At the heart of this volume is the assertion that Sartrean existentialism, most prominent in the 1940s, particularly in France, is still relevant as a way of interpreting the world today.
Out of a film culture originally starved of funds have emerged rich and eclectic works by film-makers that are now achieving the international recognition that they deserve: Barbara Albert, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, and Stefan Ruzowitzky, to give four examples.
The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave.
The legacy of emigres in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature.
Jeffrey Richards examines the cultural, social, economic and technological circumstances that dictated the rise and decline of each successive cycle of Ancient World epics, from the silent film era, to the "e;golden age"e; of the 1950s, right up to the present day (Gladiator, 300, Rome).
Explores five case studies in Britain, the USSR, Germany and Italy to determine whether or not propaganda films reached the audiences at which they were targeted, and where they did, whether the films made the impact on those audiences that the propagandists had expected.
Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation is the first academic work to examine World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai Meisaku Gekijo, 1969-2009), which popularized the practice of adapting foreign children's books into long-running animated series and laid the groundwork for powerhouses like Studio Ghibli.
Two-time Academy Award winner Sir David Lean (19081991) was one of the most prominent directors of the twentieth century, responsible for the classics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
In this persuasive reversal of previous scholarship, Linda Schulte-Sasse takes an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, examining Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Broadway teemed with showgirls, but only the Ziegfeld Girl has survived in American popular culture-as a figure of legend, nostalgia, and camp.
In March 1980 Francis Coppola purchased the dilapidated Hollywood General Studios facility with the hope and dream of creating a radically new kind of studio, one that would revolutionize filmmaking, challenge the established studio machinery, and, most importantly, allow him to make movies as he wished.
Charting the intersection of technology and ideology, cultural production and social science, Fatimah Tobing Rony explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous peoples in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific.
In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain's national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era.
In the world of globalized media, provocative images trigger culture wars between traditionalists and cosmopolitans, between censors and defenders of free expression.
The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan.
Although Gilles Deleuze is one of France's most celebrated twentieth-century philosophers, his theories of cinema have largely been ignored by American scholars.
Since the 1970s film studies has been dominated by a basic paradigm-the concept of classical Hollywood cinema-that is, the protagonist-driven narrative, valued for the way it achieves closure by neatly answering all of the enigmas it raises.
Unashamed nudists, high-flying hopheads, brazen strippers, vicious vice lords, and high school girls who find themselves "e;in trouble"e; comprise the population of exploitation films.
Producing Bollywood offers an unprecedented look inside the social and professional worlds of the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry and explains how it became "e;Bollywood,"e; the global film phenomenon and potent symbol of India as a rising economic powerhouse.
Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms.
The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives-to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.
By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, the essays in Useful Cinema show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life.
Dark Borders connects anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir.
In his bestselling book The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (1965), Jess Stearn announced that, contrary to the assumptions of many Americans, most lesbians appeared indistinguishable from other women.
The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans' reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the "e;napalm girl,"e; news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the "e;apartment plot,"e; her term for stories in which the apartment functions as a central narrative device.
In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic.
Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures.
Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation.
In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video.
