This in-depth study of Mexican film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu explores his role in moving Mexican filmmaking from a traditional nationalist agenda towards a more global focus.
'Like a pizza delivery driver who travels everywhere by moped, or a volcanologist who keeps turning the central heating up, I'm a film critic who loves going to the cinema.
Scandinavia's foremost living auteur and the catalyst of the Dogme95 movement, Lars von Trier is arguably world cinema's most confrontational and polarizing figure.
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.
The Marx Brothers are universally considered to be classic Hollywood's preeminent comedy team and Duck Soup is generally regarded as their quintessential film.
At a time when technological advances are transforming cultures and supporting new automated military operations, action films engage the senses and, in doing so, allow viewers to embody combat roles.
Of interest to historians, classicists, media and digital theorists, literary scholars, museologists, and archivists, Media, Memory, and the First World War is a comparative study that shows how the dominant mode of communication in a popular culture - from oral traditions to digital media - shapes the structure of memory within that culture.
Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms.
Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era.
With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema.
While sexually explicit writing and art have been around for millennia, pornography-as an aesthetic, moral, and juridical category-is a modern invention.
Midnight Cowboy - the story of a small-town stud's attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York - is an indisputably iconic film.
In Women's Cinema, World Cinema, Patricia White explores the dynamic intersection of feminism and film in the twenty-first century by highlighting the work of a new generation of women directors from around the world: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Nadine Labaki, Zero Chou, Jasmila Zbanic, and Claudia Llosa, among others.
This book explores the formal and thematic conventions of crime film, the contexts in which these have flourished and their links with the social issues of a globalized world.
Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain examines queer theory as it has emerged in the past three decades and discusses how Brokeback Mountain can be understood through the terms of this field of scholarship and activism.
John Schlesinger's 1969 drama, Midnight Cowboy, follows the story of na ve would-be hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and ailing con man Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), set against the gritty backdrop of New York City in the late 1960s.
Appreciating Melodrama: Theory and Practice in Indian Cinema and Television seeks to identify and appreciate the continual influence of the ancient Sanskrit drama treatise, the Natyashastra, and its theory of aesthetics, the rasa theory, on the unique narrative attributes of Indian cinema.
Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings.
Taking as its starting point the notion of photocinema - or the interplay of the still and moving image - the photographs, interviews, and critical essays in this volume explore the ways in which the two media converge and diverge, expanding the boundaries of each in interesting and unexpected ways.
The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the 'tinker', a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland.
An effective filmmaker needs to have a good understanding of how film language works, and more importantly, how to actively influence an audience's thoughts and feelings and guide their gaze around the screen.
A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change.
This collection examines literature and film studies from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in Taiwan and Korea, and highlights the similarities and differences of Taiwanese and Korean popular culture by focusing on the representation of gender, genre, state regulation, and spectatorship.
Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification.
From a decidedly inauspicious start as a low-rated television series in the 1960s that was cancelled after three seasons, Star Trek has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry of spin-off series, feature films and merchandise.
Historically, Indian cinema has positioned women at the intersection of tradition and a more evolving culture, portraying contradictory attitudes which affect women's roles in public and private spheres.
This book is an engaging and comprehensive exploration that delves into the possibility of artificial intelligence developing self-awareness, the conditions under which it may occur, and the potential behaviours it may exhibit once self-aware.
