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.
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.
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. It offers detailed analysis of contemporary films and TV series as well as novel approaches to key works within the history of Spanish cinema.While addressing the specificities of the Spanish landscape, this volume also situates the national cinematic output within the international arena, understanding film production and reception as continuously changing processes in which a variety of economic, social and cultural factors intervene. The book first analyzes the main horror trends emerging in the early 2000s, then approaches genre hybridization and the rise of new filmmakers since the 2010s with a special focus on gender issues and the reconfiguration of the past, before addressing the impact of streaming services within the Spanish film panorama, from a production and distribution standpoint.This book will be of keen interest to scholars and students in the areas of film studies, media studies, TV studies, horror, Spanish cultural studies and production studies.
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.
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.
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.
Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film
In this book, Tarja Laine provides insights into how traumatic cinema invites profound affective engagement with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. The author reveals that traumatic cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity as a time-based medium.
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 Palestinetheorizes 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, I argue 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, An Atonal Cinema 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.
Art vs. TV
While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TVmaps 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.
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 Archipelagoargues 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Golden Girls
"An essential read...." -- Library Journal, Starred Review This cultural history is a fun yet meaningful examination of the beloved 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls, including how it tackled progressive social issues of its time and forever changed the way audiences view older women.
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.
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.
Ana M. L籀pez
Ana M. L籀pez is one of the foremost film and media scholars in the world. Her work has addressed Latin American filmmaking in every historical period, across countries and genres--from early cinema to the present; from Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico to diasporic and Latinx cinemas in the United States; from documentary to melodrama to politically militant film. L籀pez's groundbreaking essays have transformed Latin American film studies, opening up new approaches, theoretical frameworks, and lines of investigation while also extending beyond cinema to analyze its connections with television, radio, and broader cultural phenomena. Bringing together twenty-five essays from throughout her career, including three that have been translated into English for this volume, Ana M. L籀pez is divided into three sections: the transnational turn in Latin American film studies; analysis of genre and modes; and debates surrounding race, ethnicity, and gender. Expertly curated and edited by Laura Podalsky and Dolores Tierney, the volume includes introductory material throughout to map and situate L籀pez's key interventions and to aid students and scholars less familiar with her work.
Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives
Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives examines the detective figure in four noir and neo-noir films: Out of the Past (1947), Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), and Chinatown (1974). Exploring the way that these characters each move from an initial state of reluctant passivity to one of passionate engagement with the world around them, it questions the cinematic forces required to motivate and move them. In its close examinations of each film, the book meditates on the detectives' hunts and how they interact with the cinematic apparatus that captures and presents them to an audience, and it tracks the receptive experience of these films in relation to these questions of motivation and movement.
Refocus: The Later Films and Legacy of Robert Altman
Illuminating the industrial, cultural, and aesthetic significance of the later years of one of American cinema's most influential auteurs, this anthology combines scholarly essays, original interviews with Robert Altman's collaborators, and previously unseen photographs from the Robert Altman Papers held at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library. The book considers post-1970s Altman as a way to rethink and reconceive his authorship, expanding our understanding of the development of Altman's personal aesthetic and production practices; his adaptation of existing source material; the representation of sex, gender, and identity in his films; his relation to the changing landscape of American independent cinema, and his unfinished projects. Interviews with key Altman collaborators like Alan Rudolph, Ira Deutchman and Anne Rapp highlight their contributions to Altman's career. Rather than place aside the extensive work on Robert Altman to date, this comprehensive book offers texture and depth to previous ways of thinking about Altman's creativity and contribution to American cinema.
A History of Danish Cinema
This wide-ranging collection places well-known auteurs such as Carl Th. Dreyer, Lars von Trier and Susanne Bier in their cultural context, and introduces a number of genres and themes that are less familiar to international audiences, including film stars of the silent era, children's film, folk comedies, porn film, trends in documentary and Greenlandic cinema. With twenty-two chapters, all of them specially commissioned for this volume, A History of Danish Cinema explores the role of screen representations and film policy in shaping Denmark's cultural identity, but also emphasises just how internationally mobile Danish films and filmmakers have always been -- showcasing this small nation's extraordinary contribution to world cinema.
British Cinema and a Divided Nation
British Cinema and a Divided Nation examines representations of the nation found within contemporary British cinema, against a backdrop of rising political tensions and deepening social divisions following the 'Brexit' referendum of June 2016. Exploring ways in which the contest of ideologies within media representations has played out post-2016, the book identifies divisions within society that have been given narrative shape and cultural form within recent British films. With case studies of major films such as Mary Queen of Scots, Peterloo, Darkest Hour, Sorry We Missed You and Downton Abbey, this book questions whether we are seeing the negotiation of a new relationship with the wider world, or simply a re-iteration of a long-standing British, or English, understanding of national identity.
Hong Kong Cinema and Sinophone Transnationalisms
Hong Kong Cinema and Sinophone Transnationalisms explores the intricate complexity of selected films and film-making practices from 1930s Hong Kong (and Shanghai) to the later 'new wave' phenomenon of the 1980s. The result is a Sinophone cinema that created some very different ways of understanding 'China' and 'Chineseness', developing their own 'cosmopolitan dreaming' within the cultural and economic changes of those times. Exploring sinification and its multiple manifestations in film, the book examines cinematic genres including Huangmei Opera films, qiqing (strange or queer romance) films, fanchuaners (professional cross-sex performers) in film, Hong Kong's Bond Movies (bangpian), erotic (fengyue) films, and New Wave Hong Kong cinema. In doing so, this book lays fruitful foundations for further understanding the development and changing faces of Hong Kong films and sinophone transnationalism in the even more complex and changing times of today.
Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Research
'Binge-watching' has become an umbrella term for a number of analytical questions in contemporary television studies, serving to describe the structure, marketing and publication model of Netflix and other streaming platforms.Because the term describes a range of different ideas linked to streaming television programming, research on binge-watching can bring together a number of different and related questions. This edited collection explores binge-watching and its role in contemporary television from the perspectives of fan studies, audience research, transnational television studies and narratology. This breadth of scope makes it possible to explore a broad variety of meanings and functions of the term and concept in contemporary television studies.
Screenwriting Unchained
Note: ISBN 9780995498129 has color interior, ISBN 9780995498174 has B&W interior.In Screenwriting Unchained, Emmanuel Oberg sets out a dogma-busting, method for developing screenplaysThis practical, no-nonsense guide leaves behind one-size-fits-all story theories and offers a refreshingly modern approach to story structure, making it a precious resource for anyone involved creatively in the Film and TV industry (or aspiring to be): writers, directors, producers, development execs, showrunners and storytellers eager to reach a wide audience at home and abroad without compromising their creative integrity.Oberg identifies three main story-types-plot-led, character-led, theme-led-then reveals in a clear, conversational style how each of these impacts on the structure of any story and how we can use a single set of tools to develop any screenplay, from an independent crossover to a studio blockbuster. Crucially, he also looks at hybrids and exceptions, those unique gems that don't fit any of the story-types but still work beautifully.This leads to the Story-Type Method, a powerful yet flexible way to handle the script development process. Oberg's inspiring framework doesn't tell filmmakers what to write and when, but focuses instead on why some storytelling tools and principles have stood the test of time, and how to use them in the 21st century.Including case studies from films as diverse as Gravity, Silver Linings Playbook, Crash, Birdman, Edge of Tomorrow, The Secret in Their Eyes, L.A. Confidential and The Lives of Others, Screenwriting Unchained will transform the way you write, read, pitch, design, assess and develop screenplays. Guaranteed!Emmanuel Oberg is a screenwriter, author and creative consultant with twenty-five years of experience in the Film and TV industry. After selling a first screenplay to Warner Bros, he has by StudioCanal, Working Title / Universal, Gold Circle and Film4. He has also designed an internationally acclaimed Advanced Development Workshop and modules on thriller, comedy and TV Series, all based on the Story-Type Method(R). He delivers them with passion to filmmakers all over the world. Emmanuel lives in the UK with his wife and their two daughters.
Bay Lodyans
In Haitian Creole, bay lodyans means to tell stories to an audience, and more generally, to entertain. This book is the first to analyze popular contemporary Haitian films, looking especially at how they respond to the needs and desires of Haitian audiences in and beyond Haiti. Produced between 2000 and 2018 and largely shot with digital cameras and sometimes cellphones, these films focus on the complexities of community, nostalgia, belonging, identity, and the emotional landscapes of exile and diaspora. They reflect sociopolitical and cultural issues related to family, language, im/migration, religion, gender, sexuality, and economic hardship. Using storytelling and other less traditionally "academic" techniques, C矇cile Accilien advances Haitian epistemological frameworks. Bay Lodyans integrates terms and concepts from Haitian culture, such as jerans and kafou (derived from the French words for "to manage" and "crossroads," respectively) and includes interviews with Haitian filmmakers, actors, and scholars in order to challenge the dominance of Western theoretical approaches and perspectives.
Klingon for the Galactic Traveler
"Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam." "It is a good day to die." What is the proper response to this? What should I do? Now, with Klingon for the Galactic Traveler you will know. Organized into four easy-to-use sections, this book will guide your steps through the Klingon language and customs: The regional dialects of the Empire Common, everyday usage of the language The slang phrases and curses that color the Klingon volcabulary Most importantly, the proper verbal, physical, and cultural responses. A misspoken word to a Klingon, who is quick to take offense and even quicker to take action, could have dire consequences. This book is the indispensable guide for the galactic traveler.
Writing a Successful TV Series
In Writing a Successful TV Series, screenwriter and industry expert Oberg shares career-boosting secrets for the modern series makerWould you like to learn how to create an irresistible bible, a compelling pilot, unforgettable characters and addictive storylines that audiences around the world will want to watch week after week once they're hooked on the first episode? If so, you've come to the right place!Based on the groundbreaking approach introduced in Screenwriting Unchained and shown in action in The Screenwriter's Troubleshooter, this third volume in the Story-Type Method(R) collection explores the crucial distinction between conventional series formats and the actual story structure lying underneath. Throughout, Oberg explains in a clear, conversational style how we can use the same dramatic tools to design series, seasons, episodes, storylines and sequences, and why modern series narratives are not just about teasers and cliffhangers.Writing a Successful TV Series provides a goldmine of actionable information to anyone involved in the series development process (writers, directors, producers, showrunners, story editors, development execs), irrespective of their level of experience. As in his previous books, Oberg puts a strong emphasis on each project reaching the widest possible audience, both at home and abroad, without following prescriptive and outdated rules.Using examples and case studies from successful series such as Stranger Things, Killing Eve, Breaking Bad, Sex Education, Occupied, The Walking Dead, Fleabag, Big Little Lies, Happy Valley and many others, Oberg reveals in this practical guide the flexible yet powerful tools and techniques needed to conquer this fast-evolving medium, focusing particularly on getting your bible and pilot commissioned. A companion online course dives further into detailed case studies and hands-on project work to help you master series design at season level.So if you're eager to find out how mini-series, procedurals and serials are really designed in order to make it to the Writers' Room and not only survive it but thrive and shine in it, look no further!About the Author: Emmanuel Oberg is a screenwriter, bestselling author and creative consultant with more than twenty-five years of experience in the Film and TV industry. After selling a first screenplay to Warner Bros, he has been commissioned as a writer by StudioCanal, Working Title / Universal, Gold Circle and Film4. He has also designed internationally acclaimed advanced development workshops and modules on thriller, comedy, animation and TV Series, all based on the Story-Type Method. He delivers them with passion to storytellers around the world, in-person or online, through a series of interactive courses and hybrid events. Emmanuel lives in the UK with his wife and their two daughters.What Readers Say: "A must read when looking for information related to the development of streamers and serialised television series.""FOR WRITERS INTERESTED IN THE STREAMING SERIES, you will enjoy this book!""Leads you through a step-by-step method to getting the most from your TV show ideas.""A must-read for anyone who wants to write a successful TV Series and more!"
A Silence from Hitchcock
In A Silence from Hitchcock, Murray Pomerance explores the resonating power of silence in the director's work--its variation, its haunting temptation, and its technical power. Working from a meditative devotion to and an illuminating familiarity with the director's work, Pomerance shines light upon six films, some of them (Notorious, The Lady Vanishes, and The Trouble with Harry) frequently, even obsessively treated, and others (Frenzy, The Wrong Man, and Topaz) less often discussed. In its strange relation to speech, memory, urbanity, guilt, mortality, and espionage, silence becomes, in these films, a dramatic protagonist in its own right. Written by a master interpreter of Hitchcock, this book offers new ways of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about the films of one of cinema's greatest artists, as well as new ways of reflecting on our experience of cinema itself.
FVM Magazine Dynamic Special Edition Gail Porter Issue
FVM Magazine Dynamic Issue Special Edition With Gail Porter DAndra Simmons Kevin Wills Dr. Matt Harrington Pablo Adame Luz Luzb Sabina Marthinsen Sandi Bogle Donna Williams Salib Irina Jacobson Kirk Richards Liz McConaghy Lilly Palmer Andrea Jane Bunker
Oppenheimer
**Winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture** The complete screenplay of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer centers on the life of the "father of the atomic bomb." Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film stars Cillian Murphy as the man who led the effort, in the midst of a world war, to unleash the power of the atom. Christopher Nolan has fashioned a story of discovery bathed in the light of a thousand suns - but one that is darkened by government surveillance and the travesty of a trial to which Oppenheimer was subjected. In his introduction to the screenplay, Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus, praises Nolan's skill in taking an extremely complex life story and miraculously turning it into "visual art that is faithful both to the history and the man."
Screenwriting from the Inside Out
This book provides aspiring screenwriters with a practical and informed way to learn how to think and write like a "creative". It stands apart from, yet complements, other screenwriting "how to" books by connecting the transdisciplinary academic fields of screenwriting, film studies and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Using a stepped approach, it shows the writer how to understand that how we think, shapes what we write, so that we may write better.
Women and Home in Cinema
This book explores visions of home in cinema and the ways in which women inhabit the onscreen realm. Looking closely at a range of films made between 1936 and 2013, it examines how filmmakers reconfigure studio sets and real locations through the filmmaking process into mutable onscreen domains imbued with depth, metaphor, and expressivity.The book studies the films through the lens of four filmmaking processes in particular: d矇coupage, mise-en-sc癡ne, sound and editing. Close analysis reveals how filmmakers use these cinematic 'building blocks' to shape onscreen worlds charged with emotion and animated by the warp and weft of psychic life.Images of home abound in the cinema, and women frequently find themselves at the core of both structures. Drawing on recent spatial and feminist enquiry, the book reviews the idea of home as a fixed and stable location and illustrates how the art of cinema is well equipped to explore home as an imaginary as well as a material realm.With its emphasis on film practice as a route into critical reflection, this book will be of interest to filmmakers, film theorists and those who simply want to understand more about how films work.
East Asian Film Remakes
This wide-ranging, historically grounded exploration of motion picture remakes produced in East Asia brings together original contributions from experts in Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas and puts forth new ways of thinking about the remaking process as both a critically underappreciated form of artistic expression and an economically motivated industrial practice. Exploring everything from ethnic Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven (2013), a Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood's Western of the same title, to Stephen Chow's The Mermaid (2016), a Chinese slapstick reimagining of Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989) and Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 fairy tale, East Asian Film Remakes contributes to a better understanding of cinematic remaking across the region and offers vital alternatives to the Eurocentric and Hollywood-focused approaches that have thus far dominated the field.
