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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.

Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director.

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.

How the cinematic gaze reveals the hidden operations of border zones


Examining a variety of documentary films made along the borders of Europe since the turn of the twenty-first century, Border Mediascapes takes a cinematic eye to the technologies employed in governing spatial movement. Working at the intersections of social sciences, political theory, contemporary media, and cinema aesthetics, this book expands our understanding of the border as not just a static political boundary inscribed on a map but a complex, dynamic network of human and nonhuman agents. 

Francesco Zucconi asserts that contemporary borders are environments defined by media: a perpetually shifting set of interactions between physical bodies and sensors, surveillance cameras, satellites, mapping programs, digital signage, and cellular devices. Analyzing documentaries filmed by or in collaboration with migrants, Border Mediascapes demonstrates how cinema can be used to reveal the otherwise unseen apparatuses that facilitate systematized practices of recognition, expulsion, and erasure.

As he details the ways specific border technologies measure and identify individuals as part of the larger project of territorial control, Zucconi illustrates the effectiveness of cinema for capturing the entanglement of geopolitics and biopolitics. Viewing the cinematic perspective as simultaneously analytical, critical, and complicit with the new technological frontier, Zucconi shows how the medium can deepen our understanding of borders as sites of power, resistance, and resilience.

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite this historical ebb in its national and international presence, it still possessed the infrastructure—superb educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT, world-class sports teams like the Celtics and Red Sox, powerful media outlets like The Boston Globe, and extensive shipping capacity—required to eventually thrive in an age of global trade and mass communication.

In Boston Mass-Mediated, Stanley Corkin explores the power of mass media to define a place. He examines the tensions between the emergent and prosperous city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its representation in a range of media genres such as news journalism, professional sports broadcasting, and popular films like Mystic River and The Departed. This mass media, with its ever-increasing digital reach, has emphasized a city restricted by tropes suggestive of an earlier Boston—racism, white ethnic crime, Catholicism, and a pre-modern insularity—even as it becomes increasingly international and multicultural. These tropes mediate our understanding and experience of the city. Using Boston as a case study, Corkin contends that our contemporary sense of place occurs through a media saturated world, a world created by the explosion of digital technology that is steeped in preconceptions.

At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works.

A first-of-its-kind collection to transform our understanding of digital media from Indigenous women creators

Indigenous women form a vital force in digital media production now and have over the past several decades—in fact, nearly three quarters of the projects at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival were created by women. By Their Work highlights the prismatic nature of Indigenous women’s digital media, connecting the digital arts with their creative labor and adaptive activism.

Joanna Hearne and Karrmen Crey bring together a collection of essays and interviews to highlight the voices of powerful and important media makers, from Indigenous video game creators to animators to social media influencers and from theorists of early Indigenous digital media to current practitioners, including trans and nonbinary creators often left out of public narratives about the digital. Creating a space to hear critical voices on Indigenous media history, theory, and production, the contributors share stories, genealogies, and practices behind Indigenous women’s power and presence in the digital world.

Focusing on the history of digital media as a whole, this collection presents a compelling case for Indigenous women’s crucial roles across the history of digital forms and platforms. In doing so, By Their Work transforms digital Indigenous studies in the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Nanobah Becker; Reilley Bishop-Stall, McGill U; Meagan Byrne; Tawny Trottier Cale; Dana Claxton; Crystal Harrison Collin; Elizabeth Day; Kristin L. Dowell, Florida State U; Miranda Due; Heid E. Erdrich; Marcella Ernest, U of New Mexico; Marisa Erven; David Gaertner, U of British Columbia; Carol Geddes; Faye Ginsburg, New York U; Patuk N. Glenn; Lisa Jackson; Jacqueline Land, William Jewell College; Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia University, Montreal; Joshua D. Miner, U of Kansas; Salma Monani, Gettysburg College; Jas M. Morgan, Simon Fraser U; Archer Pechawis, York U; Mikhel Proulx, Queen’s U Canada; Ryan Rice; Jolene Rickard, Cornell U; Channette Romero, U of Georgia; Wendi Sierra, Texas Christian U; Skawennati.