This book provides a toolkit for unconventional practice-a comprehensive list of unconventional story shapes and the meanings they create, with accompanying case studies, including: one-act structure; two-act structure; passive protagonists; untimely death of the protagonist, and more.
Arguing for the need to understand Gothic cinema as an aesthetic mode, this book explores its long history, from its transitional origins in phantasmagoria shows and the first 'trick' films to its postmodern fragmentation in the Gothic pastiches of Tim Burton.
This book argues that Halloween need not be the first nor the most influential youth slasher film for it to hold a special place in the history of youth cinema.
Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions.
When the first Fast & Furious film was released in June 2001, few predicted that it would be a box office hit, let alone the launchpad for a multi-billion-dollar franchise.
Using theories of national, transnational and world cinema, and genre theories and psychoanalysis as the basis of its argument, Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze argues that these understandings of Japanese horror films can be extended in new ways through the philosophy of Deleuze.
Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making.
Melvyn Stokes's study of the 1946 classic Gilda describes the film's production and reception history, as well as addressing Rita Hayworth's complex star persona and ethnicity identity; Gilda's status as a 'noir' film; and what the film had to say about relations between men and women in a world transformed by war.
Terrence Malick's four feature films have been celebrated by critics and adored as instant classics among film aficionados, but the body of critical literature devoted to them has remained surprisingly small in comparison to Malick's stature in the world of contemporary film.
The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, military films, medical dramas and art films.
Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to 'undo' or 'subvert' popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force.
Narratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are intentionally crafted devices which fulfil their story-telling function by manifesting the intentions of their makers.
Richard Roud, film writer and co-founder and director of the New York Film Festival, was one of the most influential film critics of the twentieth century.
Diasporas of Australian Cinema is the first volume to focus exclusively on diasporic hybridity and cultural diversity in Australian filmmaking over the past century.
In the Golden Era of moviemaking, motion picture studios "e;owned"e; Hollywood from the beat cops on up, meaning that the wild misadventures of top-earning movie stars were regularly swept out of the public eye.
How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower?
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.
Christian religious imagery and symbolism has a long history in American baseball cinema, from The Busher (1919) to Angels in the Outfield(1994) and present-day movies.
In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention.
This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle's bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland.
In November of 1942, the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, were killed when a Japanese torpedo sank their ship during the most ferocious naval engagement fought in the South Pacific.
Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanour, 'personality' and personal style.
Offering a fresh perspective on The General, arguably one of the most successful American films of the silent era, this insightful text analyses its initial critical reception and the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the film that made it difficult for critics to appreciate at the time, but led to its celebration by later generations.
From its creation in 1950, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the German Democratic Republic's Ministry for State Security closely monitored its nation's citizens.
The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service produced towards the end of the Second World War were one-reel films in which soldiers gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front.
In American cinema, films with multiple plots can be traced back to Grand Hotel in 1932, but the form was used only sporadically in subsequent decades.
