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How does a totalitarian government influence the arts, and how do the arts respond? Spanish Film Under Franco raises these important questions, giving English speakers a starting point in their study of Spanish cinema.

After a brief overview of Spanish film before Franco, the author proceeds to a discussion of censorship as practiced by the Franco regime. The response of directors to censorship—the “franquista aesthetic,” or “aesthetic of repression,” with its highly metaphorical, oblique style—is explored in the works of Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, and other important directors.

Virginia Higginbotham combines historical perspective with detailed critical analysis and interpretation of many famous Franco-era films. She shows how directors managed to evade the censors and raise public awareness of issues relating to the Spanish Civil War and the repressions of the Franco regime.

Film has always performed an educational function in Spain, reaching masses of poor and uneducated citizens. And sometimes, as this study also reveals, Spanish film has been ignored when the questions it raised became too painful or demanding.

The author concludes with a look at post-Franco cinema and the directions it has taken. For anyone interested in modern Spanish film, this book will be essential reading.

Media platforms continually evolve, but the issues surrounding media representations of gender and sexuality have persisted across decades. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism has published groundbreaking articles on gender and sexuality, including some that have become canonical in film studies, since the journal’s founding in 1982. This anthology collects seventeen key articles that will enable readers to revisit foundational concerns about gender in media and discover models of analysis that can be applied to the changing media world today.

Spectatorship begins with articles that consider issues of spectatorship in film and television content and audience reception, noting how media studies has expanded as a field and demonstrating how theories of gender and sexuality have adapted to new media platforms. Subsequent articles show how new theories emerged from that initial scholarship, helping to develop the fields of fandom, transmedia, and queer theory. The most recent work in this volume is particularly timely, as the distinctions between media producers and media spectators grow more fluid and as the transformation of media structures and platforms prompts new understandings of gender, sexuality, and identification. Connecting contemporary approaches to media with critical conversations of the past, Spectatorship thus offers important points of historical and critical departure for discussion in both the classroom and the field.

#66, The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time, The Hollywood Reporter

The legendary figure who launched the careers of Spike Lee, Michael Moore, and Richard Linklater offers a no-holds-barred look at the deals and details that propel an indie film from a dream to distribution.

Pierson, a producer’s representative, explains how he has helped filmmakers with no profile at the time to get their work made, sold and seen by the world, sharing stories about Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Moore’s Roger & Me and Linklater’s Slackers, plus Hoop Dreams, Clerks and many others. Chats with Kevin Smith serve as interstitials between chapters.

All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it

Concurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

The inaugural volume of the Cinemas of Asia series, this book offers a fresh perspective on South Korean director Lee Kwang-mo’s 1998 film Spring in My Hometown (아름다운 시절). Written and directed by Lee, the intensely personal film tells the story of his grandfather’s relationship with his ten-year-old father during the Korean War. This volume examines the industrial context in which Lee attempted to bring his film into production, the cinematic cycle from which it emerged, and the unique style that captivated festival juries but divided audiences. Jackson’s book offers a rare, historical insight into an important Asian cinematic industry on the verge of commercial transformation at the end of the last century.

Cinemas of Asia is the first series dedicated to the cinemas of South, Southeast, East, Central Asia, and global Asian diasporas. Each volume provides a critical analysis and interpretation of a notable film from Asian cinema and consists of thematic chapters, accessible writing, and screenshots and illustrations. Authors analyze each film from a variety of angles, including film, literary, historical, gender, post-/decolonial studies, and each volume is accessibly written, informative, and appeals to academics, students, cinephiles, and non-experts alike. 

Star Wars may have started out as a film about a Manichean battle between good and evil, but as countless filmmakers, novelists, animators, fan artists and even cosplayers have taken the opportunity to play in the fictional world George Lucas created, it has expanded into something far greater, resulting in a richly layered and diverse Star Wars multiverse. 
 
Drawing from a full range of Star Wars media, including comics, children’s books, fan films, and television shows like Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, Carmelo Esterrich explores how these stories set in a galaxy far far away reflect issues that hit closer to home. He examines what they have to say about political oppression, authoritarianism, colonialism, discrimination, xenophobia, and perpetual war. Yet he also investigates subtler ways in which the personal is political within the multiverse, including its articulations of gender and sexuality, its cultural hierarchies of language use, and its complex relationships between humans, droids and myriad species. This book demonstrates that the Star Wars multiverse is not just a stage for thrilling interstellar battles, but also an exciting space for interpretation and discovery.

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos
 

The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our conception of time and provided new means of envisioning the limits of our world. Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between these fields, Stardust explores how cinema has routinely looked toward the cosmos to reflect our collective anxiety about a universe without us.

Employing a “cosmocinematic gaze,” Hannah Goodwin uses the metaphorical frameworks from astronomy to posit new understandings of cinematic time and underscore the role of light in generating archives for an uncertain future. Surveying a broad range of works, including silent-era educational films, avant-garde experimental works, and contemporary blockbusters, she carves out a distinctive area of film analysis that extends its reach far beyond mainstream science fiction to explore films that reckon with a future in which humans are absent.

This expansive study details the shared affinities between cinema and the stars in order to demonstrate how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century’s moments of existential dread, from World War I to the atomic age to our current moment of environmental collapse. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity’s fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

A Hollywood director who blends substance with the mainstream

Steven Soderbergh's feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles: from the self-absorption of his breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape to populist social problem films such as Erin Brockovich, and from the modernist discontinuity of Full Frontal and filmed performance art of Gray's Anatomy to a glossy, star-studded action blockbuster such as Ocean's Eleven. Using a combination of realism and expressive stylization of character subjectivity, Soderbergh's films diverge from the contemporary Hollywood mainstream through the statements they offer on issues including political repression, illegal drugs, violence, environmental degradation, the empowering and controlling potential of digital technology, and economic inequality.

Arguing that Soderbergh practices an eclectic type of moviemaking indebted both to the European art cinema and the Hollywood genre film, Aaron Baker charts the common thematic and formal patterns present across Soderbergh's oeuvre. Almost every movie centers on an alienated main character, and Soderbergh has repeatedly emphasized place as a major factor in his narratives. Formally, he represents the unconventional thinking of his outsider protagonists through a discontinuous editing style. Including detailed analyses of major films as well as two interviews with the director, this volume illustrates Soderbergh's hybrid flexibility in bringing an independent aesthetic to wide audiences.

Streaming at the End of the World explores the pessimistic and often apocalyptic themes that have pervaded popular culture in the United States and global cinema in the new millennium. The book argues that recent films, from the art-house fare of Melancholia (2011) to the popular science fiction of Annihilation (2018), embody an ambient feeling that continually haunts people in today's capitalist world—an ineluctable impression there is no alternative to the status quo. It seems like nothing is ever really going to change; hence, we are drawn to visions of the end of everything. Written in an accessible, conversational style, this book offers a popular culture spin on the late British philosopher Mark Fisher's maxim that it’s "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." 

With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

Shilyh Warren reopens this understudied period and links it to a neglected era of women's filmmaking that took place from 1920 to 1940, another key period of thinking around documentary, race, and gender. Drawing women’s cultural expression during these two explosive times into conversation, Warren reconsiders key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary and their lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. She also excavates the lost ethnographic history of women's documentary filmmaking in the earlier era and explores the political and aesthetic legacy of these films in more explicitly feminist periods like the Seventies.

Filled with challenging insights and new close readings, Subject to Reality sheds light on a profound and unexamined history of feminist documentaries while revealing their influence on the filmmakers of today.

Winner, American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 2012

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented. Adilifu Nama sees the value—and finds new avenues for exploring racial identity—in black superheroes who are often dismissed as sidekicks, imitators of established white heroes, or are accused of having no role outside of blaxploitation film contexts.

Nama examines seminal black comic book superheroes such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, Storm, Luke Cage, Blade, the Falcon, Nubia, and others, some of whom also appear on the small and large screens, as well as how the imaginary black superhero has come to life in the image of President Barack Obama. Super Black explores how black superheroes are a powerful source of racial meaning, narrative, and imagination in American society that express a myriad of racial assumptions, political perspectives, and fantastic (re)imaginings of black identity. The book also demonstrates how these figures overtly represent or implicitly signify social discourse and accepted wisdom concerning notions of racial reciprocity, equality, forgiveness, and ultimately, racial justice.