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.
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.
Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting.
Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of innovation in the production of transmedia works that bridge narrative forms.
With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage.
The organic is by now a venerable concept within aesthetics, architecture, and art history, but what might such a term mean within the spatialities and temporalities of film?
First published in 2002, Marek Haltof s seminal volume was the first comprehensive English-language study of Polish cinema, providing a much-needed survey of one of Europe s most distinguished yet unjustly neglected film cultures.
A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice.
American director Philip Kaufman is hard to pin down: a visual stylist who is truly literate, a San Franciscan who often makes European films, he is an accessible storyteller with a sophisticated touch.
The first major English-language study of Jarmusch At a time when gimmicky, action-driven blockbusters ruled Hollywood, Jim Jarmusch spearheaded a boom in independent cinema by making now-classic low-budget films like Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train.
For well over a decade, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have produced highly original and ethically charged films that immerse their audiences in an intense and embodied viewing experience.
This invaluable resource by one of the world's leading experts in French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th century and its place and function in French society.
In Mock Classicism Nilo Couret presents an alternate history of Latin American cinema that traces the popularity and cultural significance of film comedies as responses to modernization and the forerunners to a more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s.
Introduced by a comprehensive account of the factors governing the adaptation of stage plays and musicals in Hollywood from the early 1910s to the mid-to-late 1950s, Screening the Stage consists of a series of chapter-length studies of feature-length films, the plays and musicals on which they were based, and their remakes where pertinent.
The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers.
The Star Wars films continue to revolutionize science fiction, creating new standards for cinematographic excellence, and permeating popular culture around the world.
The films of Quentin Tarantino are ripe for philosophical speculation, raising compelling questions about justice and ethics, violence and aggression, the nature of causality, and the flow of time.
With films ranging from High Noon to Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer (19132001) was one of the most successful and prolific director-producers of his day.
The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's spectacular film about the death of Jesus, has quickly become one of the most widely-viewed movies of all timeand one of the most fiercely vilified.
