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In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.

This volume in the film|minutes series focuses on Alfréd Radok’s Daleká cesta (Distant Journey, 1948), a pioneering Czechoslovak film admired by figures such as André Bazin and Alain Resnais. Renowned for its bold experiments in cinematic montage, the film combines fictional scenes with newsreel footage, Nazi propaganda, and images of liberated concentration camps. Produced shortly after the war, Daleká cesta remains one of the earliest and most formally daring cinematic attempts to grapple with the Holocaust. Drawing on the creators’ ideas of editing as a means of rescuing victims of atrocity—at least momentarily—from historical determinism, the book explores how a montage-like experiment in film analysis can challenge not only deterministic narratives of history, but also the conventions of established theoretical frameworks and academic writing.

Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.

With its focus on dangerous, determined femmes fatales, hardboiled detectives, and crimes that almost-but-never-quite succeed, film noir has long been popular with moviegoers and film critics alike. Film noir was a staple of classical Hollywood filmmaking during the years 1941-1958 and has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1990s. Dames in the Driver's Seat offers new views of both classical-era and contemporary noirs through the lenses of gender, class, and race. Jans Wager analyzes how changes in film noir's representation of women's and men's roles, class status, and racial identities mirror changes in a culture that is now often referred to as postmodern and postfeminist.

Following introductory chapters that establish the theoretical basis of her arguments, Wager engages in close readings of the classic noirs The Killers, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly and the contemporary noirs L. A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo, and Jackie Brown. Wager divides recent films into retro-noirs (made in the present, but set in the 1940s and 1950s) and neo-noirs (made and set in the present but referring to classic noir narratively or stylistically). Going beyond previous studies of noir, her perceptive readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.

Dancing Revolution presents richly diverse case studies to illuminate these patterns of movement and influence in movement and sound in the history of American public life. Christopher J. Smith spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities as he delves into a wide range of historical moments. These include the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of Shakers and Ghost Dancers in the First and Second Great Awakenings; creolized antebellum dance in cities from New Orleans to Bristol; the modernism and racial integration that imbued twentieth-century African American popular dance; the revolutionary connotations behind images of dance from Josephine Baker to the Marx Brothers; and public movement's contributions to hip hop, antihegemonic protest, and other contemporary transgressive communities’ physical expressions of dissent and solidarity.

Multidisciplinary and wide-ranging, Dancing Revolution examines how Americans turned the rhythms of history into the movement behind the movements.

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror, as well as his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. 

While considerations of Argento's films often describe them as irrational nightmares, L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock. Analyzing individual images and sequences as well as larger narrative structures, he reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.

The definitive biography of Hollywood horror legend Tod Browning—now revised and expanded with new material

One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Tod Browning (1880–1962) began his career buried alive in a carnival sideshow and saw his Hollywood reputation crash with the box office disaster–turned–cult classic Freaks. Penetrating the secret world of “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,” Dark Carnival excavates the story of this complicated, fiercely private man. In this newly revised and expanded edition of their biography first published in 1995, David J. Skal and Elias Savada researched Browning’s recently unearthed scrapbooks and photography archives to add further nuance and depth to their previous portrait of this enigmatic artist.

Skal and Savada chronicle Browning’s turn-of-the-century flight from an eccentric Louisville family into the realm of carnivals and vaudeville, his disastrous first marriage, his rapid climb to riches in the burgeoning silent film industry, and the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life. They offer a close look at Browning’s legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi as well as the studio politics that brought his remarkable run to an inglorious conclusion. With a revised prologue, epilogue, filmography, and new text and illustrations throughout, Dark Carnival is an unparalleled account of a singular filmmaker and an illuminating depiction of the evolution of horror and the early film industry.

Dark Mattermaps the invisible dimension of theater whose effects are felt everywhere in performance. Examining phenomena such as hallucination, offstage character, offstage action, sexuality, masking, technology, and trauma, Andrew Sofer engagingly illuminates the invisible in different periods of postclassical western theater and drama. He reveals how the invisible continually structures and focuses an audience’s theatrical experience, whether it’s black magic in Doctor Faustus, offstage sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, masked women in The Rover, self-consuming bodies in Suddenly Last Summer, or surveillance technology in The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Each discussion pinpoints new and striking facets of drama and performance that escape sight. Taken together, Sofer’s lively case studies illuminate how dark matter is woven into the very fabric of theatrical representation. Written in an accessible style and grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Dark Matter will appeal to theater and performance scholars, literary critics, students, and theater practitioners, particularly playwrights and directors.

An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era

 

What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.

Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.

Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.

    Dark Victory,  released in 1939, was a daring movie for its time. it depicted its heroine, Bette Davis, dying of a brain tumor. The film blended romance and realism so successfully that it is still a model for movies about death and dying today.
    Bette Davis drew upon every mood she had ever expressed—insouciance, impatience, anger, passion, acquiescence. She worked hard at the role, reveling in a story that, according to her account, she had actively campaigned for. She also benefited greatly by the professional talents of director Edmund Goulding and screenwriter Casey Robinson and a supporting cast that included Humphrey Bogart.

Beginning with Lost Highway, director David Lynch “swerved” in a new direction, one in which very disorienting images of the physical world take center stage in his films. Seeking to understand this unusual emphasis in his work, noted Lynch scholar Martha Nochimson engaged Lynch in a long conversation of unprecedented openness, during which he shared his vision of the physical world as an uncertain place that masks important universal realities. He described how he derives this vision from the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion, as well as from his layman’s fascination with modern physics.

With this deep insight, Nochimson forges a startlingly original template for analyzing Lynch’s later films—the seemingly unlikely combination of the spiritual landscape envisioned in the Holy Vedas and the material landscape evoked by quantum mechanics and relativity. In David Lynch Swerves, Nochimson navigates the complexities of Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire with uncanny skill, shedding light on the beauty of their organic compositions; their thematic critiques of the immense dangers of modern materialism; and their hopeful conceptions of human potential. She concludes with excerpts from the wide-ranging interview in which Lynch discussed his vision with her, as well as an interview with Columbia University physicist David Albert, who was one of Nochimson’s principal tutors in the discipline of quantum physics.

The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies

For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.

The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. 

Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.

Derek Jarman was the most important independent filmmaker in England during the 1980s. Using emblems and symbols in associative contexts, rather than conventional, cause-and-effect narrative, he created films noteworthy for their lyricism and poetic feeling and for their exploration of the gay experience. His style of filmmaking also links Jarman with other prominent directors of lyric film, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet.

This pathfinding book places Derek Jarman in the tradition of lyric film and offers incisive readings of all eleven of his feature-length films, from Sebastiane to Blue. Steven Dillon looks at Jarman and other directors working in a similar vein to establish how lyric films are composed through the use of visual imagery and actual poetry. He then traces Jarman's use of imagery (notably mirrors and the sea) in his films and discusses in detail the relationship between cinematic representations and sexual identity. This insightful reading of Jarman's work helps us better understand how films such as The Last of England and The Garden can be said to cohere and mean without being reduced to clear messages. Above all, Dillon's book reveals how truly beautiful and brilliant Jarman's movies are.