Worüber der Filmzuschauer lacht und wie die Gagmaschine Kino funktioniert - das erklären Filmjournalist Manfred Hobsch und Programmkino-Pionier Franz Stadler im zweibändigen Handbuch "Die Kunst der Filmkomödie": kenntnisreich, aber subjektiv, geleitet von persönlichen Einschätzungen, dennoch orientiert an Fakten - und ohne mit übersteigerter Interpretationssucht den Spaß am Lesen verderben zu wollen.
This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history.
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.
The demise of the New German Cinema and the return of popular cinema since the 1990s have led to a renewed interest in the postwar years and the complicated relationship between East and West German cinema in particular.
The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book.
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.
In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape.
Simone de Beauvoir s work has not often been associated with film studies, which appears paradoxical when it is recognized that she was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered othering gaze.
Ingmar Bergman s films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe.
Existing critical traditions fail to fully account for the impact of Austrian director, and 2009 Cannes Palm d'Or winner, Michael Haneke s films, situated as they are between intellectual projects and popular entertainments.
The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave.
Drawing on a variety of popular films, including Avatar, Enter the Void, Fight Club, The Matrix, Speed Racer, X-Men and War of the Worlds, Supercinema studies the ways in which digital special effects and editing techniques require a new theoretical framework in order to be properly understood.
Analyzing complex social and political issues through their manifestations in popular culture, this book provides readers a strong foundational knowledge of the 1960s as a decade.
Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era.
The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference.
There has been a recent revival of interest in the work of Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk, a label-defying auteur and escape artist if there ever was one.
From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested.
Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked nostalgia to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc.
Like many Eastern European countries, Poland has seen a succession of divergent economic and political regimes over the last century, from prewar embedded liberalism, through the state socialism of the Soviet era, to the present neoliberal moment.
Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world.
For over five decades, the Newcastle-based Amber Film and Photography Collective has been a critical (if often unheralded) force within British documentary filmmaking, producing a variety of innovative works focused on working-class society.
Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common.
Until his early retirement at age 50, Hasse Ekman was one of the leading lights of Swedish cinema, an actor, writer, and director of prodigious talents.
