An essential work of twenty-first-century cinema, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2004 film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is an elegant exemplar of contemporary cinematic trends, including serial storytelling, the rise of the fantasy genre, digital filmmaking, and collaborative authorship. With craft, wonder, and wit, the film captures the most engaging elements of the novel while artfully translating its literary point of view into cinematic terms that expand on the world established in the book series and previous films.

In this book, Patrick Keating examines how Cuarón and his collaborators employ cinematography, production design, music, performance, costume, dialogue, and more to create the richly textured world of Harry Potter—a world filtered principally through Harry’s perspective, characterized by gaps, uncertainties, and surprises. Rather than upholding the vision of a single auteur, Keating celebrates Cuarón’s direction as a collaborative achievement that resulted in a family blockbuster layered with thematic insights.

As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent crises in economic, social, political and cultural life. Whether filmmakers engaged with the real city on location or recreated it on a studio set, Los Angeles shaped the films that were made there and circulated influentially worldwide. The book pays particular attention to early cinema, slapstick comedy, movies about the movies and film noir, which are each explored in new ways, with an emphasis on urban and architectural space and its representation, as well as filmmaking style and technique. Including many previously unpublished photographs and new historical evidence, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles gives us a never-before-seen view of the City of Angels.

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks and production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible, were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In this book, Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Hollywood.

Hollywood Shutdown examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected film and television production, influenced trends in distribution, reshaped theatrical exhibition, and altered labor practices. From January movie theater closures in China to the bumpy September release of Mulan on the Disney+ streaming platform, Fortmueller probes various choices made by studios, networks, unions and guilds, distributors, and exhibitors during the evolving crisis. In seeking to explain what happened in the first nine months of 2020, this book also considers how the pandemic will transform Hollywood practices in the twenty-first century.

Over the past decade, the video camera has become a commonplace household technology. With falling prices on compact and easy-to-use cameras, as well as mobile phones and digital still cameras with video recording capabilities, access to moving image production technology is becoming virtually universal. Home Truths? represents one of the few academic research studies exploring this everyday, popular use of video production technology, looking particularly at how families use and engage with the technology and how it fits into the routines of everyday life.

The authors draw on interviews, observations, and the participants' videos themselves, seeking to paint a comprehensive picture of the role of video making in their everyday lives. While readers gain a sense of the individual characters involved in the project and the complexities and diversities of their lives, the analysis also raises a range of broader issues about the nature of learning and creativity, subjectivity and representation, and the "domestication" of technology---issues that are of interest to many in the fields of sociology and media/cultural studies.

David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and Director of the Institute's Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media.

Rebekah Willett is Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she teaches in Media, Culture and Communication.

Maria Pini previously worked as Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London University, and is now a researcher on the Camcorder Cultures project at the Institute of Education.

Cover art: Young videomaker ©iStockphoto.com/ kaisersosa67

Technologies of the Imagination: New Media in Everyday Life

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.