While the impact that legendary actors and actresses have had on the development of the Hollywood film industry is well known, few have recognised the power of movie fans on shaping the industry.
Employing a range of approaches to examine how "monster-talk" pervades not only popular culture but also public policy through film and other media, this book is a "one-stop shop" of sorts for students and instructors employing various approaches and media in the study of "teratologies," or discourses of the monstrous.
French comedy films occupy a specific cultural space and are influenced by national traditions and shared cultural references, but at the same time they have always been difficult to classify.
A morbidly fascinating and articulate collection of essays, this book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the disturbing, frequently conspiratorial, speculations that arise whenever the car becomes the cause or the site of human death.
Hollywood Knights examines Hollywood Arthuriana as political nostalgia offered to American viewers during times of cultural crisis: the red scare of the 1950s, the breakdown of traditional authority in the 1960s and 1970s, the turn to the right in the 1980s and the redemption of masculine and national authority in the 1990s.
The essays within this collection explore the possibilities and potentialities of all three positions, presenting encounters that are, at times contradictory, at other times supportive, as well as complementary.
Returning to questions about ideology and subjectivity, Flisfeder argues that Slavoj Zizek's theory of film aims to re-politicize film studies and film theory, bringing cinema into the fold of twenty-first century politics.
This book explores German and European exile visual artists, designers and film practitioners in the United States such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Hans Richter, Peter Lorre, and Edgar Ulmer and examines how American artists including Walter Quirt, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell responded to the Europeanization of American culture.
Defining masochism as 'literary perversion', this book probes the productivity of masochistic aesthetics in the literature of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and contemporary queer films, analysing radical accounts of desire, gender, and sexuality.
The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context.
Despite the urgent need to develop understandings of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the light of the current situation in the Middle East, the role of violence and reconciliation in Palestinian and Israeli literature and film has received only brief treatment.
Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, this volume highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema.
For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination.
The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay explores how young adults in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay make sense of the 1970s socialist projects and the ensuing years of repression in their activism, film, and literature.
Examining post-1990s Indie cinema alongside more mainstream films, Brereton explores the emergence of smart independent sensibility and how films break the classic linear narratives that have defined Hollywood and its alternative 'art' cinema.
Despite incredible political upheavals and a minimal national history of film production, movies such as Come Back, Africa (1959), uDeliwe (1975), and Fools (1998) have taken on an iconic status within South African culture.
In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric.
Drawing on a variety of film semiotic theories, this book sheds light on works by mainland Chinese directors, Hong Kong New Wave directors, Taiwan New Cinema directors, and overseas Chinese directors.
This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture.
Sue Short examines how fairy tale tropes have been reworked in contemporary film, identifying familiar themes in a range of genres - including rom coms, crime films and horror - and noting key similarities and differences between the source narratives and their offspring.
Examines contemporary cinematic representations of Argentine masculinities, the social construction of gender, and the financing of domestic film production following Argentina's 1990 change to a neo-liberal economic model.
Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with "e;getting on"e; with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences.
An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event - itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.
A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television is a response to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media by investigating the changing relations between the aesthetics and ethics of judgment.
This book offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film which foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions and analyses three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala ; Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry ; and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There .
McGee studies historical representation in commodified, popular cinema as expressions of historical truths that more authentic histories usually miss and argues for the political and social significance of mass culture through the interpretation of four recent big-budget movies: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, and Inglourious Basterds .
Coates presents the face in film as a place where transformations begin, reflecting both the experience of modernity and such influential myths as that of Medusa.
Kord and Krimmer investigate the most common male types - cops, killers, fathers, cowboys, superheroes, spies, soldiers, rogues, lovers, and losers - by tracing changing concepts of masculinity in popular Hollywood blockbusters from 1992 to 2008 - the Clinton and Bush eras - against a backdrop of contemporary political events, social developments, and popular American myths.
Drawing on both theoretical and practical case studies, this collection moves from developing attempts at local media to case studies and on to cyber-examples.
