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Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema (Queer Screens)
by Joe McElhaneyIn Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, Joe McElhaney situates Visconti’s films as privileged and deeply expressive instances of a trope that McElhaney identifies as the "cinema of fabric": a reoccurrence in film in which textiles—clothing, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets—determine the filming process. An Italian neorealist, Visconti emerges out of a movement immediately following WWII wherein fabric assumes crucial functions, yet Visconti’s use of fabric surpasses his colleagues in many ways, including its fluid, multifaceted articulations of space and time. Visconti’s homosexuality is central to this theory in that it assumes metaphoric potential in addressing "forbidden" sexual desires that are made visible in the films. Visconti’s cinema of fabric gives voice to desires not simply for human bodies draped in fabric but also for entire environments, a world of the senses in which fabric becomes a crucial method for giving form to such desires. McElhaney examines Visconti’s neorealist origins in Ossessione, La terra trema, and Rocco and His Brothers, particularly through fabric’s function within literary realism and naturalism. Neorealist revisionism through the extravagant drapings of the diva film is examined in Bellissima and Senso whereas White Nights and The Stranger are examined for the theatricalizing through fabric of their literary sources. Visconti’s interest in German culture vis-à-vis The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig, is articulated through a complex intertwining of fabric, aesthetics, politics, and transgressive sexual desire. Finally, Visconti’s final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, assess through fabric both the origins of Italian fascism and the political tensions contemporaneous with the films’ productions. Fabric in Visconti is often tied to the aesthetic impulse itself in a world of visionaries attempting to dominate their surrounding environments and where a single piece of fabric may come to represent the raw material for creation. This book will tantalize any reader with a keen eye and strong interest in film and queer studies.
Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood
by Anna Cooper Russell MeeufThe classical Hollywood films that were released between the 1930s and 1960s were some of the most famous products of global trade, crisscrossing borders and rising to international dominance. In analyzing a series of Hollywood films that illustrate moments of nuanced transnational engagement with the “foreign,” Projecting the World: Representing the “Foreign” in Classical Hollywood enriches our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema as a locus of imaginative geographies that explore the United States’ relationship with the world. While previous scholarship has asserted the imperialism and racism at the core of classical Hollywood cinema, Anna Cooper and Russell Meeuf’s collection delves into the intricacies—and sometimes disruptions—of this assumption, seeing Hollywood films as multivalent and contradictory cultural narratives about identity and politics in an increasingly interconnected world. Projecting the World illustrates how Hollywood films negotiate shifting historical contexts of internationalization through complex narratives about transnational exchange—a topic that has thus far been neglected in scholarship on classical Hollywood. The essays analyze the “foreign” with topics such as the 1930s island horror film, the 1950s Mexico-set bullfighting film, Hollywood’s projection of “exoticism” on Argentina, and John Wayne’s film sets in Africa. Against the backdrop of expanding consumer capitalism and the growth of U.S. global power, Hollywood films such as Tarzan and Anatahan, as well as musicals about Paris, offered resonant images and stories that dramatized America’s international relationships in complicated ways. A fascinating exploration of an oft-overlooked aspect of classical Hollywood films, Projecting the World offers a series of striking new analyses that will entice cinema lovers, film historians, and those interested in the history of American neocolonialism.
1968 and Global Cinema (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Paula Rabinowitz Pablo La Parra-Perez Laurence Coderre Victor Fan J. M. Tyree Sarah Hamblin Allyson Nadia Field Man-tat Terence Leung Mauro Resmini Graeme Stout David Desser Morgan Adamson Rita De Grandis Peter Hames Rocco Giansante Lily Saint Robert Stam Sara Saljoughi Christina Gerhardt1968 and Global Cinema addresses a notable gap in film studies. Although scholarship exists on the late 1950s and 1960s New Wave films, research that puts cinemas on 1968 into dialogue with one another across national boundaries is surprisingly lacking. Only in recent years have histories of 1968 begun to consider the interplay among social movements globally. The essays in this volume, edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, cover a breadth of cinematic movements that were part of the era's radical politics and independence movements. Focusing on history, aesthetics, and politics, each contribution illuminates conventional understandings of the relationship of cinema to the events of 1968, or "the long Sixties." The volume is organized chronologically, highlighting the shifts and developments in ideology in different geographic contexts. The first section, "The Long Sixties: Cinematic New Waves," examines both the visuals of new cinemas, as well as new readings of the period's politics in various geopolitical iterations. This half of the book begins with an argument that while the impact of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave on subsequent global new waves is undeniable, the influence of cinemas of the so-called Global South is pivotal for the era's cinema as well. The second section, "Aftershocks," considers the lasting impact of 1968 and related cinematic new waves into the 1970s. The essays in this section range from China's Cultural Revolution in cinema to militancy and industrial struggle in 1970s worker's films in Spain. In these ways, the volume provides fresh takes and allows for new discoveries of the cinemas of the long 1968. 1968 and Global Cinema aims to achieve balance between new readings of well-known films, filmmakers, and movements, as well as new research that engages lesser-known bodies of films and film texts. The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.
Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Age (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Kelly Turner John Alberti Vera Cuntz-Leng P. Andrew Miller Andrew Howe Cassandra Bausman Maria Dicieanu Katharine McCain Michelle Markey Butler Liza Potts Emily DallaireTransforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Ageis an edited volume of eight essays that look at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation. The movie version of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, premiered in 2001, in between publication of the fourth and fifth books of this global literary phenomenon. As a result, the production and reception of both novel and movie series became intertwined with one another, creating a fanbase who accessed the series first through the books, first through the movies, and in various other combinations. John Alberti and P. Andrew Miller have gathered scholars to explore and examine the cultural, political, aesthetic, and pedagogical dimensions of this pop culture phenomenon and how it has changed the reception of both the films and books. Divided into two sections, the volume addresses both the fidelity of adaptation and the transmedia adaptations that have evolved around the creation of the books and movies. In her essay, Vera Cuntz-Leng draws on feminist film theory to explore the gaze politics and male objectification operating in the Harry Potter movies. Cassandra Bausman contends that screenwriter Steve Klove’s revision of the end of the film version of Deathly Hallows, Part II offers a more politically and ethically satisfying conclusion to the Harry Potter saga than the ending of the Rowling novel. Michelle Markey Butler’s "Harry Potter and the Surprising Venue of Literary Critiques" argues that the fan-generated memes work as a kind of popular literary analysis in three particular areas: the roles of female characters, the comparative analysis of books and films, and the comparative analysis of the Harry Potter series with other works of fantasy. While the primary focus of the collection is an academic audience, it will appeal to a broad range of readers. Within the academic community, Transforming Harry will be of interest to scholars and teachers in a number of disciplines, including film and media studies and English. Beyond the classroom, the Harry Potter series clearly enjoys a large and devoted global fan community, and this collection will be of interest to serious fans.
Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000
by Paul Julian SmithQueer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year 2000 because of the political shift that happened within the government—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was known at the time as simply “the change” (“el cambio”) at the start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and acknowledgment of the LGBT community. Divided into five chapters, Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and production processes in the Mexican film and television industry. It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected features and shorts by Mexico’s sole internationally distributed art house director, Julián Hernández. The third chapter explores the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico’s dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the telenovela. The book also includes an extensive interview with gay auteur Julián Hernández. The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series (a sub-series of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media series), Queer Mexico is a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of Latin America.
Breaking Bad (TV Milestones Series)
by Christopher SharrettBreaking Bad (2008–2013), a remarkable synthesis of the crime film, the sitcom, the western, and the family melodrama, is a foundational example of new television in the early twenty-first century. Receiving multiple Emmy Awards, it launched the careers of its creators and stars, most notably Bryan Cranston as high school teacher turned drug manufacturer Walter White, whose attempt to grab the American dream results in the destruction of family, home, community, and himself. In this book, Christopher Sharrett examines the innovations of Breaking Bad through a study of its main character, using psychoanalysis, genre study, gender studies, American studies, and the graphic arts to assist an exploration of the supreme danger of modern, postindustrial toxic masculinity embodied in Walter White. Serving as a fresh start for the American Movie Classics (AMC) cable outlet, Breaking Bad is probably the most uncompromised rendering of the white American male’s rage in early twenty-first-century fiction. Set against a deindustrialized American landscape, its conflicted morality can seem less ambiguous than repugnant when we note the use of humor throughout, particularly as characters are introduced and killed off. Walter’s relationships with his son, who has cerebral palsy, his former student turned business partner, his long-suffering wife, and his DEA brother-in-law are layered on top of the show’s reflection of the very real challenges facing America today, which are not limited to the opioid epidemic, lax gun laws, and racial violence. Some critics have accused Breaking Bad of inciting a disturbance rather than criticizing, as it relies heavily on the audience’s humor. Sharrett’s argument for why the show is the canniest dramatic insight of our times is worth the price of admission for scholars and students of media studies and superfans alike.
The Apu Trilogy: New Edition (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Robin WoodThe Apu Trilogy is the fifth book written by influential film critic Robin Wood and republished for a contemporary audience. Focusing on the famed trilogy from Indian director Satyajit Ray, Wood persuasively demonstrates his ability at detailed textual analysis, providing an impressively sustained reading that elucidates the complex view of life in the trilogy. Wood was one of our most insightful and committed film critics, championing films that explore the human condition. His analysis of The Apu Trilogy reveals and illuminates the films' profoundly humanistic qualities with clarity and rigor, plumbing the psychological and emotional resonances that arise from Ray's delicate balance of performance, camerawork, and visual design. Wood was the first English-language critic to write substantively about Ray's films, which made the original publication of his monograph on The Apu Trilogy unprecedented as well as impressive. Of late there has been a renewed interest in North America in the work of Satyajit Ray, yet no other critic has come close to equaling the scope and depth of his analysis. In his introduction, originally published in 1971, Wood says reactions to Ray's work were met with indifference. In response, he offers possible reasons why this occurred, including social and cultural differences and the films' slow pacing, which contemporary critics tended to associate with classical cinema. Wood notes Ray's admiration for Western film culture, including the Hollywood cinema and European directors, particularly Jean Renoir and his realist films. Assigning a chapter to each Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito, (1957), and The World of Apu, (1959), Wood goes on to explore each film more thoroughly. One of the aspects of this book that is particularly rewarding is Wood's analytical approach to the trilogy as a whole, as well as detailed attention given to each of the three films. The book, with a new preface by Richard Lippe and foreword by Barry Keith Grant, functions as a master class on what constitutes an in-depth reading of a work and the use of critical tools that are relevant to such a task. Robin Wood's The Apu Trilogy offers an excellent account of evaluative criticism that will appeal to film scholars and students alike.
The Best Laid Plans: Interrogating the Heist Film
by Jeannette Sloniowski Jim LeachThe heist—a carefully organized robbery of a financial institution or other lucrative business—has been a persistent and popular mainstay of the crime film. The Best Laid Plans: Interrogating the Heist Film asks the question: why has the heist film proved so appealing to audiences over many years and in diverse cultural contexts? The twelve essays in this volume, edited by Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski, will explore the significance of the heist film in different national cinemas, as well as its aesthetic principles and ideological issues such as representation of gender, race, and class. The essays are organized in three parts dealing with the heist film's international presence, the subgenre's social and cultural implications, and some theoretical ways of approaching it. For example, contributor Tim Palmer challenges traditional notions of French film history that emphasize critically acclaimed art films by pointing to the rich achievements of critically defamed and neglected, but extremely popular, crime films; Gaylyn Studlar surveys heist films in light of feminist theories that illuminate stereotypical characterizations of both men and women in the heist; and Hamilton Carroll compares James Marsh’s documentary Man on a Wire—which draws on heist conventions to depict Philippe Petit’s unauthorized tightrope walk in 1974 between the two towers of the World Trade Center—to Spike Lee’s New York–set heist film Inside Man. The Best Laid Plans includes an accessible group of essays that will meet the needs of students and scholars in film and media studies by offering new insights into an important and neglected area in genre criticism.
Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
by Pauline GreenhillReality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths explores connections and discontinuities between lies and truths in fairy-tale films to directly address the current politics of fairy tale and reality. Since the Enlightenment, notions of magic and wonder have been relegated to the realm of the fanciful, with science and reality understood as objective and true. But the skepticism associated with postmodern thought and critiques from diverse perspectives—including but not limited to anti-racist, decolonial, disability, and feminist theorizing—renders this binary distinction questionable. Further, the precise content of magic and science has shifted through history and across location. Pauline Greenhill offers the idea that fairy tales, particularly through the medium of film, often address those distinctions by making magic real and reality magical. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies consists of an introduction, two sections, and a conclusion, with the first section, "Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres," addressing how fairy-tale films engage with and challenge scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality, drawing on films from the stop-motion animation company LAIKA, the independent filmmaker Tarsem, and the storyteller and writer Fred Pellerin. The second section, "Themes and Issues from Three Fairy Tales," shows fairy-tale film magic exploring real-life issues and experiences using the stories of "Hansel and Gretel," "The Juniper Tree," and "Cinderella." The concluding section, "Moving Forward?" suggests that the key to facing the reality of contemporary issues is to invest in fairy tales as a guide, rather than a means of escape, by gathering your community and never forgetting to believe. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies—which will be of interest to film and fairy-tale scholars and students—considers the ways in which fairy tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human animals, and the rest of the environment.
The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Jaimey Fisher Marco Abel Lisa Haegele Robert Dassanowsky William Fech Alice Bardan Ira Jaffe Inga Pollmann Roger Cook Michael Sicinski Lutz Koepnick Chris Homewood Brad Prager Gerd Gemünden Roland Végso Hester BaerThe Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema came about in light of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)’s 2013 major exhibition of works by contemporary German directors associated with the so-called Berlin School, perhaps Germany’s most important contemporary filmmaking movement. Christoph Hochhäusler, the movement’s keenest spokesperson, stated that "the Berlin School, despite what the label suggests, is not a specifically German phenomenon. All over the world there are filmmakers exploring related terrain." In response to this "transnational turn," editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher have assembled a group of scholars who examine global trends and works associated with the Berlin School. The goal of the collection is to understand the Berlin School as a fundamental part of the series of new wave films around the globe, especially those from the traditional margins of world cinema. For example, Michael Sicinski and Lutz Koepnick explore the relation of the Berlin School to cinema of Southeast Asia, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang; Ira Jaffe and Roger Cook take a look at Middle Eastern film, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Abbas Kiarostami, respectively. The volume, however, also includes essays engaging with North American filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt and Derek Cianfrance as well as European auteurs like Antonioni, Tarr, Porumboiu, McQueen, and the Dardennes. Bringing German cinema into dialogue with this series of global cinemas emphasizes how the Berlin School manifests—whether aesthetically or thematically, politically or historically—a balancing of national particularity with global flows of various sorts. Abel and Fisher posit that since the vast majority of the films are available with English subtitles (and at times also in other languages) and recent publications on the subject have established critical momentum, this exciting filmmaking movement will continue to branch out into new directions and include new voices. The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts folds German-language cinema back into conversations with international as well as transnational cinema. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.
The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics
by Matt BellThe Boys in the Band’s debut was revolutionary for its fictional but frank presentation of a male homosexual subculture in Manhattan. Based on Mart Crowley’s hit Off-Broadway play from 1968, the film’s two-hour running time approximates real time, unfolding at a birthday party attended by nine men whose language, clothing, and behavior evoke a range of urban gay “types.” Although various popular critics, historians, and film scholars over the years have offered cursory acknowledgment of the film’s importance, more substantive research and analysis have been woefully lacking. The film’s neglect among academics belies a rich and rewarding object of study. The Boys in the Band merits not only the close reading that should accompany such a well-made text but also recognition as a landmark almost ideally situated to orient us amid the highly complex, shifting cultural terrain it occupied upon its release—and has occupied since. The scholars assembled here bring an invigorating variety of methods to their considerations of this singular film. Coming from a wide range of academic disciplines, they pose and answer questions about the film in remarkably different ways. Cultural analysis, archival research, interviews, study of film traditions, and theoretical framing intensify their revelatory readings of the film. Many of the essays take inventive approaches to longstanding debates about identity politics, and together they engage with current academic work across a variety of fields that include queer theory, film theory, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and Marxist theory. Addressing The Boys in the Band from multiple perspectives, these essays identify and draw out the film’s latent flashpoints—aspects of the film that express the historical, cinematic, and queer-political crises not only of its own time, but also of today. The Boys in the Band is an accessible touchstone text in both queer studies and film studies. Scholars and students working in the disciplines of film studies, queer studies, history, theater, and sociology will surely find the book invaluable and a shaping influence on these fields in the coming years.
Treme (TV Milestones Series)
by Jaimey FisherIn Treme, Jaimey Fisher analyzes how the HBO television series Treme (2010–13) treads new ground by engaging with historical events and their traumatic aftermaths, in particular with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and subsequent flooding in New Orleans. Instead of building up to a devastating occurrence, David Simon’s much anticipated follow-up to The Wire (2002-08) unfolds with characters coping in the wake of catastrophe, in a mode that Fisher explores as "afterness." Treme charts these changes while also memorializing the number of New Orleans cultures that were immediately endangered. David Simon’s and Eric Overmyer’s Treme attempts something unprecedented for a multi-season series. Although the show follows, in some ways, in the celebrated footsteps of The Wire—for example, in its elegiac tracking of the historical struggles of an American city—Fisher investigates how Treme varies from The Wire’s work with genre and what replaces it: The Wire is a careful, even baroque variation on the police drama, while Treme dispenses with genre altogether. This poses considerable challenges for popular television, which Simon and Overmyer address in several ways, including by offering a carefully montaged map of New Orleans and foregrounding the distance witnessing of watershed events there. Another way in which Treme sets itself apart is its memorialization of the city’s inestimable contributions to American music, especially to jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, rap, rock, and funk. Treme gives such music and its many makers unprecedented attention, both in terms of screen time for music and narrative exposition around musicians. A key element of the volume is its look at the show’s themes of race, crime, and civil rights as well as the corporate versus community recovery and remaking of the city. Treme’s synthesizing mélange of the arts in their specific geographical context, coupled with political and socio-economic analysis of the city, highlights the show’s unique approach. Fans of the works of Simon and Overmyer, as well as television studies students and scholars, will enjoy this keen-eyed approach to a beloved show.
Raul Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry
by Andreea Marinescu Ignacio Lopez-VicunaMost widely known for his filmic productions, Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) was a highly prolific, erudite, and innovative artist, whose work is located at the intersection of diverse locations, languages, and aesthetic traditions. Ruiz’s eclectic body of work includes over one hundred films (among them features, shorts, television serials, and videos), books on the theory of cinema, genre-defying fiction books, plays, a radio show, and a multimedia installation. Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry posits the unity of Ruiz’s body of work and investigates the similarities between his very diverse artistic productions. Ruiz’s own concept of “cinema of inquiry” provides the lens through which his films and poetics are examined. Ruiz’s relevance to cinema and the growing interest in his work are due to his legacy as a global filmmaker. Viewers, filmmakers, and film scholars continue to return to his works because his films consistently pose the question of what cinema can be, especially at a time when cinema is increasingly seen as displaced by television and new media. Ruiz expanded the domain of cinema itself, incessantly probing the interstices between cinema and other arts. Editors Ignacio López-Vicuña and Andreea Marinescu, with six other scholars, explore different aspects of Ruiz’s work, with special attention paid to the transnational aspects of Ruiz’s films, critical regionalism, and political and aesthetic interventions. Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry includes close readings of important yet understudied films, as well as two extensive previously unpublished interviews with Ruiz. This comprehensive volume gives voice to a significant filmmaker and artist. Students and scholars of film and media studies will find great value in this collection.
Comic Venus: Women And Comedy In American Silent Film (Contemporary Approaches To Film And Media Ser.)
by Kristen Anderson WagnerFor many people the term “silent comedy” conjures up images of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Buster Keaton’s Stoneface, or Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the side of a skyscraper. Even people who have never seen a silent film can recognize these comedians at a glance. But what about the female comedians? Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda, Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge—these and numerous others were wildly popular during the silent film era, appearing in countless motion pictures and earning top salaries, and yet, their names have been almost entirely forgotten. As a consequence, recovering their history is all the more compelling given that they laid the foundation for generations of funny women, from Lucille Ball to Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. These women constitute an essential and neglected sector of film history, reflecting a turning point in women’s social and political history. Their talent and brave spirit continues to be felt today, and Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film seeks to provide a better understanding of women’s experiences in the early twentieth century, and to better understand and appreciate the unruly and boundary-breaking women who have followed. The diversity and breadth of archival materials explored in Comic Venus illuminate the social and historical period of comediennes and silent film. In four sections, Kristen Anderson Wagner enumerates the relationship between women and comedy, beginning with the question of why historically women weren’t seen as funny or couldn’t possibly be funny in the public and male eye, a question that persists even today. Wagner delves into the idea of women’s “delicate sensibilities,” which presumably prevented them from being funny, and in chapter two traces ideas about feminine beauty and what a woman should express versus what these comedic women did express, as Wagner notes, “comediennes challenged the assumption that beauty was a fundamental component of ideal femininity.” In chapter three, Wagner discusses how comediennes such as Clara Bow, Marie Dressler, and Colleen Moore used humor to gain recognition and power through performances of sexuality and desire. Women comedians presented “sexuality as fun and playful, suggesting that personal relationships could be fluid rather than stable.” Chapter four examines silent comediennes’ relationships to the modern world and argues that these women exemplified modernity and new womanhood. The final chapter of Comic Venus brings readers to understand comediennes and their impact on silent-era cinema, as well as their lasting influence on later generations of funny women. Comic Venus is the first book to explore the overlooked contributions made by comediennes in American silent film. Those with a taste for film and representations of femininity in comedy will be fascinated by the analytical connections and thoroughly researched histories of these women and their groundbreaking movements in comedy and stage.
Beyond Blaxploitation (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Gerald R. Butters Jr. Novotny LawrenceBeyond Blaxploitation, the first book-length anthology of scholarly work on blaxploitation film, sustains the momentum that blaxploitation scholarship has recently gained, giving the films an even more prominent place in cinema history. This volume is made up of eleven essays employing historical and theoretical methodologies in the examination of spectatorship, marketing, melodrama, the transition of novel to screenplay, and racial politics and identity, among other significant topics. In doing so, the book fills a substantial gap that exists in the black cinematic narrative and, more broadly, in film history. Beyond Blaxploitation is divided into three sections that feature original essays on a variety of canonical blaxploitation films and others that either influenced the movement or in some form represent a significant extension of it. The first section titled, “From Pioneer to Precursor to Blaxploitation,” centers on three films—Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—that ignited the African American film cycle. The second section, “The Canon and the Not so Canon,” is dedicated to forging alternative considerations of some of the most highly regarded blaxploitation films, while also bringing attention to lesser-known films in the movement. The final section, “Was, Is, or Isn’t Blaxploitation,” includes four essays that offer significant insights on films that are generally associated with blaxploitation but contest traditional definitions of the movement. Moreover, this section features chapters that address industrial factors that led to the creation of blaxploitation cinema and highlight the limitations of the term itself. Beyond Blaxploitation is a much-needed pedagogical tool, informing film scholars, critics, and fans alike, about blaxploitation’s richness and complexity.
Blackness Is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Treaandrea M. RusswormBlackness Is Burning is one of the first books to examine the ways race and psychological rhetoric collided in the public and popular culture of the civil rights era. In analyzing a range of media forms, including Sidney Poitier’s popular films, black mother and daughter family melodramas, Bill Cosby’s comedy routine and cartoon Fat Albert, pulpy black pimp narratives, and several aspects of post–civil rights black/American culture, TreaAndrea M. Russworm identifies and problematizes the many ways in which psychoanalytic culture has functioned as a governing racial ideology that is built around a flawed understanding of trying to “recognize” the racial other as human. The main argument of Blackness Is Burning is that humanizing, or trying to represent in narrative and popular culture that #BlackLivesMatter, has long been barely attainable and impossible to sustain cultural agenda. But Blackness Is Burning makes two additional interdisciplinary interventions: the book makes a historical and temporal intervention because Russworm is committed to showing the relationship between civil rights discourses on theories of recognition and how we continue to represent and talk about race today. The book also makes a formal intervention since the chapter-length case studies take seemingly banal popular forms seriously. She argues that the popular forms and disreputable works are integral parts of our shared cultural knowledge. Blackness Is Burning’s interdisciplinary reach is what makes it a vital component to nearly any scholar’s library, particularly those with an interest in African American popular culture, film and media studies, or psychoanalytic theory.
Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Ewa Mazierska Alfredo SuppiaIn Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema, editors Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia argue that Marxist philosophy, science fiction, and film share important connections concerning imaginings of the future. Contributors look at themes across a wide variety of films, including many international co-productions to explore individualism versus collectivism, technological obstacles to travel through time and space, the accumulation of capital and colonization, struggles of oppressed groups, the dangers of false ideologies, and the extension of the concept of labor due to technological advances. Red Alert considers a wide swath of contemporary international films, from the rarely studied to mainstream science fiction blockbusters like The Matrix. Contributors explore early Czechoslovak science fiction, the Polish-Estonian co-productions of director Marek Piestrak, and science fiction elements in 1970s American blaxploitation films. The collection includes analyses of recent films like Transfer (Damir Lukacevic), Avalon (Mamoru Oshii), Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor), and District 9 and Elysium (Neill Blomkamp), along with more obscure films like Alex Rivera's materialist science fiction works and the Latin American zombie films of Pablo Parés, Hernán Sáez, and Alejandro Brugués. Contributors show that the ambivalence and inner contradictions highlighted by the films illustrate both the richness of Marx's legacy and the heterogeneity and complexity of the science fiction genre. This collection challenges the perception that science fiction cinema is a Western or specifically American genre, showing that a broader, transnational approach is necessary to fully understand its scope. Scholars and students of film, science fiction, and Marxist culture will enjoy Red Alert.
Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film
by Marian Keane William RothmanIn their thoughtful study of one of Stanley Cavell's greatest yet most neglected books, William Rothman and Marian Keane address this eminent philosopher's many readers, from a variety of disciplines, who have neither understood why he has given film so much attention, nor grasped the place of The World Viewed within the totality of his writings about film. Rothman and Keane also reintroduce The World Viewed to the field of film studies. When the new field entered universities in the late 1960s, it predicated its legitimacy on the conviction that the medium's artistic achievements called for serious criticism and on the corollary conviction that no existing field was capable of the criticism filmed called for. The study of film needed to found itself, intellectually, upon a philosophical investigation of the conditions of the medium and art of film. Such was the challenge The World Viewed took upon itself. However, film studies opted to embrace theory as a higher authority than our experiences of movies, divorcing itself from the philosophical perspective of self-reflection apart from which, The World Viewed teaches, we cannot know what movies mean, or what they are. Rotham and Keane now argue that the poststructuralist theories that dominated film studies for a quarter of a century no longer compel conviction, Cavell's brilliant and beautiful book can provide a sense of liberation to a field that has forsaken its original calling. read in a way that acknowledges its philosophical achievement, The World Viewed can show the field a way to move forward by rediscovering its passion for the art of film. Reading Cavell's The World Viewed will prove invaluable to scholars and students of film and philosophy, and to those in other fields, such as literary studies and American studies, who have found Cavell's work provocative and fruitful.
Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement
by Joanne BernardiWhile most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's "pure film movement" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved. Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources--much of it translated here for the first time--she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers of intertitles, and the use of female impersonators. Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts--The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent--and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation. Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.
Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema
by Kyung Hyun Kim David E. JamesKorean cinema was virtually unavailable to the West during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), and no film made before 1943 has been recovered even though Korea had an active film-making industry that produced at least 240 films. For a period of forty years, after Korea was liberated from colonialism, a time where Western imports were scarce, Korean cinema became an innovative force reflecting a society whose social and cultural norms were becoming less conservative. Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema is a colleciton of essays written about Im Kwon-Taek, better know as the father of New Korean Cinema, that takes a critical look at the situations of filmmakers in South Korea. Written by leading Koreanists and scholars of Korean film in the United States, Im Kwon-Taek is the first scholarly treatment of Korean cinema. It establishes Im Kwon-Taek as the only major Korean director whose life's work covers the entire history of South Korea's military rule (1961-1992). It demonstrates Im's struggles with Korean cinema's historical contradictions and also shows how Im rose above political discord. The book includes an interview with Im, a chronology of Korean cinema and Korean history showing major dynastic periods and historical and political events, and a complete filmography. Im Kwon-Taek is timely and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Korean cinema. These essays situate Im Kwon-Taek within Korean filmmaking, placing him in industrial, creative, and social contexts, and closely examine some of his finest films. Im Kwon-Taek will interest students and scholars of film studies, Korean studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, and Asian studies.
Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles
by Diane Carson Heidi KenagaHis name is synonymous with "independent film," and for more than twenty-five years, filmmaker John Sayles has tackled issues ranging from race and sexuality to the abuses of capitalism and American culture, aspiring to a type of realism that Hollywood can rarely portray. This collection offers unprecedented coverage of Sayles's craft and content, as it deploys a rich variety of critical methods to explore the full scope of his work. Together the essays afford a deeper understanding not only of the individual films--including his 1980 The Return of the Secaucus Seven (named to the National Registry) and the recent Limbo and Men with Guns--but also of Sayles's unusual place in American cinema and his influence worldwide. The focus of Sayles's films is frequently on peoples' lives, not on stories with tidy endings, and often a main goal is to alert viewers of their complicity in the problems at hand. One might assume his style to be content driven, but closer inspection reveals a mix of styles from documentary to postmodern. In this anthology, a set of international scholars addresses these and many other aspects of Sayles's filmmaking as they explore individual works. Their methodological approaches include historical and industry analysis as well as psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, to name a few. Sayles Talk is both an in-depth and wide-ranging tribute to the "father" of independent film. In one volume, readers can find discussions of most of Sayles's films together with a comprehensive introduction to his film practice, an annotated list of existing literature on Sayles, and information on resources for further inquiry into his fiction, film, and television work. Film students as well as seasoned critics will turn to this book time and again to enrich their understanding of one of America's great cinematic innovators and his legacy.
Personal Views: Explorations in Film
by Robin WoodRobin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text Personal Views. This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud "unreconstructed humanist," offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. Personal Views is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up Personal Views appeared duing a pivotal time in both film studies-during its academic institutionalization-and in the author's life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood's overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.
Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema
by Sheila J. PettyCreated at the crossroads of slavery, migration, and exile, and comprising a global population, the black diaspora is a diverse space of varied histories, experiences, and goals. Likewise, black diasporic film tends to focus on the complexities of transnational identity, which oscillates between similarity and difference and resists easy categorization. In Contact Zones author Sheila J. Petty addresses a range of filmmakers, theorists, and issues in black diasporic cinema, highlighting their ongoing influences on contemporary artistic and theoretical discourses. Petty examines both Anglophone and Francophone films and theorists, divided according to this volume's three thematic sections--Slavery, Migration and Exile, and Beyond Borders. The feature films and documentaries considered--which include Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, The Man by the Shore, and Rude, among others--represent a wide range of cultures and topics. Through close textual analysis that incorporates the work of well-known diasporic thinkers like W. E. B. DuBois, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon along with contemporary notables such as Molefi Kete Asante, bell hooks, Clenora Hudson-Weems, René Depestre, Paul Gilroy, and Rinaldo Walcott, Petty details the unique ways in which black diasporic films create meaning. By exploring a variety of African American, Caribbean, Black British, and African Canadian perspectives, Contact Zones provides a detailed survey of the diversity and vitality of black diasporic contributions to cinema and theory. This volume will be a welcome addition to the libraries of scholars and students of film studies and Africana studies.
From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Celestino DeleytoLos Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author’s direct observation and experience of the city’s social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can’t Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the “real place” in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto’s monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States’ most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.
Have Gun—Will Travel (TV Milestones Series)
by Gaylyn StudlarOne of the most successful series of its time, Have Gun--Will Travel became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1950s and made its star, Richard Boone, a nationwide celebrity. The series offered viewers an unusual hero in the mysterious, Shakespeare-spouting gunfighter known only as "Paladin" and garnered a loyal fan base, including a large female following. In Have Gun--Will Travel, film scholar Gaylyn Studlar draws on a remarkably wide range of episodes from the series' six seasons to show its sophisticated experimentation with many established conventions of the Western. Studlar begins by exploring how the series made the television Western sexy, speaking to mid-twentieth century anxieties and aspirations in the sexual realm through its "dandy" protagonist and more liberal expectations of female sexuality. She also explores the show's interest in a variety of historical issues and contemporaneous concerns--including differing notions of justice and the meaning of racial and cultural difference in an era marked by the civil rights movement. Through a production history of Have Gun--Will Travel, Studlar provides insight into the television industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how, in this transition period in which programming was moving from sponsor to network control, the series' star exercised controversial influence on his show's aesthetics. Because Have Gun--Will Travel was both so popular and so different from its predecessors and rivals, it presents a unique opportunity to examine what pleasures and challenges television Westerns could offer their audiences. Fans of the show as well as scholars of TV history and the Western genre will enjoy this insightful volume.