Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Age is an edited volume of eight essays that look at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation. The movie version of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, premiered in 2001, in between publication of the fourth and fifth books of this global literary phenomenon. As a result, the production and reception of both novel and movie series became intertwined with one another, creating a fan base that accessed the series first through the books, first through the movies, and in various other combinations. John Alberti and P. Andrew Miller have gathered scholars to explore and examine the cultural, political, aesthetic, and pedagogical dimensions of this pop-culture phenomenon and how it has changed the reception of both the films and books. While the primary focus of the collection is an academic audience, it will appeal to a broad range of listeners. Within the academic community, Transforming Harry will be of interest to scholars and teachers in a number of disciplines, including film and media studies and English.

Gene Tierney may be one of the most recognizable faces of studio-era Hollywood: she starred in numerous classics, including Leave Her to Heaven, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Laura, with the latter featuring her most iconic role. While Tierney was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she personified "ordinariness" both on- and off-screen. Tierney portrayed roles such as a pinup type, a wartime worker, a wife, a mother, and, finally, a psychiatric patient-the last of which may have hit close to home for her, as she would soon leave Hollywood to pursue treatment for mental illness and later attempted suicide in the 1950s. After her release from psychiatric clinics, Tierney sought a comeback as one of the first stars whose treatment for mental illness became public knowledge. In this book, Will Scheibel not only examines her promotion, publicity, and reception as a star but also offers an alternative history of the United States wartime efforts demonstrated through the arc of Tierney's career as a star working on the home front. Scheibel's analysis aims to showcase that Tierney was more than just "the most beautiful woman in movie history," as stated by the head of production at Twentieth Century Fox in the 1940s and 1950s. He does this through an examination of her making, unmaking, and remaking at Twentieth Century Fox, rediscovering what she means as a movie legend both in past and up to the present. Film studies scholars, film students, and those interested in Hollywood history and the legacy of Gene Tierney will be delighted by this read.

The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema came about in light of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)'s 2013 major exhibition of works by contemporary German directors associated with the so-called Berlin School, perhaps Germany's most important contemporary filmmaking movement. Christoph Hochhausler, the movement's keenest spokesperson, stated that ""the Berlin School, despite what the label suggests, is not a specifically German phenomenon. All over the world there are filmmakers exploring related terrain."" In response to this ""transnational turn,"" editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher have assembled a group of scholars who examine global trends and works associated with the Berlin School. The goal of the collection is to understand the Berlin School as a fundamental part of the series of new wave films around the globe, especially those from the traditional margins of world cinema. For example, Michael Sicinski and Lutz Koepnick explore the relation of the Berlin School to cinema of Southeast Asia, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang; Ira Jaffe and Roger Cook take a look at Middle Eastern film, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Abbas Kiarostami, respectively. The volume also includes essays engaging with North American filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt and Derek Cianfrance as well as European auteurs like Antonioni, Tarr, Porumboiu, McQueen, and the Dardennes. Bringing German cinema into dialogue with this series of global cinemas emphasizes how the Berlin School manifests-whether aesthetically or thematically, politically or historically-a balancing of national particularity with global flows of various sorts. Abel and Fisher posit that since the vast majority of the films are available with English subtitles (and at times also in other languages) and recent publications on the subject have established critical momentum, this exciting filmmaking movement will continue to branch out into new directions and include new voices. The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts folds German-language cinema back into conversations with international as well as transnational cinema. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.

In the fading atmosphere of the New Hollywood era, William Friedkin - the wunderkind director with an Academy Award for his cop drama, The French Connection (1971) who then scored an even bigger success with The Exorcist (1973) - began work on what would prove to be the most controversial film of his career: Cruising (1980). In the process he established a template for a sub-genre, the serial killer thriller, that would thrive long after his film had left theatres, having caused widespread offence among the very audience he'd hoped to appeal to, via a campaign mobilised by the counter-culture press. As such, Cruising can be read as a bitter farewell to the seventies and its cinema and industry. This Devil's Advocate dives deep into the phenomenon that is Cruising, examining its creative context and its protagonists, as well as examining its ongoing popularity as it turns 40 in 2020.

Esfir Shub was the only prominent female director of nonfiction film present at the dawning of the Soviet film industry. She was, in fact, the first woman both to write critical texts on cinema and then practically apply these theorisations in her own films. As such, her syncretism of cinema theory and praxis inspired her to ask questions regarding both the nature of nonfiction film, such as the problem of authenticity and reality, and the function of the artist in society; issues which are still relevant in contemporary discussions about the documentary. Accordingly, this book demonstrates Shub's position not only as a significant filmmaker and recognised member of the early Soviet avant-garde but also as a key figure in global cinema history. Shub deserves recognition both as the founder and ardent promoter of the compilation film genre and as a pioneer of the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking.

- provides a new perspective in understanding our relationship with death, mourning and recovery - the topic of traumatic grief is timely and of popular interest to Jungians

How can we describe movements in animated films? In Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, Ryan Pierson introduces a powerful new method for the study of animation. By looking for figures-arrangements that seem to intuitively hold together-and forces-underlying units of attraction, repulsion, and direction-Pierson reveals startling new possibilities for animation criticism, history, and theory. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt psychology, Pierson offers a wide-ranging comparative study of four animation techniques-soft-edged forms, walk cycles, camera movement, and rotoscoping-as they appear in commercial, artisanal, and avant-garde works. In the process, through close readings of little-analyzed films, Pierson demonstrates that figures and forces make fertile resources for theoretical speculation, unearthing affinities between animation practice and such topics as the philosophy of mathematics, scientific and political revolution, and love. Beginning and ending with the imperative to look closely, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a performance in seeing the world of motion anew.

Stella Adler (1901-92) trained many well-known American actors yet throughout much of her career, her influence was overshadowed by Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio. In Beyond Method: Stella Adler and the Male Actor, Scott Balcerzak focuses on Adler's teachings and how she challenged Strasberg's psychological focus on the actor's ""self"" by promoting an empathetic and socially engaged approach to performance. Employing archived studio transcripts and recordings, Balcerzak examines Adler's lessons in technique, characterization, and script analysis as they reflect the background of the teacher-illustrating her time studying with Constantin Stanislavski, her Yiddish Theatre upbringing, and her encyclopedic knowledge of drama. Through this lens, Beyond Method resituates the performances of some of her famous male students through an expansive understanding of the discourses of acting. The book begins by providing an overview of the gender and racial classifications associated with the male ""Method"" actor and discussing white maleness in the mid-twentieth century. The first chapter explores the popular press's promotion of ""Method"" stars during the 1950s as an extension of Strasberg's rise in celebrity. At the same time, Adler's methodology was defining actor performance as a form of social engagement-rather than just personal expression-welcoming an analysis of onscreen masculinity as culturally-fluid. The chapters that follow serve as case studies of some of Adler's most famous students in notable roles-Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Missouri Breaks (1976), Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976), Henry Winkler in Happy Days (1974-84), and Mark Ruffalo in The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Balcerzak concludes that the presence of Adler altered the trajectory of onscreen maleness through a promotion of a relatively complex view of gender identity not found in other classrooms. Beyond Method considers Stella Adler as not only an effective teacher of acting but also an engaging and original thinker, providing us a new way to consider performances of maleness on the screen. Film and theater scholars, as well as those interested in gender studies, are sure to benefit from this thorough study.

This is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversion on screen. Interrogating the recent shift towards the mainstream in the cinematic representation of previously marginalised sexual practices, Tainted Love challenges the discourses and debates around sexual taboo, moral panics, degeneracy, deviance and disease, which present those who enact such sexualities as modern folk devils. This timely collection brings together leading scholars who draw on a variety of critical approaches including adaptation, performance, cultural studies, queer theory, feminism and philosophy to examine screen representations of controversial sexualities from the weird and wonderful to the debased and debauched. Chapters explore provocative performances of hysteria and sexual obsession, `everyday' perversion in neoliberal culture, the radical potential of sadomasochism, adolescent sexuality in the films of Larry Clark, intergenerational sex and incestuous relations in French cinema, sexual obsession in gay cinema, the straightness of necrophilia, the presentation of the paedophile, Swedish Erotica's `good sex' and re-imagining the Marquis de Sade from film to slash fiction. In order to move past binary distinctions of good and bad, normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, Tainted Love seeks to critically interrogate perverse sexualities and sexual perversion on screen.

A timely and captivating account of America's first women directors who, with little recognition, helped pave the way for females in the film industry today. Originally published in 1977 as Early Women Directors, Anthony Slide's The Silent Feminists was the first volume to recognize and honor the work of female directors in the American silent film industry. This invaluable resource documents these pioneering women's lives and careers and provides an introduction to the notable yet often overlooked history of female film directors. It introduces readers to such trailblazers of the motion picture as Alice Guy Blache, Lois Weber, Mrs. Wallace Reid, Ida May Park, Margery Wilson, and many others. More than forty years after its original publication, The Silent Feminists remains an important and influential study, providing original documentation on a subject that has steadily and deservedly grown in significance.

An American in Paris (1951) was a landmark film in the careers of Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. A joyous celebration of George Gershwin's music, French art, the beauty of dance and the fabled City of Light, the film was heralded as a rare example of entertainment 'for mass and class alike'. Choreographed by Kelly at the height of his career, it gave new stature to the Hollywood musical, and showcased as never before the artistic ambition, technical skills, creative imagination and collaborative ethos of MGM's pioneering Arthur Freed Unit. Sue Harris draws on archival material to trace the film's development from conception to screen. Offering new insights into the design process in particular, she shows how An American in Paris established the cinematic template for a city with which Hollywood would become increasingly infatuated in the decades to follow.

Writing on the relationship between war and cinema has largely been dominated by an emphasis on optics and weaponised vision. However, as this analysis of the Hollywood war film will show, a wider sensory field is powerfully evoked in this genre. Contouring war cinema as representing a somatic experience of space, the study applies a term recently developed by Derek Gregory within the theoretical framework of Critical Geography. What he calls "corpography" implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier's body. These assumptions can be used as a connection between already established theories of cartographic film narration and ideas of (neo)phenomenological film experience, as they also entail the involvement of the spectator's body in sensuously grasping what is staged as a mediated experience of war. While cinematic codes of war have long been oriented almost exclusively to the visual, the notion of corpography can help to reframe the concept of film genre in terms of expressive movement patterns and genre memory, avoiding reverting to the usual taxonomies of generic texts.

World War II on Film examines the war through the lens of 12 films. The movies selected include productions made during World War II and in each succeeding decade, providing a sense of how different generations perceive the war. World War II on Film provides a succinct yet well-grounded appraisal of that war as seen through 12 representative films. The book separates fact from fiction, showing where the movies were accurate and where they departed from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Each movie chosen represents a particular aspect of the conflict, including the air war over Europe, the condition of prisoners of war, Nazi atrocities, and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Unlike most histories of Hollywood during World War II or the genre of war movies, World War II on Film examines in depth the relation between the depictions of events, beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life as seen on film with reality as documented by historians or recorded by journalists or eye-witnesses to the war. The volume will appeal to high school and college readers, as well as general interest readers and film buffs. Provides readers with the perspectives of non-American combatants Gives readers an understanding of American perspectives on the war Looks at the importance of the decisions made by individuals as well as the social forces that shaped the war Arms readers with an understanding of how ideology helped determine the decisions of wartime leaders

The first book to be published on the film. In depth examination of how transnationalism has changed the language of political cinema in Latin America. Perfect for students, researchers or interested laypersons

What does it mean for a cinematic work to be "Chinese"? Does it refer specifically to a work's subject, or does it also reflect considerations of language, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, or political orientation? Such questions make any single approach to a vast field like "Chinese cinema" difficult at best. Accordingly, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas situates the term more broadly among various different phases, genres, and distinct national configurations, while taking care to address the consequences of grouping together so many disparate histories under a single banner.
Offering both a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue and a mapping of Chinese cinema as an expanded field, this Handbook presents thirty-three essays by leading researchers and scholars intent on yielding new insights and new analyses using three different methodologies. Chapters in Part I investigate the historical periodizations of the field through changing notions of national and political identity -- all the way from the industry's beginnings in the 1920s up to its current forms in contemporary Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global diaspora. Chapters in Part II feature studies centered on the field's taxonomical formalities, including such topics as the role of the Chinese opera in technological innovation, the political logic of the "Maoist film," and the psychoanalytic formula of the kung fu action film. Finally, in Part III, focus is given to the structural elements that comprise a work's production, distribution, and reception to reveal the broader cinematic apparatuses within which these works are positioned. Taken together, the multipronged approach supports a wider platform beyond the geopolitical and linguistic limitations in existing scholarship.
Expertly edited to illustrate a representative set of up to date topics and approaches, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas provides a vital addition to a burgeoning field still in its formative stages.

Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the historical fever of the 1980s and 1990sthe rise of the heritage industry, a global museum-building boom, and a cinematic fascination with costume dramas and literary adaptationsit explores the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. Author James Tweedie retraces the archaeomodern turn in films and theory that framed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative experiments. He examines late twentieth-century filmmakers who were inspired by old media, especially painting, and often viewed those art forms as portals to the modern past. In detailed discussions of Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Agnes Varda, and other key directors, the book concentrates on films that fill the screen with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes. It also considers three key figuresWalter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daneywho grappled with the late twentieth centurys characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes their theoretical work on film as a mourning play for past revolutions and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Looking at cinema and the century in the rear-view mirror, the book highlights the unrealized potential visible in the history of film, as well as the cinematic phantoms that remain in the digital age.

Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-making of Blackness, through an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of Black Panther, discusses the importance of superheroes and the ways in which they are especially important to Black fans. Aside from its global box office success, Black Panther paves the way for future superhero narratives due to its underlying philosophy to base the story on a narrative that is reliant on Afro-futurism. The film's storyline, the book posits, leads viewers to think about relevant real-world social questions as it taps into the cultural zeitgeist in an indelible way. Contributors to this collection approach Black Panther not only as a film, but also as Afrofuturist imaginings of an African nation untouched by colonialism and antiblack racism: the film is a map to alternate states of being, an introduction to the African Diaspora, a treatise on liberation and racial justice, and an examination of identity. As they analyze each of these components, contributors pose the question: how can a film invite a reimagining of Blackness?

How should we understand film authorship in an era when the idea of the solitary and sovereign auteur has come under attack, with critics proclaiming the death of the author and the end of cinema? The Bressonians provides an answer in the form of a strikingly original study of Bresson and his influence on the work of filmmakers Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat. Extending the discourse of authorship beyond the idea of a singular visionary, it explores how the imperatives of excellence function within cinema's pluralistic community. Bresson's example offered both an artistic legacy and a creative burden within which filmmakers reckoned in different, often arduous, and altogether compelling ways.

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience's experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively within the genre- women, LGBTQ+, indigenous, and BAME communities - are finally being seen and finding space to speak.

This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television history. By associating theoretical considerations and close readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic approaches, this volume offers a complex panorama of issues related to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. Written by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies, film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock.

This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler's crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city's unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.