Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror, as well as his influence on modern horror and slasher movies.
Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical Hollywood cinema.
Top Hat is the first volume to spotlight this classic Hollywood film, probing the musical genre, notions of romance and subjectivity, as well as the contested relations between the sexes.
This book shows that screens don't just distribute the visible and the invisible, but have always mediated our body's relationships with the physical and anthropological-cultural environment.
Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Sidney Lumet, and Paul Mazursky, all sons of East European Jews, remain among the most prominent contemporary American film directors.
From the late 1940s to the early '60s, Marilyn Monroe appeared in barely thirty movies, beginning with bit parts and moving on into supporting roles for such films as The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, and Clash by Night.
Adopting and developing a 'cultural politics' approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly influence how we understand power relations.
This book examines postmodern theology and how it relates to the cinematic style of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Bunuel.
The Western tradition, with its well-worn tropes, readily identifiable characters, iconic landscapes, and evocative soundtracks, is not limited to the United States.
Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology.
This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries.
An authoritative guide to the action-packed film genre With 24 incisive, cutting-edge contributions from esteemed scholars and critics, A Companion to the Action Filmprovides an authoritative and in-depth guide to this internationally popular and wide-ranging genre.
A New History of Documentary Film, Second Edition offers a much-needed resource, considering the very rapid changes taking place within documentary media.
Eric Ames draws on original archival research to provide fresh perspectives on Werner Herzog's breakthrough 1972 film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes), which portrays an expedition by Spanish conquistadors led by Aguirre (played by Klaus Kinski) to find the legendary city of El Dorado.
Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film traces the origins of the 1970s family horror subgenre to certain aspects of American culture and classical Hollywood cinema.
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.
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.
This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where and how such strategies operate.
This innovative study finds that, through his unique representation of violence, Argentine director Pablo Trapero has established himself as one of the 21st century's distinctly political filmmakers.
Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer Manoel de Oliveira's eighty-five year career made him a filmmaking icon and a cultural giant in his native Portugal.
The Dimensions of Difference departs from traditional takes on feminist film criticism, and in particular from the psychoanalytical focus on the gaze, to examine the question of sexual difference through three axes: space, time, and bodies.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction.
This collection addresses the significant cultural phenomenon of the 'zombie renaissance' - the growing importance of zombie texts and zombie cultural practices in popular culture.
Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema.
Scholars have consistently applied psychoanalytic models to representations of gender in early teen slasher films such as Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) in order to claim that these were formulaic, excessively violent exploitation films, fashioned to satisfy the misogynist fantasies of teenage boys and grind house patrons.
The Dimensions of Difference departs from traditional takes on feminist film criticism, and in particular from the psychoanalytical focus on the gaze, to examine the question of sexual difference through three axes: space, time, and bodies.
Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region.
This volume bridges the divide between film and media studies scholarship by exploring audience expectations of film and TV genre in the age of digital streaming, using qualitative thematic and quantitative data-driven analyses.
Director and producer Tim Burton impresses audiences with stunning visuals, sinister fantasy worlds, and characters whose personalities are strange and yet familiar.
Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe.
