The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films offers a rich exploration of the cinematic aesthetics that filmmakers devised to reflect the corporeal and affective experience of walking in the city. Drawing from literature in urban studies, film theory, and aesthetic philosophy, it is the first monograph to approach the history of cinema from the perspective of walking. A series of case studies providing nuanced analyses of widely referenced figures, such as the flaneur/flâneuse, vagabond, and nomad, reveal how filmmakers articulated their objection to repressive structures through depictions of walking: a common, everyday act yet transgressive, bold, and indomitable. Through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, Michel de Certeau’s concept of pedestrian acts, and Jacques Rancière’s treatment of the politics of aesthetics, Walking in Films traces how cinema evolved in conversation with the mobile body and the new images, styles, and techniques that emerged with it.

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.

Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

Frederick Aldama’s The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) was the first full-scale study of one of the most prolific and significant Latino directors making films today. In this companion volume, Aldama enlists a corps of experts to analyze a majority of Rodriguez’s feature films, from his first break-out success El Mariachi in 1992 to Machete in 2010. The essays explore the formal and thematic features present in his films from the perspectives of industry (context, convention, and distribution), the film blueprint (auditory and visual ingredients), and consumption (ideal and real audiences). The authors illuminate the manifold ways in which Rodriguez’s films operate internally (plot, character, and event) and externally (audience perception, thought, and feeling).

The volume is divided into three parts: “Matters of Mind and Media” includes essays that use psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology to shed light on how Rodriguez’s films complicate Latino identity, as well as how they succeed in remaking audiences’ preconceptions of the world. “Narrative Theory, Cognitive Science, and Sin City: A Case Study” offers tools and models of analysis for the study of Rodriguez’s film re-creation of a comic book (on which Frank Miller was credited as codirector). “Aesthetic and Ontological Border Crossings and Borderlands” considers how Rodriguez’s films innovatively critique fixed notions of Latino identity and experience, as well as open eyes to racial injustices. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how Rodriguez’s career offers critical insights into the filmmaking industry, the creative process, and the consuming and reception of contemporary film.

A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.

Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.

Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

Journey through the development of the magical film works of Russia’s “King of the Fairy Tales,” Aleksandr Rou.

More than fifty years after his death, the Soviet filmmaker, Aleksandr Rou, remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed “King of the Fairy Tales” and “The Main Storyteller of the Country,” he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972.

From the heights of Stalinist propaganda cinema, through Khrushchev’s Thaw, and into the Brezhnev Stagnation era, Rou’s films celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of young audiences. The book traces the developments of Rou’s work on fairy-tale film, providing cultural and technical contexts of production and analyzing the features that mark Rou’s personal style.

In English-speaking countries Rou’s work remains relatively little known, having received only limited theatrical distribution in the West. With home entertainment now offering wider opportunities to discover his unique and exhilarating works, this book provides a timely introduction to the work of one of the world’s great masters of fairy-tale cinema.
 

Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and his 2002 film Decasia was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. This is the first book-length study of Morrison's work, covering the whole of his career. It gathers specialists throughout film studies to explore Morrison's "aesthetics of the archive"-his creative play with archival footage and his focus on the materiality of the medium of film.

In this study of Marie Dressler, MGM's most profitable movie star in the early 1930s, Victoria Sturtevant analyzes Dressler's use of her body to challenge Hollywood's standards for leading ladies. At five feet seven inches tall and two hundred pounds, Dressler was never considered the popular "delicate beauty," often playing ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, Dressler's body, her fearless physicality, and her athletic slapstick routines commanded the screen. Although an unlikely movie star, Dressler represented for Depression-era audiences a sign of abundance and generosity in a time of scarcity.

This premier analysis of her body of work explores how Dressler refocused the generic frame of her films beyond the shallow problems of the rich and beautiful, instead dignifying the marginalized, the elderly, women, and the poor. Sturtevant inteprets the meanings of Dressler's body through different genres, venues, and historical periods by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an "unruly" yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic in the films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie.

La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco’s life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films’ financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as “la crisis,” this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.

In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan’s most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he met with modest success in  directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki’s 49 feature films.

Winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2016

Known for their violence and prolific profanity, including free use of the n-word, the films of Quentin Tarantino, like the director himself, chronically blurt out in polite company what is extremely problematic even when deliberated in private. Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with virtually all of Tarantino’s films, particularly when it comes to race and blackness. Yet beyond the debate over whether Tarantino is or is not racist is the fact that his films effectively articulate racial anxieties circulating in American society as they engage longstanding racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. This radical racial politics—always present in Tarantino’s films but kept very much on the quiet—is the subject of Race on the QT.

Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to historical and current racial issues in America. Nama’s eclectic fusion of cultural criticism and film analysis looks beyond the director’s personal racial attitudes and focuses on what Tarantino’s filmic body of work has said and is saying about race in America symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely, cynically, sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and brilliantly.

Christopher Nolan occupies a rare realm within the Hollywood mainstream, creating complex, original films that achieve both critical acclaim and commercial success. In The Traumatic Screen, Stuart Joy builds on contemporary applications of psychoanalytic film theory to consider the function and presentation of trauma across Nolan’s work, arguing that the complexity, thematic consistency, and fragmentary nature of his films mimic the structural operation of trauma.
 
From 1997’s Doodlebug to 2017’s Dunkirk, Nolan’s films highlight cinema’s ability to probe the nature of human consciousness while commenting on the relationship between spectator and screen. Joy examines Nolan’s treatment of trauma—both individual and collective—through the formal construction, mise-en-scène, and repeated themes of his films. The argument presented is based on close textual analysis and a methodological framework that incorporates the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The first in-depth, overtly psychoanalytic understanding of trauma in the context of the director’s filmography, this book builds on and challenges existing scholarship in a bold new interpretation of the Nolan canon.

Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century’s most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced for a company known for superficial, popular entertainment. In the received historiography, Dreyer broke with Nordisk in the pursuit of developing his film as a high art, eventually succeeding on the world stage as an auteur and eschewing melodrama in favor of austere art film.

Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to this narrative of his bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work—pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on—find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating our understanding not only of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.

Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time and memory that touch on the cryptic and visceral elements of gender and power. The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in this volume examine her films in relation to subjects ranging from the history of Greeks in South Africa, trauma and cultural memory, and her relationship with the French New Wave to her feminist-inflected articulations of form and content and how her films comment on apartheid. They also highlight her global South perspective to articulate a mode of filmmaking highly responsive to histories of violence, displacement, and migration as well as pleasure, joy, and renewal. The essays, which are paired with vivid stills from Siopis’s films throughout, collectively widen the understanding of Siopis’s oeuvre. Opening new vocabularies of thought for engaging with her films, this volume outlines how her work remakes the possibilities of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

Contributors. John Akomfrah, Sinazo Chiya, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Katerina Gregos, Brenda Hollweg, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Zineb Sedira, Penny Siopis, Hedley Twidle, Zoé Whitley