Film: styles and genres Books

Book SynopsisDrawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama speaks to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres.Trade ReviewTwo of the most brilliant and lucid writers on film melodrama have put together this wonderful anthology that both consolidates and clarifies thinking about the topic and opens out the field, placing film melodrama more precisely and securely in relation to its theatrical and literary antecedents and extending consideration from well beyond the confines of Europe and North America. A hand-picked roster of contributors confirm the unbounded scope of the collection and demonstrate the importance and range of melodrama and above all the complexity, ideological urgency, and intoxicating pleasures of its emotions. -- Richard Dyer, King’s College London and St. Andrews UniversityMelodrama Unbound extends the already robust feminist analysis of melodramatic modes into transmedial, transnational, and philosophical scenes. It addresses from diverse viewpoints how the emotional encounter with the artwork becomes generally held. The writing is diverse, vivid, and conceptually challenging in all the best senses. -- Lauren Berlant, University of ChicagoWhat riches the reader will find in this volume! Its vision is rigorously transmedial and transnational. Within this expansive framework, a wide variety of essays “unbind” melodrama from critical misconceptions that have hindered our understanding of its importance, its pervasiveness, and its power as a mode that continues to flourish in a magnificent proliferation of genres, media, art forms, and forms of social expression. -- Carolyn Williams, Rutgers UniversityThis book brings melodrama studies up to date with strongly argued, exciting, original work. It has been many years since melodrama has received such varied and sustained attention in a single volume as we find in Melodrama Unbound, which changes once again how we understand this protean form. -- Robert Lang, author of American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, MinnelliTable of ContentsPrologue: The Reach of Melodrama, by Christine GledhillAcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Christine Gledhill and Linda WilliamsPart I: Melodrama’s Crossmedia, Transnational Histories1. Unbinding Melodrama, by Matthew Buckley2. The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination, by Richard Allen3. Boucicault in Bombay: Global Theater Circuits and Domestic Melodrama in the Parsi Theater, by Kathryn Hansen4. Global Melodrama and Transmediality in Turn-of-the-Century Japan, by Hannah Airriess5. Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination, by Zhen Zhang6. Performing/Acting Melodrama, by Helen Day-Mayer and David Mayer7. Melodrama and the Making of Hollywood, by Hilary A. Hallett8. Modernizing Melodrama: The Petrified Forest on American Stage and Screen (1935–1936), by Martin Shingler9. One Suffers but One Learns: Melodrama and the Rules of Lack of Limits, by Carlos Monsiváis (trans. Kathleen M. Vernon)10. World and Time: Serial Television Melodrama in America, by Linda Williams11. Melodrama’s “Authenticity” in Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, by Amanda DoxtaterPart II: Cultural and Aesthetic Debates12. “Tales of Sound and Fury . . .” or, The Elephant of Melodrama, by Linda Williams13. Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama’s Journey from Hollywood to China, by Panpan Yang14. Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Emotion, by E. Deidre Pribram15. Expressionist Aurality: The Stylized Aesthetic of Bhava in Indian Melodrama, by Ira Bhaskar16. The Sorrow and the Piety: Melodrama Rethought in Postwar Italian Cinema, by Louis Bayman17. Costumes as Melodrama: Super Fly, Male Costume, and the Larger-Than-Life, by Drake Stutesman18. Melodrama and Apocalypse: Politics and the Melodramatic Mode in Contagion, by Despina Kakoudaki19. Even More Tears: The Historical Time Theory of Melodrama, by Jane M. GainesBibliographyContributor BiographiesIndex

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Book Synopsis​The Psycho Records follows the influence of the primal shower scene within subsequent slasher and splatter films.Trade ReviewThe most interesting, challenging, and eclectic psychoanalytic theorist of our time... there is no writer who works the seams between academic and B-culture with Rickels' intelligence and connoisseurship. Sensitive SkinTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface: Late Arrival of the 'New Vampire Lectures' Psycho-Historical Introduction Record One: Playing Catch Up with the Vampire-But with True Blood Record Two: Schauer Scenes Record Three: Alternate History-1960 Record Four: Epidemics of Mass Murder Record Five: Manuals Record Six: Still Working on It Record Seven: Phantoms Record Eight: The Turning Record Nine: The Crowd and the Couple Record Ten: Getting Into B-Pictures Record Eleven: The Emperor's New Closure Record Twelve: By Rule of Tomb Record Thirteen: The Renewal of Psycho Horror by Compact with the Devil Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDanger: Diabolik (1968) was adapted from a comic that has been a social phenomenon in Italy for over fifty years. This study examines its status as a comic-book movie, traces its production and initial reception in Italy, France, the U.S., and the UK, and its cult afterlife as both a pop-art classic and campy "bad film."Trade ReviewPacked with information, facts, figures, speculation, analysis, and cultural connections. * All Classical Portland *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Diabolik, chi sei?1. From fumetto nero to ‘wild and kooky cape-opera’: Production, promotion, initial reception2. ‘Uh-oh – it’s getting groovy!’: The cult afterlife of Danger: Diabolik3. Fantômas all’italiana: Analysis4. Genius of Crime: The place of the filmNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAvengers Assemble! explores the cinematic and televisual branches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a diverse range of critical perspectives. Beginning with Iron Man, the book considers them both as embodiments of the changing blockbuster film and as affective cultural artifacts that are immersed in the turbulent political climate of their era.Trade ReviewThe book engages with superhero films on a very deep level, making it not only informative but an extremely pleasurable read as well. -- Devapriya Sanyal Hindu College, University of Delhi * Journal of Popular Culture *A magnificent book. As insightful and comprehensive as it is engaging and timely, this full-length examination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a rewarding read for passionate superhero fans as well as researchers in the fields of film studies, political science, and cultural studies. -- Marc DiPaolo, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, author of War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and FilmThis is a timely and entertaining volume that will prove very useful in the development of genre courses in the next few years as the superhero genre finds its place in taught modules across film and media programmes. The work is scholarly and well referenced in ways that open it to further reading and research, but accessible to undergraduate readers. The author takes an epistemically specific approach that is not inappropriate given the avowed focus on the MCU specifically, rather than the superhero genre on the whole or its historical roots. As such, the range of contemporary readings on terrorism, conflict, and the power structures of the twenty first century (mainly American) is again both timely and informative. Intellectually, the breaking of the MCU into its industrially determined ‘phases’ again focuses the chronology but also opens new arenas of interrogation. The ‘phase two’ section demonstrates the degree to which the frames of reference change between 2008 and 2013, freeing the franchise (and scholarly debate) from some of the immediate trauma narrative tropes of the first phase, and allowing the discussion to delve into some of the more liminal spaces of the MCU, such as in Thor: The Dark World and Guardians of the Galaxy on gender and fantasy. The final section on the recent television incarnations of the franchise is useful without delving too deeply into the political economy of transmedia in the Netflix age (which is another topic entirely) -- Harvey O'Brien, University College. DublinTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsPrologue: The Heroes We Need Right Now?: Explaining ‘The Age of the Superhero’Introduction: Superheroes in the New Millennium and ‘The Example of America’PHASE ONE1. ‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it … and it’s worked out pretty well so far’: The Stark Doctrine in Iron Man and Iron Man 22. Allegorical Narratives of Gods and Monsters: Thor and The Incredible Hulk3. State Fantasy and the Superhero: (Mis)Remembering World War II in Captain America: The First Avenger4. ‘Seeing … still working on believing!’: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Destruction in The AvengersPHASE TWO5. ‘Nothing’s been the same since New York’: Ideological Continuity and Change in Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World6. ‘The world has changed and none of us can go back’: The Illusory Moral Ambiguities of the Post-9/11 Superhero in Captain America: The Winter Soldier7. Blurring the Boundaries of Genre and Gender in Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man8. ‘Isn’t that why we fight? So we can end the fight and go home?’: The Enduring American Monomyth in Avengers: Age of UltronTHE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE ON TELEVISION9. ‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’: The MCU on the Small Screen in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter10. The Necessary Vigilantism of the Defenders: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron FistConclusion: ‘Whose side are you on?’: Superheroes Through the Prism of the ‘War on Terror’ in Captain America: Civil WarEpilogue: The Superhero as Transnational IconFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAvengers Assemble! explores the cinematic and televisual branches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a diverse range of critical perspectives. Beginning with Iron Man, it considers them as both embodiments of the changing blockbuster film and affective cultural artifacts that are immersed in the turbulent political climate of their era.Trade ReviewThe book engages with superhero films on a very deep level, making it not only informative but an extremely pleasurable read as well. -- Devapriya Sanyal Hindu College, University of Delhi * Journal of Popular Culture *A magnificent book. As insightful and comprehensive as it is engaging and timely, this full-length examination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a rewarding read for passionate superhero fans as well as researchers in the fields of film studies, political science, and cultural studies. -- Marc DiPaolo, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, author of War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and FilmThis is a timely and entertaining volume that will prove very useful in the development of genre courses in the next few years as the superhero genre finds its place in taught modules across film and media programmes. The work is scholarly and well referenced in ways that open it to further reading and research, but accessible to undergraduate readers. The author takes an epistemically specific approach that is not inappropriate given the avowed focus on the MCU specifically, rather than the superhero genre on the whole or its historical roots. As such, the range of contemporary readings on terrorism, conflict, and the power structures of the twenty first century (mainly American) is again both timely and informative. Intellectually, the breaking of the MCU into its industrially determined ‘phases’ again focuses the chronology but also opens new arenas of interrogation. The ‘phase two’ section demonstrates the degree to which the frames of reference change between 2008 and 2013, freeing the franchise (and scholarly debate) from some of the immediate trauma narrative tropes of the first phase, and allowing the discussion to delve into some of the more liminal spaces of the MCU, such as in Thor: The Dark World and Guardians of the Galaxy on gender and fantasy. The final section on the recent television incarnations of the franchise is useful without delving too deeply into the political economy of transmedia in the Netflix age (which is another topic entirely) -- Harvey O'Brien, University College. DublinTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsPrologue: The Heroes We Need Right Now?: Explaining ‘The Age of the Superhero’Introduction: Superheroes in the New Millennium and ‘The Example of America’PHASE ONE1. ‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it … and it’s worked out pretty well so far’: The Stark Doctrine in Iron Man and Iron Man 22. Allegorical Narratives of Gods and Monsters: Thor and The Incredible Hulk3. State Fantasy and the Superhero: (Mis)Remembering World War II in Captain America: The First Avenger4. ‘Seeing … still working on believing!’: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Destruction in The AvengersPHASE TWO5. ‘Nothing’s been the same since New York’: Ideological Continuity and Change in Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World6. ‘The world has changed and none of us can go back’: The Illusory Moral Ambiguities of the Post-9/11 Superhero in Captain America: The Winter Soldier7. Blurring the Boundaries of Genre and Gender in Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man8. ‘Isn’t that why we fight? So we can end the fight and go home?’: The Enduring American Monomyth in Avengers: Age of UltronTHE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE ON TELEVISION9. ‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’: The MCU on the Small Screen in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter10. The Necessary Vigilantism of the Defenders: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron FistConclusion: ‘Whose side are you on?’: Superheroes Through the Prism of the ‘War on Terror’ in Captain America: Civil WarEpilogue: The Superhero as Transnational IconFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHerstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers, revealing how they skillfully deploy genre tropes.Trade ReviewThis compelling study explores how mainstream narrative films about former white-settler nations, in the hands of an emerging generation of female filmmakers, were reshaped into critiques of dominant frontier myth-histories. Herstories on Screen articulates how these directors explore the contradictions in the project of nation building, bringing to the forefront the roles of women—white, Black, and indigenous—whose stories have long been overlooked. -- Susan White, University of ArizonaHerstories on Screen is a balanced and robust treatment of films by female directors who take up their home countries' national mythologies. Written in lucid prose, it engages with the feminist film theory canon and its revisions via queer, post-colonial and indigenous interrogations. Cummins deftly weaves theory with consistently astute textual analyses, making it an eminently teachable text. Urging the consideration of film as a political tool, this book addresses what these films do for representations of women, the subaltern, the maternal role, and landscape as metaphor, among many others. -- Berkeley Kaite, McGill UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Herstories in the Counter Narrative Tradition1. Women’s Storytelling—Narrative, Genre, and the Female Voice2. Debunking the Cult of True Womanhood/Motherhood on the Frontier3. Feminist Symbolic Frontier Landscapes ConclusionAppendix: The FilmsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHerstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers, revealing how they skillfully deploy genre tropes.Trade ReviewThis compelling study explores how mainstream narrative films about former white-settler nations, in the hands of an emerging generation of female filmmakers, were reshaped into critiques of dominant frontier myth-histories. Herstories on Screen articulates how these directors explore the contradictions in the project of nation building, bringing to the forefront the roles of women—white, Black, and indigenous—whose stories have long been overlooked. -- Susan White, University of ArizonaHerstories on Screen is a balanced and robust treatment of films by female directors who take up their home countries' national mythologies. Written in lucid prose, it engages with the feminist film theory canon and its revisions via queer, post-colonial and indigenous interrogations. Cummins deftly weaves theory with consistently astute textual analyses, making it an eminently teachable text. Urging the consideration of film as a political tool, this book addresses what these films do for representations of women, the subaltern, the maternal role, and landscape as metaphor, among many others. -- Berkeley Kaite, McGill UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Herstories in the Counter Narrative Tradition1. Women’s Storytelling—Narrative, Genre, and the Female Voice2. Debunking the Cult of True Womanhood/Motherhood on the Frontier3. Feminist Symbolic Frontier Landscapes ConclusionAppendix: The FilmsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisMalcolm Turvey examines Jacques Tati's unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director's films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati's work.Trade ReviewTurvey provides a sharply observant account of the scope and function of the more ‘cognitively challenging’ of these comic devices in Tati’s major films. -- David Trotter * London Review of Books *Turvey’s study of Tati’s context traces a fascinating continuity between the clown tradition, Charlie Chaplin’s construction of comic personas and the role of the 'living object' in Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and other interwar artistic movements. * Times Literary Supplement *Play Time is a subtle, intelligent—and wonderfully funny—book. It has much to offer both Tati novices and his connoisseurs. -- Pardis Dabashi * Modernism/modernity *The book is a delicious treat, and serious film students will appreciate it as a penetrating primer on the cinematic comic artisdt at work. * Choice *Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism must be warmly recommended reading for all lovers of Tati, particularly since it is written by one of them, which shows. And my recommendation gets only warmer for all those who, like myself, are interested in understanding comedy and its mechanisms. -- Gianni Barchiesi * Alphaville Journal *Malcolm Turvey’s exhilarating study of Jacques Tati is a precise, loving appreciation of the unique style and worldview of a great filmmaker. It’s also a history of avant-garde humor and a deep analysis of techniques of slapstick and satire. Turvey, one of our finest scholars of modernity in the arts, shows in detail how Tati’s comedy turned modernist experimentation into popular entertainment. -- David Bordwell, author of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie StorytellingMalcolm Turvey’s Play Time is the best extended critical study of Tati I’ve encountered: persuasively argued, scrupulously observed, and beautifully illustrated. The writing is clear and graceful, and the research is impressive, especially regarding the relation of slapstick films to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century and Tati’s critiques of modern architecture. Most critical books about Tati have been short on close analysis, but this one beats them all. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and DialoguesFew films deserve a book-length study as much as those of Jacques Tati. Malcolm Turvey has done them justice. His explanation of their context in the slapstick and modernist traditions is fascinating. Turvey takes Tati’s work seriously, not by spoiling the fun but by respecting its extraordinary complexity. His title comes from Tati’s masterpiece. No matter how many times you have seen Play Time—and it is a film made for many viewings—Turvey will reveal something new and make you want to see it yet again. -- Kristin Thompson, Honorary Fellow in the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-MadisonThis book is an excellent, detailed study of the films of Jacques Tati that establishes how Tati’s work draws upon classical “comedian comedy” while also connecting with the interwar European avant-garde. Moreover, the author insightfully discusses Tati’s love/hate relationship with modernity as well as his passion for creating a participatory style in which the spectator works to find humor in his films and also in the real world. -- Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of PittsburghMalcolm Turvey’s Play Time is a completely joyful and entirely refreshing account of the films of Jacques Tati. It is also one of the finest, most nuanced accounts of comedic form that we have, a work that no one who studies comedy, or simply enjoys it, should be without. In tending so carefully to the structure of Tati’s gags—a seemingly infinite amount of them—Turvey does something that is as extraordinary as it is subtle. With Tati, he shows us how intelligence and popularity, structure and participation, aesthetic excellence and ordinary life, cannot be easily or gainfully opposed. -- Brian Price, University of TorontoTable of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Comedic Modernism2. Comedy of Everyday Life3. The Beholder’s Share4. Satirizing ModernityAfterword: Parade, Tati, and Participatory CultureNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisRochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. She analyzes the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as a host of film society publications.Trade ReviewFrom writer Rochona Majumdar comes this decidedly anti-colonialist read about the history of Indian cinema, with a specific eye towards post-independence India and the house of cards its democracy is built on. Highlight of the book is whenever Majumdar waxes philosophical about Ritwik Ghatak, a filmmaker worthy of much more discussion here stateside. -- Joshua Brunsting * CriterionCast *Rochona Majumdar, the historian, intervenes in the rich discourse surrounding the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak through her meticulously researched and compelling book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony. -- Swarnavel Eswaran * South Asian History and Culture *Majumdar’s brief comment on Ray’s Calcutta trilogy as an ethnographic turn in his career, for example, is a fine provocation to rethink the shifting significance of realism in Ray’s oeuvre. Such remarks invite scholars to study these filmmakers in a comparative vein across regional, national, and transnational concerns, a task set in motion by Majumdar’s book. -- TRINANKUR BANERJEE * Film Quarterly *Rochona Majumdar's book on Art Cinema is a compelling chapter on India's modern history recorded on screen. -- Tanushree Ghosh * The Indian Express *Rochona Majumdar's book is a pleasingly accessible academic study on Indian art cinema. -- Jel Arjun Singh * India Today *The book is nuanced and its arguments are complex. Yet, it is lucid and accessible, and makes for a compelling reading. It is a compulsory book for anyone interested in history and/or visual culture. -- Dr. Arvind Elangovan * Critical Collective *How does cinema apprehend its historical moment? With characteristic eloquence and insight, Majumdar gives us a vivid account of India’s art cinema and film societies to take the shifting pulse of a nation in the early decades of its independence. In Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures, a rigorous interrogation into the category of radical art extends archivally-rich readings of works by Ray, Sen and Ghatak, to ground a powerful vision of films that put the specious terms of India’s democracy under scrutiny. This book changes how we will think about histories of, and histories within, art cinema. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed SpaceHistory and film criticism are profoundly imbricated in Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures. Even as the book uncovers new archives for postcolonial research, it triumphantly validates cultural criticism as historical method. An invaluable scholarly work. -- Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, coeditor of Commodities and Culture in the Colonial WorldThe tradition of art cinema in India has rarely been framed with such a rich archival ambition. Displaying an eye for detail and a strong conceptual drive, Majumdar creatively establishes a similarity between the art film maker’s capacity for historical reflection and the historian’s craft. -- Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the CityLike the incisive art cinema she unsheathes, Rochona Majumdar probes India in its painful passage beyond partition, staggering into modernity. Cinema has never been more ‘critical’ than in Bengal from 1960 to 1974 as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen exposed the innards of an immense ailing culture of which the brightness of Bollywood is but a fever symptom. Majumdar, to use her fertile word, apprehends the absolute necessity not just of art films like those she deftly analyses, but of the fragile film society movement that let them breathe. It’s an inspiring if tragic history, one she carefully remembers for a future that may still be possible. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale UniversityIn this engaging book, Majumdar has brought art cinema alive in a carefully contextualized study of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak—three Bengali directors who, she argues, anticipated critical historians. Her writing is evocative, thoughtful and illuminating. -- Partha Chatterjee, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroductionPart I: The History of Art Cinema1. Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category2. The “New” Indian Cinema: Journeys of the Art Film3. Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society MovementPart II: Art Films as History4. Ritwik Ghatak and the Overcoming of History5. “Anger and After”: History, Political Cinema, and Mrinal Sen6. The Untimely Filmmaker: Ray’s City Trilogy and a Crisis of HistoricismEpilogue: Art Cinema and Our PresentAcknowledgmentsNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisRochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. She analyzes the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as a host of film society publications.Trade ReviewFrom writer Rochona Majumdar comes this decidedly anti-colonialist read about the history of Indian cinema, with a specific eye towards post-independence India and the house of cards its democracy is built on. Highlight of the book is whenever Majumdar waxes philosophical about Ritwik Ghatak, a filmmaker worthy of much more discussion here stateside. -- Joshua Brunsting * CriterionCast *Rochona Majumdar, the historian, intervenes in the rich discourse surrounding the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak through her meticulously researched and compelling book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony. -- Swarnavel Eswaran * South Asian History and Culture *Majumdar’s brief comment on Ray’s Calcutta trilogy as an ethnographic turn in his career, for example, is a fine provocation to rethink the shifting significance of realism in Ray’s oeuvre. Such remarks invite scholars to study these filmmakers in a comparative vein across regional, national, and transnational concerns, a task set in motion by Majumdar’s book. -- TRINANKUR BANERJEE * Film Quarterly *Rochona Majumdar's book on Art Cinema is a compelling chapter on India's modern history recorded on screen. -- Tanushree Ghosh * The Indian Express *Rochona Majumdar's book is a pleasingly accessible academic study on Indian art cinema. -- Jel Arjun Singh * India Today *The book is nuanced and its arguments are complex. Yet, it is lucid and accessible, and makes for a compelling reading. It is a compulsory book for anyone interested in history and/or visual culture. -- Dr. Arvind Elangovan * Critical Collective *How does cinema apprehend its historical moment? With characteristic eloquence and insight, Majumdar gives us a vivid account of India’s art cinema and film societies to take the shifting pulse of a nation in the early decades of its independence. In Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures, a rigorous interrogation into the category of radical art extends archivally-rich readings of works by Ray, Sen and Ghatak, to ground a powerful vision of films that put the specious terms of India’s democracy under scrutiny. This book changes how we will think about histories of, and histories within, art cinema. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed SpaceHistory and film criticism are profoundly imbricated in Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures. Even as the book uncovers new archives for postcolonial research, it triumphantly validates cultural criticism as historical method. An invaluable scholarly work. -- Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, coeditor of Commodities and Culture in the Colonial WorldThe tradition of art cinema in India has rarely been framed with such a rich archival ambition. Displaying an eye for detail and a strong conceptual drive, Majumdar creatively establishes a similarity between the art film maker’s capacity for historical reflection and the historian’s craft. -- Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the CityLike the incisive art cinema she unsheathes, Rochona Majumdar probes India in its painful passage beyond partition, staggering into modernity. Cinema has never been more ‘critical’ than in Bengal from 1960 to 1974 as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen exposed the innards of an immense ailing culture of which the brightness of Bollywood is but a fever symptom. Majumdar, to use her fertile word, apprehends the absolute necessity not just of art films like those she deftly analyses, but of the fragile film society movement that let them breathe. It’s an inspiring if tragic history, one she carefully remembers for a future that may still be possible. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale UniversityIn this engaging book, Majumdar has brought art cinema alive in a carefully contextualized study of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak—three Bengali directors who, she argues, anticipated critical historians. Her writing is evocative, thoughtful and illuminating. -- Partha Chatterjee, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroductionPart I: The History of Art Cinema1. Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category2. The “New” Indian Cinema: Journeys of the Art Film3. Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society MovementPart II: Art Films as History4. Ritwik Ghatak and the Overcoming of History5. “Anger and After”: History, Political Cinema, and Mrinal Sen6. The Untimely Filmmaker: Ray’s City Trilogy and a Crisis of HistoricismEpilogue: Art Cinema and Our PresentAcknowledgmentsNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisDr. No introduced the James Bond formula that has been a box-office fixture ever since. An explosive cocktail of action, spectacle, and sex, the film transformed popular cinema. James Chapman provides a lively and comprehensive study of Dr. No, marshaling a wealth of archival research to place the film in its historical moment.Trade ReviewDr. No: The First James Bond Film by James Chapman is particularly well researched. I especially appreciate the time the author took to dispel myths and legends about the movie. He delved into archives, first-hand sources, as well as unfinished scripts to separate fact from fiction. * Man of la Book: A Bookish Blog *Dr. No is a potentially invaluable resource for Bond scholars and cultural historians, as well as Bond fans keen to engage with the films at a more developed level. The lively writing and assured knowledge make the ideas and analysis feel fresh and revelatory. Chapman investigates and interrogates the many myths and half-truths surrounding the making of the film and the relationships between the key players in order to fully reassess the reputations and reception of the film both at its time of release and now. -- Laura Crossely, Bournemouth UniversityAn impressive and thoroughly enjoyable book. More than twenty years after the landmark volume Licence to Thrill, the author’s latest contribution to the field is meticulously researched and engagingly written. Merging the rigor of the historian with the enthusiasm of the aficionado and consistently illuminated by fresh archival discoveries, Chapman’s Dr. No reminds us that, in the field of Bond studies, nobody does it better. -- Jeremy Strong, author of James Bond UncoveredThe reward of James Chapman’s inquiry is that it explains how and why Dr. No "got it right" from the start while considering the “first” Bond film as a text on its own. Excavating a wealth of primary research, Chapman spearheads the archival and industrial turn in Bond studies to arrive at a new understanding of the ongoing appeal of the James Bond franchise. -- Jaap Verheul, editor of The Cultural Life of James BondJames Chapman's brilliant-realised study of the first Eon-produced James Bond film is a testament not only to the current renaissance of James Bond studies as a field but also the cultural significance of Dr. No in its own right, a film that arguably spawned the modern franchise blockbuster as we know it. Of course, Chapman's rigorous scholarship is the primary draw, here; he proves, once again, that, when it comes to matters of James Bond, "nobody does it better." Dr. No: The First James Bond Film breaks new ground, here, and is likely to pave the way for subsequent "deep-dive" scholarly examinations of specific films in the Bond series. This is film and cultural history scholarship at its finest. -- Ian Kinane, editor of the International Journal of James Bond StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Sex, Snobbery, and Sadism 2. Everything or Nothing3. Monkey Business4. Underneath the Mango Tree5. A Bizarre Comedy Melodrama 6. I’m Just LookingConclusionAppendix I: Dr. No Production CreditsAppendix II: Dr. No Production BudgetAppendix III: Dr. No Daily Progress ReportsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisDr. No introduced the James Bond formula that has been a box-office fixture ever since. An explosive cocktail of action, spectacle, and sex, the film transformed popular cinema. James Chapman provides a lively and comprehensive study of Dr. No, marshaling a wealth of archival research to place the film in its historical moment.Trade ReviewDr. No: The First James Bond Film by James Chapman is particularly well researched. I especially appreciate the time the author took to dispel myths and legends about the movie. He delved into archives, first-hand sources, as well as unfinished scripts to separate fact from fiction. * Man of la Book: A Bookish Blog *Dr. No is a potentially invaluable resource for Bond scholars and cultural historians, as well as Bond fans keen to engage with the films at a more developed level. The lively writing and assured knowledge make the ideas and analysis feel fresh and revelatory. Chapman investigates and interrogates the many myths and half-truths surrounding the making of the film and the relationships between the key players in order to fully reassess the reputations and reception of the film both at its time of release and now. -- Laura Crossely, Bournemouth UniversityAn impressive and thoroughly enjoyable book. More than twenty years after the landmark volume Licence to Thrill, the author’s latest contribution to the field is meticulously researched and engagingly written. Merging the rigor of the historian with the enthusiasm of the aficionado and consistently illuminated by fresh archival discoveries, Chapman’s Dr. No reminds us that, in the field of Bond studies, nobody does it better. -- Jeremy Strong, author of James Bond UncoveredThe reward of James Chapman’s inquiry is that it explains how and why Dr. No "got it right" from the start while considering the “first” Bond film as a text on its own. Excavating a wealth of primary research, Chapman spearheads the archival and industrial turn in Bond studies to arrive at a new understanding of the ongoing appeal of the James Bond franchise. -- Jaap Verheul, editor of The Cultural Life of James BondJames Chapman's brilliant-realised study of the first Eon-produced James Bond film is a testament not only to the current renaissance of James Bond studies as a field but also the cultural significance of Dr. No in its own right, a film that arguably spawned the modern franchise blockbuster as we know it. Of course, Chapman's rigorous scholarship is the primary draw, here; he proves, once again, that, when it comes to matters of James Bond, "nobody does it better." Dr. No: The First James Bond Film breaks new ground, here, and is likely to pave the way for subsequent "deep-dive" scholarly examinations of specific films in the Bond series. This is film and cultural history scholarship at its finest. -- Ian Kinane, editor of the International Journal of James Bond StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Sex, Snobbery, and Sadism 2. Everything or Nothing3. Monkey Business4. Underneath the Mango Tree5. A Bizarre Comedy Melodrama 6. I’m Just LookingConclusionAppendix I: Dr. No Production CreditsAppendix II: Dr. No Production BudgetAppendix III: Dr. No Daily Progress ReportsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAdam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across normal self and monstrous other.Trade Review[Horror Film and Otherness] is certainly one of the most important recent attempts to rethink and reevaluate horror cinema. Even the readers who do not agree with all of its theses will find them worthy of discussion. -- Dejan Ognjanovic * Rue Morgue *A field-changing and heartfelt study of the horror film and social difference. The power of Lowenstein’s book can be captured by the words he uses to describe the particular impact of the horror film: “confrontational, insistent, transformative.” This will quickly join his earlier book, Shocking Representation, as an indispensable study of the genre. -- Aviva Briefel, coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of TerrorLowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness is instantly a classic, seminal study into the ways in which we understand notions of the Other and various progressive, reactionary, and violent reactions to it. Sparring with classic horror literature while drawing on a wealth of horror films, the author pulls no punches in demanding that we take responsibility for the social fears that we have constructed. The Other, be it monstrous or transformative, must be reconciled. Lowenstein sets us on the right path for such reconciliation. -- Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to PresentHorror Film and Otherness provides a theoretical culmination of Lowenstein’s thinking on horror cinema, radically resituating the genre in relation to spectatorship, spectacle, and identity. This is a bold, ambitious book that offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the politics and aesthetics of horror. -- Rosalind Galt, author of Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of DecolonizationLowenstein does several things in this superb volume. He considers our horror at the real-life violence and injustice that surrounds us against the horrors represented in fictional texts (fictional texts that we often read for their subversive content). At the same time, he wants to push Horror Studies out of a critical morass in which we've found ourselves for awhile. Horror Studies has moved from serious criticism and critique to theory, and Lowenstein here gives us some important tools for helping to consolidate some new trends in the field. Theoretically complex and also remarkably personal, the book helps us work through foundational horror studies texts and see them in new ways. He also provides compelling readings of contemporary films. It’s as though he were reaching out to all of us in this field, who have been struggling for ways to talk about horror in this very difficult sociopolitical moment—a way that's not reductive or dismissive. Excellent read and excellent book for classes. -- Joan Hawkins, author of Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-GardeWith Night of the Living Dead as a point of departure, Lowenstein offers a passionate analysis of horror cinema as it reflects American culture and society. He examines the evolving relationship between the social construction of otherness and horror cinema. Moving beyond familiar categories of difference and pathology, repression and oppression, Lowenstein develops the concept of transformative otherness, complicating the conventional dichotomy between normality and monstrosity. -- Mia Mask, author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film[Horror Film and Otherness] reevaluates traditional critical perspectives on the horror genre and offers provocative understandings of the aesthetic, allegorical, and historical fruitfulness of the genre as a narrative and formal exercise in addressing social difference in the real world. -- M. Sellers Johnson * Film Quarterly *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Situating Horror and Otherness: Tree of Life, Night of the Living Dead, PittsburghPart I: Transforming Horror and Otherness1. A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film: Revisiting Robin Wood and 1970s Horror2. The Surrealism of Horror’s Otherness: Listening to The ShoutPart II: Transforming the Masters of Horror3. Nightmare Zone: Aging as Otherness in the Cinema of Tobe Hooper4. The Trauma of Economic Otherness: Horror in George A. Romero’s Martin5. Therapeutic Disintegration: Jewish Otherness in the Cinema of David CronenbergPart III: Transforming Horror’s Other Voices6. Gendered Otherness: Feminine Horror and Surrealism in Marina de Van, Stephanie Rothman, and Jennifer Kent7. Racial Otherness: Horror’s Black/Jewish Minority Vocabulary, from Jordan Peele to Ira Levin and Curt SiodmakAfterword. Horror and Otherness in Anguished TimesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAdam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other.Trade Review[Horror Film and Otherness] is certainly one of the most important recent attempts to rethink and reevaluate horror cinema. Even the readers who do not agree with all of its theses will find them worthy of discussion. -- Dejan Ognjanovic * Rue Morgue *A field-changing and heartfelt study of the horror film and social difference. The power of Lowenstein’s book can be captured by the words he uses to describe the particular impact of the horror film: “confrontational, insistent, transformative.” This will quickly join his earlier book, Shocking Representation, as an indispensable study of the genre. -- Aviva Briefel, coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of TerrorLowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness is instantly a classic, seminal study into the ways in which we understand notions of the Other and various progressive, reactionary, and violent reactions to it. Sparring with classic horror literature while drawing on a wealth of horror films, the author pulls no punches in demanding that we take responsibility for the social fears that we have constructed. The Other, be it monstrous or transformative, must be reconciled. Lowenstein sets us on the right path for such reconciliation. -- Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to PresentHorror Film and Otherness provides a theoretical culmination of Lowenstein’s thinking on horror cinema, radically resituating the genre in relation to spectatorship, spectacle, and identity. This is a bold, ambitious book that offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the politics and aesthetics of horror. -- Rosalind Galt, author of Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of DecolonizationLowenstein does several things in this superb volume. He considers our horror at the real-life violence and injustice that surrounds us against the horrors represented in fictional texts (fictional texts that we often read for their subversive content). At the same time, he wants to push Horror Studies out of a critical morass in which we've found ourselves for awhile. Horror Studies has moved from serious criticism and critique to theory, and Lowenstein here gives us some important tools for helping to consolidate some new trends in the field. Theoretically complex and also remarkably personal, the book helps us work through foundational horror studies texts and see them in new ways. He also provides compelling readings of contemporary films. It’s as though he were reaching out to all of us in this field, who have been struggling for ways to talk about horror in this very difficult sociopolitical moment—a way that's not reductive or dismissive. Excellent read and excellent book for classes. -- Joan Hawkins, author of Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-GardeWith Night of the Living Dead as a point of departure, Lowenstein offers a passionate analysis of horror cinema as it reflects American culture and society. He examines the evolving relationship between the social construction of otherness and horror cinema. Moving beyond familiar categories of difference and pathology, repression and oppression, Lowenstein develops the concept of transformative otherness, complicating the conventional dichotomy between normality and monstrosity. -- Mia Mask, author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film[Horror Film and Otherness] reevaluates traditional critical perspectives on the horror genre and offers provocative understandings of the aesthetic, allegorical, and historical fruitfulness of the genre as a narrative and formal exercise in addressing social difference in the real world. -- M. Sellers Johnson * Film Quarterly *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Situating Horror and Otherness: Tree of Life, Night of the Living Dead, PittsburghPart I: Transforming Horror and Otherness1. A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film: Revisiting Robin Wood and 1970s Horror2. The Surrealism of Horror’s Otherness: Listening to The ShoutPart II: Transforming the Masters of Horror3. Nightmare Zone: Aging as Otherness in the Cinema of Tobe Hooper4. The Trauma of Economic Otherness: Horror in George A. Romero’s Martin5. Therapeutic Disintegration: Jewish Otherness in the Cinema of David CronenbergPart III: Transforming Horror’s Other Voices6. Gendered Otherness: Feminine Horror and Surrealism in Marina de Van, Stephanie Rothman, and Jennifer Kent7. Racial Otherness: Horror’s Black/Jewish Minority Vocabulary, from Jordan Peele to Ira Levin and Curt SiodmakAfterword. Horror and Otherness in Anguished TimesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisSpanning the franchise’s entire history, from Sean Connery’s iconic swagger to Daniel Craig’s rougher, more visceral interpretation of the superspy, James Bond Will Return offers both academic readers and fans a comprehensive view of the series’s transformations against the backdrop of real-world geopolitical intrigue and sweeping social changes.Trade ReviewWith a stellar lineup of authors offering sharp, original analysis of every James Bond film to date, this book delivers a fascinating retrospective of the 007 franchise at a critical moment in the extended life of the series. -- Christoph Lindner, editor of The James Bond Phenomenon, Revisioning 007, and Resisting James BondFeaturing established Bond scholars and new voices, this collection offers new and exciting perspectives on the film franchise. While each of the Bond films are a product of the time they were made, these essays tell us that the series has relevance to the world we live in today. Well written and fun to read, James Bond Will Return will excite even the most seasoned Bond scholar and fan. -- Robert G. Weiner, coeditor of James Bond in World and Popular CultureJames Bond Will Return takes a chronological, anthological approach to the study of the cinematic Bond, enabling a totalizing view of the so-called ‘Bond experience.’ This is the most expansive and well-organized coverage of the Bond cinematic universe to date, representing film and cultural history par excellence. -- Ian Kinane, author of Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence and general editor of the International Journal of James Bond StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: James Bond—Agent of Continuity and Change, by Claire Hines, Terence McSweeney, and Stuart Joy1. Bond and the New Elizabethans: Tradition and Modernity in Dr. No (1962), by Laura Crossley2. “A Real Labour of Love, as They Say”: James Bond as a Sexual Plaything in From Russia with Love (1963), by Lucy Bolton3. The Midas Touch: Eastmancolor, the Bond Franchise, and Goldfinger (1964), by Keith M. Johnston4. The Popular Geopolitics of Thunderball (1965): Look Up, Look Down, and Look Everywhere!, by Klaus Dodds5. Bond in the East: Orientalism and the Exotic in You Only Live Twice (1967), by Robert Shail6. The Other Fellow: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), by James Chapman7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971): 007 and Transatlantic States of Emergency, by Ian Scott8. From Harlem to San Monique: Spatial Dichotomies, Voodoo, and Cultural Identity in Live and Let Die (1973), by Fran Pheasant-Kelly9. “We All Get Our Jollies One Way or Another”: The Perversity and Pleasure of Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), by Julie Lobalzo Wright10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)—Nobody Does It Better: “Keeping the British End Up” at a Time of National Crisis, by Terence McSweeney11. Moonraker (1979) and the Canvas of Escapism, by Steven Gerrard12. The Spectre of Death: Revenge and Retribution in For Your Eyes Only (1981), by Stuart Joy13. The (Clown) Suited Hero: James Bond, Costume, Gender and Disguise in Octopussy (1983), by Claire Hines14. Scowls and Cowls: Grace Jones, Costume Design, and A View to a Kill (1985), by Randall Stevens15. “A Time When Indiscriminating Bed-Hopping Is Definitely Not Advisable”: Safe-Sex References in the UK Press Reception of The Living Daylights (1987), by Stephanie Jones16. Bond in the New World Orders: Licence to Kill (1989), by Stacey Peebles17. Cold War Nostalgia, (Geo)Political Progress, and James Bond in GoldenEye (1995), by Tatiana Konrad18. Bond by the Numbers: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), by Llewella Chapman19. Bond at the Crossroads: The World Is Not Enough (1999), by Tobias Hochscherf20. The Digital Domain of Die Another Day (2002), by Christopher Holliday21. What Matters More: Hierarchies of Value in Casino Royale (2006), by Christine Muller22. “Like a Bullet . . .”: Speed, Economy, and Canonical Continuity in Quantum of Solace (2008), by Estella Tincknell23. “Sometimes the Old Ways Are the Best”: Technology and the Body in a Gothic Reading of Sam Mendes’s Skyfall (2012), by Monica Germanà24. “It’s Always Been Me”: Spectrality, Hauntings, and Retcon in Spectre (2015), by James Smith25. No Time to Die (2021) and The Spy Who Loved #MeToo?, by Terence McSweeney and Stuart JoySelected BibliographyContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisSpanning the franchise’s entire history, from Sean Connery’s iconic swagger to Daniel Craig’s rougher, more visceral interpretation of the superspy, James Bond Will Return offers both academic readers and fans a comprehensive view of the series’s transformations against the backdrop of real-world geopolitical intrigue and sweeping social changes.Trade ReviewWith a stellar lineup of authors offering sharp, original analysis of every James Bond film to date, this book delivers a fascinating retrospective of the 007 franchise at a critical moment in the extended life of the series. -- Christoph Lindner, editor of The James Bond Phenomenon, Revisioning 007, and Resisting James BondFeaturing established Bond scholars and new voices, this collection offers new and exciting perspectives on the film franchise. While each of the Bond films are a product of the time they were made, these essays tell us that the series has relevance to the world we live in today. Well written and fun to read, James Bond Will Return will excite even the most seasoned Bond scholar and fan. -- Robert G. Weiner, coeditor of James Bond in World and Popular CultureJames Bond Will Return takes a chronological, anthological approach to the study of the cinematic Bond, enabling a totalizing view of the so-called ‘Bond experience.’ This is the most expansive and well-organized coverage of the Bond cinematic universe to date, representing film and cultural history par excellence. -- Ian Kinane, author of Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence and general editor of the International Journal of James Bond StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: James Bond—Agent of Continuity and Change, by Claire Hines, Terence McSweeney, and Stuart Joy1. Bond and the New Elizabethans: Tradition and Modernity in Dr. No (1962), by Laura Crossley2. “A Real Labour of Love, as They Say”: James Bond as a Sexual Plaything in From Russia with Love (1963), by Lucy Bolton3. The Midas Touch: Eastmancolor, the Bond Franchise, and Goldfinger (1964), by Keith M. Johnston4. The Popular Geopolitics of Thunderball (1965): Look Up, Look Down, and Look Everywhere!, by Klaus Dodds5. Bond in the East: Orientalism and the Exotic in You Only Live Twice (1967), by Robert Shail6. The Other Fellow: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), by James Chapman7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971): 007 and Transatlantic States of Emergency, by Ian Scott8. From Harlem to San Monique: Spatial Dichotomies, Voodoo, and Cultural Identity in Live and Let Die (1973), by Fran Pheasant-Kelly9. “We All Get Our Jollies One Way or Another”: The Perversity and Pleasure of Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), by Julie Lobalzo Wright10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)—Nobody Does It Better: “Keeping the British End Up” at a Time of National Crisis, by Terence McSweeney11. Moonraker (1979) and the Canvas of Escapism, by Steven Gerrard12. The Spectre of Death: Revenge and Retribution in For Your Eyes Only (1981), by Stuart Joy13. The (Clown) Suited Hero: James Bond, Costume, Gender and Disguise in Octopussy (1983), by Claire Hines14. Scowls and Cowls: Grace Jones, Costume Design, and A View to a Kill (1985), by Randall Stevens15. “A Time When Indiscriminating Bed-Hopping Is Definitely Not Advisable”: Safe-Sex References in the UK Press Reception of The Living Daylights (1987), by Stephanie Jones16. Bond in the New World Orders: Licence to Kill (1989), by Stacey Peebles17. Cold War Nostalgia, (Geo)Political Progress, and James Bond in GoldenEye (1995), by Tatiana Konrad18. Bond by the Numbers: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), by Llewella Chapman19. Bond at the Crossroads: The World Is Not Enough (1999), by Tobias Hochscherf20. The Digital Domain of Die Another Day (2002), by Christopher Holliday21. What Matters More: Hierarchies of Value in Casino Royale (2006), by Christine Muller22. “Like a Bullet . . .”: Speed, Economy, and Canonical Continuity in Quantum of Solace (2008), by Estella Tincknell23. “Sometimes the Old Ways Are the Best”: Technology and the Body in a Gothic Reading of Sam Mendes’s Skyfall (2012), by Monica Germanà24. “It’s Always Been Me”: Spectrality, Hauntings, and Retcon in Spectre (2015), by James Smith25. No Time to Die (2021) and The Spy Who Loved #MeToo?, by Terence McSweeney and Stuart JoySelected BibliographyContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisThe unquenchable thirst of Dracula. The animal lust of Mr. Hyde. The acquiescence of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Victorian literature--with its overtones of prudishness, respectability, and Old World hypocrisy--belies a subverted eroticism. The Victorian Gothic is monstrous but restrained, repressed but perverse, static but transformative, and preoccupied by gender and sexuality in both regressive and progressive ways. Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre. A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography Trade Review"[Marks's] book will certainly be of interest to porn studies scholars. It also provides solid accounts of the ways that pornographers generate new erotic energies from classic texts. " --Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"Through its in-depth investigation of the dialogue between the porn industry and the world of our supposedly 'prudish' forefathers, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic represents an important contribution to the analysis of a cinematic genre (neo-Victorian porn) that has been partially neglected in scholarly works." --Neo-Victorian Studies"A giddy pleasure to read the future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."--Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene"Laura Helen Marks offers a persuasive exploration of the complexities of porn’s love affair with all things Victorian, particularly the fantasy invocations and reimaginings of Gothic sexualities. Her account moves across the pornographic genre and its seeming obsession with the earlier historical period in order to open some very contemporary concerns about sex, desires and technology."--Clarissa Smith, coauthor of Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Marks's] book will certainly be of interest to porn studies scholars. It also provides solid accounts of the ways that pornographers generate new erotic energies from classic texts. " --Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"Through its in-depth investigation of the dialogue between the porn industry and the world of our supposedly 'prudish' forefathers, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic represents an important contribution to the analysis of a cinematic genre (neo-Victorian porn) that has been partially neglected in scholarly works." --Neo-Victorian Studies"A giddy pleasure to read the future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."--Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene"Laura Helen Marks offers a persuasive exploration of the complexities of porn’s love affair with all things Victorian, particularly the fantasy invocations and reimaginings of Gothic sexualities. Her account moves across the pornographic genre and its seeming obsession with the earlier historical period in order to open some very contemporary concerns about sex, desires and technology."--Clarissa Smith, coauthor of Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures

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

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Book SynopsisExplores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks' "Red River" and John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and "The Searchers". The author treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history.Trade Review"A trenchant and illuminating study of three great Westerns and a convincing case for their importance both to political psychology and to our own self-understanding as American citizens."—C. D. C. Reeve, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Robert Pippin's study of three great Westerns is a fine meditation on the place of heroism in democracy and the ambiguous relationship between legend and history in the making of heroes. It can stand with the best recent books on the Western as a genre, but it is driven by a thought all its own: the difficulty of the search for order, and the elusive 'possibility of an American politics.'"—David Bromwich, Yale University “Pippin's marvelous book is a more than worthy successor to the classic essays on the Western by André Bazin and Robert Warshow. This volume is remarkable for its clarity and depth of argument.”—George Wilson, University of Southern California

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Book SynopsisA renowned movie critic on film’s treatment of one of mankind’s darkest behaviors: murderTrade Review“[Thomson’s] analysis of death in Hitchcock movies is gorgeous. His restlessness is palpable. There is an anxiety in this brief, hurried book that suits these political and medical times.”—Lisa Schwarzbaum, New York Times Book Review“David Thomson looks at how audiences become complicit in a cinematic ‘warped triangle’ in his provocative Murder and the Movies.”—Choice Magazine“In dissecting homicide’s screen allure, Thomson’s erudite insight dazzles.”—Kevin Harley, Total Film“Thomson’s dive into dependency of movies on murder leads to a surprisingly quiet tone, a conversation of lowered voices: a sense of film enacting some fated, circular history.”—Greil Marcus“Thomson, one of the world’s leading film critics and historians, in his polished, recognizable style (dancing writing, provocative gestures, first person participation), has produced a slim, smart, readable volume on murder, movies, and society.”—Jonathan Kirshner, author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age“Completely unpredictable, always surprising, always deeply engaging, and always very entertaining. You never know where Thomson may take you. You just know that wherever he does take you will be a wonderful place he will let you discover for yourself.”—Richard Burt, University of Florida

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Book SynopsisA spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedyTrade Review“[Dauber] has written a piece of criticism as elegant and sympathetic as Brooks is vulgar and savage.”—Tanya Gold, The Spectator“In a new biography, Jeremy Dauber breaks down how the comedian and director just couldn’t help being a loving iconoclast skewering the establishment.”—Times of Israel“The energy, the sass, the inexhaustible comic brio that define Mel Brooks seem too volcanic to fit between the covers of a book. But, miracle of miracles, Jeremy Dauber has made it happen, simultaneously entertaining and enlightening as he takes us along on a very wild ride.”—Kenneth Turan, author of Not to Be Missed: Fifty-Four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film“When someone has been as significant an influence on culture as Mel Brooks, it can be tough to tell their story in a fresh, cohesive way. But Jeremy Dauber has done it, giving us a limpid, inviting, and lively new look at Brooks, his work, and the ways his Jewishness shapes everything he’s done. In the process, he shows how Brooks’s fingerprints are all over our shared cultural lives—whether or not we share his cultural identity. It’s a fascinating read, and pure pleasure.”—Alissa Wilkinson, senior culture writer, Vox

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Book SynopsisFoster Hirsch''s Dark Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.Trade ReviewMartin Jackson, Cineaste "Wonderfully readable: Hirsch is clear, knowledgeable, and concise...[The Dark Side of the Screen] is a visual as well as literary pleasure." Philip French, The Observer (London) "There has been no extended work as good as Foster Hirsch's The Dark Side of the Screen, a well-written, imaginatively illustrated book that sees the brief, true heyday as between Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and his Sunset Boulevard (1950), but looks at the prelude and the aftermath, and sets the genre in its larger social and cultural context." Skyscraper, Spring 2009 "An important examination of what film noir is...The 264-page treatise is not a review source; rather, Hirsch's academic work delves deeply with a scholarly but not dry approach."

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Book Synopsis A fascinating exploration and celebration of the life and work of the coolest man in Hollywood, Samuel L. Jackson—from his star-making turns in the films of Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino to his ubiquitous roles in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, not to mention the cult favorite Snakes on a Plane.Samuel L. Jackson’s embodiment of cool isn’t just inspirational—it’s important. Bad Motherfucker lays out how his attitude intersects with his identity as a Black man, why being cool matters in the modern world, and how Jackson can guide us through the current cultural moment in which everyone is losing their cool. Edwards details Jackson’s fascinating personal history, from stuttering bookworm to gunrunning revolutionary to freebasing addict to A-list movie star.Drawing on original reporting and interviews, the book explores not only the major events of Jackson’s life but also his obsessions: golf, kung fu movies, profanity. Bad Motherfuckerfeatures a delectable filmography of Jackson’s movies—140 and counting!—and also includes new movie posters for many of Jackson’s greatest roles, reimagined by dozens of gifted artists and designers. The book provides a must-read road map through the vast territory of his on-screen career and more: a vivid portrait of Samuel L. Jackson’s essential self, as well as practical instructions, by example, for how to live and work and be.

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Book SynopsisA closer look at the captivating history of American cinema.

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Book SynopsisThis book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin's classics such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) to contemporary comedies and dramas with trickster actors' such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. The Trickster in Contemporary Film offers a fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives<Trade Review"This book surprises us and gratifies us with its scope, its detail and how, like the trickster himself, it challenges our beliefs about the function of popular culture." - Christopher Hauke, Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London. Table of ContentsIntroduction. Common Motifs in Trickster Narratives. The Trickster and Personal Relationships. The Trickster and the Economic System. The Trickster and Contemporary Powers. Gonzo-Trickster and the Art of Comic Insurrection. Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisDiscusses an array of narratives that span the American literary tradition, tracing the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child.

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Book SynopsisHitchcock's previously untold origin story. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger the first true Hitchcock movie,the one that anticipated all the others. And yet the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, even by Hitchcock himself. The First True Hitchcock focuses on the twelve-month period that encompassed The Lodger's production in 1926 and release in 1927, presenting a new picture of this pivotal year in Hitchcock's life and in the wider film world. Using fresh archival discoveries, Henry K. Miller situates Hitchcock's formation as a director against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, and its most visible exportfilm. The previously untold story of The Lodger's making in the London fogand attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sunis the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock.Trade Review'Henry K. Miller’s in-depth study of the production and impact of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger is an essential addition to the Hitch canon." * The Film Stage *"Miller reminds us that film history consistently requires an understanding of past worlds that no matter how ‘fixed’ have long since vanished." * Sight & Sound *"The First True Hitchcock is an invigoratingly deep dive into the movie that launched one of world cinema’s most endlessly intriguing careers." * Hitchcock Annual *Table of ContentsPreface Map of London, 1926–1927 1. The Embankment at Midnight 2. The Reputation and the Myth 3. No Old Masters 4. The Autocrat of the Studio 5. To Catch a Thief 6. The First True Hitchcock 7. Stories of the Days to Come 8. Wilshire Palms Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHitchcock's previously untold origin story. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger the first true Hitchcock movie,the one that anticipated all the others. And yet the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, even by Hitchcock himself. The First True Hitchcock focuses on the twelve-month period that encompassed The Lodger's production in 1926 and release in 1927, presenting a new picture of this pivotal year in Hitchcock's life and in the wider film world. Using fresh archival discoveries, Henry K. Miller situates Hitchcock's formation as a director against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, and its most visible exportfilm. The previously untold story of The Lodger's making in the London fogand attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sunis the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock.Trade Review'Henry K. Miller’s in-depth study of the production and impact of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger is an essential addition to the Hitch canon." * The Film Stage *"Miller reminds us that film history consistently requires an understanding of past worlds that no matter how ‘fixed’ have long since vanished." * Sight & Sound *"The First True Hitchcock is an invigoratingly deep dive into the movie that launched one of world cinema’s most endlessly intriguing careers." * Hitchcock Annual *Table of ContentsPreface Map of London, 1926–1927 1. The Embankment at Midnight 2. The Reputation and the Myth 3. No Old Masters 4. The Autocrat of the Studio 5. To Catch a Thief 6. The First True Hitchcock 7. Stories of the Days to Come 8. Wilshire Palms Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe first full-length study of the iconic 1960s film The Great Escape and its place in Hollywood and American history.Escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) on a stolen motorcycle jumps an imposing barbed wire fencecaught on film, the act and its aftermath have become an unforgettable symbol of triumph as well as defeat for 1960s America. Combining production and reception history with close reading, Dreams of Flight offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of Allied prisoners who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside. Through breezy prose and pithy analysis, Dana Polan centersThe Great Escapewithin American cultural and intellectual history, drawing a vivid picture of the country in the 1960s. We see a nation grappling with its own military history, a society undergoing significant shifts in its culture and identity, and a film industry in transition from Old HollywTrade Review"Dana Polan’s rich assessment of the film’s making coupled with a superb analysis of the film itself, script, style, themes and directorial bravura is filled with informative nuggets. Eschewing the standard star bio approach, Polan goes much deeper. . . . Written with tremendous authority and great style." * Cinema Retro *“Dreams of Flight is an act of devotion, a work of extreme connoisseurship.” * Air Mail *"Far more than just a love letter to a foundational film from an author and devoted fan, Dreams of Flight is a rewarding work of scholarly reclamation, a volume that is always precise in its observation of the hidden dimensions of The Great Escape. . . . Through careful attention to formal choices and an impressively broad engagement with memory, history, and cinematic legacies, Dreams of Flight uncovers the many textures of its popular subject." * Velvet Light Trap *"This book expands in myriad and often surprising directions. . . . Dreams of Flight is remarkable for the extent and imaginative richness of the research materials it brings to bear." * California History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Engineering The Great Escape From Book to Film (and In Between) 2. Tunneling In The Great Escape: Style, Theme, and Structure 3. Afterlives Coda Appendix: "It Really Happened" Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe first full-length study of the iconic 1960s film The Great Escape and its place in Hollywood and American history.Escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) on a stolen motorcycle jumps an imposing barbed wire fencecaught on film, the act and its aftermath have become an unforgettable symbol of triumph as well as defeat for 1960s America. Combining production and reception history with close reading, Dreams of Flight offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of Allied prisoners who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside. Through breezy prose and pithy analysis, Dana Polan centersThe Great Escapewithin American cultural and intellectual history, drawing a vivid picture of the country in the 1960s. We see a nation grappling with its own military history, a society undergoing significant shifts in its culture and identity, and a film industry in transition from Old HollywTrade Review"Dana Polan’s rich assessment of the film’s making coupled with a superb analysis of the film itself, script, style, themes and directorial bravura is filled with informative nuggets. Eschewing the standard star bio approach, Polan goes much deeper. . . . Written with tremendous authority and great style." * Cinema Retro *“Dreams of Flight is an act of devotion, a work of extreme connoisseurship.” * Air Mail *"Far more than just a love letter to a foundational film from an author and devoted fan, Dreams of Flight is a rewarding work of scholarly reclamation, a volume that is always precise in its observation of the hidden dimensions of The Great Escape. . . . Through careful attention to formal choices and an impressively broad engagement with memory, history, and cinematic legacies, Dreams of Flight uncovers the many textures of its popular subject." * Velvet Light Trap *"This book expands in myriad and often surprising directions. . . . Dreams of Flight is remarkable for the extent and imaginative richness of the research materials it brings to bear." * California History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Engineering The Great Escape From Book to Film (and In Between) 2. Tunneling In The Great Escape: Style, Theme, and Structure 3. Afterlives Coda Appendix: "It Really Happened" Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFor centuries, the Arctic was visualized as an unchanging, stable, and rigidly alien landscape, existing outside twenty-first-century globalization. It is now impossible to ignore the ways the climate crisis, expanding resource extraction, and Indigenous political mobilization in the circumpolar North are constituent parts of the global present. New Arctic Cinemas presents an original, comparative, and interventionist historiography of film and media in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia, Canada, and the United States to situate Arctic media in the place it rightfully deserves to occupy: as central to global environmental concerns and Indigenous media sovereignty and self-determination movements. The works of contemporary Arctic filmmakers, from Zacharias Kunuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril to Amanda Kernell and Inuk Silis Høegh, reach worldwide audiences. In examining the reach and influence of these artists and their work, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport reveal a global media system of intertwined production contexts, circulation opportunities, and imaginariesall centering the Arctic North.Table of ContentsContents List of Figures Acknowledgments 1 • Twenty-First-Century Arctic Cinemas and Global Media Studies, Media Sovereignty, the Anthropocene, and Interventionist Historiography 2 • New Arctic Explorers and Twenty-First-Century Ice Imaginaries: From Metrical Documentary to IMAX Spectacle 3 • Isuma and Indigenous Media Sovereignty 4 • The Arnait Collective, Feminist Practice, and Inuit Self-Determination 5 • Sámi Media Sovereignty and Interventionist Historiography:Environmental, Experimental, and Archival Politics 6 • Sámi Feminist First-Person Documentary and Women’s Activism 7 • Global Greenland and Postcolonial Cinema 8 • Greenlandic Reconciliation Cinema, Self-Determination, and Interventionist Historiography 9 • Russia’s Contemporary Arctic Cinema as Geopolitics 10 • From the Cold War to the Climate Crisis: The Russian North and Utopian Svalbard 11 • Looking Ahead: Global Arctic Cinemas in the Twenty-First Century References Index

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Book SynopsisFor centuries, the Arctic was visualized as an unchanging, stable, and rigidly alien landscape, existing outside twenty-first-century globalization. It is now impossible to ignore the ways the climate crisis, expanding resource extraction, and Indigenous political mobilization in the circumpolar North are constituent parts of the global present. New Arctic Cinemas presents an original, comparative, and interventionist historiography of film and media in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia, Canada, and the United States to situate Arctic media in the place it rightfully deserves to occupy: as central to global environmental concerns and Indigenous media sovereignty and self-determination movements. The works of contemporary Arctic filmmakers, from Zacharias Kunuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril to Amanda Kernell and Inuk Silis Høegh, reach worldwide audiences. In examining the reach and influence of these artists and their work, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport reTable of ContentsContents List of Figures Acknowledgments 1 • Twenty-First-Century Arctic Cinemas and Global Media Studies, Media Sovereignty, the Anthropocene, and Interventionist Historiography 2 • New Arctic Explorers and Twenty-First-Century Ice Imaginaries: From Metrical Documentary to IMAX Spectacle 3 • Isuma and Indigenous Media Sovereignty 4 • The Arnait Collective, Feminist Practice, and Inuit Self-Determination 5 • Sámi Media Sovereignty and Interventionist Historiography:Environmental, Experimental, and Archival Politics 6 • Sámi Feminist First-Person Documentary and Women’s Activism 7 • Global Greenland and Postcolonial Cinema 8 • Greenlandic Reconciliation Cinema, Self-Determination, and Interventionist Historiography 9 • Russia’s Contemporary Arctic Cinema as Geopolitics 10 • From the Cold War to the Climate Crisis: The Russian North and Utopian Svalbard 11 • Looking Ahead: Global Arctic Cinemas in the Twenty-First Century References Index

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Book SynopsisWhat a century of border films teaches about the real and imagined worlds of the US-Mexico borderlandsand how this understanding helps build better relations across boundaries. Border Witness is an account of cultural collision and fusion between Mexico and the United States, as seen on the ground and in films from the past hundred years. Blending film studies with political and cultural geography, Michael Dear investigates the making of cross-border identity and community in the territories between two nations. Border Witness introduces a new border film genre just now entering its golden age. A geographer and activist, Dear adopts an accessible and engaged perspective, combining the stories told by these films with insights drawn from his own decades-long research and travel. From early silent films to virtual reality, and from revolution to the present global crisis, border films provide fresh evidence for real and imagined politics and for envisioning future transborder architectures carved from in-between spaces.In an era of global geopolitics that favors walls and war over diplomacy, Dear's insights have relevance for borders around the world.Trade Review"Dear’s book is a magnificent chronicle of borderlands films over a century that should be a “must-read” for border scholars and perhaps used not only in film classes but also in border studies courses to supplement the often-dry readings assigned in our twenty-first century visual world." * Journal of Borderlands Studies *"A deep historical context along with solid cinematic summaries of a less discussed cinematic genre: the border film. . . . The author devotes a good deal of the book to the US's relationship with immigrants, the border patrol, and Mexican officials, providing readers with a firm understanding of the difficulties surrounding the failed policies and procedures currently taking place at the border." * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction   Part 1 Origins 1. Border Witness: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico    2. Bisected Bodies: Early Silent Films 3. Making Filmscapes   4. Using Film as Evidence 5. Revolution and Modernization 6. The Great Migrations 7. Border Film Noir Part 2 Fusions 8. Borderlands before Borders 9. From Final Girl to Woman Warrior 10. Narco Nations: Men at War 11. Lives of the Undocumented 12. Moral Tales, Border Law 13. Border Walls: Screen Folly and Fantasy 14. The Mexican Dream/El Sueño Mexicano Part 3 Witness 15. A Golden Age for Border Film 16. Ways of Seeing the Border (Beyond Film) 17. Border Witness of the Future Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Chronological Filmography Appendix 2: Alphabetical Filmography Appendix 3: Map of US-Mexico Borderlands Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisWhat a century of border films teaches about the real and imagined worlds of the US-Mexico borderlandsand how this understanding helps build better relations across boundaries. Border Witness is an account of cultural collision and fusion between Mexico and the United States, as seen on the ground and in films from the past hundred years. Blending film studies with political and cultural geography, Michael Dear investigates the making of cross-border identity and community in the territories between two nations. Border Witness introduces a new border film genre just now entering its golden age. A geographer and activist, Dear adopts an accessible and engaged perspective, combining the stories told by these films with insights drawn from his own decades-long research and travel. From early silent films to virtual reality, and from revolution to the present global crisis, border films provide fresh evidence for real and imagined politics and for envisioning future transborder archiTrade Review"Dear’s book is a magnificent chronicle of borderlands films over a century that should be a “must-read” for border scholars and perhaps used not only in film classes but also in border studies courses to supplement the often-dry readings assigned in our twenty-first century visual world." * Journal of Borderlands Studies *"A deep historical context along with solid cinematic summaries of a less discussed cinematic genre: the border film. . . . The author devotes a good deal of the book to the US's relationship with immigrants, the border patrol, and Mexican officials, providing readers with a firm understanding of the difficulties surrounding the failed policies and procedures currently taking place at the border." * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction   Part 1 Origins 1. Border Witness: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico    2. Bisected Bodies: Early Silent Films 3. Making Filmscapes   4. Using Film as Evidence 5. Revolution and Modernization 6. The Great Migrations 7. Border Film Noir Part 2 Fusions 8. Borderlands before Borders 9. From Final Girl to Woman Warrior 10. Narco Nations: Men at War 11. Lives of the Undocumented 12. Moral Tales, Border Law 13. Border Walls: Screen Folly and Fantasy 14. The Mexican Dream/El Sueño Mexicano Part 3 Witness 15. A Golden Age for Border Film 16. Ways of Seeing the Border (Beyond Film) 17. Border Witness of the Future Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Chronological Filmography Appendix 2: Alphabetical Filmography Appendix 3: Map of US-Mexico Borderlands Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisDocumentary films are the rock and roll of our times. Why are they made? Who are in the tribe of documentary film-makers? Do their films really change the world? Eighteen years ago, Nick Fraser created BBC Storyville, producing films that won Oscars, BAFTAs, and Peabody Awards. He found film-makers from all across the world covering important subjects in documentaries. In Say What Happened he describes the frenzied, intense world of documentary film-making, tracing its history back to the early pioneers, such as Dziga Vertov and his ground-breaking Man with a Movie Camera. The book deals with the British documentary tradition founded by John Grierson, and discusses the work of American masters such as the Maysles brothers, Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker, as well as Europeans such as Marcel Ophuls, Claude Lanzmann, Chris Marker, and Werner Herzog. He interviews acclaimed documentary film-makers and discusses the work of Ken Burns, Errol Morris, and Joshua

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Book SynopsisIn 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. Poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power. This is a portrait not just of what happened, but also of what was lost. What was Aberfan like in 1966? What were the interests of the people, the social life, the sporting obsessions, the bands of the day? What was the deeper history of the place? Why had it become the mining village it was, and what had it been before the discovery of coal under its soil? Perhaps most significantly: what is Aberfan like today? The Green Hollow is a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance; a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation. It is also a story known along generational rather than geographic borders. Based on the BBC One production,

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Book SynopsisPlayfully blending personal memoir, criticism and candid new interviews with filmmakers from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, Ryan Gilbey's engaging and dynamic It Used to be Witches is a non-chronological treasure-hunt through queer cinema past and present. Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass) are among the directors who reveal how queer artists use film to express their most personal truthsand to challenge, defy and outrage a world that would rather they didn't exist.That world might look rainbow-coloured from some angles, with the likes of Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight and Portrait of a Lady on Fire winning awards and acclaim. But as queer and trans people find themselves increasingly under attack, It Used to Be Witches asks whether cinema can be an effective weapon of resistance and change, and celebrates an outlaw spirit which refuses to die.

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Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Now he shares his story for the first time in “a wonderful addition to a seminal career” (San Francisco Chronicle), “infused with nostalgia and his signature hilarity” (Parade).ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: New York Post • “Laugh-out-loud hilarious and always fascinating, from the great Mel Brooks. What else do you expect from the man who knew Jesus and dated Joan of Arc?”—Billy CrystalFor anyone who loves American comedy, the long wait is over. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny.All About Me! charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise from a Depression-era kid in Brooklyn to the recipient of the

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Book SynopsisThe behind-the-scenes story of the action heroes who ruled 1980s and ’90s Hollywood and the beloved films that made them stars, including Die Hard, First Blood, The Terminator, and more.“Entertaining . . . This is a book that makes you ache for the days when the movie screen belonged not to men who dress in superhero capes but to those who lift weights.”—Washington ExaminerA NEWSWEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEARThe Last Action Heroes opens in May 1990 in Cannes, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone waltzing together, cheered on by a crowd of famous faces. After years of bitter combat—Stallone once threw a bowl of flowers at Schwarzenegger’s head, and the body count in Schwarzenegger’s Commando was increased so the film would “have a bigger dick than Rambo”—the world’s biggest action stars have at last made peace.In this wildly entertai

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Book SynopsisDiscover films that dared to be different, risked reputations and put careers in jeopardy. This is what happens when filmmakers take tradition and rip it up.  FilmQuake introduces 50 movies that shook the cinematic world, telling the fascinating stories behind their creation, reception and legacy. From unbelievable developments in technology (Citizen Kane, 1941) to feminist triumphs (Wanda, 1970); films that kickstarted New Queer Cinema (Paris is Burning, 1990) to others that challenged lawmakers (A Short Film About Killing, 1988) – FilmQuake presents the movies that questioned boundaries, challenged the status quo and made shockwaves we are still feeling today. From film's first innovators, people like the Lumière brothers, whose short film of a train arriving was reported to have terrified audiences Trade Review “Smith’s selections are often startling and surprising…” -- Christopher Schobert * The Film Stage *Table of ContentsIntroductionTHE SHOCK OF THE NEW: 1895–1929The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station: Auguste and Louis Lumière Women in FilmThe Birth of a Nation: D.W. GriffithWithin Our Gates: Oscar MicheauxNosferatu: F.W. Murnau German Expressionism Nanook of the North: Robert FlahertyBattleship Potemkin: Sergei Eisenstein Soviet CinemaThe Passion of Joan of Arc: Carl Theodor Dreyer Sound in FilmA WORLD IN FLUX: 1930–1959The Golden Age: Luis Buñuel Avant-Garde CinemaL’Atalante: Jean VigoTriumph of the Will: Leni Riefenstahl Propaganda on FilmThe Great Dictator: Charles ChaplinCitizen Kane: Orson Welles Auteur CinemaRome, Open City: Roberto Rossellini Italian NeorealismRashomon: Akira KurosawaPather Panchali: Satyajit RayThe Seventh Seal: Ingmar Bergman Art Film The Rise of AnimationSome Like It Hot: Billy WilderBREAKING ALL THE RULES: 1960–1979Breathless: Jean-Luc Goddard The French New WavePsycho: Alfred Hitchcock New Adventures in HorrorVictim: Basil DeardenCleo from 5 to 7: Agnès VardaThe Battle of Algiers: Gillo PontecorvoBonnie and Clyde: Arthur Penn New Hollywood2001: A Space Odyssey: Stanley KubrickWanda: Barbara Loden Feminist FilmSweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss: Melvin Van Peebles Black Cinema in the USTouki Bouki: Djibril Diop Mambéty Cinema of TransgressionJeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Chantal AkermanJaws: Steven SpielbergApocalypse Now: Francis Ford Coppola Developments in SoundINDEPENDENCE AND INDUSTRY: 1980–1999Fitzcarraldo: Werner Herzog An Epic CinemaShoah: Claude LanzmannThe Thin Blue Line: Errol MorrisA Short Film About Killing: Krzysztof Kieślowski Changing the WorldDo the Right Thing: Spike LeeParis is Burning: Jennie Livingston New Queer CinemaDaughters of the Dust: Julie DashTerminator 2: Judgment Day: James CameronReservoir Dogs: Quentin Tarantino US Indie CinemaChungking Express: Wong Kar-wai Cinema in Hong Kong, China Recent New WavesLa Haine: Mathieu KassovitzThe Blair Witch Project: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez Recent HorrorTHE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN: 2000–PRESENTRussian Ark: Aleksandr Sokurov Cinema and Time Digital CinemaBrokeback Mountain: Ang LeeUnited 93: Paul Greengrass Cinema Post-9/11Tangerine: Sean BakerGet Out: Jordan Peele Film and Black Lives Matter Change for the FutureAtlantics: Mati DiopFor Sama: Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts Citizen JournalismParasite: Bong Joon-Ho Glossary Further Reading Picture Credits Index

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Book SynopsisDiscover everything you''ve ever wanted to know about Star Wars in this complete history of the most famous franchise in movie history.Painstakingly researched and superbly illustrated, Star Wars™ Year By Year: A Visual History, New Edition presents a unique Star Wars timeline-the full history of the amazing Star Wars phenomenon as you''ve never seen it before.This stunning visual journey features trivia and cultural cornerstones from director George Lucas'' early life through to the iconic movie stills, comic books, novels, toys, video games, and theme parks that have spawned from five decades of seminal film making. Fully updated and expanded, this edition encompasses all nine episodes of the original, prequel, and sequel trilogies, along with the standalone movies Rogue One and Solo, and the acclaimed television series, The Mandalorian. Produced in full collaboration with Lucasfilm and written by renowned Star Wars experts, Star Wars Year by Year: A Visual History, New Edition is ideal for Star Wars fanatics and newbies alike.© & ™ 2021 Lucasfilm Ltd.

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