Jaws divides critics into those who dismiss it as infantile and sensational, and those who see the shark as freighted with political and psychosexual meaning.
Examining one of the earliest films made specifically for young audiences in US cinema, Rock around the Clock (1956), this book explores the exploitation production company that made the film and the ways it represented young people, especially in terms of their association with rock 'n' roll music and culture.
Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson.
Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is a film very much of its cinematic moment, combining the gritty realism of entrapment in the everyday with furtive dreams of escape.
Longlisted for the Kraszna-Krauz Foundation's Moving Image Book Award 2024In Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film, Nwonka offers the first dedicated analysis of Black British urban cinematic and televisual representation as a textual encounter with Blackness, masculinity and urban identity where the generic construction of images and narratives of Black urbanity is informed by the (un)knowable allure of Black urban Otherness.
Murray Pomerance's latest book explores an encyclopedic range of films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulty of conveying the experience of viewing cinema through words and the medium of text.
David Fincher's Seven (1995) follows two detectives, David Mills (Brad Pitt) and William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), as they investigate a series of gruesome murders.
This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world.
This monograph offers a cutting edge perspective on the study of Chinese film stars by advancing a "e;linguaphonic"e; model, moving away from a conceptualization of transnational Chinese stardom reliant on the centrality of either action or body.
Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility.
Auteurism - the idea that a director of a film is its source of meaning and should retain creative control over the finished product - has been one of film studies' most important paradigms ever since the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the adoption of the term auteur by Andrew Sarris.
Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way - not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media.
In this work, Edward Buscombe explores the ways in which 'Unforgiven', sticking surprisingly close to the original script by David Webb Peoples, moves between the requirements of the traditional Western, with its generic conventions of revenge and male bravado, and more modern sensitivities.
With high-profile Academy Award nominations and an increasing number of big-name actors eager to sign on to promising projects, independent films have been at the forefront in recent years like never before.
Runner-up of Best Edited Collection at the 2023 BAFTSS AwardsIn this book, editors Mario Slugan and Dani l Biltereyst present a theoretical reconceptualization of early cinema.
Featuring case studies, essays, and conversation pieces by scholars and practitioners, this volume explores how Indian cinematic adaptations outside the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of India are revitalizing the broader landscape of Shakespeare research, performance, and pedagogy.
Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don't Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected.
Stephen Mulhall presents a series of multiply interrelated essays which together make up an original study of selfhood (subjectivity or personal identity).
In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene.
Celebrated as Pixar's "e;Chief Creative Officer,"e; John Lasseter is a revolutionary figure in animation history and one of today's most important filmmakers.
Adapting Philosophy looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position.
