Classic film noir was Hollywood's 'dark cinema' of crime and corruption; a genre underpinned by a tone of existential cynicism which stripped bare the myth of the American Dream and offered a bleak, nightmarish vision of a fragmented society that rhymed with many of the social realities of forties and fifties America.
Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "e;inferential walks"e; through Italian culture in the first decades of this century.
After an unparalleled string of artistic and commercial triumphs in the 1950s and 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock hit a career lull with the disappointing Torn Curtain and the disastrous Topaz.
In this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and psychological extremes test the limits of the medium, pushing it into uncharted areas of discovery.
Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, who began his career under the censorship of Franco's regime, has forged an international reputation for his unique cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions.
Charles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.
Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears.
A collaborator with Warner Brothers and Paramount in the early days of sound film, the German film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is famous for his sense of ironic detachment and for the eroticism he infused into such comedies as So This Is Paris and Trouble in Paradise.
Jonas Mekas, one of the driving forces behind New York's alternative film culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, made for an unlikely counterculture hero: a Lithuanian emigr and fervent nationalist from an agrarian family, he had not grown up with either capitalist commercialism or the postwar rebellion against it.
In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past.
The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations.
This is the first major study in English of cine quinqui, a cycle of popular Spanish films from the late 1970s and early 1980s that starred real-life juvenile delinquents.
Jason Statham has risen from street seller through championship diving and modelling to become arguably the biggest British male film star of the twenty-first century.
This book investigates the new language of vulnerability that has emerged in feminist, queer and antiracist debates on media, taking a particular interest in the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of this language.
With Hollywood's Celebrity Playground, Howard Johns picks up where his Palm Springs Confidential left off-this time covering the other fabled desert resort towns that stretch from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
Seeking to rebuild the Russian film industry after its post-Soviet collapse, directors and producers sparked a revival of nationalist and patriotic sentiment by applying Hollywood techniques to themes drawn from Russian history.
Electric Sounds brings to vivid life an era when innovations in the production, recording, and transmission of sound revolutionized a number of different media, especially the radio, the phonograph, and the cinema.
A Queer Film Classic on the 2005 film debut by French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Valle (best known for Dallas Buyers Club and Wild), about a young gay man who struggles to find his sense of self amidst a "e;crazy"e; family of four brothers and a homophobic father who seeks to cure him.
In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the New Hollywood films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history.
Against the idea that comedy offers us a relief from the horrors of the real world, the German-Jewish-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch defended his masterpiece To Be or Not to Be, a comedy from 1942 about the concurrent Nazi occupation of Poland, with the claim that he had made up his mind "e;to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.
A motion picture chronicling the last adventures of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies was met with much bafflement upon its 2009 release.
A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 feature documentary on lesbian experience from the 1940s to the 1960s as seen through the lens of lesbian pulp fiction.
A Queer Film Classic on Canadian director Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, her quirky and hopeful first feature film which made its premiere at Cannes and won its Prix de la jeunesse.
A Queer Film Classic on two groundbreaking gay arthouse porn films from 1972, both examples of the growing liberalization of social attitudes toward sex and homosexuality in post-Stonewall America.
Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991) captures the energy, ambition, wit, and struggle of African-American and Latino participants in the 1980s New York drag ball scene.
Oscar Micheaux-the most prolific African American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period-has finally found his rightful place in film history.
Arguing that today's viewers move through a character's brain instead of looking through his or her eyes or mental landscape, this book approaches twenty-first-century globalized cinema through the concept of the "e;neuro-image.
Exceptionally popular during their time, the spectacular American action film serials of the 1910s featured exciting stunts, film tricks, and effects set against the background of modern technology, often starring resourceful female heroines who displayed traditionally male qualities such as endurance, strength, and authority.
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.
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.
Scripting Hitchcock explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie.
In this much needed examination of Mike Leigh, Sean O'Sullivan reclaims the British director as a practicing theorist--a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative dimensions.
Since the late 1980s, Hal Hartley has challenged standards of realist narrative cinema with daring narrative constructions, character development, and the creation of an unconventional visual world.
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.
