Singing Out
Singing Out explores a broad range of singing voices and sung moments, from lavish film musical sequences, television and videogames, through to online platforms, advertising, and multimedia installation work. It illustrates the diverse ways in which the singing voice is produced and understood in different media across international contexts, taking into consideration issues such as corporeal form, age, race, reception, and gender. The act of singing emphasises issues of identity, technology, and the identifying markers of the voice itself, heightening communication, acting as an aid to memory, and inviting judgement. Singing demarcates and breaks down textual and conceptual boundaries, and offers an intensity of experience that gives it a special status on the soundtrack. Singing Out contains a range of approaches to the singing voice, offering students and researchers a variety of methodological and critical tools to understand the contemporary context and importance of singing in multimedia.
Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film
A cinematic study of Asian-Indigenous relationalitySettler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian-Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently work toward decolonial worldmaking. This emerging vision can be seen in the radical friendship between Ali Kazimi and Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas in Kazimi's film Shooting Indians, in the queer relational survivance depicted in films such as This Place and Scarborough, and in the sensory disruptions of Jin-me Yoon's interactive art project Untunnelling Vision. From film and media studies to diaspora studies and critical ethnic studies, Indigenous studies to queer theory, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film provides a critical framework for engaging cinematic media to understand and imagine beyond the entrenched settler-colonial dynamics within Asian diasporic communities. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Toward a More Perfect Rebellion
Toward a More Perfect Rebellion tells the riveting story of the socially engaged filmmakers of color who studied in the Ethno-Communications Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1969 and 1973. While the program is best known for training the trailblazing group of Black directors known as the L.A. Rebellion, this book also includes the radical Asian American, Chicana/o, and Native American filmmakers who collaborated alongside their Black classmates to create one of the most expansive and groundbreaking bodies of work of any US university cohort. Through extensive interviews with the filmmakers and cross-racial analysis of their collective filmography, Josslyn Jeanine Luckett sheds light on a largely untold history of media activists working outside Hollywood yet firmly rooted in Los Angeles, aiming their cameras with urgency and tenderness to capture their communities' stories of power, struggle, and improvisational brilliance.
The Vanishing (Spoorloos)
At the 1989 Sydney Film Festival, George Sluizer's little-known independent film, Spoorloos (The Vanishing), was an unexpected hit, winning the festival's audience award and gaining accolades at other international film festivals. The Vanishing has earned a reputation as a psychological thriller that shocked audiences with its unexpected twist ending. This is the first book-length study to examine The Vanishing as a film that complements and broadens generic expectations of psychological horror cinema. It delves into The Vanishing's production history, including Sluizer's adaptation of the film screenplay from the novella The Golden Egg (1984) by Dutch author Tim Krabb矇. Beyond exploring Sluizer's filmmaking style and The Vanishing's place in Dutch cinema, this book analyses how the film's plot, themes and symbolic imagery connect it to topics prevalent in prominent sub-genres of horror cinema, including the serial-killer sub-genre that rose to prominence in the late 1980s. Its themes are also echoed in contemporary films associated with arthouse cinema, which are variously dubbed 'post-horror' and 'elevated horror'. The book will illuminate The Vanishing's close associations with modern-day cinema, arguing that its particular type of psychological horror has consistently resonated with audiences in the decades since its release.
The Vanishing (Spoorloos)
At the 1989 Sydney Film Festival, George Sluizer's little-known independent film, Spoorloos (The Vanishing), was an unexpected hit, winning the festival's audience award and gaining accolades at other international film festivals. The Vanishing has earned a reputation as a psychological thriller that shocked audiences with its unexpected twist ending. This is the first book-length study to examine The Vanishing as a film that complements and broadens generic expectations of psychological horror cinema. It delves into The Vanishing's production history, including Sluizer's adaptation of the film screenplay from the novella The Golden Egg (1984) by Dutch author Tim Krabb矇. Beyond exploring Sluizer's filmmaking style and The Vanishing's place in Dutch cinema, this book analyses how the film's plot, themes and symbolic imagery connect it to topics prevalent in prominent sub-genres of horror cinema, including the serial-killer sub-genre that rose to prominence in the late 1980s. Its themes are also echoed in contemporary films associated with arthouse cinema, which are variously dubbed 'post-horror' and 'elevated horror'. The book will illuminate The Vanishing's close associations with modern-day cinema, arguing that its particular type of psychological horror has consistently resonated with audiences in the decades since its release.
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good
Readers can't curb their enthusiasm for Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good, now fully revised and includes a full insightful episode guide to the entire Curb Your Enthusiasm series For Larry David, success was no sure thing. A frustrated New York comic who was known to walk off the stage in disgust, David was barely making a living. At least until his friend Jerry Seinfeld asked him to create a new kind of television sitcom for NBC. The result -- Seinfeld -- started slowly but became a gigantic hit. But most people didn't know that the real genius behind the show was Larry David. Rich beyond his wildest dreams, David still had something to prove -- and some television boundaries to push. And so he created Curb Your Enthusiasm, the improvised comedy that cast aside political correctness and made for hilarious, cringeworthy TV, a show that dared to relive the disastrous Seinfeld finale and turn it into a triumph. This second, fully updated edition of Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good offers a complete episode-by-episode guide to the series and recounts David's early struggle to succeed in television and movies, the creation and development of his hit sitcoms, and his later success starring in the HBO film Clear History and the Broadway hit Fish in the Dark. It also explores Larry's on- and off-screen relationships with famous pals like Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, and Jerry, Jason, Julia, and Michael. Filled with candor and humor David himself would respect, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good is an essential companion to a comedic force.
One Frame Per Second
"One Frame Per Second: Graphic Design as Visual Storyteller" is a work that explores how graphic design has become an essential storyteller in film and television. From silent films, where images made up for the absence of sound, to the streaming era, where graphic interfaces create personalized experiences, this book reveals how every visual decision transforms stories into unforgettable narratives. Through in-depth analysis, it unveils the secrets behind opening titles, visual universes in franchises and graphic strategies on digital platforms, showing how design communicates emotions, builds identities and connects with audiences.The book inspires students, designers and audiovisual lovers to appreciate the cultural and narrative impact of graphic design. It is an invitation to rediscover the power of images and to value each graphic element as a bridge between stories and their audiences. This work is a celebration of design as an art that, frame by frame, creates worlds that transcend the screen and remain in the collective memory.
James Cameron
Ground breaker. Game changer. The King of the World. Director James Cameron went from cult sci-fi rising star to box-office dominator at faster than light speed. As much a technical innovator as he is a visionary artist, Cameron has proven himself the master of his own cinematic destiny. His methods have often been controversial, but the results are undeniably impactful. Taking in his scrappy early days, his impressive breakthrough with The Terminator, his colossal triumph with Titanic, his real-life adventures in planet Earth's most extreme environment, and his astonishing world-building success with Avatar, this is a truly essential guide to Cameron's stellar filmography.
Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema
Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation's responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers' approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics. Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.
Hotels
From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film's action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling--hotels, inns, and motels--to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life. Along the way, O'Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.
Descriptive Analysis of Sound and Silence in the Audiovisual Translations of American and Japanese Movies
Religion, Theology, and Stranger Things
Religion, Theology and Stranger Things: Studies from the Upside Down on Evil, Ethics, Horror, and Hope brings interdisciplinary analysis to the teeming spiritual side of the hit television series. With chapters from social scientists, historians, theologians, and Biblical scholars, the volume addresses the many different theological, religious, and supernatural themes present in the fictional world of Hawkins, Indiana. From spiritualism to secularism, Mormon gender norms to monsters of abnormality, rock & roll to Dungeons & Dragons, an international list of scholars come together to argue that imaginative realms like the one created by the Duffer brothers can serve to showcase and to scrutinize the common impulses and needs of our culture and ourselves. To venture into the darkness of the Upside Down is to venture into the depths of human experience. This volume explores the shadows and suggests a few paths back into the light.
Man of Taste
Radley Metzger was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like The Lickerish Quartet and the hardcore classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven. After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the "porno chic" era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore, and good taste from bad. Rob King uses Metzger's work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability. Man of Taste spans Metzger's entire life: his early years in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine. Metzger's career, King argues, sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture transformed during these decades. Lavishly illustrated with rare photos and publicity images, this book paints a vivid picture of a filmmaker who channeled his artistic aspirations into some of the most disreputable movie genres of his day.
Screening Sherlock
Screening Sherlock is the first book-length academic study of the film and television career of the most famous detective in fiction. Chapman explores the contexts, adaptation strategies and critical reception of Sherlock Holmes (and Dr Watson) on film and television in Britain and the United States. The book includes case studies of such famous Holmes impersonators as William Gillette, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as charting a path through many lesser-known productions. From early cinema to the Hollywood studio system, and from heritage drama to contemporary postmodern television, Screening Sherlock is an indispensible work for all aficionados of Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective of Baker Street.
William Raban's Nautical Twilight
This book explores the practice of artist filmmaker William Raban from 1970 to the present. The trajectory from his early experimental, landscape and expanded cinema works of the 1970s leads into more recent films on the River Thames and London; his techniques are examined and engagingly explained to attract a wide readership including both experts and those with little knowledge of the subject. This is a personal account of what it means to make work in a radical filmmaking context to explore both the political and perceptual/formal qualities of film through a period of immense social and technological change.
Representations of Endymion and Selene
A focused study of an ancient myth and its reception, which provokes new consideration of how myth in general can challenge social norms.Analyzing the visual and literary transformations of the myth of Endymion and Selene, Anna Chiara Corradino argues that this myth becomes a valuable tool for understanding the cultural problematization and censorship of female sexuality, as well as the marginalization of alternative forms of male sexuality. The myth's key themes, of dominant femininity, reified masculinity and female necrophilia, are shaped through the centuries from the core story of Selene, the goddess of the Moon, falling in love with a mortal shepherd, Endymion, and granting him eternal sleep so she can kiss him every night. In five core sections focusing on the archaeology of the myth in the ancient world, the art of the Renaissance to Baroque periods, and modern art and film, Corradino traces the way the relationship between the two 'lovers' embodies the taboo topic of the eroticization of the sleeping and/or dead male body, and the suppressed desire of female domination and dominance. This research breaks new ground by displaying how these marginal desires have always challenged normativity and have had a profound impact on and through multiple receptions.
The Superhero Blockbuster
The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning builds an innovative framework for analyzing one of the most prominent genres in twenty-first-century Hollywood. In combining theories of adaptation with close textual analysis, James C. Taylor provides a set of analytical tools with which to undertake nuanced exploration of superhero blockbusters' meanings. This deep understanding of the films attends to historical, sociopolitical, and industrial contexts and also illuminates key ways in which the superhero genre has contributed to the development of the Hollywood blockbuster. Each chapter focuses on a different superhero or superhero team, covering some of the most popular superhero blockbusters based on DC and Marvel superheroes. The chapters cover different aspects of the films' adaptive practices, exploring the adaptation of stylistic strategies, narrative models, and modes of seriality from superhero comic books, while being attentive to the ways in which the films engage with the wider networks of texts in various media that comprise a given superhero franchise. Chapter 1 looks back to the first superhero blockbuster, 1978's Superman: The Movie, examining its cinematic re-envisioning of the quintessential superhero and role in establishing Hollywood's emerging model of blockbuster filmmaking. Subsequent chapters analyze the twenty-first-century boom in superhero blockbusters and examine digital imaging and nostalgia in Spider-Man films, Marvel Studios' adaptation of a shared universe model of seriality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the use of alternate timeline narratives in X-Men films. The book concludes by turning its analytical toolkit to analysis of DC Studios' cinematic universe, the DC Extended Universe.
The Superhero Blockbuster
The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning builds an innovative framework for analyzing one of the most prominent genres in twenty-first-century Hollywood. In combining theories of adaptation with close textual analysis, James C. Taylor provides a set of analytical tools with which to undertake nuanced exploration of superhero blockbusters' meanings. This deep understanding of the films attends to historical, sociopolitical, and industrial contexts and also illuminates key ways in which the superhero genre has contributed to the development of the Hollywood blockbuster. Each chapter focuses on a different superhero or superhero team, covering some of the most popular superhero blockbusters based on DC and Marvel superheroes. The chapters cover different aspects of the films' adaptive practices, exploring the adaptation of stylistic strategies, narrative models, and modes of seriality from superhero comic books, while being attentive to the ways in which the films engage with the wider networks of texts in various media that comprise a given superhero franchise. Chapter 1 looks back to the first superhero blockbuster, 1978's Superman: The Movie, examining its cinematic re-envisioning of the quintessential superhero and role in establishing Hollywood's emerging model of blockbuster filmmaking. Subsequent chapters analyze the twenty-first-century boom in superhero blockbusters and examine digital imaging and nostalgia in Spider-Man films, Marvel Studios' adaptation of a shared universe model of seriality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the use of alternate timeline narratives in X-Men films. The book concludes by turning its analytical toolkit to analysis of DC Studios' cinematic universe, the DC Extended Universe.
Queer for Fear
A new analysis of the connection between the horror genre and the queer community. Queer for Fear is the groundbreaking empirical study of the LGBTQ+ community that not only documents the opinions, habits, and tastes of the horror-loving queer spectator but also evidences how and why queers have a distinctive relationship to the horror genre. This interdisciplinary book makes impactful contributions to the fields of queer, film, horror, trauma, camp, and live cinema studies.
The Queer Coming of Age Film Genre
This book argues for the existence of the Queer Coming of Age genre, in which films reveal the unique challenges experienced by queer people during this time of their lives, positing that these films are driven by a political undercurrent advocating for queer acceptance and that they provide guidance for queer people to understand their own lives.
Winning the Crowd
How are the films we watch shaping our political worldview? Studies show that films shape us--they affect our values, our beliefs, and our actions. Consequently understanding the messages reinforced by many popular films is vital for everyone, and especially for the student of politics.Winning The Crowd: The Politics of Popular Films showcases careful, close readings of recent, popular films as serious texts of political thought. Ten contributors select a film or small set of related films--from the John Wick franchise to Pixar's The Incredibles--and analyze the political orientations that these films convey. The volume will be a helpful introduction for those interested in what Hollywood is teaching its viewers about power and the good life. It will also be a valuable model for those wishing to sharpen their own ability to think critically about the meaning of their evening entertainment.How have your values and beliefs been formed by Hollywood? Winning The Crowd takes you on a guided journey through some of the smartest popular films of recent years.
Beyond the Bbfc
This work scrutinises British film censorship from a local perspective. Examining different regions and areas, the work of individual councils and their relations with one another and with the BBFC, it offers a broad historical exploration of the intricacies of film censorship in action. Drawing on local archival material and considering the activities of local government in enforcing Cinematograph legislation, this work considers the significance of film censorship apparatus and processes in shaping and informing responses to and control of film culture in different locations across the twentieth century.
The New Italian Cinema of Precarity
竄This is an excellent and innovative study of one of the most crucial topics of today. Using gender, sexuality, and race as theoretical frameworks, The New Italian Cinema of Precarity brilliantly enlivens the study of precarity and unemployment as portrayed in contemporary Italian cinema. A must-have for both students and scholars.罈 (Dr. Paolo Chirumbolo, Louisiana State University) The book provides one of the first explorations of contemporary Italian cinematic depictions of precarity. In 2008, the world faced a significant financial crisis, leading to the emergence of the socio-economic phenomenon known as precarity. In Italy, precarity is a national issue, primarily referring to the widespread prevalence of temporary work, impacting the lifestyles of many minorities due to Italian legislation. Precarity has consequently become a recurring theme in contemporary Italian cinema, portraying characters with precarious lives marked by unpredictability, lack of job security, and material or psychological well-being, thereby becoming existential precarious characters. This book analyses seventeen popular Italian contemporary films, revealing their complex interplay between cinema and society. This interplay challenges traditional notions of Italianness in cinema and illustrates how characters' precarity intersects with other issues such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, bringing further nuance to contemporary Italian identities, which are heterogeneous and plural.
The Sex Slave in Cinema
This book examines the visual politics of the cinematic figure of the 'sex slave' from its origins in silent film to its iterations in blaxploitation cinema, European art cinema, Nollywood, and, in its most concentrated form, the Hollywood blockbuster thriller. Through close analysis of several film texts that is informed by feminist theory, visual studies, critical race studies, and the political economy of sex work, this book argues that the sex slave has long functioned as a disciplinary spectacle that simultaneously commodifies and punishes female flesh. The sex slave is used to 'sell' a libidinal fantasy of rescue, not of the trafficked woman or child, but of the very economic and social order that exploits them.
I Am McLovin
When Superbad was released on August 17th in 2007, it proved itself to be a massive success right out of the gate, especially for those in the film's target millennial demographic. The film wound up dominating at the box office, bringing in $170 million dollars worldwide, against a $20 million dollar budget. It also launched the careers of Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Emma Stone, Bill Hader, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Seth Rogen whose careers are all thriving to this day. It further proved that Judd Apatow is now one of the most successful film producers of his generation, bringing the world hit after hit.Superbad remains, to this day, a beloved comedy film for millennials who grew up with it. This is because, unlike other comedies of that era, it embraced the awkwardness of the characters, particularly with someone like Michael Cera. Unlike the cartoonish representations of an 80s comedy like Revenge of the Nerds, Superbad presented itself with a depth to the characters that enabled millennials (and other generations) to bond with the movie in a more meaningful way. Full of interviews with people like Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Emma Stone, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Martha MacIssac, Judd Apatow, Bill Hader, Greg Motolla, Evan Goldberg, and Shauna Robertson, I Am McLovin is a comprehensive guide to the movie that changed a generation.
A Quentin Tarantino Dictionary
Explore an A-Z of everything you need to know about the masterful movies of Quentin Tarantino, from AK-47 to "Zed's dead, baby" and everything in between. With hundreds of entries covering every facet of Tarantino's work - from inspiration and influences to his most frequent collaborators and little-known cameos - A Quentin Tarantino Dictionary is a stylish guide to the wonderful world of this visionary filmmaker. Written by author and film critic Helen O'Hara (Empire, BAFTA, the Telegraph) and with bespoke illustrations that bring the director's vision to life, this is a one-stop shop for all things Tarantino.
A Wes Anderson Dictionary
Explore an A-Z of everything you need to know about the iconic films of Wes Anderson, from Asteroid City to Steve Zissou and everything in between. With hundreds of entries covering every facet of Anderson's work - from inspiration and influences to his most frequent collaborators and little-known quirks - A Wes Anderson Dictionary is a stylish guide to the wonderful world of this iconic, unique filmmaker. Written by author and journalist Sophie Monks Kaufman (Little White Lies, Empire, Netflix, BBC) and with bespoke illustrations that bring the director's vision to life, this is a one-stop shop for all things Anderson.
Intimate Animation
In recent years there has been a surge of animated projects that have pushed boundaries, broken taboos, prompted discussions and wowed festival and online audiences alike through compelling storytelling and unmatched artistry.Join Ben Mitchell and Laura-Beth Cowley of Skwigly Online Animation Magazine and the Intimate Animation podcast as they take you on a tour of the landscape of contemporary animated films that deal with themes of love, intimacy, relationships, anatomy and sexuality - and the incredible artists behind them. Through research and firsthand interviews with trailblazers such as Signe Baumane, Andreas Hykade, Ruth Lingford, Michaela Pavl獺tov獺, Bill Plympton and Joanna Quinn as well as newer voices including Sawako Kabuki, Renata Gąsiorowska, Will Anderson, Sara Gunnarsd籀ttir, Michaela Mihalyi, David Stumpf, Levi Stoops, Lori Mal矇part-Traversy, Anna Ginsburg, Veljko Popovic, Renee Zhan and more, Intimate Animation looks deeply at the role animation has played in presenting elaborate and complex concepts relating to love and sexuality.Exploring the role animation has played in sex education, self-discovery, the body, lust and love, as well as how the medium can be used to visually represent emotions, feelings and concepts not easily described in words nor depicted through live-action filmmaking, Intimate Animation is the ideal book for professional animators, filmmakers, enthusiasts, researchers, academic and students of animation and film studies interested in the themes of love and sexuality.
Anita Loos Rediscovered
Anita Loos (1888-1981) was one of Hollywood's most respected and prolific screenwriters, as well as an acclaimed novelist and playwright. This unique collection of previously unpublished film treatments, short stories, and one-act plays spans fifty years of her creative writing and showcases the breadth and depth of her talent. Beginning in 1912 with the stories she submitted from her San Diego home (some made into films by D. W. Griffith), through her collaboration with Colette on the play Gigi, Anita Loos wrote almost every day for the screen, stage, books, or magazines. Film scripts include San Francisco, The Women, and Red-Headed Woman. The list of stars for whom she created unforgettable roles includes Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, and Carol Channing. This collection has been selected by Anita's niece and close friend, the best-selling author Mary Anita Loos, together with the acclaimed film historian Cari Beauchamp. Their essays are laced throughout the volume, introducing each section and giving previously untold insights and behind-the-scenes stories about Anita-her life, her friendships, and her times.
Bunuel and Mexico
Though Luis Bu簽uel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The first book-length English-language study of Bu簽uel's Mexican films, this book explores a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus fills a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Bu簽uel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Mu簽oz considers Bu簽uel's Mexican films--made between 1947 and 1965--within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Bu簽uel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.
The Films of Walter Hill
This book is an academic study of the work of an important American director working primarily in the action genre. The book explores the ways in which Hill's filmography reveals his point of view and intensifies classical approaches to storytelling.
Autism in Film and Television
Global awareness of autism has skyrocketed since the 1980s, and popular culture has caught on, with film and television producers developing ever more material featuring autistic characters. Autism in Film and Television brings together more than a dozen essays on depictions of autism, exploring how autistic characters are signified in media and how the reception of these characters informs societal understandings of autism. Editors Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer have assembled a pioneering examination of autism's portrayal in film and television. Contributors consider the various means by which autism has been expressed in films such as Phantom Thread, Mercury Rising, and Life Animated and in television and streaming programs including Atypical, The Bridge, Stranger Things, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Community. Across media, the figure of the brilliant, accomplished, and "quirky" autist has proven especially appealing. Film and television have thus staked out a progressive position on neurodiversity by insisting on screen time for autism but have done so while frequently ignoring the true diversity of autistic experience. As a result, this volume is a welcome celebration of nonjudgmental approaches to disability, albeit one that is still freighted with stereotypes and elisions.
TV on Strike
TV on Strike examines the upheaval in the entertainment industry by telling the inside story of the first writers' strike--the hundred-day writers' strike that thwarted Hollywood in late 2007 and early 2008. The television industry's uneasy transition to the digital age was the driving force behind what seemed then to be the most significant labor dispute of the twenty-first century. Now, in 2024, we know it was only the first battle. The strike put a spotlight on how the advent of new media distribution platforms reshaped the traditional business models that governed the television industry for decades. The uncertainty that sent writers out into the streets of Los Angeles and New York with picket signs laid bare the depth of the divide between the media barons who rule the entertainment industry and the writers who are integral as the creators of movies and television shows. With both sides afraid of losing millions in future profits, a critical communication breakdown spurred a fierce battle with repercussions reverberated in the 2023 writers and actors strikes. The saga of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike is told through the eyes of the key players on both sides of the negotiating table and of the foot soldiers who surprised even themselves with the strength of their resolve to fight for their rights in the face of an ambiguous future. In the years since the strike ended, the rise of digital distribution platforms has continued to change the business landscape in ways that few could have predicted when Hollywood guilds were first feverishly trying to hammer out a contract template for a new era.
