This book is both a personal journey and an introduction to the cinema cultures of Africa. A book about the politics of cultural survival, it is also a major overview of African cinema and television. The first part of the book traces the development of African cinema - from colonization to Afrocentrism. The author examines this development through a variety of fundamental themes: the decolonization of the imagination; the quest for legendary African origins and the mobilization of African cultural values. The second part of the book analyses specific films, particularly through narrative and in terms of their African specificity - in the use of silence, orality and humour. Finally, the author explores the social and economic contexts of the African cinema and television industry - including its often vexed relations with the West and the problems of production and distribution African film-makers face. Exploring the achievements and challenges of those who seek to affirm African cultural values through film, the book also covers the African television industry and African-American cinema. It includes interviews with film-makers, stills from the films and, ultimately, a plea for seeing and respecting the otherness of the Other. Winner of the French National Film Centre's best filmbook of 1997 and now available in four languages, this is book which takes us into a process of learning how to look.

This book examines in detail the formation of Canadian feature film policy from the 1950s to the present. It pays special attention to the role played by producers, filmmakers, and government agencies, in relation to the changing production practices brought about by Canadian television.

For Canadian policy-makers, the feature film was considered to be a signifier of cultural modernity. Filmmakers' desire to experiment with a new format was subverted by a political-economic agenda intent on using the format to create cultural authenticity for a nation lagging behind its neighbour to the South. Dorland crafts a careful historical analysis based on primary sources, including government records and in-depth personal interviews with key participants. Employing Foucault's concept of governmentality, Dorland analyses the state's interest in influencing and shaping feature film production.

A major contribution to scholarship on Canadian cinema, So Close to the State/s provides a revealing look at the relationship between culture and the state.

Blaise Cendrars, one of twentieth-century France's most gifted men of letters, came to Hollywood in 1936 for the newspaper "Paris-Soir". Already a well-known poet, Cendrars was a celebrity journalist whose perceptive dispatches from the American dream factory captivated millions. These articles were later published as "Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies", which has since appeared in many languages. Remarkably, this is its first translation into English. Hollywood in 1936 was crowded with stars, moguls, directors, scouts, and script girls. Though no stranger to filmmaking (he had worked with director Abel Gance), Cendrars was spurned by the industry greats with whom he sought to hobnob. His response was to invent a wildly funny Hollywood of his own, embellishing his adventures and mixing them with black humor, star anecdotes, and wry social commentary. Part diary, part tall tale, this book records Cendrars' experiences on Hollywood's streets and at its studios and hottest clubs. His impressions of the town's drifters, star-crazed sailors, and undiscovered talent are recounted in a personal, conversational style that anticipates the 'new journalism' of writers such as Tom Wolfe. Perfectly complemented by his friend Jean Guerin's witty drawings, and following the tradition of European travel writing, Cendrars' 'little book about Hollywood' offers an astute, entertaining look at 1930s America as reflected in its unique movie mecca.

" ... a modern mythography, a study of contemporary Hollywood filmsbased on the tools offered by feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxist cultural theory, anddeconstruction." -- Village Voice

"Solidly thought-out observationof the films of the 70's and 80's that comment on the system." --Audience

..". intelligent, open advocacy. Its responsiblearrangement of carefully described cultural materials will challenge students andinstructors alike." -- Teaching Philosophy

Camera Politica is acomprehensive study of Hollywood film during a period of tremendous change inAmerican history, a period that witnessed the end of the American empire, crises inthe economy, a failure of political leadership, loss at war, and the rise of theRight.

New in Paperback! In 1935, two film production companies merged to form one of the most influential corporations in the world-Twentieth Century-Fox. Here is the story of that dynamic company and of the personalities who molded it over the past fifty years, from Darryl F. Zanuk to Barry Diller. Unlike any previous volume on a film studio, this in-depth history is told from a corporate viewpoint, covering the trends that influenced film-making, profit-making incentives, and the creative policies resulting in films like The Grapes of Wrath, the Snake Pit, The Robe, Cleopatra, The Towering Inferno, and Star Wars. The book spans the birth of the movies; the rise of the studio system; the coming of sound; the Consent Decrees; the development of CinemaScope; the growth of independent production; and the video revolution. The result is an inside view of how the studio operated, with information never before published on the costs and grosses of films, as well as exclusive interviews and memos. Available in paperback 2001. Cloth version previously published in 1988.

This volume is the first fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of world cinema," Third World countries now produce well over half of the world's films. Roy Armes sets out initially to place this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World--defined as those countries that have emerged from Western control but have not fully developed their economic potential or rejected the capitalist system in favor of some socialist alternative. He then considers the paradoxes of social structure and cultural life in the post-independence world, where even such basic concepts as "nation," "national culture," and "language" are problematic.
The first experience of cinema for such countries has invariably been that of imported Western films, which created the audience and, in most cases, still dominate the market today. Thus, Third World film makers have had to ssert their identity against formidable outside pressures. The later sections of the book look at their output from a number of angles: in terms of the stages of overall growth and corresponding stages of cinematic development; from the point of view of regional evolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and through a detailed examination of the work of some of the Third World's most striking film innovators.
In addition to charting the broad outlines of filmic developments too little known in Europe and the United States, the book calls into question many of the assumptions that shape conventional film history. It stresse the role of distribution in defining and limitingproduction, queries simplistic notions of independent "national cinemas," and points to the need to take social and economic factors into account when considering authorship in cinema. Above all, the book celebrates the achievements of a mass of largely unknown film makers who, in difficult circumstances, have distinctively expanded our definitions of the art of cinema.
Roy Armes, who lives in London, has written nine books on film, his most recent being "French Cinema," He spent more than three years researching this volume.

Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon, trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by 1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials, and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.

Film is often conceived as a medium that is watched rather than experienced. Existing studies of film audiences, and of media reception more broadly, have revealed the complexity of viewing practices and cultures surrounding cinema-going and its exhibition spaces. Experiencing Cinema offers the first in-depth study of participant engagement with a range of experiential media forms derived from cinema culture. From sing-a-long screenings to theatrical extravaganzas, a broad spectrum of alternative film-going practices and immersive spaces are explored and analysed in this original audience study. Moving from intimate community gatherings to blockbuster urban venues, from isolated farmhouses to Olympic stadia, Experiencing Cinema considers the lure and value of these popular events. Often attracting a diverse, intergenerational range of participants, from early-adopter urban hipsters to DIY rural communities, the growing demand for participatory cinema within the contemporary marketplace is analysed alongside broader debates circulating around the move away from traditional tiered seating and increased audience mobility and the de-centring of the film text.

In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience. In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous period since 2009, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015), to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies for producing work under conditions of crisis. Chaudhuri argues that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities.She shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.

Fashioning James Bond is the first book to study the costumes and fashions of the James Bond movie franchise, from Sean Connery in 1962's Dr No to Daniel Craig in Spectre (2015). Llewella Chapman draws on original archival research, close analysis of the costumes and fashion brands featured in the Bond films, interviews with families of tailors and shirt-makers who assisted in creating the 'look' of James Bond, and considers marketing strategies for the films and tie-in merchandise that promoted the idea of an aspirational 'James Bond lifestyle'. Addressing each Bond film in turn, Chapman questions why costumes are an important tool for analysing and evaluating film, both in terms of the development of gender and identity in the James Bond film franchise in relation to character, and how it evokes the desire in audiences to become part of a specific lifestyle construct through the wearing of fashions as seen on screen. She researches the agency of the costume department, director, producer and actor in creating the look and characterisation of James Bond, the villains, the Bond girls and the henchmen who inhibit the world of 007. Alongside this, she analyses trends and their impact on the Bond films, how the different costume designers have individually and creatively approached costuming them, and how the costumes were designed and developed from novel to script and screen. In doing so, this book contributes to the emerging critical literature surrounding the combined areas of film, fashion, gender and James Bond.

This is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Nazi film propaganda in its political, social, and economic contexts, from the pre-war cinema as it fell under the control of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, through to the end of the Second World War. David Welch studies more than one hundred films of all types, identifying those aspects of Nazi ideology that were concealed in the framework of popular entertainment.

This expanded and revised edition explores and updates the cultural politics of the Walt Disney Company and how its ever-expanding list of products, services, and media function as teaching machines that shape children's culture into a largely commercial endeavor. The Disney conglomerate remains an important case study for understanding both the widening influence of free-market fundamentalism in the new millennium and the ways in which messages of powerful corporations have been appropriated and increasingly resisted in global contexts. New in this edition is a discussion of Disney's shift in its marketing strategies towards targeting tweens and teens, as Disney promises to provide (via participation in consumer culture) the tools through which young people construct and support their identities, values, and knowledge of the world. The updated chapters from the highly acclaimed first edition are complimented with two new chapters, 'Globalizing the Disney Empire' and 'Disney, Militarization, and the National Security State After 9/11,' which extend the analysis of Disney's effects on young people to a consideration of the political and economic dimensions of Disney as a U.S.-based megacorporation, linking the importance of critical reception on an individual scale to a broader conception of democratic global community.

Completing the landmark, award-winning, ten-volume series on the first century of American film, "The Fifties" covers a particularly tumultuous period. Peter Lev explores the divorce of movie studios from their theater chains; the panic of the blacklist era; the explosive emergence of science fiction as the dominant genre ("The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds"); the rise of television and Hollywood's response to the new medium, as seen in widescreen spectacles ("The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur) and mature Westerns (High Noon, Shane, The Searchers"). The richly detailed text elucidates a number of emerging trends as Hollywood, with its familiar stars and genres, reached out as an industry to the newly acknowledged "teenage" generation with rock and roll films, and movies as diverse as "Rebel Without a Cause and Gidget."

Cinema was one of the Cold War's most powerful instruments of propaganda. Movies blended with literary, theatrical, musical and broadcast representations of the conflict to produce a richly textured Cold War culture. Now in paperback, this timely book fills a significant gap in the international story by uncovering British cinema's contribution to Cold War propaganda and to the development of a popular consensus on Cold War issues. Tony Shaw focuses on an age in which the 'first Cold War' dictated international (and to some extent domestic) politics. This era also marked the last phase of cinema's dominance as a mass entertainment form in Britain. Shaw explores the relationship between film-makers, censors and Whitehall, within the context of the film industry's economic imperatives and the British government's anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda strategies. Drawing upon rich documentation, he demonstrates the degree of control exerted by the state over film output. Shaw analyses key films of the period, including High Treason, which put a British McCarthyism on celluloid; the fascinatingly ambiguous science fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment; the dystopic The Damned, made by one of Hollywood's blacklisted directors, Joseph Losey; and the CIA-funded, animated version of George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm". The result is a deeply probing study of how Cold War issues were refracted through British films, compared with their imported American and East European counterparts, and how the British public received this 'war propaganda'.

A behind-the-scenes odyssey into the world of the Hollywood motion picture industry. It examines the complex ways in which the major entertainment empires - Viacom, Time Warner, NBC/Universal, Fox, Sony and Disney - make their money, profiling the individuals who created these vast conglomerates.

Despite being one of the biggest industries in the United States, indeed the World, the internal workings of the 'dream factory' that is Hollywood is little understood outside the business. The Hollywood Studio System: A History is the first book to describe and analyse the complete development, classic operation, and reinvention of the global corporate entitles which produce and distribute most of the films we watch. Starting in 1920, Adolph Zukor, Head of Paramount Pictures, over the decade of the 1920s helped to fashion Hollywood into a vertically integrated system, a set of economic innovations which was firmly in place by 1930. For the next three decades, the movie industry in the United States and the rest of the world operated by according to these principles. Cultural, social and economic changes ensured the dernise of this system after the Second World War. A new way to run Hollywood was required. Beginning in 1962, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios emerged as the key innovator in creating a second studio system. He realized that creating a global media conglomerate was more important than simply being vertically integrated. Gomery's history tells the story of a 'tale of two systems 'using primary materials from a score of archives across the United States as well as a close reading of both the business and trade press of the time. Together with a range of photographs never before published the book also features over 150 box features illuminating aspect of the business.

Amid the instability and violence of turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization Russians embraced a revolutionary art form to reflect the aspirations and motivations of a new class. In "The Magic Mirror" Denise Youngblood portrays a newly urbanized entrepreneurial middle class--not the revolutionaries or imperialists of historians--and the movies they made and paid to see. Upon those screens they saw their lives depicted in all their variety and uncertainty.
Youngblood provides a cultural angle into an era most often viewed through a revolutionary lens. Film and the film industry illuminates and reflects the popular attitudes of the time.
"The Magic Mirror" is a study of the ten years of native film production through the Revolutions of 1917, based almost exclusively on Russian language primary sources. Topics examined include the organization and evolution of the industry followed by description and analysis of genres, motifs, and themes as exemplified in 65 of the most important surviving films.

"A scrupulously argued, clearly written account of Hollywood's role in bringing America skipping and giggling from the Victorian world into the twentieth century."--Philip French, "London Sunday Observer"
"It is impossible to follow a narrow trail through the movies. The vistas keep opening, and May, linking movies to mass society, finds and makes new perceptions on emerging women, the rise of the studios, the special growth and appeal of Los Angeles, the nature of studio leadership and the early and persistent imputed corrupting power of film."--Charles Champlin, "Los Angeles Times"
"Lary May . . . has provided a set of new and rich insights into the changing patterns of American culture, 1890-1929. . . . His concentration on social and cultural history indirectly provides answers to questions which have baffled political historians for several decades."--David W. Noble, "Minneapolis Tribune"
"["Screening Out the Past" is] a scrupulously argued, clearly written account of Hollywood's role in bringing America skipping and giggling from the Victorian world into the twentieth century. May is splendid on the psychology of the immigrant movie moguls, on Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford as post Great War role models, and many other things."--Philip French, "London Sunday Observor"
"Altogether, the book represents the most successful blending of movie and cultural history to date."--Benjamin McArthur, "Journal of Social History"

This series is the most thorough history yet published of the business, technology, and art of the film industry from its earliest roots 100 years ago, through the 1990s.

"Small Nation, Global Cinema" engages the effects of globalization from the perspective of small nations. Focusing her study on the specific cultural context of the international film market, Mette Hjort argues that the New Danish Cinema presents an opportunity to understand the effects of globalization within the culture and economy of a privileged small nation.
Hjort offers two key strategies underwriting the transformation and globalization of contemporary Danish cinema--the processes of cultural circulation and the psychological efficacy of heritage. Exploring the Dogma 95 movement initiated by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg as well as films by Erik Clausen, Gabriel Axel, Henning Carlsen, and Ole Bornedal, among others, Hjort examines means for cinematic globalization specific to Denmark, but then evolves her investigation into a truly comparative framework encompassing references to Hong Kong, Latin America, and Hollywood filmmaking. Providing a fresh way of looking at cultural influence in the era of globalization, Hjort's concept of "small" nation points as much to the dynamics of recognition, indifference, and participation as it does to more common measures of population size, economic strength, or linguistic reach.
Mette Hjort is professor of intercultural studies at Aalborg University.

While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's "pure film movement" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved.

Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources -- much of it translated here for the first time -- she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators.

Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts -- The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent -- and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation.

"Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.

This book examines early and silent cinema and its contexts in Ireland, 1895-1921. It explores the extent to which cinema fostered a new way of looking in and at Ireland and the extent to which the new technology inherited forms of looking from the image-producing cultural practices of the theatre, tourism, and such public events as state occasions, political protests, and sports meetings. It argues that before cinema emerged as an independent institution in the late 1910s, it was comprehensively intermedial, not only adapting to the presentational strategies of such forms as the fairground attraction, the melodrama, and the magic lantern lecture, but actually constituting these forms and altering them in the process. In locating cinema in relation to popular and elite culture during a key period of Irish history, it draws in particular on surviving films and photographs; articles and illustrations in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals; contemporary accounts; and official documents. Working against approaches that see early cinema as a precursor to the so-called 'classical' cinema of the 1920s onwards, the book provide its readers with a wealth of contemporary material that allows them to see early cinema in its own terms as an evolving (audio-)visual form.