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.
Spatialities: The Geographies of Art and Architecture draws on a distinguished panel of artists, cultural theorists, architects, and geographers to offer a nuanced conceptual framework for understanding the ever-evolving spatial orderings that materially constitute our world.
James Phillips's Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle reappraises the cinematic collaboration between the Austrian-American filmmaker Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969) and the German-American actor Marlene Dietrich (1901-92).
British cinema has been around from the very birth of motion pictures, from black-and-white to color, from talkies to sound, and now 3D, it has been making a major contribution to world cinema.
First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound.
Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force.
Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past.
This study of Kevin Smith's debut film breaks new ground by exploring how Clerks sits at the intersection of political and cultural trends relevant to alternative youth cultures in the early 1990s.
The US government launched the European Recovery Programme, otherwise known as the 'Marshall Plan', in order to save war-torn Europe from collapse in 1948.
In 1984 Joel and Ethan Coen burst onto the art-house film scene with their neo-noir Blood Simple and ever since then they have sharpened the cutting edge of independent film.
Take one well-oiled effective killing machine, add a familiar hero on the ground, in the air, and on horseback; stir in a ghastly end that's surely impossible to escape, add action, add passion, made on a shoestring budget at breakneck speed, and you've got the recipe for Republic Pictures.
One of the most original shows in the history of television, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a beloved cult hit built on the back of another cult phenomenon: the bad movie.
This book uses the case study of public television in post-communist Latvia to explore the question of how audiences respond to TV offerings, and how their choices can be seen as an act of agency.
The city of Constantinople was named New Rome or Second Rome very soon after its foundation in AD 324; over the next two hundred years it replaced the original Rome as the greatest city of the Mediterranean.
Ausgehend von den jüngsten Forschungsergebnissen zur Intermedialität widmet sich dieses Buch der Aufgabe, an den Nahtstellen medialer Ausdrucksformen Zwischenräume und Übergänge zu rahmen.
Since publication of Thomas More's Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce.
Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Aesthetics and Reception in Cinema offers a renewed critical outlook on Western classic film directly from the pantheon of European and American masters, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Ford, Leo McCarey, Sam Peckinpah, and Orson Welles.
Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting.
Rohmer is one of the most popular French directors of the second half of the 20th century, one of the members of the famous Nouvelle Vague that reconstituted French cinema based on the theoretical principles articulated in the Cahiers du Cin ma from whose editorship he was fired when the conservative Catholic opposed its turn toward politicization.
This book traces the development of popular cinema from its inception to the present day to understand why humankind has expanded its viewing of popular movies over the last century.
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.
The 1931 Universal Pictures film adaptation of Frankenstein directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the now iconic Monster claims in its credits to be 'Adapted from the play by Peggy Webling'.
The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remain one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society.
Millions of Americans have been thrilled, scared, titillated, and shocked by exploitation movies, low budget films with many scenes of sex, violence, and other potentially lurid elements.
Fully revised and updated, Archival Storytelling second edition is a timely, pragmatic look at the use of audiovisual materials available to filmmakers and scholars, from the earliest photographs of the 19th century to the work of media makers today.
