ignacio M. Sánchez PradoPrimary text: Gabriel García Márquez, "The Mambo" El Heraldo (Barranquilla), January 12, 19519. Bad Neighbors: Pérez Prado, Cinema and the Politics of Mambo / Jason Borge Part IV: The Afterlives of Moving Images: Cinephilia and Cult SpectatorshipPrimary text: Thomas E. Sibert, "Fox Film de Cuba, S.A.'s Continuing Competition for Scholarships to Summer School at the Universidad de la Habana" (1956)10. Film Culture and Education in Republican Cuba: The Legacy of José Manuel Valdés-Rodríguez / Irene Rozsa 11. The Secret History of Aztlán: Transnational Exploitation Film, Chicano Art and Unexpected Cultural Flows / Colin GunckelIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis is a sophisticated and often fascinating look at five key films of the 1960s. . . . Lida Oukaderova brings a wealth of diverse theoretical perspectives to each of the chapters, from Metz to Irigaray, Benjamin to Lefebvre. But just as impressive are convincingly drawn links between these Soviet films and some of the most important West European works of the time. * Russian Review *The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw is an exciting contribution to the study of Soviet film, moving the field beyond institutional and historical questions. Likewise, those concerned with the aesthetic, ideological, and other facets of postwar cinemas, should greet it enthusiastically. * Film Quarterly *Recommended. * Choice *This book is doubly welcome. First, because it adds substantially to the slender and dispersed literature dealing with film as a spatial medium; and secondly, by offering a corrective to accounts of Soviet cinema that are still too often preoccupied with ideological readings of a limited number of well-known films. * Sight and Sound *Overall, Oukaderova offers a fresh view on Thaw cinema, connecting the visualization—technical, architectural, and material—of space with wider artistic trends, both in non-Soviet cinema and in visual arts. What is particularly impressive is Oukaderova's exact articulation of the camerawork and its manner of capturing the body in space. The book is well researched, drawing on archival documents pertaining to discussions of individual films, and working productively with theoretical frameworks. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Persistence of Presence: Soviet Panoramic Cinema2. Mimetic Passages: The Cinema of Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevskii3. The Architecture of Movement: Georgii Danelia's I Walk the Streets of Moscow4. A Walk Through the Ruins: Larisa Shepitko's Wings5. The Obdurate Matter of Space: Kira Muratova's Brief EncountersConclusion: The Otherness of SpaceBibliographyFilmographyIndex

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