Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades.
Best known to international audiences for its carnivalesque irreverence and recent gangster blockbusters, Brazilian cinema is gaining prominence with critics, at global film festivals and on DVD shelves.
In the era of Hollywood now considered its Golden Age, there was no shortage of hard-luck stories--movie stars succumbed to mental illness, addiction, accidents, suicide, early death and more.
A Special Relationship provides not only a historical overview of the British in Hollywood, but also a detailed study of the contributions made by American individuals and companies to British cinema from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards.
In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race.
Recent years have seen an increased interest in issues of national identity and representation, and cinema is a major medium where strands and layers of representational systems come together in cross-cultural dialogues.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023The Myth of Harm engages and analyses controversies generated by horror that examines some of the most high-profile media debates around the issue of whether or not horror texts corrupt children.
The Contemporary American Survival Film investigates and breaks down the contemporary American Survival Film (from Cast Away onwards), focusing on film, television, literature and video games.
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.
Susan Smith's treatment of the works of the most subtle of all film-makers analyses the key elements of suspense, humour and tone across the whole of the director's career.
This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.
In den 1960er und 1970er Jahren entstanden in Deutschland und Europa Protestbewegungen, die in ihrer Aufmüpfigkeit das gesellschaftliche Klima bestimmten und neue Themen besetzten.
Even as actresses become increasingly marginalized by Hollywood, French cinema is witnessing an explosion of female talent-a Golden Age unlike anything the world has seen since the days of Stanwyck, Hepburn, Davis, and Garbo.
Explores the history of Batgirl from her groundbreaking comics debut to her disappointing live-action appearances and beyond in an "e;appealing, comprehensive, and enjoyable tour of Batgirl's many iterations.
In recent years, Chinese film has garnered worldwide attention, and this interdisciplinary collection investigates how new technologies, changing production constraints, and shifting viewing practices have shaped perceptions of Chinese screen cultures.
Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” provocatively examines the first Canadian film to explore pornography’s role in society from a feminist perspective.
Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media offers a new approach to understanding the networked capacity of documentary media to create public commons areas, crafting connections between unlikely interlocutors.
Offering portraits of such key figures as the Lumiere brothers, Georges Melies, Charles Pathe and Leon Gaumont, he looks at the early pioneers who transformed a fairground novelty into a global industry.
Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiri Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays.
The term "e;queer cinema"e; is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality.
This is a definitive study of films that have been built around the themes of love, death, and the afterlife-films about lovers who meet again (and love again) in heaven, via reincarnation, or through other kinds of after-death encounters.
Famous co-stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, have made screwball and romantic comedies a big seller at the box office.
Ghost in the Well is the first study to provide a full history of the horror genre in Japanese cinema, from the silent era to Classical period movies such as Nakagawa Nobuo's Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (1959) to the contemporary global popularity of J-horror pictures like the Ring and Ju-on franchises.
When representing the Holocaust, the slightest hint of narrative embellishment strikes contemporary audiences as somehow a violation against those who suffered under the Nazis.
';Street provides a crucial critical and cultural service by not only studying Eastwood's individual films in sharp detail but also by providing a close and serious analysis of the cultural and historic times of the films.
Regarding the real develops an original approach to documentary film, focusing on its aesthetic relations to visual arts such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting and architecture.
This short textbook provides an introduction to queer theory, exploring its key genealogies and terms as well as its application across various academic disciplines and to contemporary life more generally.
Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.
During a period of heightened global concerns about the movement of immigrants and refugees across borders, Migrant Anxieties explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country's shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades.
