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As the first survey of its kind, Soft in the Middle positions the contemporary softcore feature as a middlebrow form of pornography. This genre of film and video has been produced by a complex and often elusive industry situated in the ambiguous “middle” regions between hardcore and Hollywood.
In meticulous detail, Soft in the Middle demonstrates that softcore’s under-the-radar success and pervasive cultural devaluation may be understood in terms of the “postfeminist” strategies employed by successive generations of producers and distributors, each intent on overcoming obstacles to the mainstream distribution of pornographic material. Softcore and its American precursors became more “feminized” and “female friendly” as their distribution widened, a process hastened in the 1980s by the industry’s transition to private, non-theatrical modes of distribution and exhibition (e.g., home-video outlets and premium-cable networks like Cinemax). One of the byproducts of this development is that contemporary softcore has frequently resorted to what are arguably anti-male or “misandristic” attitudes and depictions. Clearly, the genre challenges traditional assumptions about pornography, including those held by feminists on both sides of “the porn debates.”  

Drawing on original industrial research, extensive sampling, and wide-ranging scholarship, Soft in the Middle offers a nuanced look at a discreetly indecent genre whose central commodity has always been female nudity. The book examines the genre’s history, describes its deflationary trajectory, and differentiates the reading patterns of its disparate audiences, including “cult” critics and feminist critics. Naturally, the book also considers the genre’s formal and ideological conventions, surveying its most exemplary subgenres, styles, and motifs—and lavishing particular attention on its most influential studios, directors, and texts.

A fascinating exchange between two giants of Indian cinema, revealing the inner workings of Satyajit Ray’s creative process and the vision that shaped world cinema.

Two of Indian cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs, Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal, come together in this intimate dialogue, offering a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a cinematic genius. Based on Benegal’s 1985 documentary on Ray, this volume brings together the film’s script, excerpts from extended interviews, and a remarkable collection of visual material showcasing Ray’s work as a filmmaker, illustrator, designer, and writer.

Through candid conversations, Ray reflects on his childhood and the philosophy behind his storytelling, providing an unparalleled look at his creative process. With one master filmmaker capturing another, the result is a deeply personal and layered portrait that moves beyond Ray’s films to reveal the man behind the camera. Satyajit Ray: A Film is both a historical document and a celebration of artistic legacy; a rare opportunity to witness a dialogue between two legends shaping the course of Indian and global cinema.

More than any other filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah opened the door for graphic violence in movies. In this book, Stephen Prince explains the rise of explicit violence in the American cinema, its social effects, and the relation of contemporary ultraviolence to the radical, humanistic filmmaking that Peckinpah practiced.

Prince demonstrates Peckinpah's complex approach to screen violence and shows him as a serious artist whose work was tied to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. He explains how the director's commitment to showing the horror and pain of violence compelled him to use a complex style that aimed to control the viewer's response.

Prince offers an unprecedented portrait of Peckinpah the filmmaker. Drawing on primary research materials—Peckinpah's unpublished correspondence, scripts, production memos, and editing notes—he provides a wealth of new information about the making of the films and Peckinpah's critical shaping of their content and violent imagery. This material shows Peckinpah as a filmmaker of intelligence, a keen observer of American society, and a tragic artist disturbed by the images he created.

Prince's account establishes, for the first time, Peckinpah's place as a major filmmaker. This book is essential reading for those interested in Peckinpah, the problem of movie violence, and contemporary American cinema.

Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency offers a vibrant and accessible collection of essays that explore how films and changes in the media industries reflect and influence our political, cultural, technological, and ecological moment. Critic Stephen Lee Naish reveals what lies just out of frame: the climate crisis, the ongoing Disney-fication of franchises, the audience's active participation in the rewriting and reproduction of their attention, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the movie theaters. Screen Captures explores these tensions from the rebooted Star Wars franchise to the dominance of superheroes, the pop cultural memeification of Nicholas Cage to the artistic worlds of David Lynch, the failing American Dream in the American Pie franchise, and the female interpretation of toxic masculinity on screen and in public life. Naish argues that film isn’t merely escapism and entertainment—it’s a political space that bleeds into our daily lives. Appealing to pop culture fans and film critics alike, these essays challenge the reader to question, critique, and go beyond passive consumption of what we see on our screens.

Astaire and Rogers, Tracy and Hepburn. Just the mention of their names evokes the powerful chemistry between these screen couples, which utterly transcended the often formulaic films in which they appeared together. Indeed, watching the synergistic flow of energy between charismatic screen partners is one of the great pleasures of cinema and television, as well as an important vehicle for thinking through issues of intimacy and gender relations.

In this book, Martha P. Nochimson engages in a groundbreaking study of screen couple chemistry. She begins by classifying various types of couples to define what sets the synergistic couple apart from other onscreen pairings. Then she moves into extended discussions of four enduring screen couples—Maureen O'Sullivan/Johnny Weissmuller, Myrna Loy/William Powell, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy. Using theories of neuroscience, she demonstrates that their onscreen chemistry is a very real phenomenon, powerful enough to subvert conventional formulations of male/female relations. Material she has uncovered in the infamous Production Code Administration files illuminates the historical context of her contentions. Finally, Nochimson traces the screen couple to its present-day incarnation in such pairs as Woody Allen/Diane Keaton, Scully/Mulder of The X-Files, and Cliff/Claire Huxtable of The Cosby Show.

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it.

Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

In Screening Social Justice, award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner presents an ethnographic study of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film production company that makes documentaries intended to mobilize progressive grassroots activism. Ortner positions the work of the company within a tradition of activist documentary filmmaking and within the larger field of “alternative media” that is committed to challenging the mainstream media and telling the truth about the world today. The company’s films cover a range of social justice issues, with particular focus on the hidden workings of capitalism, racism, and right-wing extremism. Beyond the films themselves, Brave New Films is also famous for its creative distribution strategies. All of the films are available for free on YouTube. Central to the intention of promoting political activism, the films circulate through networks of other activist and social justice organizations and are shown almost entirely in live screenings in which the power of the film is amplified. Ortner takes the reader inside both the production process and the screenings to show how a film can be made and used to mobilize action for a better world.

Since the 1970s, the name Stephen King has been synonymous with horror. His vast number of books has spawned a similar number of feature films and TV shows, and together they offer a rich opportunity to consider how one writer’s work has been adapted over a long period within a single genre and across a variety of media—and what that can tell us about King, about adaptation, and about film and TV horror. Starting from the premise that King has transcended ideas of authorship to become his own literary, cinematic, and televisual brand, Screening Stephen King explores the impact and legacy of over forty years of King film and television adaptations.

Simon Brown first examines the reasons for King’s literary success and then, starting with Brian De Palma’s Carrie, explores how King’s themes and style have been adapted for the big and small screens. He looks at mainstream multiplex horror adaptations from Cujo to Cell, low-budget DVD horror films such as The Mangler and Children of the Corn franchises, non-horror films, including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and TV works from Salem’s Lot to Under the Dome. Through this discussion, Brown identifies what a Stephen King film or series is or has been, how these works have influenced film and TV horror, and what these influences reveal about the shifting preoccupations and industrial contexts of the post-1960s horror genre in film and TV.

Moving images are used as diagnostic tools and locational devices every day in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. But how and when did they come to be established and accepted sources of knowledge about the body in medical culture? How are the specialized techniques and codes of these imaging techniques determined, and whose bodies are studied, diagnosed, and treated with the help of optical recording devices?

Screening the Body traces the fascinating history of scientific film during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show that early experiments with cinema are important precedents of contemporary medical techniques such as ultrasound and PET scanning. Lisa Cartwright brings to light eccentric projects in the history of science and medicine, such as Thomas Edison's sensational attempt to image the brain with X rays before a public audience, and the efforts of doctors to use the motion picture camera to capture movements of the body, from the virtually imperceptible flow of blood to epileptic seizures.Drawing on feminist film theory, cultural studies, the history of film, and the writings of Foucault, Cartwright illustrates how this scientific cinema was part of a broader tendency in society toward the technological surveillance, management, and physical transformation of the individual body and the social body. She unveils an area of film culture that has rarely been discussed but that will leave readers with a new way of seeing the everyday practice of diagnostic imaging that we all inevitably encounter in clinics and hospitals.

This book examines film and media representations of the social, political, and economic issue of human trafficking, one of the most dramatic challenges of today's globalized world. Productively combining field work at NGOs in South Eastern Europe, social science data discussion, and analysis of Western and East European anti-trafficking film and media and their reception in the United States and in the Balkans, Hashamova uncovers the tension between the global flow of trafficking images and their local comprehension. The detailed critical analysis of documentaries, feature films, video clips, and NGOs' media materials and their varied spectators' responses explores the flaws of these products and the ideological structures that define them and their audiences. Acknowledging the uneven quality and potential impact of all films and media products, the book, guided by trauma theory, concludes with an analysis of their effectiveness and ability to shock the viewer and create a citizen who is ready to take action against trafficking. The book seeks to explain why, despite the attention to the problem, communities continue to grapple with indifference, denial, and turning a blind eye to the existence of trafficking. Screening Trafficking: Prudent and Perilous offers fresh insights to readers interested in human trafficking and its representations as well as policymakers who are invested in well-informed decisions.

Filmmakers have long been drawn to the Gothic with its eerie settings and promise of horror lurking beneath the surface. Moreover, the Gothic allows filmmakers to hold a mirror up to their own age and reveal society's deepest fears. Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet are just a few examples of film adaptations of literary Gothic texts. In this ground-breaking study, Lisa Hopkins explores how the Gothic has been deployed in these and other contemporary films and comes to some surprising conclusions. For instance, in a brilliant chapter on films geared to children, Hopkins finds that horror resides not in the trolls, wizards, and goblins that abound in Harry Potter, but in the heart of the family.

Screening the Gothic offers a radical new way of understanding the relationship between film and the Gothic as it surveys a wide range of films, many of which have received scant critical attention. Its central claim is that, paradoxically, those texts whose affiliations with the Gothic were the clearest became the least Gothic when filmed. Thus, Hopkins surprises readers by revealing Gothic elements in films such as Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, as well as exploring more obviously Gothic films like The Mummy and The Fellowship of the Ring. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, Screening the Gothic will be of interest to film lovers as well as students and scholars.

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology.

From the early days of television broadcasts to today’s live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera’s engagement with screen media.

Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently “technological” opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

A timely study of Spanish cinema during the country’s transition to democracy, including how popular and auteur films grappled with the authoritarian past. 

Screening the Transition examines how Spanish cinema produced in the years immediately following Francisco Franco’s death articulated—through its narratives and characterizations—the social and cultural challenges encountered during the country’s transition to democracy. These films reflect emergent post-dictatorship realities, including increased openness toward sexuality and nudity; the erosion of traditional family structures; persistent attachments to, and reckonings with, the Francoist past; the development of political plurality and expanded freedom of expression; and various forms of marginalization, whether economic or based on gender and sexuality. In doing so, the analysis conceptualizes Spain’s transition not solely in political terms, as is commonly the case, but as a profoundly personal and affective process.

Federico Bonaddio demonstrates the limitations of cinema in this period, which at times revealed an inability to transcend deep-seated prejudices and forms of reticence cultivated over nearly four decades of authoritarian rule. These limitations surface in the prurient treatment of female nudity and sexual violence; in the deployment of comedy to belittle or trivialize democratic change; in a preference for metaphor and allegory over direct political engagement; and in the restricted investigative ambitions of historical dramas.

Considering both popular and auteur cinema, the book is primarily concerned with how filmmaking registered the difficulties of consigning the dictatorship fully to the past, despite the so-called pact of forgetting promoted by political elites to facilitate national reconciliation.

Scripting Hitchcock explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Drawing from extensive interviews with the screenwriters and other film technicians who worked for Hitchcock, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick illustrate how much of the filmmaking process took place not on the set or in front of the camera, but in the adaptation of the sources, the mutual creation of plot and characters by the director and the writers, and the various revisions of the written texts of the films.

Hitchcock allowed his writers a great deal of creative freedom, which resulted in dynamic screenplays that expanded traditional narrative and defied earlier conventions. Critically examining the question of authorship in film, Raubicheck and Srebnick argue that Hitchcock did establish visual and narrative priorities for his writers, but his role in the writing process was that of an editor. While the writers and their contributions have generally been underappreciated, this study reveals that all the dialogue and much of the narrative structure of the films were the work of screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Joseph Stefano, and Evan Hunter. The writers also shaped American cultural themes into material specifically for actors such as Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and Tony Perkins. This volume gives due credit to those writers who gave narrative form to Hitchcock's filmic vision.

This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity.
 
Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself.

For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction.

Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and The Blob, as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

Gone with the Wind has generated interest in every aspect of its production. Yet one crucial aspect has never been fully understood or appreciated—the vital shaping role played by executive producer David O. Selznick.

In this book, Alan David Vertrees challenges the popular image of Selznick as a megalomaniacal meddler whose hiring and firing of directors and screenwriters created a patchwork film that succeeded despite his interference. Drawing on ten years of research in the Selznick archives, and examining the screenplay's successive drafts, dramatic continuity designs and "storyboard" sketches (many of which are reproduced here), and production correspondence and memoranda, Vertrees interprets the producer's actions as manipulation, not indecision, establishing Selznick's "vision" as the guiding intelligence behind the film's success.

In his drive to create a cinematic monument, Selznick also reformed many key facets of studio filmmaking, inventing jobs such as "production designer" (inaugurated by William Cameron Menzies), which persist today. This book thus adds an important chapter to the story of classical Hollywood cinema and the making of the film that has been lauded variously as the "Sistine Chapel of movies" and the "single most beloved entertainment ever produced."

A cinematic study of Asian–Indigenous relationality

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently work toward decolonial worldmaking. This emerging vision can be seen in the radical friendship between Ali Kazimi and Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas in Kazimi’s film Shooting Indians, in the queer relational survivance depicted in films such as This Place and Scarborough, and in the sensory disruptions of Jin-me Yoon’s interactive art project Untunnelling Vision.

From film and media studies to diaspora studies and critical ethnic studies, Indigenous studies to queer theory, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film provides a critical framework for engaging cinematic media to understand and imagine beyond the entrenched settler-colonial dynamics within Asian diasporic communities.

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