Film history, theory or criticism Books

Book SynopsisThe preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studiesFor decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.Trade Review "A timely collection of critical essays that illuminates the aesthetic constitution and political deployment of depth in historical and contemporary media formations."—Critical Inquiry Table of ContentsContentsPrefacePart I. Depths of the Moving Image: Perception, Spectatorship, and Film Theory1. From the Flat Plane, an Architecture of Light: Filming Space in Interwar AnimationKatherine Rochester2. Locomotive Views: Lateral Movement and the Flatness of the Moving ImageJordan Schonig3. Deep in the CaveJean Ma4. On a Lonely Planet, Feeling-in-Depth: Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Chris Marker’s Sans SoleilJinhee ChoiPart II. Depth Hermeneutics and Surface Turns5. Depth Effects: Citizen Kane, Citizenfour, and the Deep Time of CinemaJeff Scheible6. Bankers Dream of Banking, or Against the Interpretation of DreamsJennifer Fay7. Blackness at the Heart: Extruding Sovereignty in Nancy’s and Denis’s The IntruderAlessandra Raengo and Laurel Ahnert8. Inaudible Evidence: Counterforensic Listening in Contemporary Documentary Art Pooja Rangan9. To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary beyond DocufictionErika BalsomPart III. Deep Space, Deep Time10. Sinkholes, GIFs, and Cinematic Eco-catastropheKarl Schoonover11. Underground Film: Thinking Vertically across the and of Cinema and Media Studies Karen Redrobe12. Transparency at Depth: Dark Mediation of the Deep Seabed Lisa Han13. Depth Mediators: Undersea Cables, Network Infrastructure, and the Deep OceanNicole Starosielski14. From Planetary Depth to Surface Measure, or How to Read the Future from an ImageJussi ParikkaPart IV. Deep Networks15. Depth in Deep Learning: Knowledgeable, Layered, ImpenetrableTaylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton16. From Stereoscopic Depth to Deep Learning Brooke Belisle17. The Deep Realness of Deepfake Pornography: A ConversationShaka McGlotten, Susanna Paasonen, and John Paul StadlerAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisThe preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studiesFor decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.Trade Review "A timely collection of critical essays that illuminates the aesthetic constitution and political deployment of depth in historical and contemporary media formations."—Critical Inquiry Table of ContentsContentsPrefacePart I. Depths of the Moving Image: Perception, Spectatorship, and Film Theory1. From the Flat Plane, an Architecture of Light: Filming Space in Interwar AnimationKatherine Rochester2. Locomotive Views: Lateral Movement and the Flatness of the Moving ImageJordan Schonig3. Deep in the CaveJean Ma4. On a Lonely Planet, Feeling-in-Depth: Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Chris Marker’s Sans SoleilJinhee ChoiPart II. Depth Hermeneutics and Surface Turns5. Depth Effects: Citizen Kane, Citizenfour, and the Deep Time of CinemaJeff Scheible6. Bankers Dream of Banking, or Against the Interpretation of DreamsJennifer Fay7. Blackness at the Heart: Extruding Sovereignty in Nancy’s and Denis’s The IntruderAlessandra Raengo and Laurel Ahnert8. Inaudible Evidence: Counterforensic Listening in Contemporary Documentary Art Pooja Rangan9. To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary beyond DocufictionErika BalsomPart III. Deep Space, Deep Time10. Sinkholes, GIFs, and Cinematic Eco-catastropheKarl Schoonover11. Underground Film: Thinking Vertically across the and of Cinema and Media Studies Karen Redrobe12. Transparency at Depth: Dark Mediation of the Deep Seabed Lisa Han13. Depth Mediators: Undersea Cables, Network Infrastructure, and the Deep OceanNicole Starosielski14. From Planetary Depth to Surface Measure, or How to Read the Future from an ImageJussi ParikkaPart IV. Deep Networks15. Depth in Deep Learning: Knowledgeable, Layered, ImpenetrableTaylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton16. From Stereoscopic Depth to Deep Learning Brooke Belisle17. The Deep Realness of Deepfake Pornography: A ConversationShaka McGlotten, Susanna Paasonen, and John Paul StadlerAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisA new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do this by using Buddhist ideas to examine the intricate relationship between technicity and consciousness in the cinema. The resulting dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies.Victor Fan examines cinema’s ontology and ontogenetic formation and how such a formational process produces knowledge, political agency, and in-aesthetics. Buddhism allows Fan to deconstruct binary thinking and reimagine media as an ecology, rethinking cinema in relational terms between the human and the machine. Along the way, Fan considers a wide variety of case studies from around the globe, while paying special attention to how contemporary Tibeto-Sinophone filmmakers have adopted relational thinking to detail ways of rebuilding a world that appears to be beyond repair.From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, CinemaIlluminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.Trade Review"A stunning and provocative sequel to the invaluable Cinema Approaching Reality, this book is at once audacious and scrupulous, a Promethean leap of critical imagination as substantively grounded as Talmudic exegesis. Victor Fan deftly and relevantly engages thinkers from Nāgārjuna to Deleuze without reducing these inquiries to an Asian fusion buffet, maintaining lucid explications of Buddhist tenets while daring cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogues that will engage the philosopher and the cinephile. The readings of Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève and Christian Petzhold’s Transit alone are worth the price of admission. A thrilling intellectual experience that demonstrates that inquiry can and should be an adventure."—Earl Jackson, Asia University"What if Buddhism and not Bazin or Deleuze were made the foundation for film philosophy? What conceptual and geopolitical reorientations would this require of us, and what new kinds of film experience would this open onto? These are the questions that animate this astonishingly inventive work, whose nearest cousin may be either Deleuze’s Cinema books or Barthes’s Camera Lucida."—Marc Steinberg, author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer InternetTable of ContentsDependent OriginationsNote on LanguagesIntroduction: Cinema: A Technicity-Consciousness1. Meontology2. The Karma-Image3. The Insight-Image4. Cinema Ecology5. In-AestheticsConclusion: Cinema and NonviolenceMultilingual Glossary of Buddhist Terms, Names, and TitlesNotesFilmographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do this by using Buddhist ideas to examine the intricate relationship between technicity and consciousness in the cinema. The resulting dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies.Victor Fan examines cinema’s ontology and ontogenetic formation and how such a formational process produces knowledge, political agency, and in-aesthetics. Buddhism allows Fan to deconstruct binary thinking and reimagine media as an ecology, rethinking cinema in relational terms between the human and the machine. Along the way, Fan considers a wide variety of case studies from around the globe, while paying special attention to how contemporary Tibeto-Sinophone filmmakers have adopted relational thinking to detail ways of rebuilding a world that appears to be beyond repair.From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, CinemaIlluminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.Trade Review"A stunning and provocative sequel to the invaluable Cinema Approaching Reality, this book is at once audacious and scrupulous, a Promethean leap of critical imagination as substantively grounded as Talmudic exegesis. Victor Fan deftly and relevantly engages thinkers from Nāgārjuna to Deleuze without reducing these inquiries to an Asian fusion buffet, maintaining lucid explications of Buddhist tenets while daring cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogues that will engage the philosopher and the cinephile. The readings of Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève and Christian Petzhold’s Transit alone are worth the price of admission. A thrilling intellectual experience that demonstrates that inquiry can and should be an adventure."—Earl Jackson, Asia University"What if Buddhism and not Bazin or Deleuze were made the foundation for film philosophy? What conceptual and geopolitical reorientations would this require of us, and what new kinds of film experience would this open onto? These are the questions that animate this astonishingly inventive work, whose nearest cousin may be either Deleuze’s Cinema books or Barthes’s Camera Lucida."—Marc Steinberg, author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer InternetTable of ContentsDependent OriginationsNote on LanguagesIntroduction: Cinema: A Technicity-Consciousness1. Meontology2. The Karma-Image3. The Insight-Image4. Cinema Ecology5. In-AestheticsConclusion: Cinema and NonviolenceMultilingual Glossary of Buddhist Terms, Names, and TitlesNotesFilmographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA rigorous and imaginative inquiry into rhythm’s vital importance for film and the moving imageFocusing attention on a concept much neglected in the study of film, The Rhythm of Images opens new possibilities for thinking about expanded perception and idiosyncratic modes of being. Author Domietta Torlasco engages with both philosophy and cinema to elaborate a notion of rhythm in its pre-Socratic sense as a “manner of flowing”—a fugitive mode that privileges contingency and calls up the forgotten fluidity of forms. In asking what it would mean to take this rhythm as an ontological force in its own right, she creatively draws on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray. Rhythm emerges here as a form that eludes measure, a key to redefining the relation between the aesthetic and the political, and thus a pivotal means of resistance to power.Working with constellations of films and videos by international artists—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and David Lynch to Harun Farocki and Victor Burgin, among others—Torlasco brings to bear on them her distinctive concept of rhythm with respect to four interrelated domains: life, labor, memory, and medium. With innovative readings of artworks and critical texts alike, The Rhythm of Images fashions a vibrant, provocative theory of rhythm as the excess or potential of perception. Ultimately, the book reconceives the relation between rhythm and the world-making power of images. The result is a vision of cinema as a hybrid medium endowed with the capacity not only to reinvent corporeal boundaries but also to find new ways of living together.Trade Review"Domietta Torlasco is a unique scholar-artist whose work resides at the intersection of critique and practice, reflection and poeisis. Her erudition and critical virtuosity are on full display in The Rhythm of Images, a work that looks at the way image cultures produce rhythms that resonate across philosophy, speculative thought, and cinema. Among the remarkable achievements of The Rhythm of Images is its stereographic score, a multivocity that emerges from the force of Torlasco’s ensemble."—Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift"Domietta Torlasco’s The Rhythm of Images is a major breakthrough in aesthetic ontology. At the heart of this extraordinary intervention—as beautifully written as it is rigorously conceived—is an unexpected conception of rhythm as rhuthmos. Taken as rhuthmos, rhythm is understood against the all-too-familiar, and altogether problematic, assumption that rhythm is the engine of order, synchronization, and relations of identity—and against the idea that rhythm is primarily a question of sound. For Torlasco, rhythm is a force of difference, of what holds us together in and with difference. And what emerges first as a difficult problem of form moves fearlessly outward to surprisingly new, and much needed, ways of thinking about the relation between being and technicity, subject/object relations, time and capital, freedom and labor, difference and sameness."—Brian Price, University of TorontoTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Life2. Labor3. Memory4. MediumNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow media shapes our actions and feelings about race Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism.From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists. Trade Review "Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery powerfully analyzes how television, film, and new media use slavery to socialize viewers into racialized understandings of American citizenship. Through film, television, apps, and video games, she shows how media representations of slavery underwrote forms of liberal and neoliberal subjectivity. This is one of the most brilliant takes on the intersections between media, affect, citizenship, and race; we would do well to study its insights." —Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University "Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery offers a compelling and much needed archival media history of how the national story America tells itself about itself is renewed."—International Journal of Communication "The core of Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is painful and profound but essential to an understanding of the multidisciplinary legacy and impact of slavery in the culture of the United States."—Information and Culture "Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is an exciting book that breaks new ground even as it participates in some of the most enduring conversations in the field."—Television and New Media Table of ContentsIntroduction: Racial Formation and Post–Civil Rights Governance1. “The Restless Black Peril”: Race, Television Documentary, and Emotion2. Feeling Slavery: Roots and Pedagogies of Emotion3. Choosing Freedom: Empathy and Agency4. “How Many Slaves Work for You?” Algorithmic Governance and GuiltConclusion. Refusing Prescription: Kara Walker and Black Feminist Cultural ProductionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow media shapes our actions and feelings about race Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism.From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists. Trade Review "Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery powerfully analyzes how television, film, and new media use slavery to socialize viewers into racialized understandings of American citizenship. Through film, television, apps, and video games, she shows how media representations of slavery underwrote forms of liberal and neoliberal subjectivity. This is one of the most brilliant takes on the intersections between media, affect, citizenship, and race; we would do well to study its insights." —Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University "Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery offers a compelling and much needed archival media history of how the national story America tells itself about itself is renewed."—International Journal of Communication "The core of Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is painful and profound but essential to an understanding of the multidisciplinary legacy and impact of slavery in the culture of the United States."—Information and Culture "Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is an exciting book that breaks new ground even as it participates in some of the most enduring conversations in the field."—Television and New Media Table of ContentsIntroduction: Racial Formation and Post–Civil Rights Governance1. “The Restless Black Peril”: Race, Television Documentary, and Emotion2. Feeling Slavery: Roots and Pedagogies of Emotion3. Choosing Freedom: Empathy and Agency4. “How Many Slaves Work for You?” Algorithmic Governance and GuiltConclusion. Refusing Prescription: Kara Walker and Black Feminist Cultural ProductionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAt the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema, contributors reinvigorate this debate to contemplate the ends, as well as directions and new beginnings, of cinema in the twenty-first century.In this volume, scholars at the forefront of film and media studies interrogate multiple potential “ends” of cinema: its goals and spaces, its relationship to postcinema, its racial dynamics and environmental implications, and its theoretical and historical conclusions. Moving beyond the predictable question of digital versus analog, the scholars gathered here rely on critical theory and historical research to consider cinema alongside its media companions: television, the gallery space, digital media, and theatrical environments. Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive. Contributors: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown U; James Leo Cahill, U of Toronto; Francesco Casetti, Yale U; Mary Ann Doane, U of California Berkeley; André Gaudreault, U de Montréal; Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.Trade Review"Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive."—New Books Network

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Book SynopsisAt the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema, contributors reinvigorate this debate to contemplate the ends, as well as directions and new beginnings, of cinema in the twenty-first century.In this volume, scholars at the forefront of film and media studies interrogate multiple potential “ends” of cinema: its goals and spaces, its relationship to postcinema, its racial dynamics and environmental implications, and its theoretical and historical conclusions. Moving beyond the predictable question of digital versus analog, the scholars gathered here rely on critical theory and historical research to consider cinema alongside its media companions: television, the gallery space, digital media, and theatrical environments. Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive. Contributors: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown U; James Leo Cahill, U of Toronto; Francesco Casetti, Yale U; Mary Ann Doane, U of California Berkeley; André Gaudreault, U de Montréal; Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.Trade Review"Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive."—New Books Network

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism. Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology. Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Lorenzo Fabbri’s book demonstrates how Italian Fascism wielded the cinematic apparatus to mobilize Italians as a racialized assemblage who would identify with the regime's myriad colonizing projects at home and abroad. That same apparatus was amenable to being hijacked by the resistance (embodied by Visconti and De Sica) to formulate plural, antifascist ways of living. A refreshing and beautifully written work, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon adds considerable nuance to our understandings of how Fascism works, and is actively contested, through film."—Rhiannon Noel Welch, author of Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy "A richly researched and politically urgent exploration of how cinema under Mussolini worked to assemble Italians into a fascist collectivity mobilized less by ideological consent than racial affect. By attending to filmmaking as race-making, from Luigi Pirandello to Roberto Rossellini, Lorenzo Fabbri illuminates how—building on liberal policies of internal colonization and external colonialism—Italian Fascism embarked on a biopolitical project to forge a unified, ‘whitened’ body politic committed to a melodramatic brand of imperialism. Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon unsettles film histories and theories that pivot on the ‘Year Zero’ of Italian neorealism, challenging us to rethink the entanglements of race, media, and authoritarianism while also attending to how cinema could be made useless for Fascism."—Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgments. Fascism and Us Introduction. Race War through Other Media 1. The Government of the Ungovernable: Race and Cinema in Early Italian Film Novels 2. Workers Entering the Military-Industrial Complex: Pirandello’s and Ruttman’s Acciaio 3. White, Red, Blackshirt: Blasetti’s Ecofascist Realism 4. The Shame of Escapism: Camerini’s Anthropological Machines 5. The White Italian Mediterranean: De Robertis, Rossellini, and Fascism’s Melodramatic Imperialism 6. De Sica’s Genre Trouble: Laughing Fascism Away? 7. Queer Antifascism: Visconti’s Ossessione and the Cinema Conspiracy against Ethno-Nationalism Conclusion. On Neorealism: The Ends of the Resistance and the Birth of an Area Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism. Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology. Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Lorenzo Fabbri’s book demonstrates how Italian Fascism wielded the cinematic apparatus to mobilize Italians as a racialized assemblage who would identify with the regime's myriad colonizing projects at home and abroad. That same apparatus was amenable to being hijacked by the resistance (embodied by Visconti and De Sica) to formulate plural, antifascist ways of living. A refreshing and beautifully written work, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon adds considerable nuance to our understandings of how Fascism works, and is actively contested, through film."—Rhiannon Noel Welch, author of Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy "A richly researched and politically urgent exploration of how cinema under Mussolini worked to assemble Italians into a fascist collectivity mobilized less by ideological consent than racial affect. By attending to filmmaking as race-making, from Luigi Pirandello to Roberto Rossellini, Lorenzo Fabbri illuminates how—building on liberal policies of internal colonization and external colonialism—Italian Fascism embarked on a biopolitical project to forge a unified, ‘whitened’ body politic committed to a melodramatic brand of imperialism. Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon unsettles film histories and theories that pivot on the ‘Year Zero’ of Italian neorealism, challenging us to rethink the entanglements of race, media, and authoritarianism while also attending to how cinema could be made useless for Fascism."—Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgments. Fascism and Us Introduction. Race War through Other Media 1. The Government of the Ungovernable: Race and Cinema in Early Italian Film Novels 2. Workers Entering the Military-Industrial Complex: Pirandello’s and Ruttman’s Acciaio 3. White, Red, Blackshirt: Blasetti’s Ecofascist Realism 4. The Shame of Escapism: Camerini’s Anthropological Machines 5. The White Italian Mediterranean: De Robertis, Rossellini, and Fascism’s Melodramatic Imperialism 6. De Sica’s Genre Trouble: Laughing Fascism Away? 7. Queer Antifascism: Visconti’s Ossessione and the Cinema Conspiracy against Ethno-Nationalism Conclusion. On Neorealism: The Ends of the Resistance and the Birth of an Area Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAn urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.Trade Review"All of the essays connect the subjective potency of the texts under discussion — the affects and moods that they inspire in the reader or viewer — to the ways that such works also give us a deeper understanding of the ongoing ecological transactions that are putting our very existence at risk. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not."—Los Angeles Review of Books"It is impossible for me to do complete justice to this book in a review, but I will say that the sixteen essays included in it are all illuminating, thoughtful, and interesting."—Gothic WandererTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Gothic in the AnthropocenePart I. Anthropocene1. The AnthropoceneJeffrey Andrew Weinstock2. De-extinction: A Gothic Masternarrative for the AnthropoceneMichael Fuchs3. Lovecraft vs. VanderMeer: Posthuman Horror (and Hope?) in the Zone of ExceptionRune Graulund4. Monstrous Megalodons of the Anthropocene: Extinction and Adaptation in Prehistoric Shark Fiction, 1974–2018Jennifer Schell5. A Violence “Just below the Skin”: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African AnthropoceneEsthie HugoPart II. Plantationocene6. Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Landscapes of the AnthropoceneLisa M. Vetere7. True Detective’s Folk GothicDawn Keetley8. Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Anthropocene, Animals, and GothicJustin D. EdwardsPart III. Capitalocene9. Gothic in the Capitalocene: World-Ecological Crisis, Decolonial Horror, and the South African PostcolonyRebecca Duncan10. Overpopulation: The Human as InhumanTimothy Clark11. Digging Up Dirt: Reading the Anthropocene through German RomanticismBarry Murnane12. Got a Light? The Dark Currents of Energy in Twin Peaks: The ReturnTimothy Morton and Rune GraulundPart IV. Chthulucene13. The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the BridgeJohan Höglund14. Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burialLaura R. Kremmel15. Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the “Anthropocene”Sara Wasson16. MonstroceneFred BottingContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transitionTraditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

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Book SynopsisRevealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the humanCinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.Trade Review "Articulating a powerful and provocative challenge to received wisdom about early film and its relations to digital technologies, Endless Intervals situates analog cinema’s management of discrete images and operations as a necessary context for understanding contemporary debates over AI and its apparent ability to transform discontinuous states into continuous meaning. This is an important book that complicates neat media-historical narratives and media-theoretical distinctions alike."—Shane Denson, author of Discorrelated Image "The idea behind Endless Intervals is rich and fascinating. Its great strength is that it offers a rich insight into the politics of the mind in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century."—Leonardo Table of ContentsIntroduction: Signifying Nothings1. Engineering the Interval2. The Semiotechnical Subject3. Discrete Reading4. The Technics of Bildung5. The Cinema of AfflictionsCoda: Where the Intervals EndAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisRevealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the humanCinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.Trade Review "Articulating a powerful and provocative challenge to received wisdom about early film and its relations to digital technologies, Endless Intervals situates analog cinema’s management of discrete images and operations as a necessary context for understanding contemporary debates over AI and its apparent ability to transform discontinuous states into continuous meaning. This is an important book that complicates neat media-historical narratives and media-theoretical distinctions alike."—Shane Denson, author of Discorrelated Image "The idea behind Endless Intervals is rich and fascinating. Its great strength is that it offers a rich insight into the politics of the mind in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century."—Leonardo Table of ContentsIntroduction: Signifying Nothings1. Engineering the Interval2. The Semiotechnical Subject3. Discrete Reading4. The Technics of Bildung5. The Cinema of AfflictionsCoda: Where the Intervals EndAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Trade Review "Condensed and intimate, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a systematic and insightful method to approach the queerness of Tsai Ming-liang's cinema, presenting a renewed understanding of queerness and queering in relation to the cinema as a medium and to queer politics and power relations that are specific to East and Southeast Asian cinemas"—Victor Fan, author of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy is an elucidating work... Apart from that it sheds new light on one of Taiwan’s best-known filmmakers, it lays out a new way of interpreting Tsai’s works that draws on history, the urban fabric, affect, while opening the way for creative readings of Tsai. The book adds to and also builds on our understanding of Tsai, while also pushing beyond, and being more than that."—Brian Hioe, No Man Is an Island "In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas de Villiers illuminates Tsai’s complicated and opaque filmography by unpacking the complex intersectional pieces of the director’s identity and thematic output."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisA brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Trade Review "Condensed and intimate, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a systematic and insightful method to approach the queerness of Tsai Ming-liang's cinema, presenting a renewed understanding of queerness and queering in relation to the cinema as a medium and to queer politics and power relations that are specific to East and Southeast Asian cinemas"—Victor Fan, author of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy is an elucidating work... Apart from that it sheds new light on one of Taiwan’s best-known filmmakers, it lays out a new way of interpreting Tsai’s works that draws on history, the urban fabric, affect, while opening the way for creative readings of Tsai. The book adds to and also builds on our understanding of Tsai, while also pushing beyond, and being more than that."—Brian Hioe, No Man Is an Island "In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas de Villiers illuminates Tsai’s complicated and opaque filmography by unpacking the complex intersectional pieces of the director’s identity and thematic output."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisHow the creative use of pop music in film—think Saturday Night Fever or Apocalypse Now—has shaped and shifted music history since the 1960s Quick: What movie do you think of when you hear “The Sounds of Silence”? Better yet, what song comes to mind when you think of The Graduate? The link between film and song endures as more than a memory, Nate Patrin suggests with this wide-ranging and energetic book. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movies and pop music, a phenomenon Patrin tracks through the past fifty years, revealing the power of music in movies to move the needle in popular culture. Rock ’n’ roll, reggae, R&B, jazz, techno, and hip-hop: each had its moment—or many—as music deployed in movies emerged as a form of interpretive commentary, making way for the legitimization of pop and rock music as art forms worthy of serious consideration. These commentaries run the gamut from comedic irony to cheap-thrills excitement to deeply felt drama, all of which Patrin examines in pairings such as American Graffiti and “Do You Want to Dance?”; Saturday Night Fever and “Disco Inferno”; Apocalypse Now and “The End”; Wayne’s World and “Bohemian Rhapsody”; and Jackie Brown and “Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?”. What gives power to these individual moments, and how have they shaped and shifted music history, recasting source material or even stirring wider interest in previously niche pop genres? As Patrin surveys the scene—musical and cinematic—across the decades, expanding into the deeper origins, wider connections, and echoed histories that come into play, The Needle and the Lens offers a new way of seeing, and hearing, these iconic soundtrack moments. Trade Review "Music writing and film writing are seldom as accessible and as rigorous as they are in Nate Patrin’s The Needle and the Lens—never mind in the same package and carrying the same weight. As he persuasively argues from first example to last, cinema after rock has often used existing recordings to ends that transform both, in terms cinematic and real-world alike. This sharp, humane book’s gift is in never losing sight, or focus, of either."—Michaelangelo Matos, author of Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster YearTable of Contents Contents Introduction Scorpio Rising, “He’s a Rebel” The Graduate, “The Sounds of Silence” Easy Rider, “The Pusher” The Harder They Come, “Many Rivers to Cross” American Graffiti, “Do You Want to Dance” Saturday Night Fever, “Disco Inferno” Killer of Sheep, “This Bitter Earth” Apocalypse Now, “The End” Repo Man, “When the Shit Hits the Fan” Krush Groove, “King of Rock” Blue Velvet, “In Dreams” Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” Jackie Brown, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” Belly, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” The Royal Tenenbaums, “Needle in the Hay” Drive, “A Real Hero” Outro: Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops Acknowledgments Notes References

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Book SynopsisA tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.Trade Review "This magisterial book is an extraordinary landmark in both Chinese film studies and the broader exploration of cinema itself. In his multifaceted paradigm of realism, Jason McGrath finds a master code for understanding Chinese film across the span of its history: conceptually vivid and analytically riveting, this superb study is a must-read for any student or scholar of the moving image."—Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China "Meticulously researched, Chinese Film focuses on the multiple manifestations of realism in the longue durée history, tracking a key aesthetic-political articulation embedded in the film medium in general and Chinese cinema in particular. Especially valuable is Jason McGrath’s insistence on situating each mode of realism and its transformation within richly textured historical contexts."—Yiman Wang, author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood "Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is one of the most ambitious, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking works on the subject to date."—Modern Chinese Literature & Cultures "This magnum opus—the fruit of many years’ work and thought—rethinks cinematic realism and proposes it as a conceptual framework for making sense of Chinese cinema as a whole."—The China Journal "Chinese Film is ambitious both in its historical scope and intellectual claims. (One sometimes wonders, in fact, what isn’t encompassed by McGrath’s expansive typology of realisms.) Well written and researched, the book is sure to reach a broad audience in film studies."—China Quarterly "McGrath offers a cross-cultural perspective with scholarly research and cinematic examples from China and other cultures including the United States, France, Korea, Iran, and Japan. His approach bridges the distances that may exist between these cultures, and the book’s in-depth engagement with a multitude of writings on cinematic realism provides a solid theoretical foundation for the historical study of Chinese cinematic realism."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisA tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.Trade Review "This magisterial book is an extraordinary landmark in both Chinese film studies and the broader exploration of cinema itself. In his multifaceted paradigm of realism, Jason McGrath finds a master code for understanding Chinese film across the span of its history: conceptually vivid and analytically riveting, this superb study is a must-read for any student or scholar of the moving image."—Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China "Meticulously researched, Chinese Film focuses on the multiple manifestations of realism in the longue durée history, tracking a key aesthetic-political articulation embedded in the film medium in general and Chinese cinema in particular. Especially valuable is Jason McGrath’s insistence on situating each mode of realism and its transformation within richly textured historical contexts."—Yiman Wang, author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood "Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is one of the most ambitious, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking works on the subject to date."—Modern Chinese Literature & Cultures "This magnum opus—the fruit of many years’ work and thought—rethinks cinematic realism and proposes it as a conceptual framework for making sense of Chinese cinema as a whole."—The China Journal "Chinese Film is ambitious both in its historical scope and intellectual claims. (One sometimes wonders, in fact, what isn’t encompassed by McGrath’s expansive typology of realisms.) Well written and researched, the book is sure to reach a broad audience in film studies."—China Quarterly "McGrath offers a cross-cultural perspective with scholarly research and cinematic examples from China and other cultures including the United States, France, Korea, Iran, and Japan. His approach bridges the distances that may exist between these cultures, and the book’s in-depth engagement with a multitude of writings on cinematic realism provides a solid theoretical foundation for the historical study of Chinese cinematic realism."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran

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Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran

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Book SynopsisA look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century While the war film has carved out a prominent space within the history of cinema, the twenty-first century has seen a significant shift in the characteristics that define it. Serving as a roadmap to the genre’s contemporary modes of expression, The New American War Film explores how, in the wake of 9/11, both the nature of military conflict and the symbolic frameworks that surround it have been dramatically reshaped. Featuring in-depth analyses of contemporary films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Eye in the Sky, American Sniper, and others, The New American War Film details the genre’s turn away from previously foundational themes of heroic sacrifice and national glory, instead emphasizing the procedural violence of advanced military technologies and the haptic damage inflicted on individual bodies. Unfolding amid an atmosphere of profound anxiety and disillusionment, the new American war film demonstrates a breakdown of the prevailing cultural narratives that had come to characterize conflict in the previous century. With each chapter highlighting a different facet of war’s cinematic representation, The New American War Film charts society’s shifting attitudes toward violent conflict and what is broadly considered to be its acceptable repercussions. Drawing attention to changes in gender dynamics and the focus on war’s lasting psychological effects within these recent films, Robert Burgoyne analyzes how cinema both reflects and reveals the makeup of the national imaginary. Trade Review "Robert Burgoyne offers here an essential reckoning with the changing affective contours of war representation in the twenty-first century. Eloquent and probing in equal measure, he invites us to confront the cinema’s emergent grammars of violence in the context of a forever war both intimate and remote, asking what is left—and what is possible—when the collective fiction of redemptive violence no longer coheres." —Jonna Eagle, author of Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema "Robert Burgoyne’s perceptive and engaging new volume provides a roadmap to the contemporary war film in light of the changed nature of conflict today. He illuminates how American culture comes to grips with the impact of endless wars and new geopolitical landscapes, showing how traditional narratives surrounding heroism, military technology, and victimhood have broken down. The New American War Film offers a vital new history of war and media today." —Tanine Allison, author of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media Table of Contents Contents Introduction 1. Embodiment and Pathos in the War Film: The Hurt Locker 2. Waiting for Terror: Zero Dark Thirty 3. Intimate Violence: Drone Vision in Eye in the Sky 4. War as Revelation: A Private War 5. Four Elegies of War: Restrepo,Infidel,Into the Korengal, and Sleeping Soldiers—single screen 6. American Pastoral / American Sniper Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century While the war film has carved out a prominent space within the history of cinema, the twenty-first century has seen a significant shift in the characteristics that define it. Serving as a roadmap to the genre’s contemporary modes of expression, The New American War Film explores how, in the wake of 9/11, both the nature of military conflict and the symbolic frameworks that surround it have been dramatically reshaped. Featuring in-depth analyses of contemporary films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Eye in the Sky, American Sniper, and others, The New American War Film details the genre’s turn away from previously foundational themes of heroic sacrifice and national glory, instead emphasizing the procedural violence of advanced military technologies and the haptic damage inflicted on individual bodies. Unfolding amid an atmosphere of profound anxiety and disillusionment, the new American war film demonstrates a breakdown of the prevailing cultural narratives that had come to characterize conflict in the previous century. With each chapter highlighting a different facet of war’s cinematic representation, The New American War Film charts society’s shifting attitudes toward violent conflict and what is broadly considered to be its acceptable repercussions. Drawing attention to changes in gender dynamics and the focus on war’s lasting psychological effects within these recent films, Robert Burgoyne analyzes how cinema both reflects and reveals the makeup of the national imaginary. Trade Review "Robert Burgoyne offers here an essential reckoning with the changing affective contours of war representation in the twenty-first century. Eloquent and probing in equal measure, he invites us to confront the cinema’s emergent grammars of violence in the context of a forever war both intimate and remote, asking what is left—and what is possible—when the collective fiction of redemptive violence no longer coheres." —Jonna Eagle, author of Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema "Robert Burgoyne’s perceptive and engaging new volume provides a roadmap to the contemporary war film in light of the changed nature of conflict today. He illuminates how American culture comes to grips with the impact of endless wars and new geopolitical landscapes, showing how traditional narratives surrounding heroism, military technology, and victimhood have broken down. The New American War Film offers a vital new history of war and media today." —Tanine Allison, author of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media Table of Contents Contents Introduction 1. Embodiment and Pathos in the War Film: The Hurt Locker 2. Waiting for Terror: Zero Dark Thirty 3. Intimate Violence: Drone Vision in Eye in the Sky 4. War as Revelation: A Private War 5. Four Elegies of War: Restrepo,Infidel,Into the Korengal, and Sleeping Soldiers—single screen 6. American Pastoral / American Sniper Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA cultural history of the enduring relationship between film spectatorship and intoxicating substances Movies under the Influence charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and mind-altering substances from early cinema through the psychedelic 1970s. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece examines how the parallel trajectories of these two enduring aspects of American culture, linked by their ability to influence individual and collective consciousness, resulted in them being treated and regulated in similar ways. Rather than looking at representations of drug use within film, she regards cinema and intoxicants as kindred experiences of immersion that have been subject to corresponding forces of ideology and power. Exploring the effects of intoxicants such as caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, and psychedelics on film spectatorship, Szczepaniak-Gillece demonstrates how American movie theaters sought to cultivate a dual identity, presenting themselves as both a place of wholesome entert

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Book SynopsisA new look at a beloved classic film that explores the philosophical dynamics of Casablanca Celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year, Casablanca remains one of the world’s most enduringly favorite movies. It won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is still commonly quoted: “We’ll always have Paris” and “Here’s looking at you, kid” And who can forget, “You must remember this…a kiss is just a kiss.” Yet no one expected much to come of this little film, certainly not its blockbuster stars or even the studio producing it. So how did this hastily cranked-out 1940s film, despite its many limitations, become one of the greatest films ever made? How is it that year after year, decade after decade, it continues to appear in the lists of the greatest movies ever produced? And why do audiences still weep when Rick and Ilsa part? The answer, according to Casablanca’s Conscience, is to paraphrase Rick, “It’s true.” Much has already been written about the film and the career-defining performances of Bogart and Bergman. Casablanca is an epic tale of love, betrayal, and sacrifice set against the backdrop of World War II. Yet decades later, it continues to capture the imagination of filmgoers. In Casablanca’s Conscience, author Robert Weldon Whalen explains why it still resonates so deeply. Applying a new lens to an old classic, Whalen focuses on the film’s timeless themes—Exile, Purgatory, Irony, Love, Resistance, and Memory. He then engages the fictional characters—Rick, Ilsa, and the others—against the philosophical and theological discourse of their real contemporaries, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Albert Camus. The relationships between fictional and historical persons illuminate both the film’s era as well as perennial human concerns. Both the film and the work of the philosophers explore dimensions of the human experience, which, while extreme, are familiar to everyone. It’s the themes that resonate with the viewer, that have sustained it as an evergreen classic all these years.Table of ContentsPrologue: Everybody Comes to Rick’s | 1 1 Exile | 13 2 Purgatory | 27 3 Irony | 44 4 Love | 56 5 Resistance | 78 Epilogue: You Must Remember This | 95 Acknowledgments | 105 Notes | 107 Bibliography | 127 Index | 137

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Book SynopsisA new look at a beloved classic film that explores the philosophical dynamics of Casablanca Celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year, Casablanca remains one of the world’s most enduringly favorite movies. It won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is still commonly quoted: “We’ll always have Paris” and “Here’s looking at you, kid” And who can forget, “You must remember this…a kiss is just a kiss.” Yet no one expected much to come of this little film, certainly not its blockbuster stars or even the studio producing it. So how did this hastily cranked-out 1940s film, despite its many limitations, become one of the greatest films ever made? How is it that year after year, decade after decade, it continues to appear in the lists of the greatest movies ever produced? And why do audiences still weep when Rick and Ilsa part? The answer, according to Casablanca’s Conscience, is to paraphrase Rick, “It’s true.” Much has already been written about the film and the career-defining performances of Bogart and Bergman. Casablanca is an epic tale of love, betrayal, and sacrifice set against the backdrop of World War II. Yet decades later, it continues to capture the imagination of filmgoers. In Casablanca’s Conscience, author Robert Weldon Whalen explains why it still resonates so deeply. Applying a new lens to an old classic, Whalen focuses on the film’s timeless themes—Exile, Purgatory, Irony, Love, Resistance, and Memory. He then engages the fictional characters—Rick, Ilsa, and the others—against the philosophical and theological discourse of their real contemporaries, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Albert Camus. The relationships between fictional and historical persons illuminate both the film’s era as well as perennial human concerns. Both the film and the work of the philosophers explore dimensions of the human experience, which, while extreme, are familiar to everyone. It’s the themes that resonate with the viewer, that have sustained it as an evergreen classic all these years.Table of ContentsPrologue: Everybody Comes to Rick’s | 1 1 Exile | 13 2 Purgatory | 27 3 Irony | 44 4 Love | 56 5 Resistance | 78 Epilogue: You Must Remember This | 95 Acknowledgments | 105 Notes | 107 Bibliography | 127 Index | 137

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Book SynopsisComplete in English for the first time, a major philosopher's most personal work and the source of an acclaimed film.

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Book SynopsisThree media experts guide the Christian moviegoer into a theological conversation with movies in this up-to-date, readable introduction to Christian theology and film. Building on the success of Robert Johnston's Reel Spirituality, the leading textbook in the field for the past 17 years, Deep Focus helps film lovers not only watch movies critically and theologically but also see beneath the surface of their moving images. The book discusses a wide variety of classic and contemporary films and is illustrated with film stills from favorite movies.Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A Phoropter for FilmComing Attractions1. The Power of Film2. The Church and Hollywood: A Historical LensAct I: Film3. Fade In: A Narrative Lens4. Sights and Sounds: An Audiovisual Lens5. Where Form Meets Feeling: A Critical LensAct II: Theology6. A Diverse Church Responds: An Ecclesial Lens7. Discerning Mystery: A Theological Lens8. Expanding Our Field of Vision: An Ethical LensAct III: Dialogue9. Encountering the Other: A Cultural Lens10. The Trauma of Love in the Films of Christopher Nolan: Converging LensesEpilogue: A Deeper FocusIndexes

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Book SynopsisThe National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was created in 1939 to produce, distribute, and promote Canadian cinema both domestically and abroad. During the early years of the NFB, its creative output was largely informed by the turbulent political and social climate the world was facing. World War II, Communism, unemployment, the role of labour unions, and working conditions were all subjects featured by the NFB during the period from 1939 to 1946. In Filming Politics, author Malek Khouri explores the work of the NFB during this period and argues that the political discourse of the films produced by this institution offered a counter-hegemonic portrayal of working class people and presented them as agents of social change. These films also saw an organic link between Canadian struggles for social progress, in the war against fascism and for peace, and those promoted at the time by the Soviet Union. Khouri also analyzes the various social, institutional, and political elements that contributed to the formation of the NFB's discourse. Filming Politics brings to light a number of films from the early years of the NFB, most of which have long been forgotten. Khouri presents a thorough reading of these films and the historical context within which they were produced and viewed. As such he proposes a radically new outlook on the films from how they have been appropriated in previous studies on Canadian cinema.Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Social Class and the NFB's Early Films in Canadian Film Studies 2. Canadian Film Culture Before the NFB 3. The Development of a Working Class Counter-Hegemonic Movement: A Historical Survey 4. The Establishment of the NFB: A Political and Institutional Overview 5. Out of the Depression and Into the War: NFB Films Between 1939 and 1941 6. Workers and the Politics of Fighting Fascism: NFB Films between 1942 and 1945 7. Workers, Democracy, and Social Welfare in NFB Films between 1942 and 1945 8. Stylistic Trends within the Discourse of NFB War Films 9. The NFB in a Moment of Transition: Workers in NFB Films Between 1945 and 1946 Appendix: Annotated Filmography Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisDuring the past twenty years, Latin American cinema has experienced an enormous upsurge, prompting film critics and scholars to hail the onset of a new era. What this signals, more than thriving financial or production infrastructures, is a renovated cinematic vision connected more closely to everyday experience and social and cultural concerns. The films analyzed in this new collection reflect and examine contemporary lives in their diversity and singularity, through their focus on identity politics, sexuality, the body, the family, and/or community.Drawing especially on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ""inoperative community"" and Enrique Dussel's critique of ""modernity"", the essays here weave together a progression that stresses the breakdown of the nation-state in Latin America and the search for new communal settings. The nation-state's breakdown is linked to modernity's homogenizing project and its concomitant hierarchies that, in seeking to impose order and progress, have alienated those who do not conform to conventional norms. In response, Nancy offers the concept of ""inoperative community"", which questions current forms of ""operative"" communities that do not allow for individuation and implies instead the recognition of plurality and singularity and replacement of hierarchies by horizontal and transversal connections.Essays in the first part of the volume, ""Crisis of the Nation-State and Desire for Community"", question the nation-state and its related institutions from different perspectives and theories, while the second part, ""Sexuality, Rape and Representation"", focuses on configurations of plurality and singularity in terms of sexuality and gender. The third part of the book, ""Visions of the Transnational"", moves toward the recognition of a global sense of interconnectedness that transcends local and national borders.Featuring more diversified methodological perspectives and covering a wider scope of cinematic traditions than most recent anthologies on Latin American cinema, these eleven essays represent a rich new contribution to film studies as well as cultural and gender studies.

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Book Synopsis From the dawn of cinema, images of Indigenous peoples have been dominated by Hollywood stereotypes and often negative depictions from elsewhere around the world. With the advent of digital technologies, however, many Indigenous peoples are working to redress the imbalance in numbers and counter the negativity. The contributors to Reverse Shots offer a unique scholarly perspective on current work in the world of Indigenous film and media. Chapters focus primarily on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and cover areas as diverse as the use of digital technology in the creation of Aboriginal art, the healing effects of Native humour in First Nations documentaries, and the representation of the pre-colonial in films from Australia, Canada, and Norway. Table of Contents Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe Part I. Dream Makers Introduction: Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe 1. He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film Michael Greyeyes Part II. Decolonizing Histories 2. Speakin' Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices Ernie Blackmore 3. Taking Pictures B(l)ack: The Work of Tracey Moffatt Susan Knabe 4. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/Colonial Cinema Kerstin Knopf 5. Australian Indigenous Short Film as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair's The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk Colleen McGloin 6.""Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away"": Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas and 10 Canoes Wendy Gay Pearson Part III. Mediating Practices 7. Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/New Zealand Jo Smith and Sue Abel 8. Superhighway across the Sky ... Aboriginal New Media Arts in Australia: A Remix and Email Conversation between Adam Szymanski and Jenny Fraser Jenny Fraser and Adam Szymanski 9. On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove Part IV. Documentary Approaches 10. The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project: Matching Product with Process in New Forms of Documentary Stephen Foster and Mike Evans 11. ""Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone"": Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor's Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew Ute Lischke 12. Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro Maeghan Pirie 13. ""I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are"": Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd's Hands of History Gail Vanstone Part V. Other Perspectives 14. Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette's Heater Tanis MacDonald 15. Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk Davinia Thornley Glossary Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema's lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film's provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media's materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author's previous, Harmony & Dissent , examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.Trade Review"'DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect', Bruce Elder's superb companion volume to his earlier 'Harmony and Dissent', convincingly demonstrates that for the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, cinema was the model, the preeminent form that prompted a recasting of the other arts. This wide-ranging study shows that Dada artists created cinematic collages and transformative machines, whereas Surrealists developed the film script as a new literary genre. His brilliant analyses of Duchamp's 'Anémic cinema', Man Ray's 'Retour À la raison' and 'Emak Bakia', and Buñuel's 'Un chien andalou' and 'Las Hurdes' are only surpassed by his intricate explication of Ernst's cinematic collage novels, which he relates as models for Lawrence Jordan's surrealist films. This is that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light." -- Rudolf Kuenzli, director, International Dada Archive, University of Iowa``Rigorously researched, the book rarely leans on established studes of DADA/surrealism, but it combines study of films of these movements with the movement's noncinematic work. Its length notwithstanding, this is a readable, informative book. Summing Up: Recommended.'' -- R.P. Kinsman -- Choice, January 2014, 201401Table of ContentsTable of Contents for DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect by R. Bruce Elder Preface 1 The Fate of Reason in Modernity The Modern Paradigm: Privileging Reason Geometry and Geometries Foundationalism Collapses Logic and Paradox Continuity and the Foundations of Physics Cantor and the Strangeness of Infinity Formalist Mathematics and the Limits of Reason Consequences of Reason's Retreat âPrimitivismâ as a Response to the Collapse of Reason Notes 2 Dadism and the Disasters of War The ZÃ"rich Coterie and Their Antics The Dada Conspirators: Tristan Tzara The Dada Conspirators: Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings The Dada Conspirators: Francis Picabia The KÃ"nstlerkneipe Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada DADA: War and Politics DADA against Burgeoning of Nationalism: What DADA Might Have Prevented A Precursor of DADA: The Comic Grotesque The Diffusion of DADA The Conditions That Produced the State of Mind Known as DADA Elementalism's Menacing Lure DADA: Art and Anti-Art DADA and the Life Principle Constructive DADA Hans Richter on the Six Forms of Use in Returning Art to Its Elementary Condition Dada Forms: Collage Further on Collage's New Notion of Form DADA and Language Parallels with the Russian Trans-Rationalists and Andrei Bely Zaum and the Higher Consciousness of Trans-Sense Picabia, Man Ray and the Dadaist Art of the Machine Duchamp and DADA's Art of the Machine Entr'acte (1924): Commentary Man Ray's DADA Cinema Emak Bakia : Introduction Emak Bakia : Commentary DADA: In conclusion Notes 3 Surrealism and the Cinema Beginnings Psychoanalysis and the Occult: The Intrusion of Alien Forms into Consciousness and the Poetics of the Surrealist Literary Image DADA and Surrealism Hippolyte Taine, Hasard Objectif , the Poetic Image and the Cinema The Cinema, Photography and âthe Marvellousâ Photography, the Surrealist Object, and the Unheimlich Ernst's Frottage as a Handmade Trace and Automatist Form Surrealism, Apollinaire, and Reconciliatio Surrealism and the Hegelian Dialectic Surrealism and the Freudian Dialectic Dalí, the Double Image, and Paranoiac-Critical Methods Dalí Against Idealism Dalí, Paranoia and Lacan: A New Phase of Surrealism Begins Lacan's Theories and Surrealists' Conception of the Poetic Image Un chien andalou : Commentary An Anti-art Film The Verbal Image Surrealism's Fissures and Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan Las Hurdes and the Documentary Dialectical Structure in Las Hurdes Las Hurdes and Bataille's Heterology Las Hurdes and the Sacred Las Hurdes as an Ethnographic Film The Hurdanos in History How Surrealism Has Been Passed Down into the Twenty-First Century: The Marvellous Correspondence between Max Ernst's Collage Novels and Lawrence Jordan's Films Collage as a Pneumatic Device: Through Ernst to Jordan The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââDimancheâ (Calcination) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââLundiâ (Dissolution) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââMardiâ (Separation) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââMercrediâ (Conjunction) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââJeudiâ (Putrefaction/Fermentation) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââVendrediâ (Distillation) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââSamediâ (Coagulation) The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté ââSamediâ (Coagulation) Lawrence Jordan between Surrealism and Alchemy Lawrence Jordan's Duo Concertantes : Commentary Part One: The Centennial Exposition Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway Notes In Lieu of a Conclusion Appendix 1: How Reason Lost its Purchase on Reality Notes Appendix 2: Infinity Confounds Reason Notes Appendix 3: An Account of Gödel's Proof for Poets, Painters and Art Historians Notes Appendix 4: Emak Bakia : A Shot Analysis and Commentary Notes Appendix 5: Un chien andalou : A Shot Analysis and Commentary Notes Appendix 6: Land without Bread : An Shot Analysis and Commentary Notes Appendix 7: Analysis of Larry Jordan's Duo Concertantes Part One: The Centennial Exposition Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway Duo Concertantes Musical Form: Tables Duo Concertantes Part 1: The Centennial Exposition Duo Concertantes Part 2: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway Index

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Book Synopsis Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron's film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film's message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing. To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views, not only about the film but about the controversy surrounding it. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us. Trade Review"Taylor's new exciting volume gets at the heart of where most Westerners are engaging religious and spiritual life today: the realm of popular culture. The book's contributors lead us on a compelling journey through a complex cultural ecology of religion, politics, fan forums, ethics, ecotopian promise, corporate violence, and troubling notions of the 'native.' At the end, we emerge with an altered eye, appreciating the power of narrative brought alive through the transformative semiotics of visual culture. Accessible for the uninitiated and yet interesting to the specialist, 'Avatar and Nature Spirituality' is just one of a new generation of books that are shifting the very way we conceive of religion. As traditional congregational studies gather dust, vanguard scholarship that attends to the global 'congregation' of mass culture will bring the study of religion into a new era, and this volume contributes to that important turn." -- Sarah McFarland Taylor, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture, Northwestern University"Taylor's collection is first-rate.... The contributors assembled in Avatar and Nature Spirituality are knowledgeable, well-researched, and carefully reasoned. Each furthers the stated editorial goal of cross-disciplinary appraisal. The scholarship includes work in religious and mythological studies, philology, and musicology, geography and environmental studies, and sociology and film studies. On the path of civil evolution towards a stable climate and a recovered planet, Avatar is a cultural, spiritual, and artistic milestone, and Avatar and Nature Spirituality is a highly recommended scholarly companion." -- Martin Schönfeld, University of South Florida -- ID: International DialogueTable of ContentsTable of Contents for Avatar and Nature Spirituality edited by Bron TaylorPART I BRINGING AVATAR INTO FOCUSPrologue: Avatar as Rorschach Bron TaylorIntroduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar Bron Taylor Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama Stephen RustOuter Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar's Pandora Thore Bjørnvig PART II POPULAR RESPONSES Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion Britt Istoft Post-Pandoran Depression or Na'vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception Matthew Holtmeier Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The reaction to Avatar in Hawai'i Rachelle K. Gould, Nicole M. Ardoin, and Jennifer Kamakanipakolonahe'okekai Hashimoto Watching Avatar from ""AvaTar Sands"" Land Randolph Haluza-Delay, Michael P. Ferber, and Tim Wiebe-Neufeld PART III CRITICAL, EMOTIONAL & SPIRITUAL RELFECTIONS Becoming the ""Noble Savage"": Nature Religion and the ""Other"" in Avatar Chris Klassen The Na'vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration Pat Munday Calling the Na'vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and Nature Spirits Bruce MacLennan Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics Joy H. Greenberg Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest David Landis Barnhill I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar Lisa H. Sideris Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron's Avatar Michael B. MacDonald Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sørlin Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar's Cosmogony and Nature Religion Bron Taylor Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar Daniel Heath Justice Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis book presents an ecophilosophy of cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to the lived ecologies - material, social, and perceptual relations - within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. If cinema takes us on mental and emotional journeys, the author argues that those journeys that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. A range of styles are examined, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, and Brakhage, to YouTube's expanding audio-visual universe.Trade Review"'Ecologies of the Moving Image' is an ambitious book, and a capacious and satisfying one. In addressing 'the wild phantasmagoria of images' among which we live today, Ivakhiv gives us an account that is at once systematic and brimming with rich detail. Moving-image forms both render imaginative worlds to us and help to constitute the world we live in; this book gives us a brilliant process-relational account of both of these dimensions of media experiences." -- Steven Shaviro, -- DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University"Ivakhiv, a leading light in the emerging eco-critical film studies, wraps two themes around each other, the cinema 'of' and 'as' ecology. His concern is with how cinema produces worlds, lives, and human subjects intricately implicated in the processes of Earth. Marrying Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze with eco-philosophy, Ivakhiv gives us a rich, eloquent, wide-ranging, and moving account of movement: as world, as cinema, and as hope." -- Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London"A capacious and authoritative ecophilosophy of the cinema [...] build[s] a theoretical framework for understanding the power of cinema both to reveal 'the world' and to create new ways of seeing that world. [...] Ivakhiv's grasp of ecocinema as a body of work is truly impressive. It would be hard to find a film with any hint of an environmental theme that he does not mention and discuss." -- Joni Adamson, Arizona State University -- JSRNC, 2014"The publication of Adrian J. Ivakhiv's Ecologies of the Moving Image marks an important moment in the development of ecocritical film studies. ... Ivakhiv's book surveys and synthesizes a vast number of critical perspectives and systematically and intelligently analyzes a staggering array of primary texts... Ivakhiv's book will come to be viewed as required reading for the growing ranks of ecocinema scholars." -- Bart Welling, University of North Florida -- ISLE"This is a rich book that I feel is only beginning to reveal its significance to me." -- Niall Flynn, University of Lincoln -- Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image"Adrian Ivakhiv's Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013) is a book that pushes beyond conventional reflections on film and environmental thought. It is, significantly, a book where 'the conceptual' and 'the material' enter into co-productive relationships in and through Ivakhiv's examination of cinema and the worlds it creates.... Its scale and scope exceed the purview of the humanities and offers far-reaching conceptual and methodological insights of interest to anyone attempting to make sense of our contemporary environmental condition." -- Harlan Morehouse -- Society and Space"Reflecting the interdisciplinarity within environmental humanities, Ivakhiv impressively draws upon a century of film history, as well as critical scholarship from anthropology and geography to discuss an astonishing array of films, including ethnographies, wildlife films, blockbuster science fiction and action cinemas, experimental and essay films, digital cinema, documentaries, animated films, Westerns, road movies, and European art films. ... offers a timely and significant meditation on the material realities of moving images and the shared connections between humans and non-humans which surround them, to the benefit of scholars and graduate students alike." -- Rachel Webb Jekanowski, Concordia University -- The Journal of Ecocriticism"not only develop[s] a form of ecocriticism appropriate to cinema, but several different strands of philosophy and film theory are also brought together into a structure that represents a general theory of cinema. ... There are thus two projects underway in this book: one to give an account of how the 'world-making' of cinema connects materially to the world through the 'vectors' of perception, and the other to identify and give an account of films that have historically advanced this understanding of the world as in a continuous process of flux. The two together generate three separately enjoyable products: (1) a history of classic films seen from the perspective of ecological awareness, (2) an ecological ontology of cinema, and (3) a history of ideas knitting together a significant strand of philosophy and film theory building up to an ecology of cinema." -- Helen Hughes, University of London -- Film-Philosophy"Adrian Ivakhiv makes a major contribution to eco-film studies and film philosophy by proposing a process-relational theory of cinemas. The first two chapters give a lengthy exposition of the book's theoretical and philosophical position. Central to a process-relational approach to cinema is the idea that "a film is what a film does "(48). This includes the complex interaction of several processes, "from its making to its viewing to its after-effects, including its reverberation in viewer's perceptions, sensations, conversations, motivations, and attunements to one thing or another in the social and material fields that constitute the world"(48). A.N. Whitehead's process philosophy and Charles Peirce's tripartite phenomenological theory of semiotics provide a complex vocabulary to understand the way cinema creates worlds.... A useful Appendix gives a bullet-pointed summary of its main points and lists pertinent questions that students can ask of a given film in order to do process-relational media analysis.... Ivakhiv's film analysis is superbly researched and insightfully synthesises existing criticism of his chosen films with his Peircian conceptual framework.... The range of reference make it indispensable for anyone interested in studying film from an ecocritical perspective.'' -- David Ingram, Brunel University, London, UK -- Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 19/1Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, by Adrian J. IvakhivPrefaceAcknowledgements1. Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of CinemaTwo perspectives on the visual The cinema as cosmomorphic, or world making: geomorphic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic Stalker as paradigm: Tracking the cinema, stalking the psyche The argument Overview of the chapters 2. Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis: A Process-Relational Account of CinemaThe three ecologies of images: material, social, perceptual Process-relational ontology Perceptual ecologies: How we get drawn into the cinematic world Peircean semiosis: firstness, secondness, and thirdness Spectacle, narrativity, and signness Scenes, episodes, and cinematic impact 3. Territory: The Geomorphology of the VisibleGeomorphism in life and in image An initial typology Picturing ""nature"": Landscape aesthetics as socio-natural production Anchoring the filmic world Staking claims and territorializing identities: Making the West Dovzhenko's cinematic pantheism Nature, holism, and the eco-administrative state Industry, existential landscapes, and the firstness of things Post-westerns, pantheism, and the ecological sublime Kinetic landscapes, the exhilaration of movement, and the differentiation of space Cinematic tourism, object fetishism, and the global landscape Enframing the world, or expanding perception? ""Burn but his books"": Deconstructing the gaze from both ends 4. Encounter: First Contact, Utopia, and the Becoming of AnotherThe ethnographic paradigm Nanook/Allakariallak and the two-way gaze King Kong's imperial gaze: From ethnographic to cinematic spectacle Upriver journeys, hearts of darkness, and contact zones Beyond first contact Cinematic holism, auto-ethnography, and visual sovereignty From the deconstruction of reality to its reflexive reconstruction Green identities: images of choice, hope, struggle, and community 5. Anima Moralia: Journeys Across FrontiersPointing, seeing, gazing Animating the image, imaging the animate Writing, seeing, and faking nature Making nature: inter-natural coproductions Animation, plasmaticness, and Disney Boundary traffic: seeing, being seen, and the horror of crossing over Animal by analogy: penguins and family values Individual crossings: Bittner's birds, Treadwell's bears Sheer becomings: one or several types of packs Boundary strategies: ethics of the contact zone 6. Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the RealRecapitulation of the argument Trauma and the imagination of disaster Strange weather, network narratives, and the traumatic event The sublime and the Real The eco-imaginary in post-9/11 culture Political ecologies in three dimensions and more Avatar's eco-apocalyptic Zone Toward a Peircian synthesis: aesthetics, ethics, and ecologics of the image-event Ecology, time, and the image Ecophilosophical cinema: moving images on a moving planet Afterword: Digital Futures in a Biosemiotic WorldAppendix: Doing Process-Relational Media AnalysisNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisJean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville are among the most important postwar filmmakers; they have worked across forms, across media, and across countries. This book, the first to be devoted specifically to the work they did together, examines the way they expanded the possibilities of cinema by using cutting-edge video equipment in a constant search for a new kind of filmmaking. Two Bicycles examines all of the films, videos, and television works that the two did together, and moves slowly across France and Switzerland, with detours in Quebec, Mozambique, and Palestine. Their amazingly varied body of work includes a twelve-hour television series, some experimental videos, an acclaimed feature film with Isabelle Huppert, a cigarette commercial, and much else. Overall the book shows the degree to which this work departs radically from the legacy of the French New Wave, and in many ways shows signs of having been formed by the distinct culture of Switzerland, to which Godard and Miéville returned in the 1970s to set up their ""atelier,"" Sonimage. Two Bicycles offers a chance to explore a body of work that is as unique and demanding as it is rich and revelatory. Godard and Miéville have worked together for four decades but have never seemed more relevant.Trade Review"Most significantly, one can finally see Mieville outside of a clause with Godard, even as his partner an individual with her own artistic indentity, and an important filmmaker in her own right. Of course, much of this is accomplished implicitly, as White's book is primarily focused on breaking down the films analytically. Indeed, Two Bicycles ' first and foremost act of demystification is firmly directed at clarifying the ideas in the work rather than emphasizing the people behind that work. White's readings of the films are refreshingly succinct. With impressive lucidity, he is able to define the parameters of their undertakings: the context of production; Godard and Mieville's living situation (they mostly spent time in both France and their native Switzerland, but also visited Quebec and Mozambique); and their specific interests at the time. Combining this with close inspection of the duo's running obsessions, influences, and political engagement, White comes up with well-informed but distinctly subjective interpretations of their films.... The most considered value of Two Bicycles comes from its imposition of a segmented arc that defines the ever-changing methods and projects throughout the duo's working history.... White articulates it with a sensitive eye and keen, clear prose, making Two Bicycles an important tool for navigating and understanding such a challenging and rewarding body of work." -- Adam Cook -- Cineaste, Winter 2013"This is a thoughtful, insightful, and revelatory study on a neglected subject that had new things to teach me on almost every page." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, author, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia (2010), former film critic, Chicago ReaderTable of Contents Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville by Jerry White Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Abandonments Chapter 3 Communication Chapter 4 Realization Chapter 5 Reconsideration Chapter 6 Conclusion Appendix 1: Cinéma Pratique's Interview with Jean-Luc Godard Appendix 2: Interviews with Anne-Marie Miéville Notes Biblography Index

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Book SynopsisMel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, was released on Ash Wednesday, February 24, 2004 to capacity audiences in theatres and auditoriums across the U.S. and other countries. Prior to the film's release, a groundswell of controversy filled the airwaves and media outlets. Some religious groups protested the film, while others embraced it. Mel Gibson focuses on the Passion not the life nor resurrection of Christ. By doing so, he leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story familiar to Christians and consequently he adds non-biblical gruesome details foreign to the Gospels. Mel Gibson's Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications exposes the flaws of Gibson's cinematic Christ and lays out assertively and persuasively the rationale of Jews and Christians in how to grasp and comprehend the passion and execution of the Christian savior known scripturally as the "King of the Jews.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder introduces scholars and students to the controversial and prolific but brief career of a filmmaker hailed as one of the New German Cinema's most talented exponents. Combining a chronological survey with a thematic exploration, Wallace Steadman Watson reviews the entirety of Fassbinder's artistic output, focusing specifically on fifteen of the filmmaker's thirty-eight feature-length works. Watson's interpretations of these films, all of which he studied in Germany, scrutinise the financial constraints, material conditions, and script development involved in their production.Watson draws on a wide assortment of Fassbinder interviews—many of which are not available in English—and on theoretical and critical approaches employed in the Frankfort School, performance and reception theories, gay and lesbian film theory, and studies of melodrama and camp. Watson also incorporates his own interviews with Fassbinder's mother and with the woman who served as Fassbinder's film editor and companion during the final four years of his life.

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Book SynopsisA fascinating look at Nazi Germany as revealed in its films. This collection of essays offers a view of Nazi Germany through an analysis of twenty films, representing a sampling of the period's directors and reflecting the film medium's major genres. In spite of the control that Goebbels's film industry exercised over all aspects of filmmaking in the Third Reich, the films reveal an individuality that belies subsuming them under any one rubric or containing them within any one theory. Films such as Hitlerjunge Quex, Die große Liebe, and Auf Wiedersehen Franziska represent the Nazi film industry's efforts to propagandize through entertainment. Others such as Immensee, Kleider machen Leute, and Der Schimmelreiter reveal an attempt to expropriate Germany's rich literary past for the regime. These literary adaptations and films like Glückskinder, La Habanera, and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien today seem void of Nazi ideology if viewed outside the context of Nazism. But another film, Der ewige Jude, shocks us with its virulent anti-Semitism and hateful propaganda almost sixty years after its release. All of the films treated, regardless of their fame or notoriety or the level of commitment of their directors to the Nazi cause, played an important role in a cinema that not only represents the dreams and lives of the citizens of the Third Reich, but influencedthem as well. Robert C. Reimer is professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.Trade Review...gathers forward the argument that propaganda need not be defined as the willful product of government...seeks...a historical context in which, through movies, the reader might approach the complex intersections of German cultural values and Nazism. A thoughtful book with a thorough bibliography, illuminating stills, and a useful index. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - modernity writ German - state of the art as art of the Nazi state; reflections of the Weimar cinema in the Nazi propaganda films "SA-Mann Brand", "Hitlerjunge Quex" and "Hans Westmar"; Luis Trenker - a rebel in the Third Reich?; the director and the diva - th efilm musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander; fear of flying - education to manhood in Nazi film comedies; far away, so close - Carl Froelich's "Heimat"; a cinematic constructioon of Nazi anti-Semitism - the documentary "Der ewige Jude"; escaping home - Leni Riefenstahl's visual poetry in "Tiefland"; literary Nazis? - adapting 19th-century German novellas for the screen; the spectacle of war in "Die grosse Liebe"; turning inward - an analysis of Helmut Kautner's "Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska", "Romanze in Moll", "Unter den Brucken"; working for the man, whoever that might be - the vocation of Wolfgang Liebeneiner.

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Book SynopsisExplores how entertainment cinema served everyday fascism in Nazi Germany. Hitler's regime not only terrorized its citizens; it also seduced them, offering stability, a traditional value system, a sense of belonging, and hope of a better standard of living. Nazi cinema was part of this seduction, expressing positive social fantasies and promoting the enchantment of reality, so that one would want to share in the dream at any price. This interdisciplinary study, based on exhaustive research in German archives, examines how thirteen films from five genres - the historical musical, the foreign adventure film, the home-front film, the melodrama, and the problem film - enchanted audiences and enacted shared stories that can tell us much about how family, community, history, the nation, and the war were imagined in Nazi Germany. Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien is Professor of German at Skidmore College.Trade ReviewO'Brien carries the reader into the world of Babelsberg, the German Hollywood, where the reader sees Nazi filmmaking as a form of amusement that carries the Nazi message. * CHOICE *The readings are integrated within a larger, compelling argument about the function of entertainment within the framework of Nazi culture so that the focus convincingly broadens the understanding of the complexities in this crucial period of German film history. * MONATSHEFTE *O'Brien's book is the product of extensive archival research and provides numerous services to the reader... [Her] readings convincingly show how films not generally viewed as propaganda films were produced with explicit ideological goals in mind. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Clearly structured, ... the film interpretations are embedded in well-summarized historical contexts.... The book's eminent readability makes it enjoyable and accessible to the non-specialist. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction History, Utopia, and the Social Construction of Happiness: The Historical Musical Mapping German Identity: The Foreign Adventure Film The Celluloid War: The Home-Front Film Discontented Domesticity: The Melodrama The Forbidden Desires of Everyday Life: The Problem Film Epilogue Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays by leading scholars giving a new picture of the variety of German expressionist cinema. This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shapedthe understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. The late Dietrich Scheunemann was Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh and wrote and edited several books on German literature and on film and media.Trade ReviewWith a nod to the pioneering work of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, [the book] proposes to overcome the reductive tendencies of their scholarship with a historiography that emphasizes complex and asynchronous historical developments.... * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Among the collection's greatest strengths are the reassessment of the maddeningly elusive category of 'expressionist' film - the editor should be commended for his insistence on giving more nuance and specificity to the term - and the vibrant mix of genre discussions from horror and fantasy and the so-called 'street films' to early historical dramas and the avant-garde film. * MONATSHEFTE *

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Book SynopsisRe-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath. The recent "discovery" of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television mini-series Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the now-unified nation have attempted to facethe trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world. Contributors: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, JenniferKapczynski, Manuel Köppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke. Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.Trade Review[A] highly successful undertaking that should find a wide readership including advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars . . . . Unlike so many collections, where one cherry-picks interesting articles, it is clearly rewarding to read Screening War as a whole. . . . [A] rich and comprehensive picture about how film and the German cultural memory of World War II have developed over the last 65 years. * SEMINAR *Screening War is one of several recently published titles to focus on the representation of German victimhood in its various forms. [.] the volume's strength lies in the originality of some of the discussions. Several chapters offer intriguing accounts of little-known themes [.] or film-makers whose work has received only uneven scholarly attention [.]. Other contributors provide alternative and much-needed readings of better-known films and genres. [.]Screening War is a useful and welcome contribution to a fascinating topic. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[I]nvaluable . . . . [O]f interest not only to anyone concerned with the cultural history of twentieth-century Germany or with the relations between film and totalitarianism, but also to anyone grappling with the methodological issues involved in not judging film as a more or less unsuccessful copy of a higher art form. * NEW CINEMAS *Through a careful scrutiny of a wide array of filmmakers and their work, Screening War offers a vivid glimpse of the cultural history of German visual media throughout the post-WWII period. . . . [A] formidable contribution . . . . * H-GERMAN, H-NET REVIEWS *The collection presents the theme complex of 'victim discourse' very broadly. What is stimulating about it . . . is therefore not so much the connections it provides to the examples already intensively discussed in research . . . but instead above all the references to works that have not been looked at so extensively in the light of victimization. * FILMBLATT *Provides a history of cultural and political discourses on German 'victimhood,' which counters the commonly-held belief that recent depictions of German suffering break a longstanding taboo. * THIS YEAR'S WORK IN MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction: German Suffering? - Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman Armchair Warriors: Heroic Postures in the West German War Film - Jennifer M. Kapczynski German Martyrs: Images of Christianity and Resistance to National Socialism in German Cinema - David Clarke The Rhetoric of Victim Narratives in West German Films of the 1950s - Manuel Koeppen Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy - Erica Carter Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf - Sabine Hake Shadowlands: The Memory of the Ostgebiete in Contemporary German Film and Television - Tim Bergfelder Links and Chains: Trauma between the Generations in the Heimat Mode - Rachel Palfreyman Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA's Antifascist Films - Daniela Berghahn Suffering and Sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff's Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel's NaPolA - Brad Prager Eberhard Fechner's History of Suffering: TV Talk, Temporal Distance, Spatial Displacement - John Davidson The Politics of Feeling: Alexander Kluge on War, Film, and Emotion - Johannes von Moltke Post-unification German-Jewish Relations and the Discourse of Victimhood in Dani Levy's Films - Sean Allan

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Book SynopsisA dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film. This dynamic, event-centered anthology offers a new understanding of the hundred-year history of German-language film, from the earliest days of the Kintopp to contemporary productions like The Lives of Others. Eachof the more than eighty essays takes a key date as its starting point and explores its significance for German film history, pursuing its relationship with its social, political, and aesthetic moment. While the essays offer ampletemporal and topical spread, this book emphasizes the juxtaposition of famous and unknown stories, granting attention to a wide range of cinematic events. Brief section introductions provide a larger historical and film-historicalframework that illuminates the essays within it, offering both scholars and the general reader a setting for the individual texts and figures under investigation. Cross-references to other essays in the book are included at the close of each entry, encouraging readers not only to pursue familiar trajectories in the development of German film, but also to trace particular figures and motifs across genres and historical periods. Together, the contributionsoffer a new view of the multiple, intersecting narratives that make up German-language cinema. The constellation that is thus established challenges unidirectional narratives of German film history and charts new ways of thinkingabout film historiography more broadly. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis, and Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.Trade ReviewThere has never been a history of German film like this one. [Its] original approach is to write film history from the margins of the established film canon . . . . The contributions are compact in their argumentation and quite readable; an encyclopedia wasn't the intention. . . . The book is supremely suited as a completion of and especially as a critical confrontation with the canon . . . . [I]n the future one won't be able to bypass Kapczynski and Richardson's volume. . . . -- Wolfgang Fuhrmann * FILMBLATT *The volume offers extensive and varied material on the history of German cinema; especially to be noted are the careful bibliographies. . . . The volume is well suited for classes on both the history of German cinema and on its present state, because it treats the most diverse topics carefully and offers concisely formulated insights along with suggestions for further reading. * MONATSHEFTE *[A]n extremely rich and informative book [that makes an] important contribution to the area of German film studies . . . . [It] certainly performs the task demanded of this changing discipline and revises, reconfigures, and advances German national cinema in all of its dimensions. * H-GERMAN REVIEWS *Film Book of the Year, 2012. I have decided in favor of [this] American publication on German film because I find its perspective on our film history particularly richly detailed, thought provoking, and original. * HANS-HELMUT PRINZLER, WWW.HHPRINZLER.DE *Can claim top position just by its extent and number of contributions . . . . The chronological jigsaw puzzle joins together into an original and substantial whole. . . . One shouldn't forget that this is a film book from America. Thus: a view from the outside, which, however, has the advantage of a different curiosity and perspective. . . . It is astounding, given their brevity, how the texts hit their crucial marks. . . . With this book [the editors] have accomplished an extraordinary editorial feat. * HANS-HELMUT PRINZLER, WWW.HHPRINZLER.DE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson 1 November 1895: Premiere of Wintergarten Program Highlights Transitional Nature of Early Film Technology - Janelle Blankenship 22 September 1907: Sigmund Freud Is Attracted to the Movies but Feels Lonely in the Crowd - Tan Waelchli Spring 1911: At Munich's Frankfurter Hof a Comedy Team Is Born - Christian Rogowski 27 May 1911: Asta Nielsen Secures Unprecedented Artistic Control - Heide Schlüpmann 18 December 1913: Atlantis Triggers Controversy about Sinking of Culture - Deniz Gokturk 21 January 1914: Premiere of Die Firma heiratet Inaugurates Fashion Farce - Mila Ganeva 6 March 1920: Chinese Students Raise Charges of Racism against Die Herrin der Welt - Tobias Nagl 23 May 1920: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari Brings Aesthetic Modernism to the Fairground - Paul Dobryden 15 October 1920: Ernst Lubitsch Fuels Debate over Tears in the Cinema - Michael Wedel 4 March 1921: With Das Floss der Toten, the Dead Come Back to Town - Philipp Stiasny 1 April 1921: Walther Ruttmann's Lichtspiel: Opus 1 Shapes Culture of Abstract Filmmaking - Gregory Zinman 27 May 1921: Scherben Seeks Cinematic Equivalent of Theatrical Intimacy - Patrick Vonderau 14 September 1922: Schüfftan Process Reconciles Artistic Craftsmanship with Demands of Entertainment Industry - Katharina Loew 13 October 1922: Alexander Kolowrat-Krakowsky Sets Course of Austrian (Inter)National Film - Robert von Dassanowsky 29 November 1923: Karl Grune's Die Straße Inaugurates "Street Film," Foreshadows Film Noir - Anton Kaes 31 January 1924: Premiere of Orlacs Hände Marks Beginning of the End of Expressionism - Paul Coates 14 February 1924: Die Nibelungen Premieres, Foregrounds "Germanness" - Adeline Mueller 10 May 1924: Der Berg des Schicksals Inaugurates the Genre of the "Mountain Film" - Kamaal Haque 23 December 1924: Der letzte Mann Explores Limits of Modern Community - Robert Schechtman 16 March 1925: Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit Educates Audiences in the Art of Nudity - Britta Herdegen 3 May 1925: French and German Avant-Garde Converge at Der absolute Film - Joel Westerdale 10 January 1927: Brigitte Helm Embodies Ambivalence of the New Woman - 17 June 1927: Amateur Film League Aids Invention of Film Culture - Martina Roepke 16 December 1927: Debut of Familientag im Hause Prellstein Provokes Debate about Jewish Identity in Popular Cinema - Daniel H. Magilow 31 January 1929: Limits on Racial Border-Crossing Exposed in Piccadilly - Cynthia Walk 9 May 1929: Oscar for Emil Jannings Highlights Exchange between German and American Film Industries - Gerd Gemünden 3 June 1929: Lloyd Bacon's The Singing Fool Triggers Debate about Sound Film - Lutz Koepnick 4 February 1930: Menschen am Sonntag Provides New Model of Cinematic Realism - Noah Isenberg 13 June 1930: Weekend Broadcast Tests Centrality of Image in Cinema - Brían Hanrahan 17 October 1930: Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera Lawsuit Identifies Contradiction between Individual Creativity and Collective Production in Cinema - Marc Silberman 11 December 1930: Ban of All Quiet on the Western Front Highlights Tensions over Sound Technology - Dayton Henderson 11 May 1931: With Premiere of M, a Gala Hit Becomes a Cultural Controversy - Sara Hall 28 March 1933: Goebbels's Kaiserhof Speech Reveals Tension between National and International Aims of Nazi Cinema - Laura Heins 29 February 1935: Der alte und der junge König Instrumentalizes Myth of Prussian Nationalism - Martina Lüke 28 March 1935: Premiere of Triumph des Willens Presents Fascism as Unifier of Communal Will - Kai Sicks 28 March 1935: Premiere of Triumph des Willens Presents Fascism as Unifier of Communal Will - Michael Cowan 19 June 1935: Celebration of Lilian Harvey's Return Belies Ideological Incongruence in Nazi Entertainment Films - Antje Ascheid 30 August 1936: Luis Trenker Tries but Fails to Sidestep Nazi Filmpolitik - Carola Daffner 30 December 1940: Von Borsody's Wunschkonzert Mobilizes Melodrama for Total War - Jaimey Fisher 18 February 1941: The Devil and Daniel Webster Puts American Politics on Trial - Simon Richter 28 May 1942: Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang Write a Hollywood Screenplay - Jonathan Skolnik 3 September 1942: With Venice Premiere of Die goldene Stadt, Veit Harlan Enters Debate on Color Cinema - Russell Alt 18 January 1943: Bateson Analysis of Hitlerjunge Quex Stressses Value of Film as Key to National Culture - Gary Baker 18 May 1945: Welt im Film Newsreels, Rubble Films Model "Cool Conduct" - Wilfried Wilms 22 March 1946: Screenings of Die Todesmühlen Spark Controversy over German Readiness to Confront Nazi Crimes - Ulrike Weckel 16 August 1949: Ilse Kubaschewski Founds Gloria-Filmverleih, Sets the Course of Popular West German Film - Hester Baer 16 February 1952: Peter Lorre Leaves Germany Again - Gerd Gemünden 13 January 1954: Preminger's Dual-Language The Moon Is Blue (1953) and Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach (1954) Seek Glocal Success - Christine Haase 9 March 1954: Ernst Thälmann - Sohn seiner Klasse Marks High Point of Socialist Realism - Hunter Bivens 22 December 1955: Sissi Trilogy Bridges Hapsburg to Hollywood through Hybrid Blend of Film Genres - David Bathrick 2 February 1956: In Letter to Enno Patalas, Siegfried Kracauer Advocates a Socio-Aesthetic Approach to Film - Johannes von Moltke 21 June and 30 August 1957: Jonas and Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser Link Urban Reconstruction to National Cinema in Both West and East - Bastian Heinsohn 19 September 1958: Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die Tests Limits of Postwar Feeling - Jennifer M. Kapczynski 4 September 1959: Der Frosch mit der Maske Moves Popular Cinema from Idyllic Pastures to Crime-Infested City Streets - Tassilo Schneider 28 February 1962: Oberhausen Manifesto Creates Founding Myth for New German Cinema - Eric Rentschler 1 February 1968: Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails Promotes Film as a Tool for Political Violence - Tilman Baumgärtel 1 February 1968: Konrad Wolf's Ich war neunzehn Evokes an East German Nation in Transition - Larson Powell 7 April 1968: Straub, Huillet, and Fassbinder Share the Stage at Munich's Action-Theater - Barton Byg 23 June 1968: Alexander Kluge Egged in Berlin, Months Later Awarded Gold Lion in Venice - Richard Langston Fall 1968: Expulsion of Thomas Brasch from GDR Film School Signals Fate of East German '68ers - Katie Trumpener 30 June 1970: A Faltering Berlinale Founders on o.k. Controversy - Kris Vander Lugt 29 February 1972: With Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter New German Cinema Learns to Read - Brad Prager 24 June 1974: Launching of Frauen und Film Creates Lasting Forum for Feminist Film Writing and Practice - Annette Brauerhoch 20 June 1977: DEFA's Biggest Star, Manfred Krug, Leaves the GDR - John Griffith Urang 27 October 1977: Deutschland im Herbst Equivocates on RAF and Marks End Stage of Radical Filmmaking - Jennifer Marston William 22 January 1979: West German Broadcast of Holocaust Draws Critical Fire and Record Audiences - Erin McGlothlin 20 August 1981: R. W. Fassbinder's Lola Revisits Kracauer to Critique Adenauer Period - Brigitte Peucker 6 August 1984: Heimat Celebrated as "European Requiem for the Little People" - Rachel Palfreyman 8 June 1986: Farocki's Wie man sieht Urges New Ways of Seeing - Michael Cowan 2 February 1988: Last Generation of DEFA Directors Calls in Vain for Reform - Reinhild Steingröver 23 July 1991: ZDF Broadcast of Ostkreuz Initiates Darker Reckoning with the Wende - Mattias Frey 6 May 1992: Marlene Dietrich's Berlin Burial Links Postunification Germany with Weimar Republic's Internationalism - Barbara Kosta 25 August 1992: Ostalgie Provides Pushback against Western Views on the East German Collapse - Roger Cook 10 August 1994: One Month after Founding of X-Filme, Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg Paves Way for New Productions in the Capital - Brigitta B. Wagner 2 November 1995: Neurosia Embodies Seventy-Five Years of Queer Film History - Randall Norman Halle 31 December 1995: Der bewegte Mann Sells 6.5 Million Tickets to Mark Peak of New German Comedy - David N. Coury 10 February 1999: Berlinale Premiere of Four Turkish-German Films Signals New Chapter in Cinematic Diversity - Andrea Reimann 30 April 1999: Werner Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration" Performs Critique of Documentary Cinema - Eric Ames 13 May 1999: Germany's Best Fiend, Klaus Kinski, Remembered at Cannes - Will Lehman 19 May 2000: With Code Inconnu Haneke Asserts Cinema's Centrality to Public Sphere - Monica Filimon 21 October 2001: Television Provides Platform for Record Box-Office Success of Der Schuh des Manitu - Sebastian Heiduschke 16 October 2003: Chancellor Gerhard Schröder Sheds Tears - Again - at Premiere of Das Wunder von Bern - Cornelius Partsch 14 February 2004: Golden Bear for Gegen die Wand Affirms Fatih Akin as Germany's Preeminent Transnational Director - Barbara Mennel 8 September 2004: Der Untergang Offers Palatable Authenticity - Michael D. Richardson 22 October 2005: Winner of Hessian Film Award Fremde Haut Queers Dual Binaries of Sexual and National Identity - Faye Stewart, Ph.D. 22 January 2007: Film Establishment Attacks "Berlin School" as Wrong Kind of National Cinema - Marco Abel 25 February 2007: Das Leben der Anderen Follows Blueprint for Foreign-Language Oscar Success - Paul Cooke - see C80107 6 December 2007: Indie Film Für den unbekannten Hund Seeks Space for Marginalized Male Heroism - Patricia Anne Simpson 11 February 2008: Ulrike Ottinger's Prater Wins German Critics' Award for Best Documentary Yet Highlights the Director's Ties to Both Fiction and Nonfiction Film - Nora M. Alter Epilogue: The Many Lives of Contemporary German Cinema - Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson

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Book SynopsisExplodes the conventional wisdom that there was a taboo on the topic of flight and expulsion in East Germany. It is by now almost a cliché that the flight and expulsion of Germans from east-central Europe at the end of the Second World War was a taboo topic in the German Democratic Republic. According to this claim, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) suppressed reference to flight and expulsion so as not to upset its socialist neighbors. This book shows that such a view does not hold up to serious scrutiny. While the topic may not have been addressed in the realm ofpolitics or official commemoration, it was picked up again and again in literature, particularly fiction. Representations of flight and expulsion were by no means restricted, as some have asserted, to Christa Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster: Niven's study documents around one hundred novels and short stories published in the GDR that address flight or expulsion. He argues that in the 1950s and early 1960s GDR fiction included many refugee figures. Thepredominant emphasis was on their integration under socialism rather than their experience of flight and loss of home; nevertheless, flight and to a lesser degree expulsion were depicted, as was their impact on individuals. They continued to be portrayed in the late GDR and in post-unification east Germany. Flight and expulsion were subject to a developing literary discourse in the GDR, a discourse that this book explores. Bill Niven is Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University.Trade ReviewNiven's study is outstanding in several aspects. First, he does what the title of the book advertises in a way that is highly documented yet never longwinded . . . . The astonished reader comes to the fascinating realization that German flight and expulsion were in no way taboo themes in GDR literature; indeed, that on the contrary a great number of works dealt with these difficult topics in the most diverse ways. [Niven is] even able in the end to reconstruct the origin of the taboo claim . . . . In a word, Niven's is a work of fundamental importance that no future scholar will be able to ignore, and beyond that it suggests numerous directions for future scholarship . . . . The immense amount of work that clearly went into this study does not prevent it from being highly readable. -- Jutta Faehndrich * ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR OSTMITTELEUROPA-FORSCHUNG *[M]asterly . . . . This is new knowledge about the GDR and new knowledge about the 'cipher 'flight and explusion.'' Niven's book therefore has to rejuvenate the mediatized public discourse about flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. After Niven's book we can't go back. * SEHEPUNKTE *Niven has produced an excellent work that by dint of his thorough and extensive research fully achieves its stated aim. . . . [A] major achievement. JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES [Stuart Parkes] [E]xcellent. . . . [B]reaks new ground. . . . [A]n indispensable guide to anyone who wishes to explore this central but neglected theme in GDR literature. It is an impressive achievement. . . . [T]horoughly recommended. And, true to the standards set by Camden House as perhaps the leading publisher of innovative scholarship on modern German culture, [the book] is beautifully produced. -- Joachim Whaley * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[Niven] sets out to dismantle the claim of a taboo [on the topics of flight and expulsion in the literature of the GDR]. . . . [His] persuasive and impressive book will make it far more di?cult to make such claims within an academic context and be taken seriously. -- Joanne Sayner * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction Evidence and Interpretation: Flight and Expulsion in GDR Prose Works GDR Reconstruction Literature of the 1950s and Early 1960s and the Figure of the Refugee From Novels Set in the Nazi Period to Novels of Revisiting The Skeptical Muse: Reassessing Integration Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works after Unification Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDrawing on archival research and interviews with directors, writers, and editors, Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification. Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification. With leftover GDR funds and under chaotic conditions, a group of young East German filmmakers produced around thirty stylistically diverse films. Most of these films were lost in the political upheaval of the Wende, disappearing until the 2009 Wendeflicks festival in Los Angeles brought them back for an international audience. Now available on DVD, these films provide unique insights into the generational struggle in the DEFA studio, East German youth culture in the 1970s, women directors at DEFA, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the protests of 1989. Last Features focuses in particular on the production group "DaDaeR," the creation of which in 1989 fulfilled a longstanding request by the last generation of DEFA directors for freer production conditions. Drawing onarchival research and interviews with the directors, writers, and editors of the films in question, each chapter examines specific films from the last year of DEFA, contextualizing the analysis of these "last features" with a comprehensive discussion of the directors' overall oeuvres, the historical changes in the studio and the country, and the lasting importance of these films today. Reinhild Steingröver is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.Trade ReviewSelected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2014 * . *[M]eticulously researched . . . . [N]uanced analyses . . . . Steingröver's important intervention is to . . . . connect these features and their production circumstances to larger formal, generic, political, and artistic tendencies in German and European film history, before, during, and after the existence of the GDR. Including a full filmography, extensive bibliography, and ample illustrations, this readable book lends itself to course adoption, especially since the DEFA Film Library has released a complementary 11-DVD set by the same title, which includes almost all the films Steingröver discusses. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *[R]aises important questions not just about the East German film landscape, but also about the landscape of contemporary German cinema. . . . Steingröver's labor of love represents an important contribution to German film studies. -- Stephen Brockmann * MONATSHEFTE *[A] welcome addition to a rapidly expanding body of work on the films produced by the German Democratic Republic's state film studio, DEFA (Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft), and a thought-provoking study of 'the destructive power of waiting in vain for change. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsIntroduction On Fools and Clowns or Refusal as Engagement in Two Final DEFA Films: Egon Günther's Stein and Jörg Foth's Letztes aus der DaDaeR "Film Must Fidget": DEFA's Untimely Poets Absurd Endgames: Peter Welz's Banale Tage Flight into Reality: The Cinema of Helke Misselwitz The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Andreas Voigt's Leipzig Pentalogy, 1986-96 Asynchronicity in DEFA's Last Feature: Architects, Goats, and Godot Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisOffers a fresh approach to German film studies by tracing key genres -- including horror, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history Over the last few decades, the field of film studies has seen a rise in approaches oriented toward genre: studies that look at thematic, narrative, and stylistic similarities between films, contextualizing them within culture andsociety. Although there now exists a large body of genre-based scholarship on international film, German film studies has largely ignored the importance of genre. Even as the last several years have witnessed increasing scholarlyinterest in popular cinema from Germany, very few works have substantively engaged with genre theory. Generic Histories offers a fresh approach, tracing a series of key genres -- including horror, science fiction,the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history. It also addresses detective films, comedies, policiers, and romances that deliberately localize global genres within Germany - aform of transnationalism frequently neglected. This focus on genre and history encourages rethinking of the traditional opposition (and hierarchy) between art and popular cinema that has informed German film studies. In these ways, the volume foregrounds genre theory's potential for rethinking film history as well as cultural history more broadly. Contributors: Marco Abel, Nora M. Alter, Antje Ascheid, Hester Baer, Steve Choe, Paul Cooke, Jaimey Fisher, Gerd Gemünden, Sascha Gerhards, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, Kris Vander Lugt. Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies, and Director of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, at the University of California, Davis.Trade Review[N]ot only addresses a lacuna in scholarship in German film studies, but also contributes extensively to genre theory, in presenting the unique case studies available in German film history. . . . The volume, no doubt, will engender a host of inquiries into the rich history of German genre cinema. * FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES *It is time that critics of the German cinema build a bridge between entertainment and art: the genre film is the perfect building block. . . . This is an excellent overview of themes, actors, production values, and historical context. Taken together, the essays present a picture of industry and its art . . . . Highly recommended. All readers. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Toward Generic Histories - Film Genre, Genre Theory, and German Film Studies Parallel Modernities: From Haunted Screen to Universal Horror The Essay Film and Its German Variations The Limits of Futurity: German Science-Fiction Film over the Course of Time The Situation Is Hopeless, but Not Desperate: UFA's Early Sound Film Musicals Resisting the War (Film): Wicki's "Masterpiece" Die Brücke and Its Generic Transformations Ironizing Identity: The German Crime Genre and the Edgar Wallace Production Trend of the 1960s From Siodmak to Schlingensief: The Return of History as Horror Producing Adaptations: Bernd Eichinger, Christiane F., and German Film History Exceptional Thrills: Genrification, Dr. Mabuse, and Das Experiment The Heimat Film in the Twenty-First Century: Negotiating the New German Cinema to Return to Papas Kino The Romantic Comedy and Its Other: Representations of Romance in German Cinema since 1990 Yearning for Genre: The Films of Dominik Graf Bibliography Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisShows how cinematic treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of postwar German women. This book steers attention toward two key aspects of German culture - film and fashion - that shared similar trajectories and multiple connections, looking at them not only in the immediate postwar years but as far back as 1939. They formed spectacular sites of the postwar recovery processes in both East and West Germany. Viewed against the background of the abundant fashion discourses in the Berlin-based press, the films discussed include classics such asThe Murderers Are among Us, Street Acquaintance, and Destinies of Women as well as neglected works such as And the Heavens above Us, Martina, Modell Bianka, and Ingrid. These films' treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of the women who made up a large majority of the postwar public. Costume - in films produced both by DEFA and by West German studios - is a productive site to explore the intersections between realism and escapism. With its focus on costumes within the context of the films' production, distribution, and reception, this bookopens up wider discussions about the role of the costume designer, the ways film costumes can be read as intertexts, and the impact on audiences' behaviors and looks. The book reveals multiple connections between film and fashion,both across the temporal dividing line of 1945 and the Cold War split between East and West. Mila Ganeva is Professor of German at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.Trade Review[A] captivating interpretation of fashion and film in 'the long 1940s' in Germany . . . . a valuable resource for scholars and students, as well as a lively and fascinating read for a broader audience. -- Victoria Vygodskaia-Rust * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Meticulously researched...Ganeva's trenchant analysis shows how fashion maintained pretences of normality during wartime, bolstered the processes of postwar normalization, and eventually helped to define attitudes towards consumer culture and material abundance in a 1950s Germany divided between East and West. -- Marketa Uhlirova * SCREEN *With [this book] Mila Ganeva puts forth an insight-rich study of the cultural meaning of fashion in film and the press from the Nazi period to the beginnings of the Cold War in Berlin. . . . [C]learly written and precisely researched . . . . An important contribution to research on the female horizon of experience in the 1940s and 1950s. -- Jan Uelzmann * FILMBLATT *This interesting book sheds light on the [postwar] period [in Germany] by documenting that both [the film and fashion] industries cultivated a vision of the autonomous, professionally accomplished woman and that numerous women were able to achieve an independent existence within these industries. -- R. Bledsoe * CHOICE *The book . . . is outstandingly researched and fills a thematic gap in the literature of German film history. -- Hans Helmut Prinzler * WWW.HHPRINZLER.DE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Vicarious Consumption: Wartime Fashion in Film and the Press, 1939-44 "Fashions for Fräuleins": The Rebirth of the Fashion Industry and Media in Berlin after 1945 Vignette 1 - Charlotte Glückstein: Historical Ruptures and Continuities in Postwar Fashion Fashion amidst the Ruins: Revisiting Two Early Rubble Films, . . . und über uns der Himmel (1947) and Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946) Vignette 2 - Hildegard Knef: Star Appeal from Fashion to Film Farewell to the Rubble and Welcome to the New Look: Straßenbekanntschaft (1948) and Martina (1949) Consuming Fashion on the Screens of the Early 1950s: Modell Bianka (1951), Frauenschicksale (1952), and Ingrid: Die Geschichte eines Fotomodells (1955) Epilogue Appendix 1:Principal Costume and Fashion Designers: Biographical Notes Appendix 2: Films and Newsreels Discussed Notes Bibliography Index

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