Film: styles and genres Books
£16.58
The University of Chicago Press Nollywood
Book SynopsisNigeria's Nollywood has rapidly grown into one of the world's largest film industries, radically altering media environments across Africa and in the diaspora; it has also become one of African culture's most powerful and consequential expressions, powerfully shaping how Africans see themselves and are seen by others. With this book, Jonathan Haynes provides an accessible and authoritative introduction to this vast industry and its film culture. Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions as the country and its movies have developed together over the turbulent past two decades. As he shows, Nollywood is a form of popular culture; it produces a flood of stories, repeating the ones that mean the most to its broad audience. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in t
£31.00
Columbia University Press Carceral Fantasies
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking contribution to the study of non-theatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope. Focusing on films shown before 1935, the book explores the experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated.Trade ReviewAlison Griffiths's examination of how movie exhibition came into prisons is truly groundbreaking. No one has studied the culture of movie-going behind bars in this fashion before. A unique and absolutely exciting work! -- Dana Polan, author of Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film Carceral Fantasies is a complex and highly original book that attends the intersections between various early cinema images of prisons and the real thing. Griffiths has a fascinating story to tell, in which she argues that we can view execution films as a kind of attraction-and in doing so are led to ponder: what constitutes an attraction? -- Jon Lewis, author of American Film: A HistoryTable of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Carceral Imaginary 1. Tableaux Mort: Execution, Cinema, and Carceral Fantasies 2. Prison on Screen: The Carceral Aesthetic Part II: The Carceral Spectator 3. Screens and the Senses in Prison 4. "The Great Unseen Audience": Sing Sing Prison and Motion Pictures Part III: The Carceral Reformer 5. A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women's Prisons and Reformatories 6. Cinema and Prison Reform Conclusion: The Prison Museum and Media Use in the Contemporary Prison Notes Filmography Bibliography Index
£80.39
Columbia University Press Carceral Fantasies
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAlison Griffiths's examination of how movie exhibition came into prisons is truly groundbreaking. No one has studied the culture of moviegoing behind bars in this fashion before. A unique and absolutely exciting work! -- Dana Polan, author of Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of FilmCarceral Fantasies is a complex and highly original book that attends the intersections between various early cinema images of prisons and the real thing. Griffiths has a fascinating story to tell, in which she argues that we can view execution films as a kind of attraction—and in doing so are led to ponder: what constitutes an attraction? -- Jon Lewis, author of American Film: A HistoryCarceral Fantasies paints a complex, rich portrait of the historical relationship between cinema and the American penal system that crosses disciplinary borders and engages with a diverse body of scholarship. Groundbreaking in its historical exploration, rigorous and acrobatic in its theoretical intervention, and provocative in its call to action, Carceral Fantasies is a rewarding and important read for anyone interested in the history of American cinema. * Film & History *Griffiths’s work uncovers hidden and rarely considered aspects of penal practice, media consumption and film history. * Prison Service Journal *A timely, challenging, and always thought-provoking text, Carceral Fantasies will become necessary reading for all working to map the medial administration of state terror and to imagine cinema’s capacities to glimpse beyond it. * Canadian Journal of Film Studies *Carceral Fantasies is a fascinating look at the history of cinema and the penitentiary. * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *The original research she has performed, especially in understanding the nature of the carceral spectator, makes a significant contribution to film history, particularly film as a cultural artifact. She provides a glimpse of a nearly invisible audience that may have discovered in film their only connection to the world at large. In doing so, Griffiths brings light to what remains one of the most hidden places in our society. * Wide Angle *Carceral Fantasies will certainly attract scholars who are interested in the development of this scholarship about the silent era. The book will also be of value for those who are interested by nontheatrical film exhibition and the unique experience of watching films in prison. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *Carceral Fantasies is a provocative and engrossing read. Griffiths’s study also makes a significant contribution to histories of cinema-going and early twentieth-century visual culture, and to our understanding of the complexities that underpin the dynamics between spectator and spectacle. * Alphaville *Table of ContentsList of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: The Carceral Imaginary1. Tableaux Mort: Execution, Cinema, and Carceral Fantasies2. Prison on Screen: The Carceral AestheticPart II: The Carceral Spectator3. Screens and the Senses in Prison4. "The Great Unseen Audience": Sing Sing Prison and Motion PicturesPart III: The Carceral Reformer5. A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women's Prisons and Reformatories6. Cinema and Prison ReformConclusion: The Prison Museum and Media Use in the Contemporary PrisonNotesFilmographyBibliographyIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press European Nightmares
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAn ambitious and important contribution to the study of European horror films. -- Francesco Di Chiara European Journal of Media StudiesTable of ContentsContributors Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley Reception and Perception of European Horror Cinemas Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley Resident Evil? The Limits of European Horror: Resident Evil Versus Suspiria, by Peter Hutchings Beyond Suspiria: The Place of European Horror Cinema in the Fan Canon, by Brigid Cherry Refusing to Look at Rape: The Reception of Belgian Horror Cinema, by Ernest Mathijs and Russ Hunter Depressing, Degrading! The Reception of the European Horror Film in Britain, 1957-68, by David Huxley British Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley The Boundaries of Horror in Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned, by John Sears New Labour, New Horrors: Genetic Mutation, Generic Hybridity and Gender Crisis in British Horror of the New Millennium, by Linnie Blake French Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley Baise-moi and the French Rape-Revenge Film, by Emily Brick Subjectivity Unleashed: Haute Tension, by Matthias Hurst Spanish Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley Paul Naschy, Exorcismo and the Reactionary Horrors of Spanish Popular Cinema in the Early 1970s, by Andy Willis History, Terrain and Tread: The Walk of Demons, Zombie Flesh Eaters and the Blind Dead, by Phil Smith Alejandro Amenabar and Contemporary Spanish Horror, by Barry Jordan Italian Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley Live Ate: Global Catastrophe and the Politics and Poetics of the Italian Zombie Film, by Mark Goodall A Touch of Terror: Dario Argento and Deleuze's Cinematic Sensorium, by Anna Powell German and Northern European Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley 'A Former Director of German Horror Films': Horror, European Cinema and the Critical Reception of Robert Siodmak's Hollywood Career, by Mark Jancovich World of Blood and Fire: Lang, Mabuse, and Bergman's The Serpent's Egg, by Samuel J. Umland 'Le Cineaste d'Horreur Ordinaire': Michael Haneke and the Horrors of Everyday Existence, by Catherine Wheatley Eastern European Horror Cinema Section Introduction, by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley A Gaze from Hell: Eastern European Horror Cinema Revisited, by Christina Stojanova Taxidermia-a Hungarian Taste for Horror, by Patricia Allmer Horror Films in Turkish Cinema: To Use or Not to Use Local Cultural Motifs, That is Not the Question, by Kaya Ozkaracalar Filmography Index
£64.00
Columbia University Press Motionless Pictures
Book SynopsisChallenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation.Trade ReviewAn ambitious undertaking, supported by admirably clear prose and an impressive range of research. -- Richard Dienst, Rutgers University Remes's concise writing eloquently recounts his sensitive attention to the screened films that he discusses. His subsequent, objectively based observations are often profound. His description and analysis of the implications of what he has seen in my own films is revealing even to me. Unique in its emphasis on the single frame as the core of cinema, this book is one of the best books ever written about 'experimental' film. -- Michael Snow Justin Remes' Motion(less) Pictures is written and argued so well that one can enjoy it and learn from it without much liking the cinema of stasis. Early on, the book grants us leave to view Warhol's Empire or Sleep in a state of high distraction, perhaps while munching panini and conversing with friends. We can even exit and take a stroll. Remes rightly links both films to Erik Satie's 'furniture music'--'music to which,' John Cage said, 'one did not have to listen' (Satie himself said that 'a man who has not heard Furniture music does not know happiness"). Other types of stasis cinema--"protracted cinema," "the textual film," and "the monochrome film'--invite more sustained attention. In every type, though, duration is more palpable than motion, and Remes recommends that duration rather than motion be considered the 'indispensable component' of all cinema. Yet mindful that cinema is richly diverse and ever changing, he resists reducing it to a single essence. He calls instead for 'a theory of film... as flexible and expansive as cinema itself,' and cites, as supporters as well as foils, multiple artists, theorists, and philosophers. Among them are Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Tom Gunning, Steve Shaviro, Noel Carroll, Plato, Aristotle, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Deleuze. The result is a broad survey of aesthetic thought and practice that, while illuminating all of cinema, deftly transposes stillness from the margins of our attention to the center. -- Ira Jaffe, author of Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action A brilliant book... Highly recommended. Choice A worthwhile examination of a small but notable canon. Prefix Photo MagazineTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Filmic 2. Serious Immobilities: Andy Warhol, Erik Satie, and the Furniture Film 3. Stasis in Fluxus: Disappearing Music for Face and Protracted Cinema 4. Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film 5. Colored Blindness: Derek Jarman's Blue and the Monochrome Film 6. Conclusion: Static Cinema in the Digital Age Appendix 1. The Cinema of Stasis Appendix 2. Films Relevant to Understanding the Cinema of Stasis Notes Index
£67.20
Columbia University Press Motionless Pictures
Book SynopsisChallenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation.Trade ReviewAn ambitious undertaking, supported by admirably clear prose and an impressive range of research. -- Richard Dienst, Rutgers University Remes's concise writing eloquently recounts his sensitive attention to the screened films that he discusses. His subsequent, objectively based observations are often profound. His description and analysis of the implications of what he has seen in my own films is revealing even to me. Unique in its emphasis on the single frame as the core of cinema, this book is one of the best books ever written about 'experimental' film. -- Michael Snow Justin Remes' Motion(less) Pictures is written and argued so well that one can enjoy it and learn from it without much liking the cinema of stasis. Early on, the book grants us leave to view Warhol's Empire or Sleep in a state of high distraction, perhaps while munching panini and conversing with friends. We can even exit and take a stroll. Remes rightly links both films to Erik Satie's 'furniture music'--'music to which,' John Cage said, 'one did not have to listen' (Satie himself said that 'a man who has not heard Furniture music does not know happiness"). Other types of stasis cinema--"protracted cinema," "the textual film," and "the monochrome film'--invite more sustained attention. In every type, though, duration is more palpable than motion, and Remes recommends that duration rather than motion be considered the 'indispensable component' of all cinema. Yet mindful that cinema is richly diverse and ever changing, he resists reducing it to a single essence. He calls instead for 'a theory of film... as flexible and expansive as cinema itself,' and cites, as supporters as well as foils, multiple artists, theorists, and philosophers. Among them are Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Tom Gunning, Steve Shaviro, Noel Carroll, Plato, Aristotle, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Deleuze. The result is a broad survey of aesthetic thought and practice that, while illuminating all of cinema, deftly transposes stillness from the margins of our attention to the center. -- Ira Jaffe, author of Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action A brilliant book... Highly recommended. Choice A worthwhile examination of a small but notable canon. Prefix Photo MagazineTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Filmic 2. Serious Immobilities: Andy Warhol, Erik Satie, and the Furniture Film 3. Stasis in Fluxus: Disappearing Music for Face and Protracted Cinema 4. Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film 5. Colored Blindness: Derek Jarman's Blue and the Monochrome Film 6. Conclusion: Static Cinema in the Digital Age Appendix 1. The Cinema of Stasis Appendix 2. Films Relevant to Understanding the Cinema of Stasis Notes Index
£999.99
Columbia University Press The Struggle for Form
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewHighly recommended. CHOICE The variety of voices contained within this slim volume celebrates the different kinds of discourse generated by and about avant-garde filmmakers. The result is a collection as formally experimental as many of the films in question-one that makes for exuberant reading. Slavic and East European JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction 1. The Themersons and the Polish Avant-Garde: Warsaw-Paris-London, by A. L. Rees 2. 'The Inexpressible Unearthly Beauty of the Cinematograph': The Impact of Polish Futurism on the First Polish Avant-Garde Films, by Kamila Kuc Excerpts from the 'Archives' of the Polish Avant-Garde 3. The Search for a 'More Spacious Form': Experimental Trends in Polish Documentary (1945-1989), by Mikolaj Jazdon 4. Avant-Garde and the Thaw: Experimentation in Polish Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, by Marcin Gizycki 5. Avant-Garde Exploits: The Cultural Highs and Lows of Polish Emigre Cinema, by Jonathan L. Owen 6. The Mechanical Imagination-Creativity of Machines: Film Form Workshop 1970-1977, by Ryszard Kluszczynski 7. The 1980s: From Specificity to the New Tradition-Avant-Garde Film and Video Art in Poland, by Ryszard Kluszczynski Film Form Workshop Statements 8. A Rebellion a la Polonaise, by Mateusz Werner Bibliography Filmography Index of Names
£70.40
Columbia University Press The Subject of Torture
Book SynopsisShowcases film and television studies’ singular ability to expose and potentially disable the fantasies that sustain torture and the regimes that deploy itTrade ReviewOne of the clearest signs of the ethical regression that characterizes the last decade is the changed status of torture in public discourse: no longer a taboo, something that is to be done in secret, torture is today a topic of 'rational' legal, ethical, and medical debates. This renormalization of torture would not have been possible without movies and television series that gradually rendered it acceptable. This is why Hilary Neroni's The Subject of Torture reaches well beyond cultural studies and provides a courageous examination of the ongoing moral catastrophe-everyone who cares about our ethical predicament should read it. The book is not only very readable and simultaneously a work of highest academic standards, it is much more: an alarm call that should awaken us all from our moral slumber. -- Slavoj Zizek, author of Less Than Nothing and The Year of Dreaming Dangerously and coauthor of What Does Europe Want? Wonderfully astute, politically timely, and deeply engaging. Hilary Neroni undertakes the pressing task of destroying the logic that sustains contemporary justifications for torture. The Subject of Torture is truly pathbreaking in its lucid engagement with the torture debate from a psychoanalytic perspective. -- Jennifer Friedlander, Pomona College The suffering, tremulous body examined in this excellent book is not that of the torture victim, who must pay in the flesh for our access to truth, but that of the torturer, who conceals his obscene pleasure behind euphemisms such as 'enhanced interrogation' and rationalizations based on false scenarios of imminent threat. Hilary Neroni's expert and detailed readings of the Abu Ghraib photographs, documentary films about the events leading up to them, and the new genre of 'torture porn' that appeared in their wake execute a fine twist, one that completely revises the course of reflections on the body at stake in biopolitics. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University Neroni deftly illuminates the conspicuous uptick of post-9/11 media representations of torture by adopting the neglected but indispensable viewpoint of unconscious motives and distorting fantasies. A valuable contribution. -- Richard Boothby, Loyola University MarylandTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs 1. Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject 2. The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films 3. Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in Hostel and Saw 4. 24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy 5. The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland 6. Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture Notes Index
£22.50
Columbia University Press The Gangster Film
Book SynopsisExamines the gangster film in its historical context with an emphasis on the ways the image of the gangster has adapted and changedTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. A Silent Era: From Gangs to Gangsters 2. The Racketeer and the Outlaw: Gangster Archetypes of the 1930s 3. Murder, Incorporated: Post-war Developments in the Gangster Film 4. La Famiglia: Coppola, Scorsese, and Gangster Ethnicity Conclusion Filmography Bibliography Index
£16.19
Columbia University Press The Cinema of Hal Hartley
Book SynopsisFeaturing new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley’s work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.Trade ReviewHal Hartley has been at work for a quarter of a century and his films still seem like fresh discoveries. Independent, individualistic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable, he defies all known pigeonholes, and this balanced, wide-ranging collection marks a welcome new stage in the exploration of his work. -- David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America This first collection to showcase the curiously under-celebrated independent filmmaker reminds us why Hartley and his films matter. Rich in original insights about conditions of authorship into the crowdfunding era, textuality and intertextuality, film style, critical reception, the local in location production, indie genericity, performance, and more across the past 25 years, this book brings Hartley's vibrant work back to the fore of film studies. -- Mark Gallagher, University of NottinghamTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Hal Hartley: A Quality of Attention, by Steven Rybin 1. Up Close and Impersonal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition, by David Bordwell 2. 'Young. Middle-Class. College-Educated. Unskilled.': Hal Hartley in 1991, by Mark L. Berrettini 3. 'Some Things Shouldn't Be Fixed': Frameworks of Critical Reception and the Early Career of Hal Hartley, by Jason Davids Scott 4. The Locality of Hal Hartley: The Aesthetics and Business of Smallness, by Steven Rawle 5. Hal Hartley's Romantic Comedy, by Sebastian Manley 6. A New Man: The Logic of the Break in Hal Hartley's Amateur, by Daniel Varndell 7. Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film, by Steven Rybin 8. Poiesis and Media in The Book of Life and No Such Thing, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 9. Bodies, Space and Theatre in The Unbelievable Truth (and its American Precursors), by Zachary Tavlin 10. Parker Posey as Hal Hartley's 'Captive Actress', by Jennifer O'Meara 11. The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy, by Steven Rybin Filmography Bibliography Index
£56.00
Columbia University Press The Cinema of Hal Hartley
Book SynopsisFeaturing new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley’s work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.Trade ReviewHal Hartley has been at work for a quarter of a century and his films still seem like fresh discoveries. Independent, individualistic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable, he defies all known pigeonholes, and this balanced, wide-ranging collection marks a welcome new stage in the exploration of his work. -- David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America This first collection to showcase the curiously under-celebrated independent filmmaker reminds us why Hartley and his films matter. Rich in original insights about conditions of authorship into the crowdfunding era, textuality and intertextuality, film style, critical reception, the local in location production, indie genericity, performance, and more across the past 25 years, this book brings Hartley's vibrant work back to the fore of film studies. -- Mark Gallagher, University of NottinghamTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Hal Hartley: A Quality of Attention, by Steven Rybin 1. Up Close and Impersonal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition, by David Bordwell 2. 'Young. Middle-Class. College-Educated. Unskilled.': Hal Hartley in 1991, by Mark L. Berrettini 3. 'Some Things Shouldn't Be Fixed': Frameworks of Critical Reception and the Early Career of Hal Hartley, by Jason Davids Scott 4. The Locality of Hal Hartley: The Aesthetics and Business of Smallness, by Steven Rawle 5. Hal Hartley's Romantic Comedy, by Sebastian Manley 6. A New Man: The Logic of the Break in Hal Hartley's Amateur, by Daniel Varndell 7. Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film, by Steven Rybin 8. Poiesis and Media in The Book of Life and No Such Thing, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 9. Bodies, Space and Theatre in The Unbelievable Truth (and its American Precursors), by Zachary Tavlin 10. Parker Posey as Hal Hartley's 'Captive Actress', by Jennifer O'Meara 11. The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy, by Steven Rybin Filmography Bibliography Index
£19.80
Columbia University Press The Essay Film Dialogue Politics Utopia
Book SynopsisThe essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. This volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema.Trade ReviewThe long-awaited news flash foregrounded by The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia is that cinema studies has at last parted ways with moldy, genre-based epistemologies. The idea of film-thinking as a philosophia sui generis that opposes formalistic classifications has been there from the get-go-in the hearts and minds of groundbreaking film-heretics. Here we are finally offered a thoroughly researched and carefully thought-out contemplation of the primordial desires and wishful prospects of the art of filmmaking, a distinct form of human expression. This book heralds an advanced phase of maturation for cinema studies. Its straightforward willingness to destabilize its own epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions, generating authentic terms-of-being, perfectly matches the true spiritual and intellectual scope of the essay film as we know it-and, more critically, as we can never truly know its inherently unknowable stratum. The clarity of this book's statement provides a firm foundation for future revelations the essay film holds in store. -- Dan Geva, Haifa University, and documentary filmmaker This exciting collection promises to be an important milestone for ongoing debates and discussions about the emergent medium of interactive and nonlinear documentary. -- Matt Soar, Concordia UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades Part I: The Essay Film as Dialogue 1. Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative, by Timothy Corrigan 2. Essaying the Forms of Popular Cinema: Godard, Farocki and the Principle of Shot/Countershot, by Rick Warner 3. The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus, from Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) to Claire Denis (2004), by Martine Beugnet 4. Cinema-verite and Kino-pravda: Rouch, Vertov, and the Essay Form, by Caroline Eades and Elizabeth A. Papazian Part II: The Essay Film as Politics 5. Notes for a Revolution: Pasolini's Postcolonial Essay Films, by Luca Caminati 6. Chris Marker's Description of a Struggle and the Limits of the Essay Film, by Eric Zakim 7. A Woman with a Movie Camera: Chantal Akerman's Essay Films, by Anne Eakin Moss 8. 'What Does It Mean Today to Be a Communist?': Nanni Moretti's Palombella rossa and La cosa as Essay Films, by Mauro Resmini Part III: The Essay Film as Utopia 9. Mohamed Soueid's Cinema of Immanence, by Laura U. Marks 10. Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian's Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga, by Ernesto Livon-Grosman 11. American Essays in How to Build a Home: Thoreau, Mekas, Proenneke, by Oliver Gaycken 12. 'to speak, to hold, to live by the image': Notes in the Margins of the New Videographic Tendency, by Luka Arsenjuk Afterword: The Idea of Essay Film, by Laura Rascaroli Index
£56.00
Columbia University Press Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes
Book SynopsisIn Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, Maggie Hennefeld examines little-known silent films that, she argues, provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. Hennefeld shows how slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language and experimentation.Trade ReviewNamed Best Silent Film Book of 2018 * Silent London *An original and significant book, solidly grounded in comic theory. * Film Quarterly *Hennefeld's work will delightfully haunt, but intelligently entertain. Highly recommended. * Choice *Hennefeld’s book concludes with a call to “make visible the forgotten histories of feminist social struggle and of women’s cultural visibility”. Rather neatly, Specters of Slapstick offers an engrossing and energising example of that very work. -- Pamela Hutchinson * Sight & Sound *Delivers on its ambitious commitment to ‘find a third way, an alternative to the impasses of the killjoy’s refusal and the unruly woman’s disruption.’ * Screen *Hennefeld’s book represents a significant contribution to the field in its refreshing methodological combination of cultural analysis and feminist historiography. * NECSUS *Invite[s] us to rethink our preconceptions about the place of women’s comic performances in film history, to imagine the effects of spectator laughter a century ago, and to examine the sources of our own delight in those performances. * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *The depth of Hennefeld’s analysis, the breadth of her research, the many cinematic examples she uses to illustrate her points, and the compelling nature of her arguments make the book a moving tribute to these women and an engaging andinformative read. * Women's Studies *This book’s animated tone and savvy provocations [cause readers] to think about women’s silent-era comedy in new, dynamic, and surprising ways...In addition, Specters of Slapstick offers a significant new critical approach to women’s comedy for scholarship. * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *Maggie Hennefeld's comprehensive and in-depth study of female comedians in the silent film era...is an important intervention in the field of comedy studies as well as gender studies...a must read for students and scholars interested in gender, in film history, and in comedy. * Early Popular Visual Culture *Hennefeld’s thoughtful reflections on theories of humor flesh out not only her discussions of slapstick but also the fraught relation between what makes us laugh and feminism. * Studies in American Humor *Hennefeld’s thoughtful, comprehensive study, which does much to illuminate an overlooked archive of films, demonstrates clearly that these texts are themselves part of an 'undead past' that haunts the development of film throughout the 20th century and resonates with conventions of film comedy today. -- Rebecca Burditt * Film and History *Simultaneously hilarious and seriously incisive, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes is a dazzling demonstration of the way in which the female body in early film comedy is the privileged site for the display of the cinema’s defamiliarization of the world. Hennefeld skillfully links the centrality of women in comic films of mobility and catastrophe to anxieties surrounding their rapidly changing social position. This is a marvelous analysis. -- Mary Ann Doane, University of California, BerkeleyHennefeld does a remarkable job of framing the politics of early film comedy in relation to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of laughter. This is a far-reaching study that will change our understanding of the history of early film slapstick and gender. -- Robert J. King, Columbia UniversityHennefeld draws on hundreds of films to reveal the radical interest and specificity of the silent film comediennes who humorously ruptured themselves while negotiating the shifting place of women’s bodies in cinema’s early years. Forging a rigorous third way between “killjoy refusal” and “unruly disruption” using a “Laughing Methodology” to counter misogynist violence, this brilliant book illuminates the vital link between feminist laughter and the slow-burn pleasure of feminist thought. -- Karen Redrobe, University of PennsylvaniaSpecters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes has been quite a revelation to me. -- Scott AdlerbergWill set new agendas in our understanding of comic theory, early film history, feminist performances, and the sources of laughter. -- Tom Gunning * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Early Film Combustion1. Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe 2. Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography Part II. Transitional Film Metamorphosis3. Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium 4. The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph Versus French Pathé-Freres 5. D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling Part III. Feminist Slapstick Politics6. Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics 7. Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence Postscript: Haunted Laughter at Late Comediennes Annotated Filmography Notes Bibliography Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press Melodrama Unbound Across History Media and
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
£101.70
Columbia University Press Melodrama Unbound
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
£29.75
Columbia University Press The Psycho Records
Book SynopsisThe 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
£19.80
Columbia University Press Danger Diabolik
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
£12.34
Columbia University Press Avengers Assemble
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
£70.40
Columbia University Press Herstories on Screen
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
£64.00
Columbia University Press Herstories on Screen Feminist Subversions of
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
£22.50
Columbia University Press Play Time Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism Film
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
£71.25
Columbia University Press Art Cinema and Indias Forgotten Futures
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
£93.60
Columbia University Press Art Cinema and Indias Forgotten Futures
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
£27.00
Columbia University Press Dr. No
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
£73.60
Columbia University Press Horror Film and Otherness
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
£93.60
Columbia University Press Horror Film and Otherness
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
£27.00
Columbia University Press James Bond Will Return Critical Perspectives on
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
£93.60
Columbia University Press James Bond Will Return
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
£27.00
University of Illinois Press Alice in Pornoland
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
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Alice in Pornoland
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
£17.99
Indiana University Press Descended from Hercules
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
£19.94
Yale University Press Hollywood Westerns and American Myth
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
£30.00
Yale University Press Murder and the Movies
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
£18.04
WW Norton & Co American Film
Book SynopsisA closer look at the captivating history of American cinema.
£76.00
University of California Press The First True Hitchcock
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
£63.90
University of California Press Dreams of Flight
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
£64.00
University of California Press New Arctic Cinemas
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
£64.00
University of California Press New Arctic Cinemas
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
£22.50
University of California Press Border Witness Reimagining the USMexico
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
£64.00
University of California Press Border Witness
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
£22.50
Baker Publishing Group Cinematic Faith
Book SynopsisAn expert on American culture explores how Christians can most profitably and critically hear, read, and view popular culture through the lens of film.Table of ContentsContents List of Movie Musings 1. Why a Christian Approach? 2. Culture Communicates: Biblical Principles for a Peculiar Means of Expression 3. Moviemaking Magic: Poetic Portals and the Power of Perspective 4. Creating an Illusion of Reality: Film Form and Content 5. Connecting the Dots: Style and Meaning 6. Redemption American-Style: The Melodramatic Vision 7. The Yellow Brick Road to Self-Realization: Classical Hollywood Cinema 8. A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do: American Action-Adventure Movies 9. Stop Taking My Hand! Gender and Mainstream Hollywood Epilogue Indexes
£20.69
University of Nebraska Press PostWesterns
Book SynopsisDuring the post-World War II period, the Western, like America’s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply “maintaining its empty frame.” Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films—including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men—reconfigures our notions of region Trade Review"Readers of western history and literature and, of course, fans of the Western will find Campbell's insights and interpretations a compelling reason to revisit the post-Westerns he analyzes so well."—Leonard Engel, Western Historical Quarterly"This is the work of a mature, well-informed scholar very much at the top of his game."—James F. Scott, Western American Literature“Post-Westerns is distinguished by its theoretical sophistication, its brilliant close readings of the form and content of a diversity of modern and contemporary films, and its close meditation on the potential politics associated with such films [as they] address the intersection of memory, identity, and history.”—Stephen Tatum, author of In the Remington MomentTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Big Hats, Horses, and Dust: The Visible and Invisible West1. Dead Westerns: The Posthumous and the Post-Western2. Mourning in America: The Lusty Men (1952) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1954)3. "You and Your God's Country": The Misfits (1961)4. "We Keep Heading West": Dennis Hopper and the Post-Western5. Exile and Dislocation in the Urban Post-Western: The Exiles (1961) and Fat City (1972)6. Post-Western Genealogies: John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) and Silver City (2004)7. "Opened from the Inside Out": Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking (2005)8. The Idioms of Living: Donna Deitch and Allison Anders9. The Schizo-West: Down in the Valley (2005)10. Spook Country: The Pensive West of No Country for Old Men (2007)Conclusion: Is There a Politics of the Post-Western?NotesIndex
£999.99
LSU Press Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film
Book Synopsis
£35.06
Louisiana State University Press Writing History with Lightning
Book SynopsisBalancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation's past.
£39.91
Louisiana State University Press Martial Culture Silver Screen
Book SynopsisAnalyses war movies for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape US national identity. The volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition.
£28.45
Rutgers University Press The Superhero Symbol Media Culture and Politics
Book SynopsisBringing together superhero scholars from a range of disciplines, alongside key industry figures, The Superhero Symbol provides fresh perspectives on how characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and Wonder Woman have engaged with media, culture, and politics, to become the “everlasting” symbols to which a young Bruce Wayne once aspired.Trade Review"With contributions by an imposing list of scholars, The Superhero Symbol offers readers enlightening essays on the politics of the superhero, on the commercial branding, nationalism and national identity, on sexuality and sexual identity, and on the culture and mythology of the superhero; in short, everything about the superhero that you never asked because it never even occurred to you to ask." -- Trina Robbins * author of Pretty in Ink, North American Women Cartoonists 1896 - 2013 *"This extraordinary league of transmedial comics scholars pull off the impossible: the definitive tome on how global industries create and planetary consumers actively engage with the superhero symbol. The tack-sharp cross-disciplinary scholarship along with deep-probe interviews with industry titans take us on a wild journey through time and space to forcefully show how those costume-clad full-chested insignias and sky-beamed icons are much more than expressions of fan-boy wish fulfilment fantasies. Provocative. Field defining. A must read!" -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of the Eisner Award winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"Throughout the essays cross-refer, giving the collection considerable unity. Combining fundamental concerns in superhero studies with a variety of thought-provoking special topics, and studded with color illustrations, this is a worthwhile collection for both knowledgeable scholars and newcomers to superhero studies. Recommended." * Choice *"There is a lot of ground covered in this book, much of which will make you think beyond your normal perimeters and that’s never a bad thing and makes for an interesting book." * SFcrowsnest *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: “Everlasting” Symbols: Unmasking superheroes and their shifting symbolic function, Liam BurkeSection 1: Superheroes, Politics, and Civic Engagement 1. “What Else Can You Do With Them?”: Superheroes and the Civic ImaginationHenry Jenkins 2. “America Is A Piece of Trash”: Captain America, Patriotism, Nationalism, and FascismNeal Curtis 3. “This Land is Mine!” Understanding the Function of SupervillainsJason Bainbridge Interview 1: Comics artist, writer, and "herstorian" Trina Robbins Section 2: The Superhero as a Brand 4. The Secret Commercial Identity of Superheroes: Protecting the Superhero SymbolMitchell Adams 5. Siegel and Shuster as Brand NameIan Gordon 6. Practicing Superhuman Law: Creative License, Industrial Identity, and Spider-Man’s HomecomingTara Lomax 7. The sound of the cinematic superheroDan Golding Interview 2: Former President of DC Entertainment Diane Nelson Section 3: Becoming the Superhero 8. Arkham Knave: The Joker in Game DesignSteven Conway 9. Being Super, Becoming Heroes: Dialogic Superhero Narratives in Cosplay CollectivesClaire Langsford 10. “From Pages to Pavements”: A Criminological Comparison Between Depictions of Crime Control in Superhero Narratives and “Real-Life Superhero” ActivityVladislav Iouchkov and John McGuire Interview 3: Dark Night: A True Batman Story writer Paul Dini Section 4: Superheroes and National Identity 11. Captain America, National Narratives, and the Queer Subversion of the RetconNaja Later 12. Apes, Angels, and Super Patriots: The Irish in Superhero ComicsLiam Burke 13. Missing in Action: The Late Development of the German-Speaking SuperheroPaul M. Malone 14. Chinese Milk for Iron Men: Superhero Coproductions and Technological AnxietyShan Mu Zhao 15. Age of the Atoman: Australian Superhero Comics and Cold War ModernityKevin Patrick Interview 4: Cleverman creator Ryan Griffen and star Hunter Page-Lochard Acknowledgements Notes on the Editors Notes on Contributors Index
£27.90
Rutgers University Press The Superhero Symbol Media Culture and Politics
Book SynopsisBringing together superhero scholars from a range of disciplines, alongside key industry figures, The Superhero Symbol provides fresh perspectives on how characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and Wonder Woman have engaged with media, culture, and politics, to become the “everlasting” symbols to which a young Bruce Wayne once aspired.Trade Review"With contributions by an imposing list of scholars, The Superhero Symbol offers readers enlightening essays on the politics of the superhero, on the commercial branding, nationalism and national identity, on sexuality and sexual identity, and on the culture and mythology of the superhero; in short, everything about the superhero that you never asked because it never even occurred to you to ask." -- Trina Robbins * author of Pretty in Ink, North American Women Cartoonists 1896 - 2013 *"This extraordinary league of transmedial comics scholars pull off the impossible: the definitive tome on how global industries create and planetary consumers actively engage with the superhero symbol. The tack-sharp cross-disciplinary scholarship along with deep-probe interviews with industry titans take us on a wild journey through time and space to forcefully show how those costume-clad full-chested insignias and sky-beamed icons are much more than expressions of fan-boy wish fulfilment fantasies. Provocative. Field defining. A must read!" -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of the Eisner Award winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"Throughout the essays cross-refer, giving the collection considerable unity. Combining fundamental concerns in superhero studies with a variety of thought-provoking special topics, and studded with color illustrations, this is a worthwhile collection for both knowledgeable scholars and newcomers to superhero studies. Recommended." * Choice *"There is a lot of ground covered in this book, much of which will make you think beyond your normal perimeters and that’s never a bad thing and makes for an interesting book." * SFcrowsnest *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: “Everlasting” Symbols: Unmasking superheroes and their shifting symbolic function, Liam BurkeSection 1: Superheroes, Politics, and Civic Engagement 1. “What Else Can You Do With Them?”: Superheroes and the Civic ImaginationHenry Jenkins 2. “America Is A Piece of Trash”: Captain America, Patriotism, Nationalism, and FascismNeal Curtis 3. “This Land is Mine!” Understanding the Function of SupervillainsJason Bainbridge Interview 1: Comics artist, writer, and "herstorian" Trina Robbins Section 2: The Superhero as a Brand 4. The Secret Commercial Identity of Superheroes: Protecting the Superhero SymbolMitchell Adams 5. Siegel and Shuster as Brand NameIan Gordon 6. Practicing Superhuman Law: Creative License, Industrial Identity, and Spider-Man’s HomecomingTara Lomax 7. The sound of the cinematic superheroDan Golding Interview 2: Former President of DC Entertainment Diane Nelson Section 3: Becoming the Superhero 8. Arkham Knave: The Joker in Game DesignSteven Conway 9. Being Super, Becoming Heroes: Dialogic Superhero Narratives in Cosplay CollectivesClaire Langsford 10. “From Pages to Pavements”: A Criminological Comparison Between Depictions of Crime Control in Superhero Narratives and “Real-Life Superhero” ActivityVladislav Iouchkov and John McGuire Interview 3: Dark Night: A True Batman Story writer Paul Dini Section 4: Superheroes and National Identity 11. Captain America, National Narratives, and the Queer Subversion of the RetconNaja Later 12. Apes, Angels, and Super Patriots: The Irish in Superhero ComicsLiam Burke 13. Missing in Action: The Late Development of the German-Speaking SuperheroPaul M. Malone 14. Chinese Milk for Iron Men: Superhero Coproductions and Technological AnxietyShan Mu Zhao 15. Age of the Atoman: Australian Superhero Comics and Cold War ModernityKevin Patrick Interview 4: Cleverman creator Ryan Griffen and star Hunter Page-Lochard Acknowledgements Notes on the Editors Notes on Contributors Index
£105.40
