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117 results in Film, Media, Mass Communication

Page 1 of 6

Four from the forties
  • Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington
  • Brian McFarlane
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
  • The 1940s represent a high point in the history of British film, characterised by the works of such recognised greats as David Lean and Michael Powell. But alongside this ‘quality cinema’ there exists a body of popular productions by film-makers who have not yet been the objects of detailed scholarly attention. Four from the forties addresses this oversight, drawing attention to four directors whose career trajectories had a good deal in common and can tell us much about what British film-goers expected from the cinema in this crucial decade. Leslie Arliss, Arthur Crabtree, Bernard Knowles and Lawrence Huntington were all born at the turn of the century. All had been active in a range of film-making functions in the 1930s, and all would do their most proficient and popular work in the 1940s, thereafter prolonging their careers into the 1960s through ‘B’ movies, co-features and television. Taken together, they offer a commentary on the changing fortunes of mid-century British cinema.

Nordic Gothic
  • Edited by Maria Holmgren Troy, Johan Höglund, Yvonne Leffler, Sofia Wijkmark
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    06 March 2026
  • Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV series and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. The book creates an understanding of a ubiquitous but hitherto under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the Gothic narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries and their welfare systems, and how central these anxieties are for the understanding of identities and ideologies in the Nordic region. It examines how figures from Nordic folklore and mythology function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes, and also how universal Gothic figures such as vampires and witches are used in the Nordic context. The Nordic settings, and especially the Nordic wilderness, are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism and subcategories such as Gothic crime, Gothic humour, troll Gothic and geriatric Gothic are defined and discussed. Furthermore, the phenomenon of transcultural adaptation is investigated, using the cases of Lars von Trier’s Riget and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Låt den rätte komma in, two seminal works of contemporary Nordic Gothic.

TV antiquity
  • Swords, sandals, blood and sand
  • Sylvie Magerstädt
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    04 March 2026
  • TV antiquity explores representations of ancient Greece and Rome throughout television history. It is the first comprehensive overview of the genre in television. More specifically, the author argues that serial television set in antiquity offers a perspective on the ancient world quite distinct from their cinematic counterparts. The book traces the historic development of fictional representations of antiquity from the staged black-and-white shows of the 1950s and 1960s to the most recent digital spectacles. A key argument explored throughout the book is that the structure of serial television (with its focus on intimacy and narrative complexity) is at times better suited to explore the complex mythic and historic plots of antiquity. Therefore, the book consciously focuses on multipart television dramas rather than made-for-TV feature films. This enables the author to explore the specific narrative and aesthetic possibilities of this format. The book features a range of insightful case studies, from the high-profile serials I, Claudius (1976) and Rome (2005–8) to lesser-known works like The Caesars (1968) or The Eagle of the Ninth (1976) and popular entertainment shows such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–99) and STARZ Spartacus (2010–13). Each of the case studies also teases out broader issues of the specific decade under consideration. Consequently, the book highlights the creative interplay between television genres and production environments and illustrates how cultural and political events have influenced the representations of antiquity in television.

Philippe Garrel
  • Michael Leonard
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    04 March 2026
  • This book provides a comprehensive study of the cinema of Philippe Garrel, placing his work within the political context of France in the second half of the twentieth century (including the tumultuous events of May 68) and the broader contexts of auteur cinema and the avant-garde. Challenging the assumption that Garrel’s oeuvre exists in direct continuity with that of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et al., this study locates a more radical shift with Garrel’s predecessors by observing the eclecticism of the influences absorbed and exploited by the director. In doing so, it explores contexts beyond French cinema in order to interpret the director’s work, including avant-garde movements such as the Situationists, Surrealism, Arte Povera and the American Underground. Acknowledging Garrel’s role as an unofficial historian of the so-called ‘post-New Wave’, the study equally considers his relationship with other members of this loose film school, including Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman and Jacques Doillon. The book is structured according to both a chronological and thematic reading of Garrel’s oeuvre. This method introduces different conceptual issues in each chapter while respecting the coherence of the various periodisations of the director’s career.

Resistance in Indian Documentary Film
  • Aesthetics, Culture and Practice
  • Edited by Shweta Kishore, Kunal Ray
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    04 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • While sizable literature exists on the themes, issues and voices that constitute resistance in historical Indian documentary cinema, less is known about contemporary modes of resistance in Indian documentary. This volume identifies languages and practices of resistance constructed by Indian documentary practitioners located in contemporary global and national contexts organised by majoritarian political discourse, rising social inequalities, tightening media regulatory mechanisms and variable access to digital technologies. Extending its analytical lens beyond textual politics, the volume offers an original conceptualisation of how we identify, mobilise, and recuperate acts of resistance as both represented in documentary and those represented by the organisation of documentary practice e.g., documentary exhibition, curation, education, and criticism. Combining scholarly essays and practitioner writing, the volume offers a timely reconsideration of how central debates and issues of power and representation in documentary may be studied as objects of analysis and as subjective accounts of individual experience, decisions, and actions relating to documentary aesthetics and practice.

Resilient reporting
  • Media coverage of Irish elections since 1969
  • Michael Breen, Michael Courtney, Iain Mcmenamin, Eoin O’Malley, Kevin Rafter
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    04 March 2026
  • By means of a unique dataset involving twenty-five million words from newspapers as well as radio and television coverage, this timely book examines how election news reporting in Ireland has changed over the last half-century.The authors examine reporting in terms of framing, tone, and the distribution of coverage. They also focus on how the economy has affected election coverage as well as media reporting of leaders and personalities, gender, and the effect of the commercial basis of media outlets.The authors evaluate three broad hypotheses about Ireland’s election coverage since 1969: the extent to which the norms of critical impartiality have survived, whether the media has shifted towards hypercritical infotainment, and the extent to which content has been influenced by exogenous factors, i.e. political, social, and economic factors outside the media itself. The findings – which are drawn from a machine learning computer system involving a huge communications content analysis study – will interest academics as well as politicians and policymakers internationally.

David Milch
  • Jason Jacobs
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    04 March 2026
  • This is the first full-length study of the career and achievements of David Milch, the US writer who created NYPD Blue, Deadwood and other ground-breaking television dramas. It locates Milch’s work in the traditions of American literature while tracking his career from academic research assistant to leading Hollywood screenwriter of his generation. It draws on behind-the-scenes material in order to evaluate the nature and significance of authorship, intention, collaboration and performance in his shows, and in doing so provides a major contribution to the study of television art.

Filming Death
  • End-of-Life Documentary Cinema
  • Outi Hakola
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    03 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • End-of-life documentaries have proliferated in the twenty-first century as various organisations, institutions, journalists, independent filmmakers, and members of the public have wanted to give death and dying a face in the public discussion.

    Each documentary film that concerns individuals with a terminal illness, in hospice care, or desiring assisted death, redefines cultural expectations of what dying is and feels like. These films invite their viewers to witness intimate and emotional moments of dying people, including moments on their deathbed. Filming Death explores these documentaries as ethical spaces, asking the viewers to learn how to engage with end-of-life through the experiences of others and to find ways to alleviate potential death anxiety.

    The book argues that the diversity of documentary films resists simplified moral divisions between good and bad death, and instead, embellishes diverse realities where dying takes many forms, ranging from death acceptance to raging to death.

Theatricality and the Arts
  • Film, Theatre, Art
  • Edited by Andrew Quick, Richard Rushton
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    03 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • Theatricality and the Arts presents a series of investigations of the notion of 'theatricality'. Primarily, theatricality concerns that which pertains to theatre, but the term has always carried with it the potentially pejorative associations of exaggeration and fakery. The essays here question and contest such associations. The book is divided into four sections which together provide a comprehensive interrogation of theatricality. The four sections begin with multimedia, where theatricality is examined in relation to mixed modes of media (internet art, painting, performance and digital display). A second section takes a philosophical approach to questions of theatricality. A third section looks at art, broadly speaking, but also at the historical contexts of art, photography and other media (literature, film, music). A final section features reflections on theatre and cinema, often in conjunction. Considered as a whole, the collection contributes to debates on theatricality in various fields, while also enabling a cross-examination of approaches to the topic.

Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film
  • Sarah Jilani
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    03 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2024
  • The decades following the independences from colonialism saw a pioneering generation of realist novels and films emerge across Africa and South Asia. They told stories of people living through national circumstances fast diverging from the promises of decolonisation.

    Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film explores how post-independence texts critique their own political conditions by choosing to narrate a different, but related, problem - that which Ngugi wa Thiong'o once called 'decolonising the mind'. Guided by the psycho-political thought of Frantz Fanon, who maps a dialectical relationship between decolonisation and the self, this book considers how eight well known and less studied works from the 1950s-1980s. Together, they help us understand how the transformation of subjectivities is a materially consequential process that sits squarely within the broader, unfinished project that is decolonisation.

Folk horror on film
  • Return of the British repressed
  • Edited by Louis Bayman
  • Revised by K. J. Donnelly
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    27 February 2026
  • The term 'folk horror' has a become pervasive way of describing a wide array of films. The famous trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) associates folk horror with the cultural margins of 1960s and 70s Britain, and elicits a fear and fascination with its curiosu rural inhabitants. But although the term is now ubiquitous, few can specify any further what ‘folk horror’ actually is. This collection undertakes an extended discussion of folk horror by considering the special importance of British cinema to it. It defines folk horror as a cultural landscape which brings to the surface what British modernity has repressed. Understanding folk horror this way helps delineate its common stylistic features, its development in British cinema and its place within the wider field of horror. In studies of topics as diverse as folklore, nature, the countryside, drums, English and Celtic history this collection widens the corpus of folk horror, incorporating lesser-known works like the sci-fi Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975), women’s folk horror and films by more recent filmmakers such as Ben Wheatley. Considering also the cult critical status that continues to make it a living, changing organism, this collection argues for folk horror as a cultural phenomenon, thereby providing an expanded understanding of the genre’s characteristics through which to explore the tensions and contradictions it stages.

The art of the observer
  • A personal view of documentary
  • David MacDougall
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    27 February 2026
  • The Art of the Observer is a personal guide to documentary filmmaking, based on the author’s years of experience as a writer on film and a maker of ethnographic and documentary films. It devotes particular attention to observational filmmaking and the distinctive philosophy and methodology of this approach. Each of its chapters addresses a different aspect of filmmaking practice, offering both practical insights and reflections on what it means, in both intellectual and emotional terms, to attempt to represent the lives of others. The book makes clear that documentary cinema is not simply a matter of recording reality, but also of analytically and artfully organising the filmmaker’s observations in ways that reveal the complex patterns of social life.

Mothers on American television
  • From here to maternity
  • Kim Akass
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    27 February 2026
  • The book examines the representation of mothers on quality American television investigating how their portrayal links to their economic and political oppression. Arguing that mothers on television betray a deep cultural misogyny, it concludes that patriarchy has an investment in the ways our televisual mothers are positioned.

London calling Italy
  • BBC broadcasts during the Second World War
  • Ester Lo Biundo
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    27 February 2026
  • During the Second World War the BBC established many of its foreign services.The ambiguity of Radio Londra, as the BBC was known in Italy, is clearly reflected in the broadcasts of the BBC Italian Service. The British station was both the voice of an occupier and a liberator of Italy from Nazi fascism. Despite this, the radio is mainly remembered as the authentic voice of anti-fascism and resistance.By analysing, from a transnational perspective, archive material collected in Italy and the UK, this book aims to understand why the BBC programmes have become one of the myths of Italian cultural heritage of the Second World War. To what extent were the Italian exiles at the BBC independent from the government? How did the programmes engage with ordinary Italians, and how did Italian civilians receive them?The book also investigates the role played by transnational broadcasts in offering ordinary people a window onto a foreign world, and the contribution of foreign refugees living in the UK to the war effort and the development of the BBC. The book claims that the Corporation did play an ambiguous role, but it was the reception of the programmes in Italy at the time that created the myth of the BBC as an authentic supporter of Italian anti-fascism. It also argues that one of the key reasons for the success of the Italian Service was its ability to engage with ordinary people and address their concerns during the difficult years of the war.

Substance / style
  • Moments in television
  • Edited by Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • Substance and style have been attended to separately in different strands of television studies, from those who have sought to establish the discipline as serious and worthy of study, to the work of television aesthetics, which has taken stylistic achievement as a primary focus. This collection interrogates and overturns the typical relationships between the terms, instead setting them alongside one another and renegotiating their relationship through new perspectives and with reference to a range of television programming. Contributors draw attention to the ways substance and style inform one another, placing value on their integration and highlighting the potential for new meanings to form through their combination. In this way, the binary is used to re-evaluate television that has been deemed a failure, or to highlight the achievements of programming or creative personnel who are less celebrated. Chapters present style as a matter of substance, in terms of it being both part of the material constitution of television and an aspect of television that rewards detailed attention. Substance is developed through a range of interpretations which invite discussion of television’s essential qualities and capabilities as well as its meaningfulness, in conjunction with its stylistic achievements. Programmes studied comprise The Americans, Call the Midwife, Les Revenants, The Good Wife, Friends, The Simpsons, John From Cincinnati, Police Squad! and The Time Tunnel. Substance and style are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which include series and serial dramas, sitcoms, science fiction, animation, horror, thrillers and period dramas.

The looking machine
  • Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking
  • David MacDougall
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.

Complexity / simplicity
  • Moments in television
  • Edited by Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • This collection appraises an eclectic selection of programmes, exploring and weighing their particular achievements and their contribution to the television landscape. It does so via a simultaneous engagement with the concepts of complexity and simplicity. This book considers how complexity, which is currently attracting much interest in TV studies, impacts upon the practice of critical and evaluative interpretation. It engages reflectively and critically with a range of recent work on televisual complexity, expands existing conceptions of complex TV and directs attention to neglected sources and types of complexity. It also reassesses simplicity, a relatively neglected category in TV criticism, as a helpful criterion for evaluation. It seeks out and reappraises the importance of simple qualities to particular TV works, and explores how simplicity might be revalued as a potentially positive and valuable aesthetic feature. Finally, the book illuminates the creative achievements that arise from balancing simplicity with complexity.The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, animation, science fiction, adaptation and advertisement. Programmes comprise The Handmaid’s Tale, House of Cards, Father Ted, Rick and Morty, Killing Eve, The Wire, Veep, Doctor Who, Vanity Fair and The Long Wait.

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
  • Art, culture and ethics in black and white
  • Edited by Jenny Barrett, Douglas Field, Ian Scott
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • More than a century after its release in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation remains one of the most controversial films in cinema history. Drawing together a range of scholars and practitioners, this volume reveals a continued fascination in this film as a gauge of American racism and a milestone of early cinema that allows us to recognise the complex relationship between art, culture and ethics. Through stimulating analyses and new research on its reception, both on its release and one hundred years later, this book offers fresh, engaging perspectives on Birth. Topics include the presence of African American actors in the film, the craft of Griffith’s racist dialectics, public reception of the film in the state of Virginia and re-reading promotion of the film as ‘fake news’. It traces Birth’s legacies through historical and contemporary cinema and art, demonstrating that its significance has not diminished. Vivid relationships are drawn between the film and the art of Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley. Traditions are found both upheld and challenged in film works by Oscar Micheaux, Matthew McDaniel, DJ Spooky, Nate Parker and Quentin Tarantino. In the context of ongoing struggles over racial inequities in the twenty-first century, with white supremacist activity very much a part of the contemporary world, this book thus offers relevant and productive routes into the study of Griffith’s film.

Sound / image
  • Moments in television
  • Edited by Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • In television scholarship, sound and image have been attended to in different ways, but image has historically dominated. The chapters gathered here attend to both: they weigh the impact and significance of specific choices of sound and image, explore their interactions, and assess their roles in establishing meaning and style. The contributors address a wide range of technical and stylistic elements relating to the television image. They consider production design choices, the spatial organisation of the television frame and how camera movements position and reposition parts of the visible world. They explore mise-en-scène, landscapes and backgrounds, settings and scenery, and costumes and props. They attend to details of actors’ performances, as well as lighting design and patterns of colour and scale. As regards sound, each chapter distinguishes different components on a soundtrack, delineating diegetic from non-diegetic sound, and evaluating the roles of elements such as music, dialogue, voice-over, bodily sounds, performed and non-performed sounds. Attending to sound design, contributors address motifs, repetition and rhythm in both music and non-musical sound. Consideration is also given to the significance of quietness, the absence of sounds, and silence. Programmes studied comprise The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse, Children of the Stones, Dancing on the Edge, Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, Bodyguard, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Sound and image are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which includes series, serial and one-off dramas, children’s programmes, science fiction, thrillers and detective shows.

Worrier state
  • Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa
  • Nicky Falkof
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    26 February 2026
  • A wide-ranging and interdisciplinary investigation of cultures of fear in South Africa, this book reveals how fear and its various features, particularly risk, anxiety and moral panic, manifest in contemporary media forms and the communities they serve, and how these are impacted by systems and histories of race, class, gender, space and identity. It foregrounds the significance of emotion as a sociopolitical force in South Africa as elsewhere, arguing that we need to take emotion seriously in order to properly account for the way in which feelings and experiences, and powerful narratives about them, impact on politics and daily life. Spanning a range of imagined communities and physical spaces, it investigates four disparate but deeply affective case studies: the far right myth of ‘white genocide’; so-called ‘Satanist’ murders of young women; an urban legend about township crime; and social theories about safety and goodness in the suburbs. The book is intimately interested in the way in which moral panics, mass fears and collective anxieties manifest in circumstances of higher risk, heightened insecurity, deep inequality and accelerated social change. It emphasises South Africa’s imbrication within globalised conditions of anxiety, and thus its fundamental hypermodernity, in contrast to the atavistic, sometimes dismissive portrayals of Africa that are common within global media and scholarship.

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