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Sing Musicals
This is the first book documenting the history of the Singapore musical. It aims not only to portray what the Singapore theatre scene was like in the past, but also how the stories and language used can capture its culture, art and social life. The first musicals appeared in 1988 and for the next couple of decades there has been a flourishing of new musicals. However, this was stalled for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic with the closure of theatres. Recovery is starting again and there is a renaissance in creativity with new musicals being written and staged. This book covers original Singapore stage musicals, pantomimes, operas, movies and college musicals. It also touches on Chinese language musicals. Important playwrights, lyricists, composers, producers and directors are highlighted in the book. It ends by proposing several ways to stimulate further creation of new musicals which will have an impact on the evolution of Singapore's musical theatre.Initially influenced by Broadway and West End musicals, Singapore has evolved into its own unique style of presentation. Documentation of this development is important. The final chapter recommends how musicals can be developed further, and this can have an significant impact on the creation of future Singapore musicals. The Foreword is written by Professor Tommy Koh, the Founder President of the National Arts Council of Singapore.
Sing Musicals
This is the first book documenting the history of the Singapore musical. It aims not only to portray what the Singapore theatre scene was like in the past, but also how the stories and language used can capture its culture, art and social life. The first musicals appeared in 1988 and for the next couple of decades there has been a flourishing of new musicals. However, this was stalled for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic with the closure of theatres. Recovery is starting again and there is a renaissance in creativity with new musicals being written and staged. This book covers original Singapore stage musicals, pantomimes, operas, movies and college musicals. It also touches on Chinese language musicals. Important playwrights, lyricists, composers, producers and directors are highlighted in the book. It ends by proposing several ways to stimulate further creation of new musicals which will have an impact on the evolution of Singapore's musical theatre.Initially influenced by Broadway and West End musicals, Singapore has evolved into its own unique style of presentation. Documentation of this development is important. The final chapter recommends how musicals can be developed further, and this can have an significant impact on the creation of future Singapore musicals. The Foreword is written by Professor Tommy Koh, the Founder President of the National Arts Council of Singapore.
Transforming Faces for the Screen
This book brings together research from medical and film archives to illustrate the cultural impact of film and literature in its relationship to the discourse of plastic surgery in the 1920s. This different take on reading the body after the First World War enables students of multiple disciplines, and readers interested in both Hollywood and post-war culture, to understand some of the complexities of medical interventions gained after the First World War and the way in which they filtered into the world of Hollywood film making. It also allows readers who may not be familiar with these two 1920s stars to access the films of Lon Chaney and the books and films of Elinor Glyn and gain new insights into 1920s visual culture. For ease of readership, the book is organised so that each of the main chapters focuses on a particular film (either Lon Chaney or Elinor Glyn). This is particularly useful for use in the classroom or for online education. Readers can refer to the film directly, aided by illustrations of frames from the films. This book tells the story of how two stars of Hollywood film transformed their character's faces on screen through a close reading of three films in the 1920s. It reveals how they applied their embodied knowledge of surgery and surgical procedures to broaden their audience's emotional and intellectual understanding of the treatment of deformity and disability.
The Child in British Cinema
This book argues that over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cinema in Britain became the site on which childhood was projected, examined, and understood. Through an analysis of these projections; via case studies that encompass early cinema, pre and post-war film, and contemporary cinema; this book interprets the child in British cinema as a device through which to reflect upon issues of national culture, race, empire, class, and gender. Beginning with a discussion of early cinematic depictions of the child in Britain, this book examines cultural expressions of nationhood produced via non-commercial cinemas for children. It considers the way cinema encroaches on the moral edification of the child and the ostensible vibrancy and vitality of the British boy in post-war cinema. The author explores the representational and instrumental differences between depictions of boys and girls before extending this discussion to investigate the treatment of migrant, refugee, and immigrant children in British cinema. It ends by recapitulating these arguments through a discussion of internationally successful British blockbuster cinema. The child in this study is a mobile figure, deployed across generic boundaries, throughout the history of British cinema and embodying a range of discourses regarding the health and wellbeing of the nation.
David Fincher’s Zodiac
David Fincher's Zodiac, the first book-length study of the critically acclaimed 2007 release, offers various critical approaches to the film ranging from early influences, studies in genre and narrative, and media analysis including cinema history, game theory, musicology, and extensions in television studies.
The Dark Shadows Daybook Unbound
Following up 2021's bestseller, THE DARK SHADOWS DAYBOOK, this volume, expanded for the fall of 2023, offers over 100 irreverent insightful reviews and the past, present, and future of the landmark, supernatural drama, DARK SHADOWS, from the mind of underground comics author, designer, and director, Patrick McCray (ELVIS SHRUGGED, BABYLON 5, STAR TREK: THE CONTINUING MISSION). With a special introduction by writer and producer, Mark B. Perry, winner of the Emmy Award and the creator/producer of the next official chapter in the DARK SHADOWS saga, DARK SHADOWS: REINCARNATION.
Dear Tabby
Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film's moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film's portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern's mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film's melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle. Over a century after the film's release, Anders als die Andern serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.
Conflict Cinemas in Northern Ireland and Brazil
This book focuses on the analysis of sensorial representations of violent images in contemporary films that portray embodied violation in urban environments of street clashes and prisons in Northern Ireland and Brazil during the late twentieth century. There is an emphasis on the representation of senses and how they play a significant role in structuring narratives and mapping the cinematic landscapes of conflict. Whether on the streets and prisons of Belfast, Derry, S瓊o Paulo or Rio, the attention is on the endangered body and its fragility or strength. Analyzing films through the novel framework of sensorial perspective enables the understanding of urban and prison landscapes as part of a somatic geography that affects the corporeal engagement of the participants. As a multicultural study, this is an essential book for those interested in the relationship between cinema and history while taking into consideration the interactive roles of the senses and perception.
Short Filmmaking
"Each screen director has a different path getting to the point when "Action!" and "Cut!!" are everyday occurrences, but the books on Directing and Acting tend to look and read the same. Anthony Barnett has come up with a new approach in his book with Q & A, answering the questions that will come up from potential directors and actors, rather than just giving them a slab of instructions. He has also tackled one of the hardest bottlenecks in the training of directors and actors, which is finding and giving them suitable texts to work on. The numerous scripts to be found in his book will be of immense value to the lecturer and student alike, as they can now easily find appropriate material to put pictures onto. Just as different working directors found different paths to working on a shoot, so this book finds different ways of helping potential directors and actors on their own journey". Patrick Tucker, director of over 200 dramas for the screen. Author of Secrets of Screen Acting (3rd Edition Routledge 2014) Secrets of Screen Directing (Routledge 2019)Directors: learn how to direct Actors for a screen performance.Actors: learn how to give a screen performance.Directors are often wary of actors and likewise actors of directors. Yet both need each other's skills to succeed. These skills need to be learnt by novice directors and actors - but what are they? This book is a short cut to what many years of 'experience' in front of and behind the camera would eventually reveal of each other's reciprocal needs.30 original short screenplays of varying genres and technical challenges have been written for you to put your newly discovered skills into action.colour blind casting mostly 2 and 3 hander casts many suitable for gender to be changed Interactive QR codes of film examples throughout the book and a dedicated website www.bothsidesofthemoviecamera.filmwith pre-production resources, tutorials and frequent blogs
Breaking the Mold-Independent Cinema in the Late 80s
Breaking the Mold: Independent Cinema in the Late 80s is a must-read for anyone who is passionate about cinema and wants to know more about the incredible world of independent filmmaking.In this book, you will discover the fascinating history of independent cinema in the late 80s and the impact it has had on the movie industry. You'll learn about the challenges and triumphs of independent filmmakers and the role that film festivals like Sundance played in launching the careers of some of the most talented directors of our time.But Breaking the Mold is much more than a history lesson. This book provides a deep dive into the artistry and innovation of independent cinema, with detailed analyses of iconic films like Do the Right Thing, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and My Own Private Idaho. You'll gain insight into the creative process behind these groundbreaking films and hear from the filmmakers themselves about their experiences and motivations.You'll also get an inside look at the business side of independent filmmaking, with a focus on funding and distribution. From the challenges faced by independent filmmakers to the rise of independent studios within Hollywood, this book covers it all. You'll even get to hear directly from the financiers and distributors themselves about their strategies and approaches to making independent films successful.But what really sets Breaking the Mold apart is its focus on the future of independent cinema. With the rise of streaming services and new avenues for funding and distribution, independent filmmaking is more exciting and dynamic than ever before. This book offers a thought-provoking analysis of the potential for growth and success in independent cinema, and features interviews with filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of the medium in new and exciting ways.Whether you're a film student, a cinephile, or simply someone who loves great movies, Breaking the Mold is the ultimate guide to the world of independent cinema in the late 80s and beyond. With its engaging prose, insightful analysis, and exclusive interviews, this book is a must-read for anyone who is passionate about the art of filmmaking. So, get your copy today and discover the incredible world of independent cinema for yourself!
Isn't She Great
A love letter to women-led comedies. Based on Elizabeth Teets's program series called "Isn't She Great" at the Hollywood Theater, this anthology is a collection of the most beloved female-centric comedies and the audiences who adore them. From 9 to 5 to Romy and Michelle to the iconic Elle Woods, the essays in this collection build on our devotion to these films and continue the conversation around funny women and how these characters have shaped so many talented writers. As Elizabeth Teets reminds us, there is a specific power in a funny woman. A woman who dares to laugh at the world and at herself. These movies made us strong and smart and sexy (and bend and snap a lot). At the end of the day, we remind ourselves when the world only tries to let us have a little, a little money, a little confidence, a little joy to go out and get the whole enchilada.Isn't She Great is for anyone who loves movies and feels the glamour in pink. Cult cinema and film criticism will never be the same.
Cloverfield
Upon its release in 2008, Matt Reeves's Cloverfield revitalized the giant creature, a cinematic trope that had languished for over a decade. The film addressed the attacks of September 11, 2001, trading the jingoistic rhetoric of retributive military aggression for serious engagement with personal and collective trauma. It applied the horror genre's fascination with personal stories captured by found footage to the grand violence of history. Innovative and intense, Cloverfield represented blockbuster filmmaking at its best. Cloverfield's franchising followed the path of high-profile Hollywood properties. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the franchise, measuring how it steers precariously between the commercial potential, creative risks, and political challenges in Hollywood. As 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) struggled to sustain and update the franchise's original concept, both films' strengths and weaknesses come into focus by comparison with the original, just as the historical sequence of all three films allows for a reassessment of Cloverfield itself. Author Steffen Hantke examines how, in the broader context of postmillennial Hollywood, the Cloverfield franchise remains both a harbinger of the way Hollywood does business and a test case for the cinematic fantasies of apocalyptic disaster that continue to dominate global box office, long after the Cold War that gave rise to giant creatures has ended and 9/11 has lost its hold on the global imagination. As an inspiration for the next stage of blockbuster filmmaking, in which franchises have replaced the singular cinematic masterpiece and marketing plays to fans as critics and scholars, Cloverfield remains as relevant today as when it first unleashed its giant creature onto New York City over a decade ago.
How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America
Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist Wendy Melillo authors the first book to explore the history of the Ad Council and the campaigns that brought public service announcements to the nation through the mass media.How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America: A History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns details how public service advertising campaigns became part of our national conversation and changed us as a society. The Ad Council began during World War II as a propaganda arm of President Roosevelt's administration to preserve its business interests. Happily for the ad industry, it was a double play: the government got top-notch work; the industry got an insider relationship that proved useful when warding off regulation. From Rosie the Riveter to Smokey Bear to McGruff the Crime Dog, How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America explores the issues and campaigns that have been paramount to the nation's collective memory and looks at challenges facing public service campaigns in the current media environment.
Cloverfield
Upon its release in 2008, Matt Reeves's Cloverfield revitalized the giant creature, a cinematic trope that had languished for over a decade. The film addressed the attacks of September 11, 2001, trading the jingoistic rhetoric of retributive military aggression for serious engagement with personal and collective trauma. It applied the horror genre's fascination with personal stories captured by found footage to the grand violence of history. Innovative and intense, Cloverfield represented blockbuster filmmaking at its best. Cloverfield's franchising followed the path of high-profile Hollywood properties. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the franchise, measuring how it steers precariously between the commercial potential, creative risks, and political challenges in Hollywood. As 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) struggled to sustain and update the franchise's original concept, both films' strengths and weaknesses come into focus by comparison with the original, just as the historical sequence of all three films allows for a reassessment of Cloverfield itself. Author Steffen Hantke examines how, in the broader context of postmillennial Hollywood, the Cloverfield franchise remains both a harbinger of the way Hollywood does business and a test case for the cinematic fantasies of apocalyptic disaster that continue to dominate global box office, long after the Cold War that gave rise to giant creatures has ended and 9/11 has lost its hold on the global imagination. As an inspiration for the next stage of blockbuster filmmaking, in which franchises have replaced the singular cinematic masterpiece and marketing plays to fans as critics and scholars, Cloverfield remains as relevant today as when it first unleashed its giant creature onto New York City over a decade ago.
Stand-Up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms
What are the barriers to women's participation in live comedy, and how are these barriers maintained in the digital era? In this book, Ellie Tomsett considers how the origins of stand-up comedy still impact on current live comedy production, and explains how the contemporary stand-up scene continues to reflect wider societal stereotypes about the capabilities of women. Using primary data collected from women-only comedy nights and immersive research with the UK Women in Comedy Festival in Manchester, Tomsett analyses examples of stand-up performed by contemporary comedians - including Bridget Christie, Luisa Omielan, Lolly Adefope and Gr獺inne Maguire - and provocatively questions how these performances relate to conceptions of feminist and postfeminist humour, as well as notions of backlash against contemporary feminisms. She focuses on live comedy that is explicitly feminist to consider how social attitudes to women, the increasing visibility of female labour outside the home, and the emergence of multiple (and sometimes contradictory) feminisms has influenced the comedy produced by women comedians in 21st century Britain.
Exploring the Land of Ooo
Exploring the Land of Ooo: An Unofficial Overview and Production History of Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time" is a guide through the colorful and exuberant animated television series that initially aired from 2010 to 2018. Created by visionary artist Pendleton Ward, the series was groundbreaking and is credited by many with heralding in a new golden age of animation. Known for its distinct sense of humor, bold aesthetic choices, and memorable characters, Adventure Time has amassed a fan-following of teenagers and young adults in addition to children. Popularly and critically acclaimed, the show netted three Annie awards, eight Emmys, and a coveted Peabody. In this thorough overview, author Paul A. Thomas explores the nuances of Adventure Time's characters, production history, ancillary media, and vibrant fandom. Based in part on interviews with dozens of the creative individuals who made the show possible, the volume comprises a captivating mix of oral history and primary source analysis. With fresh insight, the book considers the show's guest-directed episodes, outlines its most famous songs, and explores how its characters were created and cast. Written for fans and scholars alike, Exploring the Land of Ooo ensures that, when it comes to Adventure Time, the fun truly will never end.
Movie-Made Los Angeles
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in Southern California provided early filmmakers with a template for building a myth-making business and envisioning ideal moviegoers. These art forms positioned California as a land of transformative experiences and catapulted the dusty backwater town of Los Angeles to the largest city on the west coast by 1915. Photography aided the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in opening the region to the rest of nation. Painters gave traditions that were fading in Europe a new lease on life in the California sun, with signature colors and techniques that would be adopted by L.A. real estate companies, agribusiness, and health retreats. Tourism infused the iconography and signature styles of art with cultural mythology of the state's colonial past, offering proto-cinematic experiences to those who ventured west. Author John Trafton explores how Hollywood, an industry based on world-building, was the product of these art forms in the land of sunshine. A more complete story of the American film industry's ascendency in Los Angeles emerges when one considers how the City of Angels cultivated its self-image through pre-cinema narrative
Traveling Auteurs
What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period. As documentaries, the films considered in this book record specific manifestations of political sensibilities of the twentieth century. As bodies of work, they reveal that the traveling auteurs who made them were symptomatic actors in complex geopolitical networks. As cultural objects reflecting and shaping contemporaneous debates, they provoke a complex afterlife at home and abroad. In the three chapters dedicated to Rossellini in India, Pasolini in Africa and the Middle East, and Antonioni in China, Caminati pays particular attention both to the reception that these films had in the countries where they were shot and to their legacies in Italian film history. As it follows the entanglements of filmmakers, artists, and activists involved as allies or direct witnesses to momentous political change, this book sheds new light on anticolonial struggles, the reaffirmation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party.
Traveling Auteurs
What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period. As documentaries, the films considered in this book record specific manifestations of political sensibilities of the twentieth century. As bodies of work, they reveal that the traveling auteurs who made them were symptomatic actors in complex geopolitical networks. As cultural objects reflecting and shaping contemporaneous debates, they provoke a complex afterlife at home and abroad. In the three chapters dedicated to Rossellini in India, Pasolini in Africa and the Middle East, and Antonioni in China, Caminati pays particular attention both to the reception that these films had in the countries where they were shot and to their legacies in Italian film history. As it follows the entanglements of filmmakers, artists, and activists involved as allies or direct witnesses to momentous political change, this book sheds new light on anticolonial struggles, the reaffirmation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party.
Exploring the Land of Ooo
Exploring the Land of Ooo: An Unofficial Overview and Production History of Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time" is a guide through the colorful and exuberant animated television series that initially aired from 2010 to 2018. Created by visionary artist Pendleton Ward, the series was groundbreaking and is credited by many with heralding in a new golden age of animation. Known for its distinct sense of humor, bold aesthetic choices, and memorable characters, Adventure Time has amassed a fan-following of teenagers and young adults in addition to children. Popularly and critically acclaimed, the show netted three Annie awards, eight Emmys, and a coveted Peabody. In this thorough overview, author Paul A. Thomas explores the nuances of Adventure Time's characters, production history, ancillary media, and vibrant fandom. Based in part on interviews with dozens of the creative individuals who made the show possible, the volume comprises a captivating mix of oral history and primary source analysis. With fresh insight, the book considers the show's guest-directed episodes, outlines its most famous songs, and explores how its characters were created and cast. Written for fans and scholars alike, Exploring the Land of Ooo ensures that, when it comes to Adventure Time, the fun truly will never end.
A Year In The Country
Lost Transmissions weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television's dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflecting visions of a hopeful future in its depths. Alongside other experimenters in electronic sound the book explores Boards of Canada's invoking of "the past inside the present"; Paul Weller's visiting of Ghost Box Records' elsewhere universe; work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Hannah Peel and the reformed Radiophonic Workshop, and their collaborations across time with electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire; Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan's summoning of "pastoral spook" via a hidden language of angels; and takes a trip in the company of fairground and rural ghosts conjured up on records released by Castles in Space. Alongside these it examines the paranormal and "worlds beyond" via the semi-lost supernatural-orientated television series Leap in the Dark which included work by Alan Garner and David Rudkin, Sharron Kraus' contemporary investigations into the preternatural and the conjuring of modern-day phantasms in Luciana Haill's artwork. The book also includes an intertwined consideration of the "deluxe dystopias" that can be found in films such as Rollerball and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca and prescient views of the future's past & media collusion in film and television including Nigel Kneale's work and the overlooked corners of science fiction. * * * * * The book is released as part of the A Year In The Country project, which since 2014 via the posts on its website, artwork, music and book releases has explored the wyrd, eerie and re-enchanted landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and culture and the spectral parallel worlds of hauntology. * * * "A Year In The Country make excellent music and excellent books about all things dark rural, folk horror, liminal England and hauntology." Stuart Maconie, Freak Zone, BBC Radio 6 * * * "A Year In The Country epitomises the confluence of interest and dark synergy between nature, myth, occultism and ghost traces of hauntological memory." Rob Young, The Magic Box
Analyzing Adventure Time
In 2010, Cartoon Network debuted a new animated series called Adventure Time, and within just a few short years the show became both a pop culture phenomenon and a critical darling. But despite all the admiration, not many works of scholarship have assessed the show through a critical lens. This anthology is an attempt to fill this scholarly oversight and spark a wider conversation about the show's deeper themes. Across 15 scholarly essays, this book's contributors study Adventure Time from a variety of angles, proving just how insightful the series really is. From a consideration of BMO's queer identity to a psychoanalytic reading of Lemongrab and an examination of how anime has impacted the show, the topics explored in this anthology are diverse and unique and are likely to appeal to scholars and fans alike.
Spanish Horror Film and Television in the 21st Century
This book provides an up-to-date, in-depth survey of 21st century Spanish horror film and media, exploring both aesthetics and industrial dynamics.
Entertaining German Culture
Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany's problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.
The Last Laugh
A penetrating new reading of Murnau's classic silent film that shows its transitional status, both historically and stylistically, while emphasizing its innovative camerawork and the ethical stakes of its story. An undisputed masterpiece of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) stars the larger-than-life Emil Jannings as a proud hotel porter who is demoted to lowly washroom attendant. One worker's misfortune becomes a tragic turning point in a social drama as much about the struggling Weimar Republic, which had just overcome several years of social, political, and economic instability, as about its working-class citizens. At once clinging to the symbols of the old order while helplessly thrust into an unforgiving modern world, Jannings's fallen porter embodies the contradictions of this transitional moment for the young democracy. Samuel Frederick shows us that Murnau's film is similarly transitional: born at the crossroads between the Expressionist style of the early 1920s and the emerging aesthetics of New Objectivity, it is both soberly realistic and oneirically distorted. With only one intertitle, The Last Laugh's flow of images is complemented by cinematographer Karl Freund's innovative mobile camera, which, "unchained" from the tripod, swims effortlessly through the film's different urban spaces. Here, inanimate objects become charged with potency and architecture is animated, conveying both allure and danger. Frederick's incisive analysis of the film foregrounds the visual dynamism of its technological and aesthetic experimentation while also pursuing the ethical implications of its central figure's downfall.
The Filmmaker's Guide to Creatively Embracing Limitations
Starting out as a filmmaker comes with a host of limitations and restrictions leading to one key question: how do you channel your creativity past these daunting challenges to create compelling and impactful films? Authors William Pace and Ingrid Stobbe advise the key is to not consider them roadblocks to being creative, but opportunities. Providing both historical and contemporary examples, as well as outlining practical exercises filmmakers can apply to their own creative processes, they illustrate how filmmakers can transform obstacles into successes. Looking into limitations and restrictions arising at all stages of the film production process, the book illuminates the importance of developing unique creative muscles and how to apply them to your own work. This is a unique text in the field that provides both a theoretical and practical approach to inspired and savvy filmmaking that uses limitations as points of inspiration. Drawing on examples from artists like Frank Oz, Pete Docter, Gabby Sumney, and Shaun Clarke, filmmakers will gain a well-rounded understanding of the creative processes behind motion picture production and learn how to shape their own independent creative voice when utilizing budget-conscious, creatively aware filmmaking. Foregrounding limitation-embracing strategy and capability, making a film for the first time or with limited resources is no longer overwhelming with this highly practical textbook.　 Ideal for undergraduate students of film production and first-time filmmakers.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film.Volume Two of this landmark series on African cinema is devoted to the decolonizing mediation of the Pan African Film & Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the most important, inclusive, and consequential cinematic convocation of its kind in the world. Since its creation in 1969, FESPACO's mission is, in principle, remarkably unchanged: to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diasporas of people, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and the futurity of the Black World. This volume features historically significant and commissioned essays, commentaries, conversations, dossiers, and programmatic statements and manifestos that mark and elaborate the key moments in the evolution of FESPACO over the span of the past five decades.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume Three of this landmark series on African cinema spans the past century and is devoted to the documentation of decoloniality in cultural policy in both Africa and the Black diaspora worldwide. A compendium of formal resolutions, declarations, manifestos, and programmatic statements, it chronologically maps the long history and trajectories of cultural policy in Africa and the Black Atlantic. Beginning with the 1920 declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which anticipates cinema as we know it today, and the formal oppositional assertions--aspirational and practical. The first part of this work references formal statements that pertain directly to cultural policy and cinematic formations in Africa, while the next part addresses the Black diaspora. Each entry is chronologically ordered to account for when the statement was created, followed by where and in what context it was enunciated.
Art vs. TV
While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.
City Limits
Belfast, Beirut and Berlin are notorious for their internal boundaries and borders. As symbols for political disunion, the three cities have inspired scriptwriters and directors from diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite their different histories, they share a wide range of features central to divided cities. In each city, particular territories take on specific symbolic and psychological meanings. Following a comparative approach, this book concentrates on the cinematographic representations of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin. Filmmakers are in constant search of new ways in order to engage with urban division. Making use of a variety of genres reaching from thriller to comedy, they explore the three cities' internal and external borders, as well as the psychological boundaries existing between citizens belonging to different communities. Among the characters featuring in films set in Belfast, Berlin and Beirut, we may count dangerous gunmen, prisoners' wives, soldiers and snipers, but also comic Stasi-members, punk aficionados and fake nuns. The various characters contribute to the creation of a multifaceted image of city limits in troubled times.
The Film Archipelago
How do the islands and archipelagos of the New World figure in Latin American cinema? Comprising 15 essays and a critical introduction, The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema addresses this question by examining a series of intersections between insular spaces and filmmaking in Latin America. The volume brings together international scholars and filmmakers to consider a diverse corpus of films about islands, films that take place on islands, films produced in islands, and films that problematise islands. The book explores a diverse range of films that extend from the Chilean documentaries of Patricio Guzm獺n to work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, and films by Argentine directors Gustavo Font獺n and Lucrecia Martel. Chapters focus on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Mexican Islas Mar穩as, and the Panamanian Caribbean; on ecocritical, environmental and film historical aspects of Brazilian and Argentine river islands; and on Cuban, Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Puerto Rican contexts. The Film Archipelago argues that the islands and archipelagos of Latin American cinema constitute a critically interesting, analytically complex, and historically suggestive angle to explore issues of marginality and peripherality, remoteness and isolation, and fragility and dependency. As a whole, the collection demonstrates to what extent the combined insular and archipelagic lens can re-frame and re-figure both longstanding and recent discussions on the spaces of Latin American cinema.
Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film
In Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film, Tarja Laine provides insights into how cinema engages its spectator emotionally with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. By arguing that cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity, Laine demonstrates that traumatic cinema can be an important source of ethical knowledge, both within and beyond the cinematic world. The films discussed in this book do not necessarily narrate trauma but embody that aspect of trauma which resists narrativization. This is why there are modes of affective engagement beyond storytelling by which spectators can meaningfully relate to trauma. Scholars of film studies, media studies, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.
An Atonal Cinema
This is a book about Palestinians elsewhere and Palestinian elsewheres. Articulating an ambiguous right to remain out-of-place as a spatialized response to the fossilized present, the films and filmmakers in this book examine Palestine, as a place and idea, from the dissonance of exile. An Atonal Cinema: Resistance, Counterpoint and Dialogue in Transnational Palestine theorizes a transnational consciousness within contemporary Palestinian cinema as one which articulates an 'atonal' cinema, utilizing contrapuntal dialogue as a mode of resistance with which to respond critically to the 'place-myth' of Palestine in films produced within Palestine but without Palestinians. Drawing on a genealogy of Edward Said's atonal thinking of counterpoint, the author argues that the films in this book display a 'double-consciousness', through which Palestine is simultaneously elided and re-inscribed in a contrapuntal dialogue between the 'here' of its contemporary reality and the 'elsewhere' of its historical image. An Atonal Cinema's radical approach includes cinematic texts from Europe, South America and Israel in its corpus, which have both triggered and been shaped by critical responses in contemporary Palestinian cinema. Drawing on both literature and cinema, it draws on the work of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean Genet and Carlo Levi. Films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Menahem Golan and Miguel Litt穩n are read contrapuntally through contemporary responses from Ayreen Anastas, Basma Alsharif, Mohanad Yaqubi, Elia Suleiman and Kamal Aljafari.
Show and Biz
How is capitalism represented in popular culture today? Are profits seen as a legitimate reward of entrepreneurship? Are thrift and effort still considered a cornerstone of a healthy society? Or is it that inequalities are eliciting scandal and reproach? How is the ecosystem portrayed, vis-?-vis profit seeking companies? Are they irreconcilable, or maybe not? Are there any established trends with respect to the presentation of entrepreneurship, and that complex legal artefact that is the modern limited liability company? These are questions that will be at the core of this book. But they are not examined through the usual theoretical point of references, but looking at TV series produced in 2000-2020. Each chapter of this book is a case studies, covering some of the most popular, successful and engaging TV shows of the last 20 years. And showing how deep economic ideas and biases lie, at the roots of some of our times' most successful entertainment products.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume Three of this landmark series on African cinema spans the past century and is devoted to the documentation of decoloniality in cultural policy in both Africa and the Black diaspora worldwide. A compendium of formal resolutions, declarations, manifestos, and programmatic statements, it chronologically maps the long history and trajectories of cultural policy in Africa and the Black Atlantic. Beginning with the 1920 declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which anticipates cinema as we know it today, and the formal oppositional assertions--aspirational and practical. The first part of this work references formal statements that pertain directly to cultural policy and cinematic formations in Africa, while the next part addresses the Black diaspora. Each entry is chronologically ordered to account for when the statement was created, followed by where and in what context it was enunciated.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film.Volume Two of this landmark series on African cinema is devoted to the decolonizing mediation of the Pan African Film & Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the most important, inclusive, and consequential cinematic convocation of its kind in the world. Since its creation in 1969, FESPACO's mission is, in principle, remarkably unchanged: to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diasporas of people, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and the futurity of the Black World. This volume features historically significant and commissioned essays, commentaries, conversations, dossiers, and programmatic statements and manifestos that mark and elaborate the key moments in the evolution of FESPACO over the span of the past five decades.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume One of this landmark series on African cinema draws together foundational scholarship on its history and evolution. Beginning with the ideological project of colonial film to legitimize the economic exploitation and cultural hegemony of the African continent during imperial rule to its counter-historical formation and theorization. It comprises essays by film scholars and filmmakers alike, among them Roy Armes, Med Hondo, F癡rid Boughedir, Haile Gerima, Oliver Barlet, Teshome Gabriel, and David Murphy, including three distinct dossiers: a timeline of key dates in the history of African cinema; a comprehensive chronicle and account of the contributions by African women in cinema; and a homage and overview of Ousmane Semb癡ne, the "Father" of African cinema.
African Cinema
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume One of this landmark series on African cinema draws together foundational scholarship on its history and evolution. Beginning with the ideological project of colonial film to legitimize the economic exploitation and cultural hegemony of the African continent during imperial rule to its counter-historical formation and theorization. It comprises essays by film scholars and filmmakers alike, among them Roy Armes, Med Hondo, F癡rid Boughedir, Haile Gerima, Oliver Barlet, Teshome Gabriel, and David Murphy, including three distinct dossiers: a timeline of key dates in the history of African cinema; a comprehensive chronicle and account of the contributions by African women in cinema; and a homage and overview of Ousmane Semb癡ne, the "Father" of African cinema.
Movie-Made Los Angeles
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in Southern California provided early filmmakers with a template for building a myth-making business and envisioning ideal moviegoers. These art forms positioned California as a land of transformative experiences and catapulted the dusty backwater town of Los Angeles to the largest city on the west coast by 1915. Photography aided the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in opening the region to the rest of nation. Painters gave traditions that were fading in Europe a new lease on life in the California sun, with signature colors and techniques that would be adopted by L.A. real estate companies, agribusiness, and health retreats. Tourism infused the iconography and signature styles of art with cultural mythology of the state's colonial past, offering proto-cinematic experiences to those who ventured west. Author John Trafton explores how Hollywood, an industry based on world-building, was the product of these art forms in the land of sunshine. A more complete story of the American film industry's ascendency in Los Angeles emerges when one considers how the City of Angels cultivated its self-image through pre-cinema narrative art.
Chaoid Cinema
Expanding on a burgeoning area in contemporary film studies that explores visual and aural absences and interstices in film narrative, this book explores silences in the soundtrack - not ambient silence or so-called 'room tone' but complete sound drop-outs, as if the film projector had broken down, thereby jolting the audience out of their passive relationship to the screen, forcing them to become aware of their surroundings and the material apparatus of film as a mechanical device.Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Chaoids, which are various organizations of chaos through the different disciplines of science, philosophy and art, this book uses silence to pursue a variety of vectors that open up the surface plane of art (in this case cinema) to discover different philosophical (and by extension, political) singularities and multiplicities.
The Golden Girls
"This book is a much-needed addition to the growing body of scholarship around this beloved sitcom. An essential read for The Golden Girls fans and media studies scholars alike." -- Library Journal, Starred ReviewOver the course of seven years and 180 episodes, The Golden Girls altered the television landscape. For the first time in history, Americans (and, later, the rest of the world) were watching sexagenarians--and one octogenarian--leading active, vital lives. These were older women who had careers, families, lovers, and adventures, far from the matronly television characters of the past. In The Golden Girls: A Cultural History, Bernadette Giacomazzo shows why this iconic sitcom is more than just comedy gold. She examines how, between all the laughs and the tales of St. Olaf, these women tackled tough issues of the time--issues that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. From sexual harassment, ageism, and PTSD to AIDS, inter-racial relationships, and homosexuality, Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia weren't afraid to take on topics which were once considered taboo. This first-ever cultural history of The Golden Girls explores how the show forever changed the world's perception of what it means to grow older, and showed us the healing power of friendship, community, and sisterhood. It gave the voiceless a new voice and unveiled all the possibilities of what "family" can mean--no matter one's race, religion, creed, or sexual orientation.
Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema
Farīd ad-Dīn-e ʿAṭṭār's Persian folk tale The Conference of the Birds relates the quest by thousands of pilgrim birds for an ideal king, the mythical bird called Sīmorgh. At the end of the quest, the surviving birds recognise that the longed-for king is nothing other than the reflection of their own existence. But what about those other birds that were not able to become part of the final representation? This groundbreaking book calls them 'counter-memories'; memories that are barred from hegemonic history, but are, nevertheless present in cinematic forms. Due to the strategic and artistic interventions of a range of Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Shahram Mokri, Ali Hatami and Tahmineh Milani, Kianoush Ayari and Rakshan Banietemad, the history of post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema is also structured by counter-memories, with the potential to destabilise officially fabricated success stories of revolution, war and sacred defence. Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema establishes a new framework for understanding the tensions between censorship and resistance, helping to carve out resistant points of remembering both within and outside state-controlled cinema.
Refocus: The Films of Mary Harron
Mary Harron's diverse career includes cult films like I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, as well as a range of network and cable television episodes. This is the first book to examine an overlooked filmmaker in relation to feminist cinema. It discusses the dialectical dynamics within her wide-ranging body of work, and it argues that Harron's work has a distinguishing approach to stylistic and aesthetic choices prompted by cultural contexts, controversial subject matter and production limitations. Each chapter provides an in-depth study on Harron's creative approaches to film and television production, with chapters offering close readings of each of her 5 narrative features, and her work in television and promotional film. With scholarly approaches from the fields of cinema, television, gender, fashion, death and celebrity studies, this is a long-awaited introduction to a groundbreaking figure in contemporary cinema.
Spinsters, Widows and Chars
Actresses like Maggie Smith, Cicely Courtneidge and Sybil Thorndike have established the enduring appeal of the ageing actress in British film. Historicising and contextualising this archetypal figure, this book establishes a taxonomy of female ageing in British cinema, from the 1930s to the present day.Arguing that the prevalence of various iterations of the character actress is essential in understanding the nature of British cinema, specifically in how it has developed to define itself against Hollywood, employing archetypes which draw on well-established mythologies regarding ageing femininities. The book centres on the analysis of a broad range of films, such as Blithe Spirit (1945), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), as well as the work of selected actresses, considering them within the context of the broader historical factors which impacted on ageing femininities, including the Second World War, the post-war settlement, the Welfare State, and the implications for the women's movement as a whole.
Japanese High School Films
Japanese High School Films: Iconography, Nostalgia and Discipline explores how these contemporary films capture a distinct view of Japanese adolescent life, uncovering significant links with the themes of discipline and institutionalisation that underpin Japanese society. It illustrates how Japanese high school films link directly to manga, anime, TV dramas and pop music, triggering audience recognition and nostalgia through on-screen use of iconographic images, from school uniforms to rooftop recreational spaces. This book also identifies universal themes of adolescent romance, friendship, and bullying, and the spatial and temporal changes that affect every student's journey. The casting of already-famous music and fashion celebrities as students or as teachers allows the films to capitalise on cross-generational fandom across Japan's prolific entertainment industries. For anyone who wants to understand contemporary Japanese culture, Japanese High School Films is essential reading.
Action Scenarios
Action Scenarios: The Essential Guide to Action in Film examines all of the ways in which action is manifested in cinema, or what author Tico Romao calls the "action scenarios" of film. Loaded with detail, nuance, rare insight, and historical analysis, Action Scenarios explores how and why filmmakers use these action scenarios as a function of character development, story narrative, and much more.
Reboot Culture
Since the release of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins in 2005, there has been a pronounced surge in alternative uses of the computer term 'reboot, ' a surge that has witnessed the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices, involving politics, fashion, sex, nature, sport, business, and media. As a narrative concept, however, reboot terminology remains widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted across popular, journalistic, and academic discourses, being recklessly and relentlessly solicited as a way to describe a broad range of narrative operations and contradictory groupings, including prequels, sequels, adaptations, revivals, re-launches, generic 'refreshes, ' and enactments of retroactive continuity. Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that fuses cultural studies, media archaeology, and discursive approaches, this book challenges existing scholarship on the topic by providing new frameworks and taxonomies that illustratekey differences between reboots and other 'strategies of regeneration, ' helping to spotlight the various ways in which the culture industries mine their intellectual properties in distinct and novel ways to present them anew. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first academic study to critically explore and interrogate the reboot phenomenon as it emerged historically to describe superhero comics that sought to jettison existing narrative continuity in order to 'begin again' from scratch.of franchising in the twenty-first century. of franchising in the twenty-first century.
Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century
Ecuadorian cinema has been largely overlooked in film scholarship, usually being limited to brief descriptions in Latin American compendiums. Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century would be the first major publication in English to fill this gap. It provides a thorough account of film activities during the new millennium, while also referring to the country's previous film history. Specifically, this book discusses the so-called 'mini-boom" in Ecuadorian cinema, and its relation to industry structures, film policy, and the context of Socialism for the 21st century, hence the chosen terminology of "Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century". What makes this project distinctive, aside from the originality of its content, is its transdisciplinary methodology. As a means to frame the textual analysis of selected films, this book discusses theories on national cinemas, memory, politicalideology, and production practices, in an interdisciplinary approach that can be emulated in later projects. For this purpose, the book is divided into five chapters, in addition to a brief introduction and conclusion. Each chapter relies on specific case studies to discuss local narratives and documentaries, whether state sponsored or privately funded, centring primarily on films that premiered in commercial theatres between 2006 and 2016.
