In this timely critical introduction to the representation of Afghanistan in film, Mark Graham examines the often surprising combination of propaganda and poetry in films made in Hollywood and the East. Through the lenses of postcolonial theory and historical reassessment, Graham analyzes what these films say about Afghanistan, Islam, and the West and argues that they are integral tools for forming discourse on Afghanistan, a means for understanding and avoiding past mistakes, and symbols of the country's shaky but promising future. Thoughtfully addressing many of the misperceptions about Afghanistan perpetuated in the West, Afghanistan in the Cinema incorporates incisive analysis of the market factors, funding sources, and political agendas that have shaped the films.

The book considers a range of films, beginning with the 1970s epics The Man Who Would Become King and The Horsemen and following the shifts in representation of the Muslim world during the Russian War in films such as The Beast and Rambo III. Graham then moves on to Taliban-era films such as Kandahar, Osama, and Ellipsis, the first Afghan film directed by a woman. Lastly, the book discusses imperialist nostalgia in films such as Charlie Wilson's War and destabilizing visions represented in contemporary works such as The Kite Runner.

African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction analyzes the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity. Having left the continent, these filmmakers see Africa as a site of representation and cultural circulation. The diasporic experience displaces the center and forges new syncretic identities. Through migratory movement, people become foreigners, Others—and in this instance, black. The African diasporic condition in the Western world is characterized by the intersection of various factors: being African and bearing the historical memory of the continent; belonging to a black minority in majority-white societies; and finally, having historically been the object of negative, stereotyped representation. As a result, quests for the self and self-reconstruction are frequent themes in the films of the African diaspora, and yet the filmmakers refuse to remain trapped in the confines of an assigned, rigid identity. Reflecting these complex circumstances, this book analyzes the contemporary diaspora through the prism of cultural hybridization and the processes of recomposing fragmented identities, out of which new identities emerge.

Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy.

American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history.

The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.

Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster.

Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler’s earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger. Bukatman argues that Black Panther is escapism of the best kind, offering a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital questions.

The southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged zones in the United States, second only to its historical predecessor and partner, the western frontier. Though they span many genres, border films share common themes, trace the mood swings of public policy, and shape our cultural agenda.

In this examination, Camilla Fojas studies how major Hollywood films exploit the border between Mexico and the United States to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the American hemisphere. She charts the shift from the mythos of the open western frontier to that of the embattled southern frontier by offering in-depth analyses of particular border films, from post-World War II Westerns to drug-trafficking films to contemporary Latino/a cinema, within their historical and political contexts.

Fojas argues that Hollywood border films do important social work by offering a cinematic space through which viewers can manage traumatic and undesirable histories and ultimately reaffirm core "American" values. At the same time, these border narratives delineate opposing values and ideas.

Latino border films offer a critical vantage onto these topics; they challenge the presumptions of U.S. nationalism and subsequent cultural attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and often critically reconstruct their Hollywood kin.

By analyzing films such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch, El Norte, The Border, Traffic, and Brokeback Mountain, Fojas demands that we reexamine the powerful mythology of the Hollywood borderlands. This detailed scrutiny recognizes that these films are part of a national narrative comprised of many texts and symbols that create the myth of the United States as capital of the Americas.

Branding Brazil examines a panorama of contemporary cultural productions including film, television, photography, and alternative media to explore the transformation of citizenship in Brazil from 2003 to 2014. A utopian impulse drove the reproduction of Brazilian cultural identity for local and global consumption; cultural production sought social and economic profits, especially greater inclusion of previously marginalized people and places. Marsh asserts that three communicative strategies from branding–promising progress, cultivating buy-in, and resolving contradictions–are the most salient and recurrent practices of nation branding during this historic period. More recent political crises can be understood partly in terms of backlash against marked social and political changes introduced during the branding period. Branding Brazil takes a multi-faceted approach, weaving media studies with politics and cinema studies to reveal that more than a marketing term or project emanating from the state, branding was a cultural phenomenon.

Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil.

A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.

What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s.

The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image.

This book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.

In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

Explore new routes into the burgeoning field of biblical literature and film theory

The present collection of essays is a sequel to the groundbreaking Semeia 74 issue, published in 1996, entitled Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. These new essays showcase the divergent approaches from film studies and cultural studies that can be used in the visual analysis of biblical and religious themes, narratives, and characters in cinema. It is the first volume that specifically addresses issues of methodology, theory, and analysis in the study between bible and film. As such, this collection is of interest to scholars in film studies and theology/religion/biblical studies, who are invested in doing interdisciplinary research in the expanding field of religion and film.

Features

• Specific focus on methods of film analysis, rather than the more common focus on thematic analysis in the study of religion, Bible, and film.
• Visual analysis in the encounter between Bible and film
• Fourteen essays and an introduction by top scholars in the field

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Directed by God explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.

Once the purview of secular culture, Israel’s media initially promoted alternatives to traditional religious expression; however, using films such as Kadosh, Waltz with Bashir, and Eyes Wide Open, Yaron Peleg shows how Israel’s contemporary film and television programs have been shaped by new religious trends and how secular Israeli culture has processed and reflected on its religious heritage. He investigates how shifting cinematic visions of Jewish masculinity and gender track transformations in the nation’s religious discourse. Moving beyond the secular/religious divide, Directed by God explores changing film and television representations of different Jewish religious groups, assessing what these representations may mean for the future of Israeli society.

People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. 

Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.

Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity. 

By examining contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency. Chowdhury analyzes Bangladeshi feminist films including Meherjaan, and Itihaash Konna (Daughters of History), as well as socially-engaged films by activist-filmmakers including Jonmo Shathi (Born Together), and Shadhinota (A Certain Liberation), to show how war films of Bangladesh can generate possibilities for gender justice. 

Chowdhury argues that justice-driven films are critical to understanding and negotiating the layered meanings and consequences of catastrophic human suffering yet at the same time they hint at subjectivities and identities that are not reducible to the politics of suffering. Rather, they are key to creating an alternative and disruptive archive of feminist knowledge—a sensitive witnessing, responsible spectatorship, and just responsibility across time, and space. 

Drawing on Black and transnational feminist critiques, Chowdhury explores questions around women’s place, social roles, and modes of participation in war as well as the visual language through which they become legible as victims/subjects of violence and agents of the nation. Ethical Encounters illuminates the possibilities of film as a site to articulate an ethics that acknowledges a founding violence of the birth of a nation, recuperates it even if in fragments, and imagines differently the irreconcilable relationship between humanity, liberty, and justice.

 

Europe and Love in Cinema explores the relationship between love and Europeanness in a wide range of films from the 1920s to the present. A critical look at the manner in which love—in its broadest sense—is portrayed in cinema from across Europe and the United States, this volume exposes constructed notions of "Europeanness" that both set Europe apart and define some parts of it as more "European" than others. Through the international distribution process, these films in turn engage with ideas of Europe from both outside and within, while some, treated extensively in this volume, even offer alternative models of love. A bracing collection of essays from top film scholars, Europe and Love in Cinema demonstrates the centrality of desire to film narrative and explores multiple models of love within Europe's frontiers.

Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh is an unconventional book about an unconventional filmmaker. Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found refuge in France where he discovered in film a language that allowed him to tell what happened to the two million souls who suffered hunger, overwork, disease, and death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. His innovative cinema is made with people, not about them—even those guilty of crimes against humanity.  Whether he is directing Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall, following laborers digging trenches, or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison, aesthetics and ethics inform all he does.  With remarkable access to the director and his work, Deirdre Boyle introduces readers to Panh’s groundbreaking approach to perpetrator cinema and dazzling critique of colonialism, globalization, and the refugee crisis. Ferryman of Memories reveals the art of one of the masters of world cinema today, focusing on nineteen of his award-winning films, including Rice People, The Land of Wandering Souls, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and The Missing Picture.

This is the first study to cover cinemas from Iran to Morocco. Nine essays present the region's major national cinemas, devoting special attention to the work of directors who have given image and voice to dissent from political regimes, from patriarchal customs, from fundamentalist movements, and from the West. These country essays are complemented by in-depth discussions of eighteen films that have been selected for both their excellence and their critical engagement with pressing current issues. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of filmmaking throughout the region, including important films produced outside the national cinemas. The long history of Iranian cinema, its international renown, and the politics of directors confronting the state, earns it a special place in this volume. The other major emphasis is on the Israel/Palestine conflict, featuring films by Palestinian directors, Israelis, and an Egyptian working in Syria.

Nineteen authors collaborated on this book, among them Walter Armbrust, Roy Armes, Kevin Dwyer, Eric Egan, Nurith Gertz, Lina Khatib, Florence Martin, and Nadia Yaqub. About half of the contributors are film scholars; the others range across literary studies and the social sciences to two film directors and a novelist. Beyond differences in disciplinary orientation, there is considerable variation among contributors in the perspectives that inform their writing. They offer an illuminating range of approaches to the cinemas of the region.

The book is richly illustrated with posters of the featured films, photos of their directors at work, and stills illustrating critical arguments in the film essays.

Our movies have started talking back to us, and Film Nation takes a close look at what they have to say. In movies like JFK and Forrest Gump, Robert Burgoyne sees a filmic extension of the debates that exercise us as a nation--debates about race and culture and national identity, about the nature and makeup of American history. In analyses of five films that challenge the traditional myths of the nation-state--Glory, Thunderheart, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Forrest Gump--Burgoyne explores the reshaping of our collective imaginary in relation to our history. These movies, exploring the meaning of "nation" from below, highlight issues of power that underlie the narrative construction of nationhood. Film Nation exposes the fault lines between national myths and the historical experience of people typically excluded from those myths. Throughout, Burgoyne demonstrates that these films, in their formal design, also preserve relics of the imaginary past they contest. Here we see how the "genre memory" of the western, the war film, and the melodrama shapes these films, creating a complex exchange between old concepts of history and the alternative narratives of historical experience that contemporary texts propose. The first book to apply theories of nationalism and national identity to contemporary American films, Film Nation reveals the cinematic rewriting of history now taking place as a powerful attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define America as a nation. "The chief merit of Film Nation is that it outlines a study of an important but neglected period of American film--the 1980s--from a sophisticated historiographical perspective, a complex version of postmodernism and cultural studies. That is, it arises, conceptually speaking, from within the film studies orbit and takes advantage in a provocative, and in my view, compelling way, the resources and perspectives of contemporary critical theory more generally." Nick Brown "Film Nation makes a real contribution to film studies by underscoring how much the 'war film' has been revived for the purpose of contemplating nationhood, and how, more implicitly, the idea of 'America' or even 'identity' has become increasingly problematic in the era of international democratic capitalism." Tom Conley "A brilliant and elegant series of essays which demonstrate how the best contemporary historical films provide a powerful counternarrative to traditional history and help us to rethink the American past. Burgoyne's is by far the best book to date on the important relationship between American history and American film." Robert A. Rosenstone Contents: Introduction Race and Nation in Glory History vs. Folklore Two Historical Trajectories Racial Identity into National Identity Native America, Thunderheart, and the National Imaginary Reversing the Territorial Imaginary The Western and the National Imaginary The Western and its Tropes of Space and Nation War and the Forging of Ethnic Community National Identity, Gender Identity and the "Rescue Fantasy" in Born on the 4th of July Melodrama and National Identity The Critique of Masculinity as "Punitive Agency" Imaging the Nation Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK The Temporality of Trauma The Imagined Community as Lost Object Prosthetic Memory/National Memory: Forrest Gump Memory and National Identity Nation and Religion Redefining the Sixties Conclusion Robert Burgoyne is professor of English and film studies at Wayne State University and is chair of the Department of English. He is the author of Bertolucci's 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (1991) and coauthor, with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, of New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (1992).

Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.

Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub

Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later.

One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era.

In this thirty-year history of feature filmmaking in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich tracks a sea change in Hollywood production practices, as location shooting overtook studio-based filming as the dominant production method by the early 1970s. He shows how this transformation intersected with a precipitous decline in public perceptions of the American city, to which filmmakers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities. Analyzing major films set in San Francisco, ranging from Dark Passage and Vertigo to The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, and Bullitt, as well as the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, Gleich demonstrates that the city is a physical environment used to stage urban fantasies that reveal far more about Hollywood filmmaking and American culture than they do about San Francisco.

No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance.

Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration—the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s—and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.

As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects.

Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.

Why do early films present the Netherlands as a country full of canals and windmills, where people wear traditional costumes and wooden shoes, while industries and modern urban life are all but absent? Images of Dutchness investigates the roots of this visual repertoire from diverse sources, ranging from magazines to tourist brochures, from anthropological treatises to advertising trade cards, stereoscopic photographs, picture postcards, magic lantern slide sets and films of early cinema. This richly illustrated book provides an in-depth study of the fascinating corpus of popular visual media and their written comments that are studied for the first time. Through the combined analysis of words and images, the author identifies not only what has been considered Ÿtypically DutchŒ in the long nineteenth century, but also provides new insights into the logic and emergence of national clichés in the Western world.

The German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II left a lasting mark on Dutch memory and culture. This book is the first to explore depictions of that period in films made a generation later, between 1962 and 1986. As Dutch public opinion towards the war altered over the postwar decades, the historical trajectory of Dutch recovery and reconstruction-political, economic, and, most complicated of all, psychological-came to be revealed, often unconsciously, in the films of the period.

Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about." Her long service fighting for the Spanish empire in Peru and Chile won her a soldier's pension and a papal dispensation to continue dressing in men's clothing.

This theoretically informed study analyzes the many ways in which the "Lieutenant Nun" has been constructed, interpreted, marketed, and consumed by both the dominant and divergent cultures in Europe, Latin America, and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. Sherry Velasco argues that the ways in which literary, theatrical, iconographic, and cinematic productions have transformed Erauso's life experience into a public spectacle show how transgender narratives expose and manipulate spectators' fears and desires. Her book thus reveals what happens when the private experience of a transgenderist is shifted to the public sphere and thereby marketed as a hybrid spectacle for the curious gaze of the general audience.

Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City.

David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. "Politics of the City" examines the films Rojo amanecer,Novia que te vea,Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas. "Human Geographies" looks at El Callejón de los Milagros,Mecánica nacional,El castillo de la pureza,Todo el poder, and Lolo. "Mapping Gender" discusses Danzón,De noche vienes,Esmeralda,La tarea,Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.

2024 Honorable Mention — The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards

Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs.

If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.

Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.

Based on work the author has carried out with survivor groups in Northern Ireland and South Africa, Recording Memories from Political Violence draws on written and audiovisual texts to describe and analyze the use of documentary filmmaking in recording experiences of political conflict. A variety of issues relevant to the genre are addressed at length, including the importance of ethics in the collaboration between the filmmaker and the participant and the effect of location on the accounts of participants. Cahal McLaughlin draws on the diverse fields of film and cultural studies, as well as nearly twenty years of production experience, in this informed and instructive contribution to documentary filmmaking and post-conflict studies.

For three decades, award-winning independent filmmaker Todd Haynes, who emerged in the early 1990s as a foundational figure in New Queer Cinema, has gained critical recognition for his outsider perspective. Today, Haynes is widely known for bringing women’s stories to the screen. Analyzing Haynes’s films including Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far from Heaven (2002), and Carol (2015), as well as his unauthorized Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar (1987), and the television miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), the contributors to Reframing Todd Haynes reassess his work in light of his long-standing feminist commitments and his exceptional career as a director of women’s films. They present multiple perspectives on Haynes’s film and television work and on his role as an artist-activist who draws on academic theorizations of gender and cinema. The volume illustrates the influence of feminist theory on Haynes’s aesthetic vision, most evident in his persistent interest in the political and formal possibilities afforded by the genre of the woman’s film. The contributors contend that no consideration of Haynes’s work can afford to ignore the crucial place of feminism within it.

Contributors. Danielle Bouchard, Nick Davis, Jigna Desai, Mary R. Desjardins, Patrick Flanery, Theresa L. Geller, Rebecca M. Gordon, Jess Issacharoff, Lynne Joyrich, Bridget Kies, Julia Leyda, David E. Maynard, Noah A. Tsika, Patricia White, Sharon Willis

A sweeping account of one of the cultural centers of Latin America, Specular City tells the history of Buenos Aires during the interregnum after Juan Perón's fall from power and before his restoration. During those two decades, the city experienced a rapid metamorphosis at the behest of its middle class citizens, who were eager to cast off the working-class imprint left by the Perónists. Laura Podalsky discusses the ways in which the proliferation of skyscrapers, the emergence of car culture, and the diffusion of an emerging revolution in the arts helped transform Buenos Aires, and, in so doing, redefine Argentine collective history.More than a cultural and material history of this city, this book also presents Buenos Aires as a crucible for urban life. Examining its structures through films, literatures, new magazines, advertising and architecture, Specular City reveals the prominent place of Buenos Aires in the massive changes that Latin America underwent for a new, modern definition of itself.

As sites of continual change and transformation, cities are fundamentally forgetful places. Yet at the same time, urban areas are also homes to museums and archives that collect and exhibit the past-a key cultural, political, and economic activity. This book looks at that paradox through the example of Berlin to see how the city has responded to challenges to memory created by rapid changes in politics, economics, society, and the built environment, ultimately arguing that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in the contemporary city.

Vienna, with its stunning architecture and unforgettable streetscape, has long provided a backdrop for filmmakers. Visions of Vienna offers a close look at how directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophüls made use of the city, and how the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg era can be seen as directly tied to crucial issues of modernity. Films set in Vienna, Alexandra Seibel shows, persistently articulate the experience of displacement due to emigration, changing gender relations and anti-feminism, class distinction, and anti-Semitism, themes that run counter to the ongoing mystification of Vienna as the incarnation of "waltz dreams" and schmaltz.

In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.

Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, 2012

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches, the traumatic aspects of the tragedy continue to haunt our perceptions of the 1960s. One reason for this lies in the home movie of the incident filmed by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander who became one of the twentieth century's most important accidental documentarians.

The first book devoted exclusively to the topic, Zaprudered traces the journey of the film and its effect on the world's collective imagination. Providing insightful perspective as an observer of American culture, Norwegian media studies scholar Øyvind Vågnes begins by analyzing three narratives that are projections of Zapruder's images: performance group Ant Farm's video The Eternal Frame, Don DeLillo's novel Underworld, and an episode from Seinfeld. Subsequent topics he investigates include Dealey Plaza's Sixth Floor Museum, Zoran Naskovski's installation Death in Dallas, assassin video games, and other artifacts of the ways in which the footage has made a lasting impact on popular culture and the historical imagination. Vågnes also explores the role of other accidental documentarians, such as those who captured scenes of 9/11.

Zapruder's footage has never yielded a conclusive account of what happened in Dealey Plaza. Zaprudered thoroughly examines both this historical enigma and its indelible afterimages in our collective imagination.