2646 books match the query 'History & Criticism' and 189 start with c

cover of Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema

Cinema Babel

Translating Global Cinema

Abe Mark Nornes

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The original foreign film—its sights and sounds—is available to all, but the viewer is utterly dependent on a translator and an untold number of technicians who produce the graphic text or disconnected speech through which we must approach the foreign film. A bad translation can ruin a film’s beauty, muddy its plot, and turn any joke sour.

In this wide-ranging work, Abé Mark Nornes examines the relationships between moving-image media and translation and contends that film was a globalized medium from its beginning and that its transnational traffic has been greatly influenced by interpreters. He discusses the translation of film theory, interpretation at festivals and for coproductions, silent era practice, “ talkies,” subtitling, and dubbing.

Nornes—who has written subtitles for Japanese cinema—looks at the ways misprision of theory translations produced stylistic change, how silent era lecturers contributed to the construction of national cinemas, how subtitlers can learn from anime fans, and how ultimately interpreters can be, in his terms, “traders or traitors.”

Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor of Asian languages and cultures and film and video studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Japanese Documentary Film (Minnesota, 2003) and Forest of Pressure (Minnesota, 2007).

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cover of Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Cinema Civil Rights

Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Scott, Ellen C

Rutgers University Press, 2015

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.

Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.

Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.
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cover of Cinema Houston: From Nickelodeon to Megaplex

Cinema Houston

From Nickelodeon to Megaplex

By David Welling

University of Texas Press, 2007

Cinema Houston celebrates a vibrant century of movie theatres and moviegoing in Texas's largest city. Illustrated with more than two hundred historical photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertisements, it traces the history of Houston movie theatres from their early twentieth-century beginnings in vaudeville and nickelodeon houses to the opulent downtown theatres built in the 1920s (the Majestic, Metropolitan, Kirby, and Loew's State). It also captures the excitement of the neighborhood theatres of the 1930s and 1940s, including the Alabama, Tower, and River Oaks; the theatres of the 1950s and early 1960s, including the Windsor and its Cinerama roadshows; and the multicinemas and megaplexes that have come to dominate the movie scene since the late 1960s.

While preserving the glories of Houston's lost movie palaces—only a few of these historic theatres still survive—Cinema Houston also vividly re-creates the moviegoing experience, chronicling midnight movie madness, summer nights at the drive-in, and, of course, all those tasty snacks at the concession stand. Sure to appeal to a wide audience, from movie fans to devotees of Houston's architectural history, Cinema Houston captures the bygone era of the city's movie houses, from the lowbrow to the sublime, the hi-tech sound of 70mm Dolby and THX to the crackle of a drive-in speaker on a cool spring evening.

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cover of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism

Cinema Illuminating Reality

Media Philosophy through Buddhism

Victor Fan

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse
 

How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do this by using Buddhist ideas to examine the intricate relationship between technicity and consciousness in the cinema. The resulting dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies.

Victor Fan examines cinema’s ontology and ontogenetic formation and how such a formational process produces knowledge, political agency, and in-aesthetics. Buddhism allows Fan to deconstruct binary thinking and reimagine media as an ecology, rethinking cinema in relational terms between the human and the machine. Along the way, Fan considers a wide variety of case studies from around the globe, while paying special attention to how contemporary Tibeto-Sinophone filmmakers have adopted relational thinking to detail ways of rebuilding a world that appears to be beyond repair.

From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, CinemaIlluminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

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cover of Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film

Cinema India

The Visual Culture of Hindi Film

Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel

Rutgers University Press, 2002

As the largest producer of films in the world, Indian cinema is both a major industry and a distinctive art form that permeates daily life in that country and shapes emerging global cultures elsewhere. While much has been written on the history of Indian cinema, its iconography and aesthetics have yet to be analyzed as reflections of national and cultural identities. In this important new work, Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel focus on the development of Bombay-based commercial cinema since 1913, exploring the symbolic role of settings and costumes in staging the nation and the function of makeup and hairstyles in defining notions of beauty, sexuality, and consumption. The authors also examine how factors such as ethnicity, modernization, and Westernization impact reception of film along caste, region, language, and religious lines.

The economic influence of advertising in actually determining film content and the dissemination of its imagery are also discussed. Film studies scholars recently have begun to investigate advertising in the film industry and this book makes an important contribution to this emerging subfield in its engagement with Indian cinema and the impact of advertising on the culture at large.
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cover of Cinema Novo x 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film

Cinema Novo x 5

Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film

By Randal Johnson

University of Texas Press, 1984

With such stunning films as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Bye Bye Brazil, and Pixote, Brazilian cinema achieved both critical acclaim and popular recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming the premier cinema of Latin America and one of the largest film producers in the western world. But the success of Brazilian film at home and abroad came after many years of struggle by filmmakers determined to create a strong film industry in Brazil. At the forefront of this struggle were the filmmakers of Cinema Novo, the internationally acclaimed movement whose flowering in the 1960s marked the birth of modern Brazilian film.

Cinema Novo x 5 places the success of Brazilian cinema in perspective by examining the films of the five leaders of this groundbreaking movement—Andrade, Diegues, Guerra, Rocha, and dos Santos. By exploring the individuality of these masters of contemporary Brazilian film, Randal Johnson reveals the astonishing stylistic and thematic diversity of Cinema Novo. His emphasis is on the films themselves, as well as their makers’ distinctive cinematic vision and views of what cinema should be and is. At the same time, he provides a wealth of valuable background information to enhance readers’ understanding of the historical, cultural, and economic context in which Cinema Novo was born and flourished.

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cover of Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World

Cinema Today

A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World

Oumano, Elena

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Imagine attending a fascinating film forum among a distinguished and varied panel of cinema legends. An afternoon or evening where contemporary filmmakers from around the world--Kazakhstan, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Cameroon, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, the People's Republic of China, Mexico, Poland, the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France--gather together to discuss how they arrive at the creative choices that bring their film projects to life.

Can't spare the time from work or class? Travel expense too great? What? You can't even find such a collaborative event?

Then imagine curling up with a good book, maybe a shot of espresso in hand, and becoming engrossed in the exciting and informative conversation that Elena Oumano has ingeniously crafted from her personal and individual interviews with these artists. Straying far from the usual choppy question-and-answer format, Cinema Today saves you from plowing through another tedious read, in which the same topics and issues are directed to each subject, over and over-an experience that is like being trapped in a revolving door.

Oumano stops that revolving door by following a lively symposium-in-print format, with the filmmakers' words and thoughts grouped together under various key cinema topics. It is as though these experts are speaking to each other and you are their audience--collectively they reflect on and explore issues and concerns of modern filmmaking, from the practical to the aesthetic, including the process, cinematic rhythm and structure, and the many aspects of the media: business, the viewer, and cinema's place in society. Whether you are a movie lover, a serious student of cinema, or simply interested in how we communicate in today's global village through films that so profoundly affect the world, Cinema Today is for you.
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cover of Cinema and Modernity

Cinema and Modernity

Pomerance, Murray

Rutgers University Press, 2006

The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a fragmentation of experience. Motion pictures––the quintessence of modernism––entered into this cultural, technical, and philosophical richness with a vast public appeal and a jarring new vision of what life could be.

In Cinema and Modernity, Murray Pomerance brings together new essays by seventeen leading scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. Among the many films considered are Detour, Shock Corridor, The Last Laugh, Experiment in Terror, The Great Dictator, Leave Her to Heaven, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut, Sunrise, The Crowd, The Shape of Things to Come, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Scarlet Street, Shadow of a Doubt, Stella Dallas, The Blue Angel, Sullivan’s Travels, and Catch Me If You Can.

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cover of Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film

Cinema and Painting

How Art Is Used in Film

By Angela Dalle Vacche

University of Texas Press, 1996

The visual image is the common denominator of cinema and painting, and indeed many filmmakers have used the imagery of paintings to shape or enrich the meaning of their films. In this discerning new approach to cinema studies, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses how the use of pictorial sources in film enables eight filmmakers to comment on the interplay between the arts, on the dialectic of word and image, on the relationship between artistic creativity and sexual difference, and on the tension between tradition and modernity.

Specifically, Dalle Vacche explores Jean-Luc Godard's iconophobia (Pierrot Le Fou) and Andrei Tarkovsky's iconophilia (Andrei Rubleov), Kenji Mizoguchi's split allegiances between East and West (Five Women around Utamaro), Michelangelo Antonioni's melodramatic sensibility (Red Desert), Eric Rohmer's project to convey interiority through images (The Marquise of O), F. W. Murnau's debt to Romantic landscape painting (Nosferatu), Vincente Minnelli's affinities with American Abstract Expressionism (An American in Paris), and Alain Cavalier's use of still life and the close-up to explore the realms of mysticism and femininity (Thérèse).

While addressing issues of influence and intentionality, Dalle Vacche concludes that intertextuality is central to an appreciation of the dialogical nature of the filmic medium, which, in appropriating or rejecting art history, defines itself in relation to national traditions and broadly shared visual cultures.

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cover of Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America

Conversations with Filmmakers

Edited by Julianne Burton

University of Texas Press, 1986

Since the late 1960s, films from Latin America have won widening audiences in North America and Europe. Until now, no single book has offered an introduction to the diverse personalities and practices that make up this important regional film movement.

In Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, Julianne Burton presents twenty interviews with key figures of Latin American cinema, covering three decades and ranging from Argentina to Mexico. Interviews with pioneers Fernando Birri, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Glauber Rocha, renowned feature filmmakers Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Carlos Diegues, prize-winning documentarists Patricio Guzmán and Helena Solberg-Ladd, among others, endeavor to balance personal achievement against the backdrop of historical, political, social, and economic circumstances that have influenced each director's career. Presented also are conversations that cast light on the related activities of acting, distribution, theory, criticism, and film-based community organizing.

More than their counterparts in other regions of the world, Latin American artists and intellectuals acknowledge the degree to which culture is shaped by history and politics. Since the mid-1950s, a period of rising nationalism and regional consciousness, talented young artists and activists have sought to redefine the uses of the film medium in the Latin American context. Questioning the studio and star systems of the Hollywood industrial model, these innovators have developed new forms, content, and processes of production, distribution, and reception.

The specific approaches and priorities of the New Latin American Cinema are far from monolithic. They vary from realism to expressionism, from observational documentary to elaborate fictional constructs, from "imperfect cinema" to a cinema that emulates the high production values of the developed sectors, from self-reflexive to "transparent" cinematic styles, from highly industrialized modes of production to purely artisanal ones. What does not vary is the commitment to film as a vehicle for social transformation and the expression of national and regional cultural autonomy.

From early alternative cinema efforts in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba to a contemporary perspective from within the Mexican commercial industry to the emerging cinema and video production from Central America, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America offers the most comprehensive look at Latin American film available today.

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cover of Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City: Colonial Encounters in Shanghai, 1900–1930

Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City

Colonial Encounters in Shanghai, 1900–1930

Qiliang He

University of Michigan Press, 2027

In early twentieth-century Shanghai, cinema was more than entertainment—it reshaped the city itself. As movie theaters appealed to city dwellers of all backgrounds, colonial authorities struggled to manage this new public space and introduced new safety rules, censorship, and anti-crime measures. Movie theaters unintentionally brought the unofficial way of racial segregation to an end. Moreover, imported films, though emblematic of Western modernity, paradoxically eroded the myth of Western civilizational superiority. These films revealed social ills in Euro-American societies, exposed Hollywood’s racist depictions of Chinese people, and galvanized anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments among local audiences.

Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City adopts a “cinema off-screen” approach—stitching together urban history and film studies and foregrounding circulation, consumption, and spatial practice. Qiliang He draws on municipal archives, police records, censorship reports, trade journals, film reviews, and news stories to reconstruct the regulatory regimes imposed by the Shanghai Municipal Council and Shanghai Municipal Police, which was targeting both Bolshevism and “immoral” content. This book reveals how cinema didn’t just reflect modern life—it actively changed urban governance, fueled anticolonial feelings, and linked cosmopolitan culture with rising nationalism in China.

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cover of Cinema and the Sandinistas: Filmmaking in Revolutionary Nicaragua

Cinema and the Sandinistas

Filmmaking in Revolutionary Nicaragua

By Jonathan Buchsbaum

University of Texas Press, 2003

Following the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, young bohemian artists rushed to the newly formed Nicaraguan national film institute INCINE to contribute to "the recovery of national identity" through the creation of a national film project. Over the next eleven years, the filmmakers of INCINE produced over seventy films—documentary, fiction, and hybrids—that collectively reveal a unique vision of the Revolution drawn not from official FSLN directives, but from the filmmakers' own cinematic interpretations of the Revolution as they were living it.

This book examines the INCINE film project and assesses its achievements in recovering a Nicaraguan national identity through the creation of a national cinema. Using a wealth of firsthand documentation—the films themselves, interviews with numerous INCINE personnel, and INCINE archival records—Jonathan Buchsbaum follows the evolution of INCINE's project and situates it within the larger historical project of militant, revolutionary filmmaking in Latin America. His research also raises crucial questions about the viability of national cinemas in the face of accelerating globalization and technological changes which reverberate far beyond Nicaragua's experiment in revolutionary filmmaking.

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cover of Cinema as Infrastructure: Visuality, Power, and the Latin American South

Cinema as Infrastructure

Visuality, Power, and the Latin American South

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

University of Texas Press, 2027

Examining the interplay of visuality and infrastructure in Latin American films.

Images do far more than we realize. They do not simply represent or depict; they run our world. Surveillance cameras and drones, medical imaging, social media platforms, market-data visualization––these and other technologies make the image an infrastructure of power, a tool for organizing and governing, impressing labor and extracting value.

Adriana Johnson draws on the medium of film to sensitize us to the logics of visuality as a technology of power. In particular, Latin American cinema presents a key site for both crystallizing and retreating from these logics. Through close readings of Argentine, Paraguayan, and Brazilian movies—including the documentary Bus 174, the dystopian sci-fi The Aerial,and the farcical The Gold Bug—Johnson shows how filmmakers can amplify or attenuate the infrastructural reach of visuality. They also reveal visuality’s otherwise-submerged power, and even engage in something like piracy: hacking into, rerouting, and deconstituting the workings of visual infrastructures. A deeply insightful and theoretically rich account, Cinema as Infrastructure reframes the political stakes of filmmaking in an era when visual forms have become means of production and order.

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cover of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India

Cinema at the End of Empire

A Politics of Transition in Britain and India

Priya Jaikumar

Duke University Press, 2006

How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain’s national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India. Imperially themed British films and Indian films envisioning a new civil society emerged during political negotiations that redefined the role of the state in relation to both film industries.

In addition to close readings of British and Indian films of the late colonial era, Jaikumar draws on a wealth of historical and archival material, including parliamentary proceedings, state-sponsored investigations into colonial filmmaking, trade journals, and intra- and intergovernmental memos regarding cinema. Her wide-ranging interpretations of British film policies, British initiatives in colonial film markets, and genres such as the Indian mythological film and the British empire melodrama reveal how popular film styles and controversial film regulations in these politically linked territories reconfigured imperial relations. With its innovative examination of the colonial film archive, this richly illustrated book presents a new way to track historical change through cinema.

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cover of Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles: Origins to 1960

Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles

Origins to 1960

Horak, Jan-Christopher

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere. 
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cover of Cinema is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy

Cinema is the Strongest Weapon

Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy

Lorenzo Fabbri

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance
 

Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism. 

 

Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology. 

 

Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society.

 

 

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cover of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics

Cinema of Actuality

Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics

Yuriko Furuhata

Duke University Press, 2013

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of image politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.
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cover of Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism

Cinema of Anxiety

A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism

By Vincent F. Rocchio

University of Texas Press, 1999

The "new" realism of Italian cinema after World War II represented and in many ways attempted to contain the turmoil of a society struggling to rid itself of Fascism while fighting off the threat of radical egalitarianism at the same time. In this boldly revisionist book, Vincent F. Rocchio combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology and Marxist critical theory to examine the previously neglected relationship between Neorealist films and the historical spectators they address.

Rocchio builds his analysis around case studies of the films Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, La Terra Trema, Bitter Rice, and Senso. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, he challenges the traditional understanding of Neorealism as a progressive cinema and instead reveals the anxieties it encodes: a society in political turmoil, an economic system in collapse, and a national cinema in ruins; while war, occupation, collaboration, and retaliation remain a part of everyday life.

These case studies demonstrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis can play a key role in analyzing the structure of cinematic discourse and its strategies of containment. As one of the first books outside of feminist film theory to bring the ideas of Lacan to theories of cinema, this book offers innovative methods that reinvigorate film analysis. Clear and detailed insights into both Italian culture and the films under investigation will make this engaging reading for anyone interested in film and cultural studies.

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cover of Cinema of Confinement

Cinema of Confinement

Thomas J. Connelly

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. 

Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.

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cover of Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema

Cinema of Crushing Motherhood

A New Feminist Cinema

Olivia Landry

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Twenty-first century contemporary films like Emily Atef’s Das Fremde in mir and Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama portray motherhood as a source of regret, exhaustion, rage, shame, guilt, and disgust. Olivia Landry analyzes this new feminist cinema and the ways it embraces and explores the crushing burden of mothering children. Landry surveys films released in North America, Europe, and Australia over a period beginning in 2007. As she shows, revelation and the expression of negative feelings upend the traditional image of the perfect, self-sacrificial, and happy mother. Landry tracks how radical positions like maternal regret and family abolition have replaced age-old tropes while also going beyond portrayals of maternal ambivalence. Her feminist method casts off psychoanalysis and renounces pathological approaches to motherhood to show how a generation of filmmakers have insisted on the subjective position and experience of the mother rather than that of the child. Bold and groundbreaking, Cinema of Crushing Motherhood looks at taboo-breaking films and illuminates the emotions and affects that make them so powerful.
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cover of Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture During the Thaw

Cinema of Sincerity

Soviet Films and Culture During the Thaw

Viktoria Paranyuk

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes in 1956, “sincerity” emerged as a cultural imperative in the Soviet Union. The cinema of this period turned inward, insisting on ordinary characters and creating a sense of spontaneity through particular staging methods and cinematic techniques, such as interior monologue and the close-up. These changes shifted the understanding of what “realism” meant and allowed Soviet cinema to reestablish with its audiences the trust that had been corrupted by serving Stalin’s cult of personality.

Using both theory and close readings of specific films produced in the Soviet Union during the Thaw, a period known for its relative political and cultural liberalization, Cinema of Sincerity treats sincerity as both a concept and an aesthetic strategy. Viktoria Paranyuk argues that Soviet cinema’s use of sincerity was a reworking of a trend in global cinema that sought to bridge the gap between reality and the filmed image. This period saw increased accessibility to world cinematic traditions, new voices in criticism, and, above all, the multigenerational effort in filmmaking that developed and thrived in centers outside Moscow. Paranyuk demonstrates how these changes allowed Soviet cinema to renew its visual language and use film as a space for collective self-examination.
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cover of Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983

Cinema of Solitude

A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983

By Charles Ramírez Berg

University of Texas Press, 1992

La crisis, a period of political and economic turmoil in Mexico that began in the late 1960s, spawned a new era in Mexican cinema. Known as el Nuevo Cine (the New Cinema), these films presented alienated characters caught in a painful transition period in which old family, gender, and social roles have ceased to function without being replaced by viable new ones. These are the films explored by Charles Ramírez Berg in Cinema of Solitude, the first book-length critical study of Mexican cinema in English.

Berg discusses the major films and filmmakers of el Nuevo Cine in depth. He analyzes dozens of commercial movies, from popular comedies and adventures to award-winning films. Introductory chapters address the issue of mexicanidad (Mexican national identity) and outline Mexican history, the history of film as popular culture and as a leading national industry, and the ideological dynamics of Mexican cinema.

In thematically arranged chapters, Berg investigates the images of women, men, and social structures portrayed in New Cinema films. He finds that women characters have begun to reject traditional stereotypes for more positive images, while male characters have grown ambiguous and undefined as machismo is abandoned. Other chapters trace the continuing marginalization of Indians in Mexican culture, the changes in male dominance within the family, and the disruptive social and economic effects caused by migration.

For everyone interested in Mexican culture as reflected in its major cinematic productions, as well as students of film theory and national cinemas, this book will be important reading.

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cover of Cinema under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

Cinema under National Reconstruction

State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

Hye Seung Chung

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Cinema under National Reconstruction calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961–1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok’s The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong’s The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho’s Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.
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cover of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissim Adrift

Cinema without Reflection

Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissim Adrift

Akira Mizuta Lippit

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Cinema without Reflection traces an implicit film theory in Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, especially in his frequent invocation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Derrida’s reflections on the economies of image and sound that reverberate in this story, along with the spectral dialectics of love, mirrors, and poiesis, serve as the basis for a theory of cinema that Derrida perhaps secretly imagined.

Following Derrida’s interventions on Echo and Narcissus across his thought on the visual arts, Akira Mizuta Lippit seeks to return to a theory of cinema adrift in Derrida’s philosophy.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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cover of Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating

Cinema's Bodily Illusions

Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating

Scott C. Richmond

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. 

Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema’s perceptual, rather than representational, power.

Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. 

[more]
cover of Cinema's Original Sin: D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture

Cinema's Original Sin

D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture

Paul McEwan

University of Texas Press, 2022

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life.

In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.

[more]
cover of Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds

Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism

Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds

Edited by Dina Sherzer

University of Texas Press, 1996

In this first major study of French colonial and postcolonial cinema, Dina Sherzer compiles essays by some of the foremost scholars on the subject who interrogate and analyze the realities behind the images of the nation's past and present. Through an examination of France and its colonies, multiethnic contemporary France, and cinematic discourses which have been and are being produced about France's colonial past, these authors explore how the images relay underlying assumptions and their relation to historical and political facts. A variety of subjects and viewpoints inform these studies, which cover the entire range of films on that topic.

The authors expound upon the role French and Francophone films are currently playing in reconstructing and imagining France's colonial past. Not only do the essays examine how French cinema has represented the encounter of French citizens with individuals from former colonies during the colonial era; they examine how French cinema has portrayed and has come to terms with the immigration of former colonial subjects to France. In addition, the book features another postcolonial facet by analyzing films of directors from the former colonies who give their own representation of colonialism and presentation of their culture.

This study is a major contribution to postcolonial research. Race, gender, and geography are central themes throughout this book that presents innovative material that contributes to the history of French cinema and emphasizes how cinema participates in and is a part of national culture.

[more]
cover of CinemaTexas Notes: The Early Days of Austin Film Culture

CinemaTexas Notes

The Early Days of Austin Film Culture

Edited by Louis Black, with Collins Swords

University of Texas Press, 2018

Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael.

This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

[more]
cover of Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method

Cinemachines

An Essay on Media and Method

Garrett Stewart

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The hero stands on stage in high-definition 3-D while doubled on a crude pixel screen in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Alien ships leave Earth by dissolving at the conclusion of Arrival.  An illusory death spiral in Vertigo transitions abruptly to a studio set, jolting the spectator. These are a few of the startling visual moments that Garrett Stewart examines in Cinemachines, a compelling, powerful, and witty book about the cultural and mechanical apparatuses that underlie modern cinema.
            Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.
 
[more]
cover of Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film

Cinemachismo

Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film

By Sergio de la Mora

University of Texas Press, 2006

After the modern Mexican state came into being following the Revolution of 1910, hyper-masculine machismo came to be a defining characteristic of "mexicanidad," or Mexican national identity. Virile men (pelados and charros), virtuous prostitutes as mother figures, and minstrel-like gay men were held out as desired and/or abject models not only in governmental rhetoric and propaganda, but also in literature and popular culture, particularly in the cinema. Indeed, cinema provided an especially effective staging ground for the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity.

In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity. In particular, his analyses of Mexican cinematic icons Pedro Infante and Gael García Bernal and of Arturo Ripstein's cult film El lugar sin límites illuminate cinema's role in fostering distinct figurations of masculinity, queer spectatorship, and gay male representations. De la Mora completes this exciting interdisciplinary study with an in-depth look at how the Mexican state brought about structural changes in the film industry between 1989 and 1994 through the work of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), paving the way for a renaissance in the national cinema.

[more]
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Cinemal

The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film

Tessa Laird

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

A foray through the wilds where experimental films and animals collide
 

Like the flash of a tropical bird’s iridescent wing, cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals,her field notes from countless hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat.

 

Part of a growing focus on nonhuman animals in film, Cinemal ventures to the “furry underbelly” of global experimental film practice, focusing on films from New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Laird examines how animals are depicted in film and analyzes the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colors, and voices (barking, howling, or echolocation). Burrowing into the work of filmmakers such as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz, Laird’s energetic prose embodies the films she discusses, seamlessly combining personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy to spread a wide sensory buffet.

 

Lively and optimistic, Laird uses cinematic animal tropes to encourage readers to rethink what it means to be human. She argues that, in a time of ecological collapse, such an impulse is a necessary means of imagining other, healthier ways of being in this world. Connecting us with the more-than-human, Cinemal lures us toward the beastly becomings of film and, ultimately, our own animal natures.

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom: Decades of Decline, 1945–1965

Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom

Decades of Decline, 1945–1965

Sam Manning

University of London Press, 2020

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the United Kingdom during the first half of the twentieth century, with attendance growing significantly during World War II and peaking in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though “going to the pictures” remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the forties, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the fifties, a range of factors led to rapid declines in attendance, and by 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million.

Cinema attendance fell in all regions, but the speed, nature, and extent of this decline varied widely across the United Kingdom. By presenting detailed case studies of two similarly-sized industrial cities, Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance and detail to the discussion of regional variations in film exhibition and audience habits. Using a wide range of sources, such as oral testimony, box-office data, newspapers, and trade journals, Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom conveys the diverse and ever-changing nature of the cinema industry.
[more]
cover of Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989

Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989

Catherine Portuges

Temple University Press, 2013

The cinemas of Eastern and Central Europe have been moving away from earlier Cold War perspectives and iconographies toward identifications more closely linked to a redefined Europe. Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 studies the shifts in the dynamics between film production, exhibition, and reception in Eastern bloc countries as they moved from state-sponsored systems toward the free market.
 
The contributors and editors of this exciting volume examine the interrelations between thematic, aesthetic, and infrastructural changes; the globalization of the international cinema marketplace; and the problems and promises arising from the privatization of national cinemas. 

Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 also addresses the strategies employed for preserving national cinemas and cultures through an analysis of films from the Czech and Slovak republics, the former German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the former Yugoslavia. The study provides a picture of Eastern European cinema at a critical juncture as well as its connections to the emergent world of transnational media.

Contributors include Barton Byg, Alexandra Foamente, Andrew Horton, Dina Iordanova, Ewa Mazierska, Bohdan Y. Nebesio, and Bogdan Stefanescu,

[more]
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Cinematic Body

Steven Shaviro

University of Minnesota Press, 1993

In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro proposes a radical new approach to film viewing. Moving between Jerry Lewis and Andy Warhol, between Fassbinder’s gay sex icons and George Romero’s flesh-eating zombies, The Cinematic Body cuts across disciplinary boundaries and seeks to engage new currents in critical thought.

Shaviro radically critiques the Lacanian model currently popular in film theory and film studies, arguing against that model’s obsessive emphasis on the phallus, castration anxiety, sadistic master, ideology, and the structure of the signifier. In this groundbreaking volume, Shaviro effectively communicates a sense of the inescapable ambivalence and intensities of contemporary culture, ultimately affirming a thoroughly postmodern sensibility.
[more]
cover of Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

Cinematic Canines

Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

McLean, Adrienne L

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of “man’s best friends” (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.

The representation and visualization of dogs in cinema, as of other animals, has influenced our understanding of what dogs “should” do and be, for us and with us. Adrienne L. McLean expertly shepherds these original essays into a coherent look at “real” dogs in live-action narrative films, from the stars and featured players to the character and supporting actors to those pooches that assumed bit parts or performed as extras. Who were those dogs, how were they trained, what were they made to do, how did they participate as characters in a fictional universe? These are a just a few of the many questions that she and the outstanding group of scholars in this book have addressed.

Often dogs are anthropomorphized in movies in ways that enable them to reason, sympathize, understand and even talk; and our shaping of dogs into furry humans has had profound effects on the lives of dogs off the screen. Certain breeds of dog have risen in popularity following their appearance in commercial film, often to the detriment of the dogs themselves, who rarely correspond to their idealized screen versions. In essence, the contributors in Cinematic Canines help us think about and understand the meanings of the many canines that appear in the movies and, in turn, we want to know more about those dogs due in no small part to the power of the movies themselves.
[more]
cover of Cinematic Encounters 2: Portraits and Polemics

Cinematic Encounters 2

Portraits and Polemics

Jonathan Rosenbaum

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Eschewing the idea of film reviewer-as-solitary-expert, Jonathan Rosenbaum continues to advance his belief that a critic's ideal role is to mediate and facilitate our public discussion of cinema. Portraits and Polemics presents debate as an important form of cinematic encounter whether one argues with filmmakers themselves, on behalf of their work, or with one's self.

Rosenbaum takes on filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Richard Linklater, Manoel De Oliveira, Mark Rappaport, Elaine May, and Béla Tarr. He also engages, implicitly and explicitly, with other writers, arguing with Pauline Kael—and Wikipedia—over Jacques Demy, with the Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviewers of Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, with David Thomson about James L. Brooks, and with many American and English film critics about misrepresented figures from Jerry Lewis to Yasujiro Ozu to Orson Welles. Throughout, Rosenbaum mines insights, pursues pet notions, and invites readers to join the fray.

[more]
cover of Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues

Cinematic Encounters

Interviews and Dialogues

Jonathan Rosenbaum

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Godard. Fuller. Rivette. Endfield. Tarr. In his celebrated career as a film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum has undertaken wide-ranging dialogues with many of the most daring and important auteurs of our time.

Cinematic Encounters collects more than forty years of interviews that embrace Rosenbaum's vision of film criticism as a collaboration involving multiple voices. Rosenbaum accompanies Orson Welles on a journey back to Heart of Darkness, the unmade film meant to be Welles's Hollywood debut. Jacques Tati addresses the primacy of décor and soundtrack in his comedic masterpiece PlayTime, while Jim Jarmusch explains the influence of real and Hollywoodized Native Americans in Dead Man. By arranging the chapters chronologically, Rosenbaum invites readers to pursue thematic threads as if the discussions were dialogues between separate interviews. The result is a rare gathering of filmmakers trading thoughts on art and process, on great works and false starts, and on actors and intimate moments.

[more]
cover of Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda

Cinematic Hamlet

The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda

Patrick J. Cook

Ohio University Press, 2011

Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.

Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.

Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

[more]
cover of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health

Cinematic Prophylaxis

Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health

Kirsten Ostherr

Duke University Press, 2005

A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease.

Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

[more]
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Cinematic Uses of the Past

Marcia Landy

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Cinematic Uses of the Past was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

From the first, cinema has sustained a romance with the past. The nature of this attachment, and what it reveals about our culture, is the subject of Marcia Landy's book. Cinematic Uses of the Past looks at British, American, Italian, and African films for what they can tell us about popular history and our cultural investment in certain images of the past.

Landy peruses six different moments in the history of cinema, employing the theories of Nietzsche and Gramsci. Her reading of these films explores their investments in history and memory in relation to ideas of nation, sexuality, gender, and race. Among the films she discusses are A Fistful of Dynamite, The Scarlet Empress, Dance with a Stranger, Holocaust, Schindler's List, Le camp de Thiaroye, Guelwaar, The Leopard, and Veronika Voss.

A thoroughly compelling reading of these emblematic films, Cinematic Uses of the Past is also a revealing interpretation of popular history, exposing the fragmentary, tentative, and invested nature of cultural memory.

Marcia Landy is professor of literature and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of several books, including Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minnesota, 1995).

[more]
cover of Cinematography

Cinematography

Keating, Patrick

Rutgers University Press, 2014

How does a film come to look the way it does? And what influence does the look of a film have on our reaction to it? The role of cinematography, as both a science and an art, is often forgotten in the chatter about acting, directing, and budgets. The successful cinematographer must have a keen creative eye, as well as expert knowledge about the constantly expanding array of new camera, film, and lighting technologies. Without these skills at a director’s disposal, most movies quickly fade from memory. Cinematography focuses on the highlights of this art and provides the first comprehensive overview of how the field has rapidly evolved, from the early silent film era to the digital imagery of today.

The essays in this volume introduce us to the visual conventions of the Hollywood style, explaining how these first arose and how they have subsequently been challenged by alternative aesthetics. In order to frame this fascinating history, the contributors employ a series of questions about technology (how did new technology shape cinematography?), authorship (can a cinematographer develop styles and themes over the course of a career?), and classicism (how should cinematographers use new technology in light of past practice?). Taking us from the hand-cranked cameras of the silent era to the digital devices used today, the collection of original essays explores how the art of cinematography has been influenced not only by technological advances, but also by trends in the movie industry, from the rise of big-budget blockbusters to the spread of indie films.

The book also reveals the people behind the camera, profiling numerous acclaimed cinematographers from James Wong Howe to Roger Deakins. Lavishly illustrated with over 50 indelible images from landmark films, Cinematography offers a provocative behind-the-scenes look at the profession and a stirring celebration of the art form. Anyone who reads this history will come away with a fresh eye for what appears on the screen because of what happens behind it.
[more]
cover of Cinephilia and the Adventure for Existential Health: Recomposing Subjectivity at the Cinema

Cinephilia and the Adventure for Existential Health

Recomposing Subjectivity at the Cinema

Adam Szymanski

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Exploring how art cinema cultivates existential health through the films of Olivier Assayas
 
This book proposes that cinephilia can facilitate existential health, which makes palpable the potential for subjectivity to be recomposed through meaningful encounters with cinema. Adam Szymanskidraws on the ethos of psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and thinks with select films from director Olivier Assayas—including Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper—to theorize how the cinema can be invested with therapeutic value. Cinephilia and the Adventure for Existential Health engages the history of psychoanalytic film theory, excavates its long-standing concern with the production of spectatorial subjectivity, and challenges pathologizing understandings of cinema spectatorship couched in identification, fetishism, and voyeurism. By embracing the indeterminacy of the cinematic experience and the adventurous disposition of cinephilia, the book allies itself to the pursuit of collective health and challenges the logic of medical power.

[more]
cover of Circle Jerk and This American Wife: the internet theater of Fake Friends

Circle Jerk and This American Wife

the internet theater of Fake Friends

Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, Rory Pelsue, Cat Rodríguez, and Ariel Sibert, edited by Michael Breslin and Ariel Sibert

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Two plays along with process essays on the cacophonous world of pop culture, politics, and personal testimony that we call the internet


In March 2020, the New York theater company Fake Friends was pushed off the stage and into the land of the internet. This book marks the first publication of two of their deliciously absurd and toxically serious internet plays, Circle Jerk (the first-ever work in digital theater to be shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama) and This American Wife. Circle Jerk tells the social media–infused tale of gay white supremacists creating an AI-influencer to dominate the global discourse, and This American Wife spins a surrealist web of queer devotion to the stars and performance strategies of reality television; both plays are unapologetically theatrical and digitally native, born out of the exigencies of the pandemic. This collection features an electrifying visual archive as well as individual essays from each company member reflecting on the practical and interpersonal processes of bringing these award-winning plays to life in our ever-more online, political, and personal world.
 

[more]
cover of Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture

Circle of Winners

How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture

Denise Von Glahn

University of Illinois Press, 2023

An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization’s prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II.

Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization’s ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.

[more]
cover of Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Circuit Listening

Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Andrew F. Jones

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution

What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s? And how did the mambo, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? In Circuit Listening, Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, and suggests how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music around the globe.

Focusing on the introduction of the transistor in revolutionary China and its Cold War counterpart in Taiwan, Circuit Listening reveals the hidden parallels between music as seemingly disparate as rock and roll and Maoist anthems. It offers groundbreaking studies of Mandarin diva Grace Chang and the Taiwanese folk troubadour Chen Da, examines how revolutionary aphorisms from the Little Red Book parallel the Beatles’ “Revolution,” uncovers how U.S. military installations came to serve as a conduit for the dissemination of Anglophone pop music into East Asia, and shows how consumer electronics helped the pop idol Teresa Teng bring the Maoist era to a close, remaking the contemporary Chinese soundscape forever.

Circuit Listening provides a multifaceted history of Chinese-language popular music and media at midcentury. It profiles a number of the most famous and best loved Chinese singers and cinematic icons, and places those figures in a larger geopolitical and technological context.  Circuit Listening’s original research and far-reaching ideas make for an unprecedented look at the role Chinese music played in the ’60s pop musical revolution.

[more]
cover of Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain

Circular Breathing

The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain

George McKay

Duke University Press, 2005

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.

McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies—particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa—have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

[more]
cover of Citizen Spielberg

Citizen Spielberg

Lester D. Friedman

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Steven Spielberg is the director or producer of over one third of the thirty highest grossing films of all time, yet most film scholars dismiss him as little more than a modern P. T. Barnum--a technically gifted and intellectually shallow showman who substitutes spectacle for substance. To date, no book has attempted to analyze the components of his worldview, the issues which animate his most significant works, the roots of his immense acceptance, and the influence his vast spectrum of imaginative products exerts on the public consciousness. 
 
In Citizen Spielberg, Lester D. Friedman fills that void with a systematic analysis of the various genres in which the director has worked, including science fiction (E.T.), adventure (Raiders trilogy), race films (The Color Purple, Amistad), and war films (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List). Friedman concludes that Spielberg’s films present a sustained artistic vision combined with a technical flair matched by few other filmmakers, and makes a compelling case for Spielberg to be considered as a major film artist.
 
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cover of Citizen Spielberg

Citizen Spielberg

Lester D. Friedman

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery.

This new edition of Citizen Spielberg expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker.

Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon.

[more]
cover of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture

Citizen Spy

Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture

Michael Kackman

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In Citizen Spy, Michael Kackman investigates how media depictions of the slick, smart, and resolute spy have been embedded in the American imagination. Looking at secret agents on television and the relationships among networks, producers, government bureaus, and the viewing public in the 1950s and 1960s, Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis. 

During the first decade of the Cold War, Hollywood developed such shows as I Led 3 Lives and Behind Closed Doors with the approval of federal intelligence agencies, even basing episodes on actual case files. These “documentary melodramas” were, Kackman argues, vehicles for the fledgling television industry to proclaim its loyalty to the government, and they came stocked with appeals to patriotism and anti-Communist vigilance. 

As the rigid cultural logic of the Red Scare began to collapse, spy shows became more playful, self-referential, and even critical of the ideals professed in their own scripts. From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart to the more complicated global and political situations of I Spy and Mission: Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the tumultuous culture of the civil rights and women’s movements and the war in Vietnam. Yet, even as spy shows introduced African-American and female characters, they continued to reinforce racial and sexual stereotypes. 

Bringing these concerns to the political and cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, Kackman asserts that the roles of race and gender in national identity have become acutely contentious. Increasingly exclusive definitions of legitimate citizenship, heroism, and dissent have been evident through popular accounts of the Iraq war. Moving beyond a snapshot of television history, Citizen Spy provides a contemporary lens to analyze the nature—and implications—of American nationalism in practice. 

Michael Kackman is assistant professor in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin.
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cover of City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination

City That Never Sleeps

New York and the Filmic Imagination

Pomerance, Murray

Rutgers University Press, 2007

New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness.

The glittering skyscrapers of such films as On the Town have shadowed the characteristic seedy streets in which desperate, passionate stories have played out-as in Scandal Sheet and The Pawnbroker. In other films, the city is a cauldron of bright lights, technology, empire, egotism, fear, hunger, and change--the scenic epitome of America in the modern age.

From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger. Contributors consider the work of Woody Allen, Blake Edwards, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory La Cava, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Vincente Minnelli, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, and numerous others. 
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