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This book examines a sampling of cinematic works that provoked censorious impulses throughout the shift away from formal film censorship in the late modern West. The public controversies surrounding 'Fat Girl', 'Irreìversible', 'Ken Park', 'The Brown Bunny', 'Wolf Creek', and 'Welcome to New York', each highlight significant stages in this cultural shift, which necessitated policy revision within the institutions of formal film censorship in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Parallels and distinctions are drawn between governmental film regulation policies in these countries and social control mechanisms at work within a wider network of institutions, including news media, film festivals, and advocacy groups. The study examines the means by, and ends to, which the social control of film content persists in the 'post-censorship' media landscape of Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States, and how concepts of film 'classification' manifest in commercial market contexts, journalistic criticism, and practices of distribution and advertising.
Despite the enormous cultural impact of 'Nosferatu' (1922) on modern entertainment, from cartoon parodies and collectible toys, the history of vampires in silent cinema is largely unknown.
Vampires in Silent Cinema covers the subject from 1896-1931, reclaiming a large array of forgotten films while adding meaningfully to horror studies through the examination of thousands of primary sources.
ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks highlights the accomplishments of one of postwar America's most important and successful directors, with an emphasis on the 'literary' aspects of his career, including his work as a screenwriter and adaptor of such modern classics as 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', 'Lord Jim', and 'The Brothers Karamazov'.
Jane Campion's work shines a spotlight on gender relations, often through complex female characters and an innovative approach to the screen representation of women functioning at the edges of society. Campion is vocal about the under-representation of women in the film industry more generally, though her commitment to the notion of feminism is tempered by an ambivalence towards the term. Despite this ambiguity, Campion's continued focus on women merits an exploration of her work through a feminist lens particularly in the wake of #MeToo, which has had a wide-ranging impact on the film industry.
In Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation, Roberts undertakes the first full-length study of postcolonial, settler-colonial and Indigenous film adaptation, encompassing literary and cinematic texts from Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, British, and US cultures.
A necessary rethinking of adaptation in the context of race and nation, this book interrogates adaptation studies' rejection of 'fidelity criticism' to consider the ethics and aesthetics of translating narratives from literature to cinema and across national borders for circulation in the global cultural marketplace. In this way, Roberts also traces the circulation of cultural power through these adaptations as they move into new contexts and find new audiences, often at a considerable geographical remove from the production of the source material. Further, this book assesses the impact of national and transnational industrial contexts of cultural production on the film adaptations themselves.
Contemporary Screen Ethics focuses on the intertwining of the ethical with the socio-political, considering such topics as: care, decolonial feminism, ecology, histories of political violence, intersectionality, neoliberalism, race, and sexual and gendered violence. The collection advocates looking anew at the global complexity and diversity of such ethical issues across various screen media: from Netflix movies to VR, from Chinese romcoms to Brazilian pornochanchadas, from documentaries to drone warfare, from Jordan Peele movies to Google Earth. The analysis exposes the ethical tension between the inclusions and exclusions of global structural inequality (the identities of the haves, the absences of the have nots), alongside the need to understand our collective belonging to the planet demanded by the climate crisis. Informing the analysis, established thinkers like Deleuze, Irigaray, Jameson and Rancière are joined by an array of different voices - Ferreira da Silva, Gill, Lugones, Milroy, Muñoz, Sheshadri-Crooks, Vergès - to unlock contemporary screen ethics.
The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today's screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media.
Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.
Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert argues that the career of this singular French actor - constituting a corpus of well over a hundred films - offers a unique testing ground for current approaches in film studies and affect studies.
Attention to Huppert's performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion and normativity through a compelling paradox: her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities - negativity, dispossession, trauma - but through elusive and at times resistant or diminutive forms of expression: what J. Hoberman once called her 'genius to distinguish 47 varieties of blankness'. Including diverse contributions from an international line-up of established scholars, this volume examines Huppert's flat affect and other registers with an eye to their significance for cinema and media studies, queer and gender studies, star studies and world cinema.
Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances offers the first sustained analysis of films about ageing and dementia through a temporal framework. Analysing the aesthetics of films like 'A Moment to Remember' (2004), 'Memories of Tomorrow' (2006) and 'Happy End' (2017), Deng provides new insights into our understanding of how ageing is temporally produced, presented, received and interrogated in and through cinema.
Bringing together Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference and ideas on time, and building on scholars like Alia Al-Saji, Henri Bergson, Bliss Cua Lim, and David Martin-Jones, the book develops a conceptual framework of relational change - of temporal performances - and suggests that everyone and everything experiences time differently.
The Rwandan genocide is the second most audio-visually recreated genocide after the Holocaust, with approximately 200 films and documentaries produced in thirty-nine countries between 1994 and 2021.
Historical Media Memories of the Rwandan Genocide studies the construction, the development, and the recreation of the transnational historical media memory of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
This is the first comprehensive work that traces the international media image and the creation of historical memories of the Rwandan genocide, starting with the day to day television news reporting in 1994, and continuing with analyzes of how the genocide has been used and recreated in film and documentaries on a global level as well on a national level, where Rwanda, as a nation, creates its own images of the genocide in film and television production in order to support a new national identity.
The production of films that may be called both 'French' and 'western' spans the history of cinema, and includes the films by celebrated stars and directors. However, with the exception of early silent production, French westerns are overlooked in studies of French cinema, of film genre and even of the 'transnational' western.
French Westerns: The Frontier of Film Genre and French Cinema is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to these films. This study advances the recovery of popular European cinema, and adds new dimension to the understanding of the western genre. However, the purpose is not to stretch existing definitions of the genre or the national cinema to accommodate this production. Instead, these films expose and exploit the acts of imagination to which the logics of 'French Cinema' and 'Western' owe their coherence: acts that fail repeatedly, productively, and at times spectacularly.
This book anthologises selected key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering figure within Anglophone Film and Scottish cultural studies since the 1960s.
Collecting together thirty-seven essays written between 1966 and 2022, twenty-one of which were hitherto out-of-print, the book identifies and illustrates the central strands of scholarly interest that have defined one of British Film Studies and Scottish Cultural Studies' most influential careers: critical investigation and legitimisation of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema and popular American film genres; the cinematic representation of Scotland and the gradual development of a Scottish film production sector; and Scotland's status as a distinctive visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of international popular cultures from the eighteenth century to the present.
World-renowned South Korean directors, including Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, cite Kim Ki-young as being the greatest Korean influence on their work. During his thirty year career, Kim Ki-young produced thirty-three films and became revered by critics within the national and international community as one of the few South Korean 'auteurs'.
As the first comprehensive scholarly volume on Kim Ki-young in English, ReFocus: The Films of Kim Ki-young covers his entire career and history of cinematic work, highlighting the thematic and stylistic singularity of Kim's oeuvre, which was produced relative to the specific historical and cultural conditions of post-war South Korea. It offers an innovative departure point from which to explore South Korean film relative to the wider history of world cinema, in addition to situating Kim's work within the broader fields of Korean modern history, transnational cinema and cultural studies.
This edited collection provides an insightful look at the career and output of American horror director Wes Craven, whose most famous films - such as 'The Last House on the Left' (1972), 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' (1984) and 'Scream' (1996) - came to define the form in the later decades of the twentieth century. Also paying attention to Craven's more underrated work, from 'Deadly Friend' (1986) through to his melodrama 'Music of the Heart' (1999), this academic study argues that the filmmaker's influence can still be felt on cinema today, many years after his passing. Featuring sixteen chapters and an extensive introduction, this addition to the ReFocus line will prove to be essential reading for scary movie connoisseurs and brings a valuable contribution to the growing field of horror film studies.
Lebanon and Tunisia are two of the freest countries in the Middle East and North Africa, but elites in both countries seek to manipulate media organisations and individual journalists to shore up support for themselves and attack opponents. This book explores the political role of journalism in these hybrid settings where democratic and authoritarian practices co-exist - a growing trend all over the world. Through interviews with journalists in different positions and analyses of key events in recent years, Journalism in the Grey Zone explains the tensions that media instrumentalisation creates in the news media and how journalists navigate conflicting pressures from powerholders and a marginalised populace. Despite 'capture' of the media by political and economic actors, journalism remains a powerful and occasionally disruptive force.
In his forty-five-year career, William Wyler not only traversed the silent and the sound eras, but also connected classic Hollywood to 'new Hollywood.' The range of his films also spans a wide spectrum of genres: from westerns to adaptations of classic literature, from crime thrillers to rom-coms, and from controversial topics to musicals. His three Oscars for Best Director are an achievement surpassed only by John Ford. His life experience as one of Hollywood's early immigrant artists also speaks to the foreign influence on classic Hollywood. Yet despite his awards and commercial success, artistic recognition has mostly eluded Wyler. This volume of the ReFocus series attempts to analyze this Wyler paradox and also seeks to contextualize and theorize selections from Wyler's canon and his relationship to American cinematic history and American culture. This collection has gathered contributions from international authors from extremely diverse backgrounds, and therefore differing perspectives on Wyler and his work.
Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences focuses on movie magazines, publications first produced in 1911 for movie fans in the United States, but soon reaching movie fans on a global scale. Bringing together scholars from different disciplinary and international contexts, this collection considers fan magazines as objects of material and visual history. The designer's toolkit aided movie magazines in seducing their readers, with visual elements, such as fonts, photographs, and illustrations, plied across both editorial content and advertisements. In this way, each issue was subtly designed to stir desire in readers and moviegoers alike. By focusing on the visual aspects of fan magazines, a key pleasure for readers, this collection provides detailed examples of how visual elements engendered aspiration and longing, thus putting the visual contents of the fan magazines at the heart of every chapter.
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.
The Eye of the Cinematograph investigates the ethical and aesthetic implications of the automatic formation of the body's image by the camera. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas' thought, Manafi asks what happens when the other makes their body available to the gaze of the camera to be automatically recorded, and this giving of the body is preserved within the image, juxtaposed with other images to allude to a story that might otherwise remain untold.
To locate the ethical at this intersection of the body and the aesthetic, this book articulates an ethical account of a diverse range of film theories to demonstrate alternative encounters with the other that realisms of the body offer. Manafi discusses works by Chantal Akerman, Bruno Dumont, Pedro Costa, Gus Van Sant, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Abbas Kiarostami, Amir Naderi, Jafar Panahi, Carlos Reygadas and Andy Warhol to make a case for the ethics and aesthetics of incompleteness and performative failure.
Silicon Valley corporations now dominate our daily lives to the extent that many of us now question their ability to determine the direction of human life in the twenty-first century. The 2010s saw Hollywood filmmakers engaging in this very debate. Through a sequence of films ranging from biopics of key Silicon Valley leaders to science fiction action films and whimsical workplace comedies, Hollywood films probed Silicon Valley's impact on our past, present, and future. Silicon Valley Cinema analyses these films, arguing that they seek to encourage scepticism about our Silicon Valley overlords and have us step back from our immersion in Silicon Valley's world. Doing so, they suggest, might make our working lives more pleasurable, our world a better place, and might even help us avoid a war with genetically enhanced apes or avert a robot-led apocalypse.