Michael Tapper considers Swedish culture and ideas from the period 1965 to 2012 as expressed in detective fiction and film in the tradition of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Believing the Swedish police narrative tradition to be part and parcel of the European history of ideas and culture, Tapper argues that, from being feared and despised, the police emerged as heroes and part of the modern social project of the welfare state after World War II. Establishing themselves artistically and commercially in the forefront of the genre, Sjöwall and Wahlöö constructed a model for using the police novel as an instrument for ideological criticism of the social democratic government and its welfare state project. With varying political affiliations, their model has been adapted by authors such as Leif G. W. Persson, Jan Guillou, Henning Mankell, Håkan Nesser, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, and Stieg Larsson, and in film series such as Beck and Wallander. The first book of its kind about Swedish crime fiction, Swedish Cops is just as thrilling as the novels and films it analyzes.

Film festivals are an ever-growing part of the film industry, but most considerations of them focus almost entirely on their role in the business of filmmaking.
This book breaks new ground by bringing scholars from a range of disciplines together with industry professionals to explore the concept of festivals as spaces through an activist lens, as spaces where the sociopolitical identities of communities and individuals are confronted and shaped. Tracing the growth of activist and human rights-focused films from the 1970s to the present, and using case studies from San Francisco, Brazil, Bristol, and elsewhere, the book addresses such contentious topics as whether activist films can achieve humanitarian aims or simply offer “cinema of suffering.” Ultimately, the contributors attack the question of just how effective festivals are at producing politically engaged spectators?
 

Highlighting the challenges faced by a nascent national cinema with limited resources, Passion of the Reel provides an in-depth analysis of the output of the Cameroonian film industry. Jean-Olivier Tchouaffe shows that, far from an empty receptacle for colonial legacies, Cameroon—and Africa—must move beyond their colonial legacies to focus on indigenous productions of meaning informed by traditional wisdom and ordinary Cameroonian life experience. Tchouaffe’s analysis sets the stage for a film-driven exploration of postcolonialism, social construction, and modernization.

The 1930s were a period of triumph and turmoil in Poland, yet the decade saw the production of a number of exceptional dramatic works. Some dramatists of the period, among them Jerzy W. Tepa, are not well-known today because many of their plays were lost—or presumed to be lost—during the war years. However, the recent rediscoveries of Tepa’s Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte allow a fascinating glimpse into a rich and vital period of Polish literary culture unfamiliar to most English readers and scholars. This book not only reintroduces Tepa and his work to new readers but also demonstrates why he was one of the leading voices of the Polish interwar era.

This book is the first comprehensive directory of the journalism education and training offered in thirty-three European countries. The volume, organized by country, discusses the history of journalism education and includes an analysis of all the current university programs and training provided by private media and professional organizations in each location. In addition, each section includes a thorough examination of the historical, political, economic and social framework of journalism in each country that looks towards the future of journalism education and media in Europe. European Journalism Education will be an asset to scholars of international communication studies and to media policy makers around the world.

The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook continues to showcase the best academic debates, discussions, and research published in the prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy from the previous year. This volume brings together specially selected articles, covering the most up-to-date topics in Chinese cinema studies appearing for the first time in English, in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies, as well as to encourage new conversations. 

This book is the latest offering in Intellect China Library series, which publishes work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English-language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, media, and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Examining art that intersects with science and seeks to make visible what cannot ordinarily be seen with the naked eye,  provides thorough insight into new understandings of materiality and life. It includes an extensive overview of the history of nanoart from the work of Umberto Boccioni right up to present-day artists. The author looks specifically at art inspired by nanotechnological research made possible by the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and Atomic Force Microscope in the 1980s, as well as the development of other instruments of nanotechnological experimentation. Nanoart is a sustained consideration of this fascinating artistic approach that challenge how we see and understand our world.

 

At the core of both art and science we find the twin forces of probability and uncertainty. However, these two worlds have been tenuously entangled for decades. On the one hand, artists continue to ask complex questions that align with a scientific fascination with new discoveries, and on the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that creativity and subjectivity inform science’s objective processes and knowledge systems.
In order to draw parallels between art, science, and culture, this publication will explore the ways that selected art works have contributed to a form of cultural pedagogy. It follows the integration of culture and science in artists’ expressions to create meaningful experiences that expose the probabilities and uncertainties equally present in the world of science.

José María Rodríguez Méndez is a noted playwright, an acerbic cultural critic, and a political dissident under Franco. In Performing Spanishness, the first English-language examination of Méndez’s life and work, Michael Thompson sets the playwright’s lifelong struggle against censorship in the context of Spain’s shifting national identity. Méndez’s work presents “Spanishness” not as a static trait, but as an ongoing performance; Performing Spanishness is an indispensable resource to those interested in theater, Spain, and the relationship between art and activism.

In her heyday, Martha Graham’s name was internationally recognized within the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her status in dance still inspires regard. In this, the first extended feminist look at this modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a feminist lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir, and critique in order to uniquely highlight her contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

 

In an era where the way people get news is ever-changing, how do broadcast journalists work? How do changes to the field affect journalists at traditional public broadcasters? And what similarities are there between license-funded news programs—like those on the BBC—and commercial news?

​This book, built on years of unique access to the newsrooms of BBC News and ITV News in the United Kingdom and DR TV Avisen and TV2 Nyhedeme in Denmark, answers those questions and more. Exploring the shared professional ideals of journalists, the study analyzes how they conceive of stories as important, and how their ideals relating to their work are expressed and aspired to in everyday practice.

There has been plenty of scholarship on science fiction over the decades, but it has left one crucial aspect of the genre all but unanalyzed: the visual. Ambitious and original, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary corrects that oversight, making a powerful argument for science fiction as a visual cultural discourse. Taking influential historical works of visual art as starting points, along with illustrations, movie matte paintings, documentaries, artist’s impressions, and digital environments, John Timberlake focuses on the notion of science fiction as an “imaginary topos,” one that draws principally on the intersection between landscape and historical/prehistorical time. Richly illustrated, this book will appeal to scholars, students, and fans of science fiction and the remarkable visual culture that surrounds it.

Public service broadcasting is in the process of evolving into “public service media” as a response to the challenges of digitalization, intensive competition, and financial vulnerability. While many commentators regard public service as being in transition, a central dimension of its mission—to integrate and unify the nation while respecting and representing plurality—is being reemphasized and relegitimated in a political climate where the politics of migration and cultural diversity loom large in public debate. Through a series of thematic chapters and in-depth national case studies, National Conversations examines the reshaping of public service media and the concomitant development of new guiding discourses, policies, and program practices for addressing difference and lived multiculturalism in Europe. 

From Death of a Cyclist to Open Your Eyes to The Limits of Control, Madrid has graced the big screen countless times across a wide variety of genres enacted by a similarly eclectic array of directors, including Carlos Saura, Luis Buñuel, and Pedro Almodovar. With the aim of capturing the full range of portrayals of the city onscreen, this volume pairs short synopses of scenes from fifty films with an accompanying array of dynamic full-color film stills. These scenes are set in context through a series of incisive essays that examine significant periods from Madrid’s rich film history, as well as its key industry figures and recurring themes.

 

Packed with fun facts, World Film Locations: Madrid offers a fascinating—and often surprising—tour of the many film representations of Madrid. For jetsetters planning a jaunt to this richly cinematic city, the book also includes photographs of locations as they appear now and city maps with information on how to locate key features.

Set to generate discussions in the field for years to come, The Poetics of Poetry Film is an encyclopedic work on the ever-evolving art of the poetry film. Poetry films are a genre of short film usually involving three main elements: the poem as verbal message, the moving film image and diegetic sounds, and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. In this book, Sarah Tremlett examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry, and videopoetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time.

Tremlett sets the emergence and history of poetry film in its proper global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, The Poetics of Poetry Film includes interviews, analysis, and a rigorous investigation of the history of the genre, from its origins to the present. This is an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art, and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers.

Architecture Filmmaking investigates how the field of architecture utilizes the practice of filmmaking in research, teaching, and practice, and explores the consequences of this interdisciplinary exchange. While architecture and filmmaking have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs, and filmmaking is a much younger art than architecture, the intersection between them is less defined. This book investigates the ways in which architectural researchers, teachers of architecture, their students and practicing architects, filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice. The authors’ adept analysis presents a contribution to the debates surrounding interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary methodologies in the emerging field of architecture filmmaking research.

Fashion and Ethics focuses on issues of power, social positioning, and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers, and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt.

With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion’s self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends, and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, Fashion and Ethics applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behavior or is it just a charade of good intentions?

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle’s work within the context of the Trustus theatre’s dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

Covering the silent era to the present, this wide-ranging collection of essays examines Greek cinema as an aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomenon with the potential to appeal to a diverse range of audiences. Using a range of methodological tools, the authors investigate the ever-shifting forms and meanings at work within Greece’s national cinema and locate it within the booming interdisciplinary study of European cinema at large. Designed for undergraduate courses in film studies, this well-researched volume fills a substantial gap in the market for critical works on Greek cinema in English.