Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation
In Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation, Roberts undertakes the first full-length study of postcolonial, settler-colonial and Indigenous film adaptation, encompassing literary and cinematic texts from Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, British, and US cultures. A necessary rethinking of adaptation in the context of race and nation, this book interrogates adaptation studies' rejection of 'fidelity criticism' to consider the ethics and aesthetics of translating narratives from literature to cinema and across national borders for circulation in the global cultural marketplace. In this way, Roberts also traces the circulation of cultural power through these adaptations as they move into new contexts and find new audiences, often at a considerable geographical remove from the production of the source material. Further, this book assesses the impact of national and transnational industrial contexts of cultural production on the film adaptations themselves.
Korean Film and History
Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made--a major mass medium of the twentieth century dealing with history. The re-enactments of historical events in film straddle reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction, representation and performance, entertainment and education. This interdisciplinary book examines the relationship between film and history and the links between historical research and filmic (re-)presentations of history with special reference to South Korean cinema.As with all national film industries, Korean cinema functions as a medium of inventing national history and identity, and also establishing their legitimacy--in both forgetting the past and remembering history. Korean films also play a part in forging cultural collective memory. Korea as a colonised and divided nation clearly adopted different approaches to the filmic depiction of history compared to colonial powers such as Western or Japanese cinema. The Colonial Period (1910-1945) and Korean War (1950-1953) draw particular attention as they have been major topics shaping the narrative of nation in North and South Korean films.Exploring the changing modes, impacts and functions of screen images dealing with history in Korean cinema, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Korean history, film, media and cultural studies.
South African Horror Cinema
This is the first study to explore South Africa both in horror cinema and as a formidable producer of celluloid scares. From framing the notorious apartheid system as a mental asylum in the ground-breaking and criminally underseen Jannie Totsiens (Jans Rautenbach, 1970) to such seventies exploitation shockers as The Demon (Percival Rubens, 1979) through to the blockbuster hit District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) and beyond, this book suggests that South Africa should finally obtain its rightful place in the canon of wider genre studies and horror cinema fandom. Taking in the 80s nightmares of Darrell Roodt and concluding with an analysis of the recent boom-period in South African fright-films, including discussion of such contemporary efforts as The Tokoloshe (Jerome Pikwane, 2018) and the Troma-esque leanings of Fried Barry (Ryan Kruger, 2020), South African Horror Cinema focuses on ever-changing identities and perspectives, and embraces the frequently carnivalesque and grotesque elements of a most unique lineage in macabre motion pictures.
Screening Adult Cinema
This collection of 39 original essays is designed to support film screenings. Each chapter focusses on a single adult film - a category broadly construed as films that foreground sex as a primary narrative, aesthetic, or marketing element. They draw upon a variety of perspectives, contexts, histories, themes, and politics in examinations of style, genre, authorship, performance, and stardom.The first of its kind, Screening Adult Cinema brings together a broad range of established scholars alongside new voices to demonstrate the global breadth and diversity of adult cinema, from a variety of time periods and transnational contexts, paying particular attention to regions and films that have been underrepresented within existing adult film scholarship. Following the Screening Cinema series, Screening Adult Cinema is intended as a teaching text and reference for courses in which film screenings are a core activity, while also appealing to adult film scholars.This unique collection will be invaluable for courses on adult or exploitation film history, feminist film studies, global queer cinema and porn studies. It will also be useful for general courses in media studies with a focus on gender, sex and sexuality.
Screaming and Conjuring
LIMITED DELUXE EDITION (first 5,000 copies worldwide) has black foil gilded page edges, textured cover spot varnish, and is printed on heavyweight paper stock.Blockbuster box office. Critical acclaim and Oscars recognition. From Get Out and M3GAN to The Substance and Sinners, the horror genre is enjoying a glorious-and gory-golden age.Screaming and Conjuring details the films and frights that led to this extraordinary renaissance, from the release of the groundbreaking Scream in 1996 to the arrival of 2013's The Conjuring, which spawned a multi-billion dollar franchise. Written by entertainment journalist Clark Collis (author of You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life), this exhaustively researched book is the first in-depth examination of a remarkably fertile and influential time for big screen horror.Wes Craven's Scream was followed by a flood of classic terror tales such as The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, Final Destination, The Others, Pan's Labyrinth, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Saw, Hostel, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious. This comprehensive history covers the often difficult and tortuous making of all these films (and many more), giving readers the exclusive lowdown on productions which were often as intense as the horrifying sights that ended up on screen.Screaming and Conjuring features recollections from a host of genre icons, including actors Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Neve Campbell (Scream), directors Eli Roth (Hostel) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell), and legendary makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero (The Mist, The Walking Dead). The book also includes 200 production stills, film posters, and rarely seen images.Blood. Sweat. Tears. More blood. Clark Collis takes you behind the scenes, and the scares, with this fascinating history of the modern horror movie.
From Victimhood to Empowerment
From Victimhood to Empowerment: Representing Women in 1920s Soviet Georgian Cinema brings the cinematographic works of Georgia's State Film Industry from the margins of the Soviet film studies to the centre. The book focuses on women's representations and explores how the gender roles were modified throughout the decade according to the new social and political ideals employing the discourse analysis, postcolonial perspectives and psychoanalytical feminist film theories. Bringing together Soviet Georgia's most important films of the period, the book inspects the female body's symbolic function in the aspects of class dichotomy and ethnic hierarchies. It analyzes the construction of the 'Oriental other' by the Russian colonial imagination and its subsequent dismantling in the context of the Caucasus's de-Orientalization. It also examines the characteristics embodied by the 'heroine' and 'villain' of the new social order-the New Soviet Woman and the NEPwoman-and explores women's transformation within the revolutionary setting during the decade. In the light of Bolsheviks' preoccupation and endeavour to improve 'woman question', the book surveys to what extent women's screen images were emancipated and whatthe functional meaning of this emancipation was in the given context; how the new ideals of the New Soviet woman were inscribed in the period's films and how these ideals were combined with Georgian nationality.
Steven Spielberg's Children
Why has Steven Spielberg's work been so often identified with childhood and children? How does the director elicit such complex performances from his young actors? Steven Spielberg's Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg's employment of child actors together and in depth. Through a series of lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars in films such as E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and Empire of the Sun, as well as less discussed roles in films such as War of the Worlds, The BFG, and Jurassic Park, this book shows children to be key players in the director's articulation of childhood since the 1970s. Steven Spielberg's Children presents children and childhood in some surprising ways, not only analyzing boyhood and girlhood according to Spielberg, but considering children as alien, adult-children who refuse to grow up, and children who aren't even human. It discusses the way in which children have served to cast Spielberg as a sentimentalist, but also how they are more frequently framed as complex, cruel, and canny. The child might be dangled as bait in an exploitation horror scenario (Jaws), might become the image of universal higher beings (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or might be a young cultural creator like the director was himself (The Fabelmans), "born with a camera glued to [his] eye." The child, on both sides of the camera, is a resonant image, signifying all that adult culture wants it to be, yet resisting this through authorship of their own stories. The book also looks at Spielberg's young actors in the long history of child stars in theater and cinema, and how Spielberg's children have fared as performers and celebrities.
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen: Interviews is the first collection of conversations with the acclaimed filmmaker, and one that spans his career to date. Included are McQueen's discussions with such artists, critics, curators, and public intellectuals as Donna De Salvo, Paul Gilroy, David Olusoga, Tricky, and Cornel West. In these conversations, McQueen (b. 1969) discusses some of his preoccupations and recurring themes throughout his oeuvre including nationalism, martyrdom, and violence; obsession and desire; and the intertwined histories of racism, surveillance, and carceral politics. Most interestingly, he also talks about his love for his fellow artists, past and present, including Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Prince, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Robeson, Jean Vigo, and Andy Warhol. McQueen is one of the most celebrated British filmmakers of his generation, an artist as committed to avant-garde film and lyric forms of documentary as he is to producing landmark historical dramas. A deeply humane artist with a clear ethical drive, McQueen nevertheless explores the sublime sense of scale that cinema affords its viewers in his films. While he remains best known for his feature film 12 Years a Slave--winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture--McQueen has been a fixture of major contemporary museum and gallery exhibitions for decades, beginning with the short experimental works that garnered him the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. His acclaimed installations include the diptychs Caribs' Leap/Western Deep and Gravesend/Unexploded, works that interrogate film form as they challenge documentary norms, not unlike his recent four-and-a-half-hour epic Occupied City that investigates the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.
The Drive-In
The Drive-In meaningfully contributes to the complex picture of outdoor cinema that has been central to American culture and to a history of US cinema based on diverse viewing experiences rather than a select number of films. Drive-in cinemas flourished in 1950s America, in some summer weeks to the extent that there were more cinemagoers outdoors than indoors. Often associated with teenagers interested in the drive-in as a 'passion pit' or a venue for exploitation films, accounts of the 1950s American drive-in tend to emphasise their popularity with families with young children, downplaying the importance of a film programme apparently limited to old, low-budget or independent films and characterising drive-in operators as industry outsiders. They retain a hold on the popular imagination. The Drive-In identifies the mix of generations in the drive-in audience as well as accounts that articulate individual experiences, from the drive-in as a dating venue to a segregated space. Through detailed analysis of the film industry trade press, local newspapers and a range of other primary sources including archival records on cinemas and cinema circuits in Arkansas, California, New York State and Texas, this book examines how drive-ins were integrated into local communities and the film industry and reveals the importance and range of drive-in programmes that were often close to that of their indoor neighbours.
Hollywood's Others
We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with disabilities? Hollywood's Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified--but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple's career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood's Others challenges common notions about film's capacity to build empathy.
Hollywood's Others
We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with disabilities? Hollywood's Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified--but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple's career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood's Others challenges common notions about film's capacity to build empathy.
The Art of DreamWorks the Bad Guys 2
A gorgeous, all-encompassing look at the making of The Bad Guys 2, the sequel to DreamWorks Animation's original blockbuster In the next action-packed chapter by DreamWorks Animation, based on Aaron Blabey's New York Times bestselling book series, The Bad Guys 2 follows the crackerjack crew as they are hijacked into a globe-trotting heist masterminded by a new team of criminals they never saw coming: the Bad Girls! With never-before-seen production art, insider perspectives, and script-to-screen details, The Art of DreamWorks The Bad Guys 2 is packed with goodies, including: Exclusive interviews with the writers, artists, and filmmakers Hundreds of character designs, concept art, sketches, storyboards, and color keys from the making of the movie An exclusive 64-page insert featuring the original beat boards created by director Pierre Perifel and production designer Luc Desmarchelier A preface by acclaimed actor Anthony Ramos, who voices Mr. Pirhana in the film A foreword by the esteemed director of The Bad Guys and The Bad Guys 2, Pierre Perifel
Watching the Chosen
What makes The Chosen so popular, and how does it portray Jesus and his disciples? The Chosen is the first-ever multiple-season television show about Jesus Christ and his first followers. With over half a billion views on its free electronic media app, the show has amassed a worldwide following and has now become available on cable networks, streaming services, and broadcast television venues as well as making appearances in theatrical releases. But what, exactly, makes it so appealing to viewers? And how do its theology and storytelling technique compare with the biblical narratives? These and other questions are addressed in this fascinating collection of essays written by theologians, biblical scholars, and other academics from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. The authors discuss the theatrical portrayal of Jesus, the theological ideas and ideals represented in the program, and the ways it utilizes--and sometimes overutilizes--artistic license in bringing the stories from the Bible's four canonical Gospels to the screen. Although approaching the television show as academics, the authors are sympathetic to the faith implications of The Chosen and are themselves writing from a range of theological perspectives. This thought-provoking volume will appeal to people interested in the intersection of theology and popular culture, church leaders seeking to utilize The Chosen in their ministries, and fans of the television show. Contributors: Daniel M. Garland Jr. Robert K. Garcia Paul Gondreau Patrick Gray Matthew Grey Kenneth Gumbert Liz Hall Todd Hall Jeannine Hanger John Hilton III Douglas S. Huffman James F. Keating David Kneip Dolores Morris Joy E. A. Qualls Deborah Savage Jesse Stone Gaye Strathearn T. Adam Van Wart
East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era
This book makes a critical intervention in the scholarship of East Asian cinema by examining how the platform-driven cinephilic engagement evokes a new imaginary of auteurs. While East Asian filmmakers continue to provide world screens with vibrant and innovative works in recent years, their names and visions have been intensely scrutinised and renegotiated by global cinephiles on digital media platforms such as Facebook, Letterboxd, MUBI, X, and Bilibili. The novel cinephilic experiences potentially problematises the authorial intent and structure legitimised by the traditional cinema, thus, challenging what film authorship means. This monograph employs a dual structuring of auteurism and digital cinephilia to contend how East Asian auteurs' brands are recoded, re-mobilised, and reassessed by platform users. As the first book-length account in the area, this volume calls for conceptual rethought of the auteur function in East Asia at the crossroads of film studies, audience/cinephilia studies, and new media studies.
Debating Authenticity
Debating Authenticity merges phenomenology, paratextual analysis, genre studies, cultural theory, and trans scholarship to investigate emerging debates regarding trans media's authorship, authenticity, and aesthetics across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By questioning how trans people, both on-and offscreen, are deployed within mainstream cultural industries as representatives of political and cultural progressiveness Paige Macintosh interrogates consultancy roles and their authorship status. Building on trans scholars' new attention to trans aesthetics, they also consider how scholars might productively counter the charged debates currently informing trans media scholarship by reconsidering the categorisation of trans media and beginning to reroute the power of canonisation from cis industry elites to trans viewers. Looking to genre studies - particularly the intersections of gothic horror, science fiction, and spectacle-driven genres like the musical or melodrama - Macintosh outlines their own variation of trans aesthetics, one that is capable of countering trans cinemas melancholic tendencies.
Doing Documentary, Becoming Subjects
Doing Documentary, Becoming Subjects explores a range of contemporary nonfiction films, including autobiography, essay film and animated documentary, to understand how these films depict identities being constructed, altered and performed. By applying concepts such as performativity and Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, this book aims to show how the self in documentary is in constant states of becoming at the same time as the films are themselves brought into existence.
Godzilla: The First 70 Years
An epic celebration of Godzilla's 70th anniversary, exploring every aspect of the creation, design, and evolution of King of the Monsters in Toho Studios' films and TV series from 1954 to the present Godzilla: The First 70 Years is a narrative and visual history of Japan's King of the Monsters, chronicling the triumphs, challenges, and meaning of seven decades of city-trashing, kaiju-smashing mayhem. It's also a tribute to Godzilla's creators and costars--the filmmakers, special-effects wizards, cast members, even the stuntmen inside the monster suit--and an appreciation of the behind-the-scenes artistry involved in bringing Godzilla to cinematic life, then and now. Extensive visuals detail the evolution of kaiju design, as well as profile the creative contribution and SFX developments across seven decades of exceptional filmmaking and innovation. Exclusive behind-the-scenes photography, production materials, posters, and lobby cards showcase: The Showa Era films (1954-1975) The Heisei Era films (1984-1995) The Millennium Series (1999-2004) Animated works Shin Godzilla (Japan's Picture of the Year, 2016) Academy Award-winning 2023 box-office phenomenon Godzilla Minus One
Sally Wainwright
The first and only book length study of British screenwriter, director and producer Sally Wainwright. Authors Gorton and Johnson brings together Wainwright's key television series and television films with theoretical work on the concept of emotion and feminist television criticism, exploring Wainwright's contributions to British television through the heroic female characters she creates. The book covers a wide range of theoretical work on melodrama, genre and emotion to explore Wainwright's televisual texts, offering analysis of globally recognised television series such as Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, and Gentleman Jack.
The Craft of Criticism
With contributions from thirty-five leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies.Fully revised and updated throughout, the chapters in this second edition address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy studies, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses digital technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and social media. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author's own research.Together, the chapters in this collection give media scholars and critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.
Creating Experimental Documentary Films
This book explores the continued development and practice of experimental documentary films with evolving trends in still photography, visual arts, journalism, interactive media, and literature-especially poetry and creative nonfiction. Through sets of observations, analyses, and exercises, readers will gain an understanding of the traditional principles of documentary and simultaneously challenge its conventions in practice.While exploring the responsibilities of a documentary director to be fair and objective, the book weaves through arguments around truth and propaganda and offers practical lessons about how to create hybrid forms of documentary films. Written by a documentary filmmaker with decades of experience, the text provides a comprehensive overview of how documentary narratives are written and created in the research, pre-production, production and post-production phases. This is supplemented with an exploration of the relationships among documentary filmmaking, music, sound design, journalism, poetry, and the essay form. New, inclusive audiences and methods of distribution, interactivity, and immersion are also introduced as a part of the changing landscape of the documentary genre.This book is designed for students who are approaching documentary for the first time, as well as documentary filmmakers who are searching for new approaches, new subject matter, and languages of cinematic expression.
Creating Experimental Documentary Films
This book explores the continued development and practice of experimental documentary films with evolving trends in still photography, visual arts, journalism, interactive media, and literature-especially poetry and creative nonfiction. Through sets of observations, analyses, and exercises, readers will gain an understanding of the traditional principles of documentary and simultaneously challenge its conventions in practice.While exploring the responsibilities of a documentary director to be fair and objective, the book weaves through arguments around truth and propaganda and offers practical lessons about how to create hybrid forms of documentary films. Written by a documentary filmmaker with decades of experience, the text provides a comprehensive overview of how documentary narratives are written and created in the research, pre-production, production and post-production phases. This is supplemented with an exploration of the relationships among documentary filmmaking, music, sound design, journalism, poetry, and the essay form. New, inclusive audiences and methods of distribution, interactivity, and immersion are also introduced as a part of the changing landscape of the documentary genre.This book is designed for students who are approaching documentary for the first time, as well as documentary filmmakers who are searching for new approaches, new subject matter, and languages of cinematic expression.
The Nightmares of Presence
From haunted houses to sandy beaches, The Nightmares of Presence explores the role of setting in inspiring fear and wonder through audiovisual media. With an emphasis on horror and the Gothic, this book takes case studies from Spain to propose new approaches to the spaces and places of fear and fantasy. With the primary aim of marrying the spatial turn in cultural and film studies with genre study of horror and Gothic film, Professor Ann Davies explores how different landscapes, spaces and places enable the subject to interact with the terrors they encounter and confront. Case studies include internationally renowned films, lesser known films which have not received distribution beyond Spain, and films made both in Spanish and English, including The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro), [.REC ](Jaume Balaguer籀), Insensibles (Painless, Juan Carlos Medina), 聶Qui矇n puede matar a un ni簽o? (Who Can Kill A Child?, Narciso Ib獺簽ez Serrador), Los cronocr穩menes (Time Crimes, Nacho Vigalondo), and El d穩a de la bestia (The Day of the Beast), among others.
Exploring Film through Bad Cinema
Exploring Film Through Bad Cinema offers an overview of the practice of film analysis through a specific focus on the concept of 'bad' cinema within a series of broad cultural and historical contexts. Providing a wide-ranging discussion of film from multiple perspectives including history, aesthetics, and criticism, this broad theoretical engagement illustrates the ways in which our registers of value applied to film are inseparable from the wider discourses of taste that shape our culture. While loosely chronological, it is largely thematic in arrangement as it applies the traditional methods of film studies to in-depth discussions of some of the most notoriously (and compellingly) bad films in cinema history. Situating its analysis of a wide variety of films and filmmakers in terms of period, genre, and issues such as the emergence of narrative cinema, canon formation, and the politics of cultural hierarchy, it provides an in-depth consideration of the multiple and complex social and aesthetic discourses that shape our qualitative assessments of film.Designed for both the lay reader and student of film, Exploring Film Through Bad Cinema engages with a wide range of topics from film history and film theory to postmodernism, exploitation, and cult cinema. This theoretically and historically sophisticated analysis will appeal to researchers and scholars in Film Studies as well as cognate disciplines such as Screen Studies, Visual Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Ida Lupino
This book contributes to a welcome new wave focusing on the importance of female filmmakers, providing a reappraisal of Ida Lupino, a cinematic figure of significant importance. Given her ability to move between popular and independent cinemas and her status as both a Hollywood star and director/writer/producer of socially relevant films overlooked by the mainstream, Lupino is a particularly interesting case study. Employing a range of critical approaches, including feminist theory, auteur theory and critical theory, this book investigates key themes and motifs that developed across Lupino's unusual and unique career as one of the most significant female players in film history. Investigating her oeuvre as actress, director, writer and producer, it discusses Lupino as a complex and important filmmaker whose career, on both sides of the camera, requires substantially more critical attention than it has been awarded thus far.
