Results by title

618 books match the query 'Motion pictures' and 38 start with f

cover of Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema

Fade to Gray

Aging in American Cinema

Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie

University of Texas Press, 2016

Winner, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017

Americans are living longer and reinventing both work and retirement, but Hollywood movies barely hint at this reality of contemporary society. In many popular films, older characters fade into irrelevance, inactivity, or absurdity, or else they stay in the background as wise elders while younger characters provide the action. Most American films do not attempt to portray the rich variety of experiences or the sensitive aging issues that people confront in the years beyond fifty.

Fade to Gray offers one of the first extended studies of the portrayal of older people in American cinema from the silent era to the present. Writing in an accessible style for both general audiences and scholars, Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie examine social attitudes toward aging through an analysis of hundreds of individual films, including such classics as You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Nebraska (2013). They show how representations of the aging process and depictions of older people embracing or enduring the various experiences of longer lives have evolved over the past century, as well as how film industry practices have both reflected and influenced perceptions of aging in American society. Exposing the social and political motivations for negative cinematic portrayals of the elderly, Fade to Gray also gives visibility to films that provide opportunities for better understanding and appreciation of the aged and the aging process.

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cover of Fan Phenomena: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Fan Phenomena

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Edited by Marisa C. Hayes

Intellect Books, 2015

When The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in 1975, it initially received an indifferent reception in movie theaters, but it began to gain notoriety after it was embraced by audiences at midnight screenings in New York City and elsewhere. The movie tells of the misadventures of Brad and Janet, newly engaged, whose car breaks down in a rainstorm, forcing them to seek refuge in the castle of the bizarre and flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
An homage to campy B-movies, sci-fi, and horror films, the movie was—and still is—more than the sum of its parts. Participatory and party-like, midnight showings attract moviegoers who dress as film characters, sing along with the catchy show tunes, and interact with the action on screen. In the four decades since its release, it has become a cultural phenomenon, not to mention one of the most commercially successful films of all time.
In Fan Phenomena: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Marisa C. Hayes brings together a diverse group of writers who explore the film’s influence on the development of the pastiche tribute film, emerging queer activism of the 1970s, glam rock style, and the creative use of audience dialogue in recreating and interacting with the spoken and sung language of the film.
Spotlighting a cult phenomenon and its fans, many of who count the number of times they’ve seen the movie in the hundreds, this contribution to the Fan Phenomena series covers never-before-explored topics related to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For anyone who has ever done the “Time Warp,” this will be essential reading.
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cover of Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction

Fantasies of Neglect

Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Rutgers University Press, 2016

In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. 
 
Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children’s books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid’s independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. 
 
While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children—girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together. 
 
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cover of Fassbinder: The Life And Work Of A Provocative Genius

Fassbinder

The Life And Work Of A Provocative Genius

Christian Braad Thomsen

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

The revealing biography of this highly productive and radical film director

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the most innovative practitioner of New German Cinema. He worked at breakneck speed and in fourteen years made forty-four films, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). Fassbinder ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity, and his films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society defeats that desire.

In Fassbinder, Christian Thomsen, a close friend of the director, illuminates Fassbinder’s body of work while revealing his insider views of a man who, despite a furious temper, manic working habits, and rampant drug addiction, supported an extended family—including his mother, a string of male lovers, lovelorn women, and even a pair of frustrated wives—with his intoxicating and prolific imagination. This book, like Fassbinder’s often-used image of the mirror, brilliantly reflects the sexual, political, and overwhelmingly human contradictions inherent in the life of this intensely creative man and the remarkable films he directed.
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cover of Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood

Fast and Furious Franchising

How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood

Dan Hassler-Forest

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

What the popularity of the Fast and Furious film franchise says about Hollywood blockbusters and media production

Fast and Furious Franchising charts the transformation of Hollywood through the story of one of its most successful cinematic universes. Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious became an unexpected hit, developing into a seven-billion-dollar media franchise with nine direct sequels (so far), one “sidequel,” copious spin-offs, and licensing deals from board games to theme park rides.

Dan Hassler-Forest shows how Fast and Furious paved the way for a new form of serialized storytelling that balanced new distribution practices and expansion into international markets with a savvy awareness of representational politics. By following the series’s development over the past twenty-five years, Fast and Furious Franchising reveals distinct phases that reflect larger media-industrial trends: the postclassical blockbuster era of the early 2000s; the emergence of the megafranchise between 2008 and 2014; the franchise’s “imperial” era, from 2015 through 2019; and the postpandemic crisis era of media saturation and franchise fatigue.

While examining this rapidly changing media landscape, Hassler-Forest offers lively, insightful analyses of the films as they have embraced ever-more-ludicrous plots and unlikely character turns while always maintaining their signature faith in the power of family. As he illuminates the role of the Fast and Furious movies in the global entertainment industry, Hassler-Forest shows how the films’ improbable success proves Dominic Toretto’s adage that, whether “you win by an inch or a mile . . . winning’s winning.”

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women's Auto/biographical Film in Postwar Germany

Feminism, Film, Fascism

Women's Auto/biographical Film in Postwar Germany

By Susan E. Linville

University of Texas Press, 1998

German society's inability and/or refusal to come to terms with its Nazi past has been analyzed in many cultural works, including the well-known books Society without the Father and The Inability to Mourn. In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women's feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s.

After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages—Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, Jutta Brückner's Hunger Years, Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, and Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou. By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.

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cover of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Fictions Inc.

The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Clare, Ralph

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Beginning with perhaps the most famous depiction of a corporation—Frank Norris’s The Octopus—Ralph Clare traces this figure as it shifts from monster to man, from force to “individual,” and from American industry to multinational “Other.” Clare examines a variety of texts that span the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including novels by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; films such as Network, Ghostbusters, Gung Ho, Office Space, and Michael Clayton; and assorted artifacts of contemporary media such as television’s The Office and the comic strips Life Is Hell and Dilbert. 

Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend. Whether demonized or lionized, the corporation embodies American anxieties about these current conditions and ongoing fears about the viability of a capitalist system. 
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cover of Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema

Fidel between the Lines

Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema

Laura-Zoë Humphreys

Duke University Press, 2019

In Fidel between the Lines Laura-Zoë Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Offering insights that extend beyond Cuba, Humphreys reveals what happens to public debate when freedom of expression can no longer be distinguished from complicity while demonstrating the ways in which combining anthropology with film studies can shed light on cinema's broader social and political import.
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cover of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945

Fiery Cinema

The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945

Weihong Bao

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions.

Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity.

Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

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cover of Film Criticism in the Digital Age

Film Criticism in the Digital Age

Frey, Mattias

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Over the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a “crisis of criticism” and mourned the “death of the critic.” Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that “everyone’s a critic,” urgent questions have emerged about the status and purpose of film criticism in the twenty-first century. 
 
In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ten scholars from across the globe come together to consider whether we are witnessing the extinction of serious film criticism or seeing the start of its rebirth in a new form. Drawing from a wide variety of case studies and methodological perspectives, the book’s contributors find many signs of the film critic’s declining clout, but they also locate surprising examples of how critics—whether moonlighting bloggers or salaried writers—have been able to intervene in current popular discourse about arts and culture.
 
In addition to collecting a plethora of scholarly perspectives, Film Criticism in the Digital Age includes statements from key bloggers and print critics, like Armond White and Nick James. Neither an uncritical celebration of digital culture nor a jeremiad against it, this anthology offers a comprehensive look at the challenges and possibilities that the Internet brings to the evaluation, promotion, and explanation of artistic works. 
 
 
 
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cover of Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen

Film Festivals

Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen

Wong, Cindy H

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Movies, stars, auteurs, critics, and the sheer excitement of cinema come together in film festivals as quintessential constellations of art, business, and glamour. Yet, how well do we actually understand the forces and meanings that these events embody?

Film Festivals offers the first comprehensive overview of the history, people, films, and multiple functions of the festival world. From Sundance to Hong Kong, from the glitter of Cannes to edgier festivals that challenge boundaries or foster LGBTQ cultural production, film festivals celebrate art, promote business, bring cinema to diverse audiences, and raise key issues about how we see our world. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong situates festivals within changing global practices of film, including their important ties to both Hollywood and independent cinema. She explores how these events have become central in the construction of cinema knowledge as well as the behind-the-scene mechanics of finance, distribution, and evaluation. By linking general structures and connections to specific films and auteurs, Wong addresses the components and creation of film festivals that continue to reshape filmmaking as art and business.

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cover of Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema

Film Language

A Semiotics of the Cinema

Christian Metz

University of Chicago Press, 1990

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film.

"The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage?'"—Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement

"Modern film theory begins with Metz."—Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura

"Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [Film Language] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."—Stephen Heath, Screen
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cover of Film Programming for Public Libraries

Film Programming for Public Libraries

Kati Irons

American Library Association, 2014

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cover of Film Talk: Directors at Work

Film Talk

Directors at Work

Dixon, Wheeler Winston

Rutgers University Press, 2007

What 1970s Hollywood filmmaker influenced Quentin Tarantino? How have contemporary Japanese horror films inspired Takashi Shimizu, director of the huge box office hit The Grudge? What is it like to be an African American director in the twenty-first century?

The answers to these questions, along with many more little-known facts and insights, can be found in Film Talk, an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking from the 1940s to the present. In eleven intimate and revealing interviews, contemporary film directors speak frankly about their work-their successes and their disappointments, their personal aspirations, struggles, relationships, and the politics that affect the industry.

A medley of directors including those working in pop culture and documentary, as well as feminist filmmakers, social satirists, and Hollywood mavericks recount stories that have never before been published. Among them are Monte Hellman, the auteur of the minimalist masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop; Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David, created some of the most important documentaries of the 1960s, including Salesman and The Beatles: What's Happening?; Robert Downey Sr., whose social satires Putney Swope and Greaser's Palace paved the way for a generation of filmmakers; Bennett Miller, whose film Capote won an Academy Award in 2005; and Jamie Babbit, a lesbian crossover director whose low-budget film But I'm a Cheerleader! became a mainstream hit.

The candid conversations, complimented by more than fifty photographs, including many that are rare, make this book essential reading for aspiring moviemakers, film scholars, and everyone interested in the how movies are made and who the fascinating individuals are who make them.

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cover of Film and Nationalism

Film and Nationalism

Williams, Alan

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Today there is much debate over an increasingly "global economy." But commercial cinema has been, from the very beginnings of its existence, "globalized." From the mediums inception, films have defined and reinforced the core values and social structures of countries. They have also helped definesocially and culturallywhat is to be considered "outside" the nation and what it is to be shunned.

Film and Nationalism examines the ways in which cinema has been considered an arena of conflict and interaction between nations and nationhood. Each section of this volume explores a crucial aspect of the discussion. Is film an effective form of national propaganda? Are films losing the very notion of nationhood, in favor of a generalized, "global" cinematographic culture? What is films influence over "national character"? In addition, the volume explores the cultural and economic interactions between developed and underdeveloped countries. How have third world nations defined themselves in relation to hegemonic first world cultures, and how have their relations been changed through the dissemination of Western films? Throughout, Alan Williams chooses essays that enhance our understanding of how films help shape our sense of nationhood and self.

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cover of Film and Television After 9/11

Film and Television After 9/11

Edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.

While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.

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cover of Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney

Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature

Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney

Ronald B. Tobias

Michigan State University Press, 2011

With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile—part grimace, part snarl—Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others—Jesse “Buff alo” Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.
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cover of Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe

Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic

From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe

By Bruce Murray

University of Texas Press, 1990

The Weimar Republic of Germany, covering the post-World War I period of civil and governmental strife, witnessed a great struggle among a variety of ideologies, a struggle for which the arts provided one important arena. Leftist individuals and organizations critiqued mainstream art production and attempted to counter what they perceived as its conservative-to-reactionary influence on public opinion. In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Murray focuses on the leftist counter-current in Weimar cinema, offering an alternative critical approach to the traditional one of close readings of the classical films.

Beginning with a brief review of pre-Weimar cinema (1896-1918), he analyzes the film activity of the Social Democratic Party, the German Communists, and independent leftists in the Weimar era. Leftist filmmakers, journalists, and commentators, who in many cases contributed significantly to marginal leftist as well as mainstream cinema, have, until now, received little scholarly attention. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and personal interviews, Murray shows how the plurality of aesthetic models represented in the work of individuals who participated in leftist experiments with cinema in the 1920S collapsed as Germany underwent the transition from parliamentary democracy to fascist dictatorship. He suggests that leftists shared responsibility for that collapse and asserts the value of such insights for those who contemplate alternatives to institutional forms of cinematic discourse today.

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cover of Film as Argument: The Secret to Feature Film Storytelling

Film as Argument

The Secret to Feature Film Storytelling

Darren Paul Fisher

Rutgers University Press, 2025

If you’ve picked up this book, it’s most likely that you have an interest in movies over-and-above the typical audience member. Perhaps a screenwriter, producer or director looking to improve your work, always searching for any insight that will result in better cinematic storytelling. If that’s the case, then good news: this is the book for you. It asks a deceptively straightforward question. Why do we make feature films?

Is it to entertain? To move and audience? To tell a powerful story? For fame and fortune?

You may have answered yes to each, but those answers don’t account for the practice overall. Most books about screenwriting and directing are primarily concerned with craft and technique, but how can you truly understand filmmaking – or make the best films - unless you know what purpose it really serves.

So what’s the secret? As the title of this book suggests, making feature films is fundamentally the practice of making a very specific type of argument. To see how this works, we will deep-dive into how filmmakers are trained and taught to think about filmmaking, and what traditions they knowingly or unknowingly follow. We will look at hundreds of films and some major case studies, including Toy Story 3, Schindler’s List, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Amour, and mother!,  to explore how and what films argue, and why knowing this can both unlock both a greater appreciation of the form, and improve the impact your films make. 
 
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cover of Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence

Film in the Middle East and North Africa

Creative Dissidence

Edited by Josef Gugler

University of Texas Press, 2011

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

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

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

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cover of Film on The Faultline

Film on The Faultline

Edited by Alan Wright

Intellect Books, 2015

Film has always played a crucial role in the imagination of disaster. Earthquakes, especially, not only shift the ground beneath our feet but also herald a new way of thinking or being in the world. Following recent seismic events in countries as dissimilar as Iran, Chile and Haiti, Japan and New Zealand, national films have emerged that challenge ingrained political, economic, ethical, and ontological categories of modernity. Film on the Faultline explores the fractious relationship between cinema and seismic experience and addresses the important role that cinema can play in the wake of such events as forms of popular memory and personal testimony.
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cover of Film's Ghosts: Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan

Film's Ghosts

Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan

Stephen Barber

Diaphanes, 2019

Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata—the initiator of the “Butoh” performance art and the seminal figure in Japan’s experimental arts culture of the 1960s—created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil, his experimental film projects and his horror and erotic films uniquely invoking the intensity of the decade. Based on original interviews with Hijikata’s collaborators as well as new research, Film’s Ghosts illuminates Hijikata’s work against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo. This will be an essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan’s experimental art and its histories.
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cover of Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form

Filmed Thought

Cinema as Reflective Form

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago Press, 2020

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life.

Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.
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cover of Filming the City: Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism through the Lens

Filming the City

Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism through the Lens

Edited by Edward Clift, Mirko Guaralda, and Ari Mattes

Intellect Books, 2016

Filming the City brings together the work of filmmakers, architects, designers, video artists, and media specialists to provide three distinct prisms through which to examine the medium of film in the context of the city. The book presents commentaries on particular films and their social and urban relevance, offering contemporary criticisms of both film and urbanism from conflicting perspectives, and documenting examples of how to actively use the medium of film in the design of our cities, spaces and buildings. Bringing a diverse set of contributors to the collection, editors Edward Clift, Ari Mattes, and Mirko Guaralda offer readers a new approach to understanding the complex, multilayered interaction of urban design and film.
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cover of Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of Transgression

Films That Spill

Beyond the Cinema of Transgression

Marie Sophie Beckmann

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Films That Spill is a comprehensive study of the Cinema of Transgression, a hitherto underexamined moment in US underground film culture. Reconsidering the concept of transgressive cinema not only as a description of the intentionally provocative content of the films but also as a feature of a cross-disciplinary practice, Marie Sophie Beckmann explores how filmmaking in the context of the vibrant and intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes in 1980s Lower Manhattan spilled over the boundaries of artistic disciplines, media formats, and content concepts. This study not only provides a microhistory of these scenes and insight into their afterlife in archives and exhibitions but also represents an innovative contribution to debates within film, media, and visual culture about the methodological and historiographical challenges posed by the expansion of film beyond the discursive boundaries of cinema.
 
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cover of Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing

Flamboyant Fictions

The Failed Art of Passing

Ian Fleishman

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Exposes a stylistic tradition of flamboyantly failed passing in queer literature and film

This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to the German New Wave and the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and disidentification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.

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cover of Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America

Flatlining on the Field of Dreams

Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America

Nadel, Alan

Rutgers University Press, 1997

"Flatlining on the Field of Dreams takes a apart some of the most commercially successful films of the epoch, demonstrating how they reflected, debated, and played with the dominant ideology of the time. . . . cleverly and wittily written . . . . The book will work extremely well in the classroom."
-Film Quarterly

"From Back to the Future to Forrest Gump, Nadel shows not only how notions of cinematic time re-script political change but how our very conceptualizations of change are thematized by our experiences of watching movies. This is not simply film history, or film as history, but film affirming "history" in the same way that Ronald Reagan affirmed film narratives."
-Susan Jeffords, University of Washington

"Flatlining on the Field of Dreams brilliantly restages the cultural narratives associated with Reaganism within a neo-imperialist cinematic space and reveals the heretofore unexamined role class played in the reproduction of those narratives."
-Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

Flatlining on the Field of Dreams demonstrates, with witty prose and careful analysis, how the overindulgent, image-conscious years of the Reagan administration are reflected in sundry aspects of American films produced during that era. Discussing dozens of films, including Home Alone, Beetlejuice, Ghost, The Little Mermaid, Working Girl, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Trading Places, Alan Nadel identifies narratives about credit, deregulation, gender, race, and masculinity that defined "President Reagan's America." Linking the way Hollywood films work to the stories they tell, he explains how the ideas and values of Reaganism became the symbolic food of a hyper-consumptive society. The book provides hard-to-ignore demonstrations of the extensive synergy between politics, history, and popular culture. 
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cover of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe

Flickering Shadows

Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe

J. M. Burns

Ohio University Press, 2002

Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Flickering Shadows is the first book to explore this little-known world of colonial cinema. J. M. Burns pieces together the history of the cinema in Rhodesia, examining film production, audience reception, and state censorship, to reconstruct the story of how Africans in one nation became consumers of motion pictures. Movies were a valued “tool of empire” designed to assimilate Africans into a new colonial order. Inspired by an inflated confidence in the medium, Rhodesian government offcials created an African Film industry that was unprecedented in its size and scope. Transforming the lives of their subjects through cinema proved more complicated than white officials had anticipated. Although Africans embraced the medium with enthusiasm, they expressed critical opinions and demonstrated decided tastes that left colonial officials puzzled and alarmed. Flickering Shadows tells the fascinating story of how motion pictures were introduced and negotiated in a colonial setting. In doing so, it casts light on the history of the globalization of the cinema. This work is based on interviews with white and black filmmakers and African audience members, extensive archival research in Africa and England, and viewings of scores of colonial films.
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cover of Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

Flickers of Film

Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

Sperb, Jason

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Whether paying tribute to silent films in Hugo and The Artist or celebrating arcade games in Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It-Ralph, Hollywood suddenly seems to be experiencing a wave of intense nostalgia for outmoded technologies. To what extent is that a sincere lament for modes of artistic production that have nearly vanished in an all-digital era? And to what extent is it simply a cynical marketing ploy, built on the notion that nostalgia has always been one of Hollywood’s top-selling products?
 
In Flickers of Film, Jason Sperb offers nuanced and unexpected answers to these questions, examining the benefits of certain types of film nostalgia, while also critiquing how Hollywood’s nostalgic representations of old technologies obscure important aspects of their histories. He interprets this affection for the prehistory and infancy of digital technologies in relation to an industry-wide anxiety about how the digital has grown to dominate Hollywood, pushing it into an uncertain creative and economic future. Yet he also suggests that Hollywood’s nostalgia for old technologies ignores the professionals who once employed them, as well as the labor opportunities that have been lost through the computerization and outsourcing of film industry jobs. 
 
Though it deals with nostalgia, Flickers of Film is strikingly cutting-edge, one of the first studies to critically examine Pixar’s role in the film industry, cinematic representations of videogames, and the economic effects of participatory culture. As he takes in everything from Terminator: Salvation to The Lego Movie, Sperb helps us see what’s distinct about this recent wave of self-aware nostalgic films—how Hollywood nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be. 
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cover of Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture

Folklore/Cinema

Popular Film as Vernacular Culture

Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven

Utah State University Press, 2007

Interest in the conjunctions of film and folklore is stronger and more diverse than ever. Documentaries on folk life and expression remain a vital genre, but scholars such as Sharon Sherman and Mikel Koven also are exploring how folklore elements appear in, and merge with, popular cinema. They look at how movies, a popular culture medium, can as well be both a medium and type of folklore, playing cultural roles and conveying meanings customarily found in other folkloric forms. They thus use the methodology of folklore studies to analyze films made for commercial distribution.

The contributors to this book look at film and folklore convergences, showing how cinema conveys vernacular culture in traditional and popular venues. Folklore/Cinema will be of interest to scholars from many fields---folklore, film studies, popular culture, American studies, history, anthropology, and literature among them---and will help introduce students in various courses to intersections of film and culture.

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cover of Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema

Framed Time

Toward a Postfilmic Cinema

Garrett Stewart

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema’s 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip.
Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films—from Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and The Sixth Sense to La mala educación and Caché —Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film’s original rolling reel to today’s digital pixel. He goes on to show—with 140 stills—how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen, breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.
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cover of Framing the Past: The Historiograpy of German Cinema and Television

Framing the Past

The Historiograpy of German Cinema and Television

Edited by Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

This collection of essays was selected from those presented in October 1988 at a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, "Concepts of History in German Cinema." The contributors include notable historians, film scholars, and German studies specialists who explore the complex network of social, political, and religious institutions that have influenced the historiography of German cinema and television.

Before the turn of the century, Germans began to employ the medium of film to represent the past when they attempted to document their Prussian heritage. Since then, German cinema and television have promoted history as a component of personal, cultural, and national identity by consistently providing prominent treatment of historical subjects.

Although it is relatively easy to document changes in the selection and handling of these subjects, it is more difficult to determine precisely which factors have motivated those changes.

In attempting to define these factors, the link between German cinema, television, and history has developed around three interrelated issues: (1) the reception of Weimar cinema, which for most film scholars continues to be mediated to one extent or another by Siegfried Kracauer’s work; (2) the inscribing of fascism in cinema and television; and (3) the nature of, and potential for, alternatives to mainstream cinema and television.

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cover of Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Keith B. Wagner

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.  
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cover of French Film History, 1895–1946

French Film History, 1895–1946

Richard Neupert

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

French Film History, 1895–1946 addresses the creative and often unexpected trajectory of French cinema, which continues to be one of the most provocative and engaging cinemas in the world. Tracing French film and its developments from the earliest days, when France dominated world cinema, up through the Occupation and Liberation, Neupert outlines major players and films that made it so influential. Paris held a privileged position as one of the world’s hubs of scientific, social, and cultural experimentation; it is no wonder that the cinema as we know it was born there in the nineteenth century. This book presents French cinema’s most significant creative filmmakers and movies but also details the intricate relations between technology, economics, and government that helped shape the unique conditions for cinematic experimentation in the country.
 
Neupert explains the contexts behind the rise of cinema in France, including groundbreaking work by the Lumière family, Georges Méliès, and Alice Guy; the powerhouse studios of Pathé and Gaumont; directors such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Renoir; and an array of stars, including Max Linder, Jean Gabin, Josephine Baker, and Michèle Morgan. The first fifty years of French film practice established cinema’s cultural and artistic potential, setting the stage for the global post–World War II explosion in commercial movies and art cinema alike. French film and its rich history remain at the heart of cinematic storytelling and our moviegoing pleasure.
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cover of From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors: Constructing American Boyhood in Postwar Hollywood Films

From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors

Constructing American Boyhood in Postwar Hollywood Films

Peter W.Y. Lee

Rutgers University Press, 2021

After World War II, studies examining youth culture on the silver screen start with James Dean. But the angst that Dean symbolized—anxieties over parents, the “Establishment,” and the expectations of future citizen-soldiers—long predated Rebels without a Cause. Historians have largely overlooked how the Great Depression and World War II impacted and shaped the Cold War, and youth contributed to the national ideologies of family and freedom. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors explores this gap by connecting facets of boyhood as represented in American film from the 1930s to the postwar years. From the Andy Hardy series to pictures such as The Search, Intruder in the Dust, and The Gunfighter, boy characters addressed larger concerns over the dysfunctional family unit, militarism, the “race question,” and the international scene as the Korean War began. Navigating the political, social, and economic milieus inside and outside of Hollywood, Peter W.Y. Lee demonstrates that continuities from the 1930s influenced the unique postwar moment, coalescing into anticommunism and the Cold War.
 
 
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cover of From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

From Light to Byte

Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

Markos Hadjioannou

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the issue of technological shift within media archaeologies.

Hadjioannou turns to the technical basis of the image as his first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, he explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. He observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.

Throughout this work Hadjioannou examines how the two technologies set themselves up with reference to reality, physicality, spatiality, and temporality, and he concludes that the question concerning digital cinema is ultimately one of ethical implications—a question, that is, of the individual’s ability to respond to the image of the world.

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cover of Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010

Frontiers of Screen History

Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010

Edited by Raita Merivirta, Kimmo Ahonen, Heta Mulari, and Rami Mähkä

Intellect Books, 2013

Frontiers of Screen History provides an insightful exploration into the depiction and imagination of European borders in cinema after World War II. While films have explored national and political borders, they have also attempted to identify, challenge, and imagine frontiers of another kind: social, ethnic, religious, and gendered. The book investigates all these perspectives. Its unique focus on the representation of European borders and frontiers via film is groundbreaking, opening up a new field of research and scholarly discussion. The exceptional variety of national and cultural perspectives provides a rewarding investigation of borders and frontiers.

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cover of Futures of the Flesh: An Experiment in Film Writing

Futures of the Flesh

An Experiment in Film Writing

Domietta Torlasco

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Exploring alternative possibilities of viewpoint through cinematic experimentation

In this boldly multidimensional work, Domietta Torlasco alternates between theoretical writings, film essays, and fragmented excerpts from an original screenplay to construct a temporal as well as spatial architecture for her critical intervention. Futures of the Flesh posits that cinematic experimentation holds the strongest potential to reimagine life—its forms, rhythms, and affects—beyond the division between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. Such potential cannot be clearly located in either space or time but, on the contrary, requires that we think according to momentum, diffraction, and difference.

As a novel notion and the formative medium of both subject and object, the flesh affirms the openness and indefinite generativity of being, allowing for the appearance of new perceptual relations and forms of kinship. Torlasco stages a dialogue between thinkers including Hortense Spillers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and turns to canonical films, including Blade Runner and Solaris, classic sci-fi literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and contemporary video art to elucidate how these media imaginatively rework the distinction between categories of being. This book endeavors to redefine the relation between theory and practice, analysis and creation, to name the primary relations that, under specific techno-aesthetic conditions, enable the emergence of porous, un-bordered forms of life.

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