BiblioVault - Books about Film & Video

Fan Phenomena

Mermaids

Edited by Matthieu Guitton

Intellect Books, 2016

Disney’s Princess Ariel would give anything to be “where the people are,” but little does she know there’s an ever-growing fan base of humans dying to be down in the ocean where she is. Movies like the Little Mermaid and Pirates of the Caribbean have sparked the interest of newer generations of mermaid fans, but our enchantment with these mythical creatures of the sea goes back for centuries. Fan Phenomena: Mermaids takes a deep dive into these fascinations and the cultural creations that mermaids inspire among fans of all ages.

Mermaids, and merfolk more generally, are everywhere you look. Merfolk devotees march in themed parades and practice mermaid-ing—swimming with a mermaid tail. There’s mermaid fiction and mermaid virtual reality; mermaid art and #mermaid trends. You may not know it, but transgenerational merfolk fan communities stretch around the world—from sea to shining sea. And their popularity is only growing.

In Fan Phenomena: Mermaids, Matthieu Guitton assembles a star-studded cast of scholars and popular culture insiders to decode the mermaid phenomenon. The book explores how merfolk have evolved in popular culture and what it is that grants them their privileged status among fantasy creatures. Illustrated throughout with fan photographs and stills from a plethora of films and TV shows, this new addition to the Fan Phenomena series promises to both fascinate and delight readers—earthbound and ocean-going alike.

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Fan Phenomena

Star Trek

Edited by Bruce E. Drushel

Intellect Books, 2013

From a decidedly inauspicious start as a low-rated television series in the 1960s that was cancelled after three seasons, Star Trek has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry of spin-off series, feature films, and merchandise. Fueling the ever-expanding franchise are some of the most rabid and loyal fans in the universe, known affectionately as Trekkies. Perhaps no other community so typifies fandom as the devoted aficionados of the Star Trek television series, motion pictures, novels, comic books, and conventions. Indeed, in many respects, Star Trek fans created modern fan culture and continue to push its frontiers with elaborate fan-generated video productions, electronic fan fiction collectives, and a proliferation of tribute sites in cyberspace.

In this anthology, a panel of rising and established popular culture scholars examines the phenomenon of Star Trek fan culture and its most compelling dimensions. The book explores such topics as the impact of the recent “rebooting” of the iconic franchise on its fan base; the complicated and often contentious relationship between Star Trek and its lesbian and gay fans; the adaptation of Star Trek to other venues, including live theatre, social media, and gaming; fan hyperreality, including parody and non-geek fandom; one iconic actor’s social agenda; and alternative fan reactions to the franchise’s villains. The resulting collection is both snapshot and moving picture of the practices and attitudes of a fan culture that is arguably the world’s best-known and most misunderstood.

Striking a balanced tone, the contributors are critical yet respectful, acknowledging the uniquely close and enduring relationship between fans and the franchise while approaching it with appropriate objectivity, distance, and scope. Accessible to a variety of audiences—from the newcomer to fan culture to those already well-read on the subject—this book will be heralded by fans as well as serious scholars.

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Fan Phenomena

Star Wars

Edited by Mika Elovaara

Intellect Books, 2013

In October 2012, the Walt Disney Company paid more than $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilms, the film and production company responsible for Howard the Duck. But Disney, despite its history and success with duck characters, wasn’t after Howard; in buying Lucasfilms, it also bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise. Soon after the purchase, Disney announced a new Star Wars film was in the works and would be released in 2015, nearly four decades after the first movie hit big screens around the world and changed popular culture forever.

The continued relevance of Star Wars owes much to the passion of its fans. For millions of people around the world, the films are more than diversions—they are a way of life. Through costumed role-playing, incessant quoting, Yoda-like grammatical inversions, and scholarly debates about the Force, fans keep the films alive in a variety of ways, and in so doing, add to the saga’s cultural relevance. The first book to address the films holistically and from a variety of cultural perspectives, Fan Phenomena: Star Wars explores numerous aspects of Star Wars fandom, from its characters to its philosophy. As one contributor notes, “the saga that George Lucas created affects our lives almost daily, whether we ourselves are fans of the saga or not.” Anyone who is struggling to forget Jar Jar Binks can certainly agree to that.

Academically informed but written for a general audience, this book will appeal to every fan and critic of the films. That is, all of us.

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Farocki/Godard

Film as Theory

Volker Pantenburg

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempts to express theoretical issues by combining shots, thus creating a visual form of thinking. This book brings together two major filmmakers-French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and German avant-gardist Harun Farocki to explore the fundamental tension between theoretical abstraction and the capacities of film itself, a medium where everything seen onscreen is necessarily concrete. Volker Pantenburg shows how these two filmmakers explored the potential of combined shots and montage to create "film as theory."

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Fellini

Sam Stourdzé

Amsterdam University Press, 2014

The career of Federico Fellini lasted for forty years and made him perhaps the most illustrious of all the filmmakers to have come out of Italy. Those forty years saw the appearance of titles that have carved out a permanent niche in the memory of generations of film lovers. Fellini, a richly illustrated book written and edited by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland), taps into the sources of his fertile imagination and brings the vital power of his work into the limelight providing insight into the obsessions and motivations of the man behind La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8¿.This book and the exhibition aim to reveal the universe of the filmmaker and the sources of his rich imagination, and to highlight the essential power of his work. The story of Fellini’s themes and obsessions is, twenty years after his death, told by movie stills, set photos and his drawings, as well as by archive material and posters.The fantasy world of Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini made so many of his films, is revealed through previously unseen behind-the-scenes pictures that were taken by photographers such as Gideon Bachmann, Deborah Beer, Pierluigi Praturlon and Paul Ronald.The publication includes four main chapters. Popular Culture concentrates on Fellini’s many sources of inspiration within the day-to-day popular culture of the time. This includes not only the steadily more prevalent mass media, but also such manifestations as the circus, rock music, cartoons and Catholic or political parades. Fellini at Work shows us the director on the film set, instructing his actors, working together with costume designers, behind the camera, and so on. The City of Women concerns Fellini’s most important subject and obsession: Woman, in all her many guises. Finally, Biographical Imagination presents Fellini in the guise of various doppelgangers, each reflecting a different aspect of his personality. Particular attention is given to his ‘Book of Dreams’ in which he recorded his dreams in words and drawings.

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Feminisms

Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures

Edited by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism.

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Feminist Ethics in Film

Reconfiguring Care through Cinema

Joseph H. Kupfer

Intellect Books, 2012

Popular films can do more than merely entertain us; they can contribute to our understanding of human nature and the ethical theory that informs it. Feminist Ethics in Film explores a varied group of cinematic narratives from the perspective of care-based ethics. The interpersonal relationships they portray disclose important dimensions of care that have been overlooked in less contextualized discussions. In particular, the book examines the relationships between care and community, autonomy, family, and self transformation. Interpreting films from the perspective of the feminist ethics of care both expands our knowledge of this burgeoning area of philosophy and adds depth to our appreciation of the films.

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Ferocious Reality

Documentary according to Werner Herzog

Eric Ames

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Over the course of his career Werner Herzog, known for such visionary masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Ferocious Reality is the first book to ask how this conviction, so hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world’s most provocative documentarians.

Herzog, whose Cave of Forgotten Dreams was perhaps the most celebrated documentary of 2010, may be the most influential filmmaker missing from major studies and histories of documentary. Examining such notable films as Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Grizzly Man (2005), Eric Ames shows how Herzog dismisses documentary as a mode of filmmaking in order to creatively intervene and participate in it. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog’s career, Ames makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so. Thus his book expands the field of cinema studies even as it offers an invaluable new perspective on a little studied but integral part of Werner Herzog’s extraordinary oeuvre.

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Film Authorship in Contemporary Transmedia Culture

The Paratextual Lives of Asian Auteurs

Wikanda Promkhuntong

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Film Authorship in Contemporary Transmedia Culture: The Paratextual Lives of Asian Auteurs examines film authorship in the transmedia era whereby film directors have become public figures through a wide range of textual, material, and performative practices. The book draws on the notion of paratext and its related term – palimpsest – to bring forth the idea of self-reflexive authorship as a method of examining the mediated past, present, and afterlife of East Asian filmmakers. The first part of the book pays attention to materials surrounding film festivals, multi-platform distribution, and cinephile/fan creative practices, which have been created, rewritten, and shared to foster and problematize the reputations of selected filmmakers. The second part examines alternative modes of self-projections and creative productions that address the filmmakers’ sense of selves and relations with the industry and the public. Across different chapters, discourses surrrounding film authorship and East Asian cinema are revisited and expanded to highlight its multiple histories and possible futures.

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Film History as Media Archaeology

Tracking Digital Cinema

Thomas Elsaesser

Amsterdam University Press, 2017

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the 'death of cinema' debate, Film History as Media Archaeology presents a robust argument for the cinema's current status as a new epistemological object, of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in the museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction, as we experience them today.

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Film Nation

Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

Robert Burgoyne

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.

In this revised and expanded edition of Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, Burgoyne argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).

Film Nation provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.

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Film on The Faultline

Edited by Alan Wright

Intellect Books, 2015

Film has always played a crucial role in the imagination of disaster. Earthquakes, especially, not only shift the ground beneath our feet but also herald a new way of thinking or being in the world. Following recent seismic events in countries as dissimilar as Iran, Chile and Haiti, Japan and New Zealand, national films have emerged that challenge ingrained political, economic, ethical, and ontological categories of modernity. Film on the Faultline explores the fractious relationship between cinema and seismic experience and addresses the important role that cinema can play in the wake of such events as forms of popular memory and personal testimony.

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Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan

Cinema as a Sensory Circuit

Ya-Feng Mon

Amsterdam University Press, 2016

This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience-yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.

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Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940

Operational Detection

Ilka Brasch

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition, looking at how they adapted the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serial visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces the relationship of film serials to the broadcast models of radio and television and thereby shows how film serials introduced modes of storytelling that informedpopular culture even beyond the serial's demise.

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Filming for the Future

The Work of Louis van Gasteren

Patricia Pisters

Amsterdam University Press, 2016

Louis Van Gasteren was one of the most prolific filmmakers in the history of the Netherlands, with a resume that includes nearly eighty documentaries and two feature films - to say nothing of artworks and books.

Filming for the Future offers an extended exploration of Van Gasteren's work and audio-visual world. Patricia Pisters introduces us to a filmmaker who always had his camera ready and was relentless in filming a wide range of topics and events of national and international importance. Fascinated by technology, deeply engaged with politics, and intensely occupied by the traumatic effects of war, Van Gasteren assembled an unparalleled record of life in twentieth-century Amsterdam and beyond. Filming for the Future will be an invaluable source of documentation and analysis of one of the key filmmakers of our time.

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Filming the City

Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism through the Lens

Edited by Edward Clift, Mirko Guaralda, and Ari Mattes

Intellect Books, 2016

Filming the City brings together the work of filmmakers, architects, designers, video artists, and media specialists to provide three distinct prisms through which to examine the medium of film in the context of the city. The book presents commentaries on particular films and their social and urban relevance, offering contemporary criticisms of both film and urbanism from conflicting perspectives, and documenting examples of how to actively use the medium of film in the design of our cities, spaces and buildings. Bringing a diverse set of contributors to the collection, editors Edward Clift, Ari Mattes, and Mirko Guaralda offer readers a new approach to understanding the complex, multilayered interaction of urban design and film.

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Filming the Middle Ages

Bettina Bildhauer

Reaktion Books, 2011

In this groundbreaking account of film history, Bettina Bildhauer shows how from the earliest silent films to recent blockbusters, medieval topics and plots have played an important but overlooked role in the development of cinema.

Filming the Middle Ages is the first book to define medieval films as a group and trace their history from silent film in Weimar Germany to Hollywood and then to recent European co-productions. Bildhauer provides incisive new interpretations of classics like Murnau’s Faust and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and she rediscovers some forgotten works like Douglas Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan and Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet. As Bildhauer explains, both art house films like The Seventh Seal and The Passion of Joan of Arc and popular films like Beowulf or The Da Vinci Code cleverly use the Middle Ages to challenge modern ideas of historical progress, to find alternatives to a print-dominated culture, and even to question what makes us human. Filming the Middle Ages pays special attention to medieval animated and detective films and provactively demonstrates that the invention of cinema itself is considered a return to the Middle Ages by many film theorists and film makers.

Filming the Middle Ages is ideal reading for medievalists with a stake in the contemporary and film scholars with an interest in the distant past.

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Films That Work Harder

The Circulation of Industrial Film

Vinzenz Hediger

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape today’s world? To solve this riddle economic historians usually point to the emergence of business-friendly values, the emergence of consumer markets and new forms of applied knowledge in early European modernity, which led to innovations in industrial organization, shipping, logistics and trade (which, among other things, enabled and were driven by the transatlantic slave trade). This book focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries and zooms in on the moving image as a factor of economic development and the history of global capitalism. In a series of in-depth cases studies at the intersection of film and media studies, science and technology studies and economic and social history, Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film presents an in-depth, global perspective on the dynamic relationship between film, industrial organization and economic development. Bringing together new research from leading scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, this book combines the state of the art in the field with an agenda for future research.

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Flickers of Film

Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

Sperb, Jason

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Whether paying tribute to silent films in Hugo and The Artist or celebrating arcade games in Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It-Ralph, Hollywood suddenly seems to be experiencing a wave of intense nostalgia for outmoded technologies. To what extent is that a sincere lament for modes of artistic production that have nearly vanished in an all-digital era? And to what extent is it simply a cynical marketing ploy, built on the notion that nostalgia has always been one of Hollywood’s top-selling products?

In Flickers of Film, Jason Sperb offers nuanced and unexpected answers to these questions, examining the benefits of certain types of film nostalgia, while also critiquing how Hollywood’s nostalgic representations of old technologies obscure important aspects of their histories. He interprets this affection for the prehistory and infancy of digital technologies in relation to an industry-wide anxiety about how the digital has grown to dominate Hollywood, pushing it into an uncertain creative and economic future. Yet he also suggests that Hollywood’s nostalgia for old technologies ignores the professionals who once employed them, as well as the labor opportunities that have been lost through the computerization and outsourcing of film industry jobs.

Though it deals with nostalgia, Flickers of Film is strikingly cutting-edge, one of the first studies to critically examine Pixar’s role in the film industry, cinematic representations of videogames, and the economic effects of participatory culture. As he takes in everything from Terminator: Salvation to The Lego Movie, Sperb helps us see what’s distinct about this recent wave of self-aware nostalgic films—how Hollywood nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be.

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From Grain to Pixel

The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Third Revised Edition

Giovanna Fossati

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

In From Grain to Pixel, Giovanna Fossati analyzes the transition from analog to digital film and its profound effects on filmmaking and film archiving. Reflecting on the theoretical conceptualization of the medium itself, Fossati poses significant questions about the status of physical film and the practice of its archival preservation, restoration, and presentation. From Grain to Pixel attempts to bridge the fields of film archiving and academic research by addressing the discourse on film's ontology and analyzing how different interpretations of what film is affect the role and practices of film archives. By proposing a novel theorization of film archival practice, Fossati aims to stimulate a renewed dialogue between film scholars and film archivists.Almost a decade after its first publication, this revised edition covers the latest developments in the field. Besides a new general introduction, a new conclusion, and extensive updates to each chapter, a novel theoretical framework and an additional case study have been included.

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From Light to Byte

Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

Markos Hadjioannou

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the issue of technological shift within media archaeologies.

Hadjioannou turns to the technical basis of the image as his first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, he explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. He observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.

Throughout this work Hadjioannou examines how the two technologies set themselves up with reference to reality, physicality, spatiality, and temporality, and he concludes that the question concerning digital cinema is ultimately one of ethical implications—a question, that is, of the individual’s ability to respond to the image of the world.

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From Melies to New Media

Spectral Projections

Wendy Haslem

Intellect Books, 2019

From Méliès to New Media is an exploration of the presence and importance of film history in digital culture. The author demonstrates that new media forms are not only indebted to, but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. This book presents a comparative examination of pre-cinema and new media: early film experiments with contemporary music videos; silent films and their digital restorations; German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema; French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake; and more. Using a media archaeology approach, Wendy Haslem envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalized contributions to film history.

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