Over the course of several decades, scientific fact has overtaken science fiction as humankind's understanding of the universe has expanded. Mirroring this development, the cinematic depictions of space exploration over the last century have evolved from whimsical sci-fi fantasies to more fact-based portrayals. This book chronologically examines 75 films that depict voyages into outer space and offers the historical, cultural, and scientific context of each. These films range from Georges Melies' fantastical A Trip to the Moon to speculative science fiction works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and Contact, and fact-based accounts of actual space missions as depicted in The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, Salyut 7 and First Man. Each film is analyzed not only in terms of its direction, screenplay, and other cinematic aspects but also its scientific and historical accuracy. The works of acclaimed directors, including Fritz Lang, George Pal, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Wise, Ron Howard, Robert Zemeckis, Ridley Scott, and Christopher Nolan, are accorded special attention for their memorable contributions to this vital and evolving subgenre of science fiction film.

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries, in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, in Spain, where the myth traveled, was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West, in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New-always self-renewing-American West. It includes the work of authors of both sides of the Atlantic ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography and the representation of the American West.

New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in film. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in films of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of "agitated urban modernity" articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of film, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City.

Ranging from blockbuster movies to experimental shorts or documentaries to scientific research, computer animation shapes a great part of media communication processes today. Be it the portrayal of emotional characters in moving films or the creation of controllable emotional stimuli in scientific contexts, computer animation's characteristic artificiality makes it ideal for various areas connected to the emotional: with the ability to move beyond the constraints of the empirical "real world," animation allows for an immense freedom. This book looks at international film productions using animation techniques to display and/or to elicit emotions, with a special attention to the aesthetics, characters and stories of these films, and to the challenges and benefits of using computer techniques for these purposes.

This is the first edited volume on new independent Indian cinema. It aims to be a comprehensive compendium of diverse theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and practice-based perspectives, featuring contributions from multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners across the world. This edited collection features analyses of cutting-edge new independent films and is conceived to serve as a beacon to guide future explorations into the burgeoning field of new Indian Cinema studies.

"Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema" is the first book-length study of the Hollywood boxing film, a popular movie entertainment since the 1930s, that includes such classics as "Million Dollar Baby," "Rocky," and "Raging Bull." The boxer stands alongside the cowboy, the gangster, and the detective as a character that shaped America's ideas of manhood. Leger Grindon relates the Hollywood boxing film to the literature of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Clifford Odets; the influence of ring champions, particularly Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; and controversies surrounding masculinity, race, and sports.

"Knockout" breaks new ground in film genre study by focusing on the fundamental dramatic conflicts uniting both documentary and fictional films with compelling social concerns. The boxing film portrays more than the rise and fall of a champion; it exposes the body in order to reveal the spirit. Not simply a brute, the screen boxer dramatizes conflicts and aspirations central to an American audience's experience. This book features chapters on the conventions of the boxing film, the history of the genre and its relationship to famous ring champions, and self-contained treatments of thirty-two individual films including a chapter devoted to Raging Bull.

Oxi (Gr. Determiner, lit. 'No', fig. 'Resistance', pronounced 'ochi') retells Sophocles' Antigone through the contemporary Greek crisis and modern European philosophy. A collaboration between the renowned British auteur Ken McMullen and the literary theorist Martin McQuillan, the film draws upon and responds to the importance of the Antigone of modern thought (Hegel, Arendt, Lacan, Derrida, Butler), while coming up close to the politics of the street and the malign effects of the austerity experiment in Greece today. The screenplay weaves together a range of idioms, including performance, fiction, documentary, interview and literary collage. The result is an intensely moving reflection on the tragedy of austerity today, with contributions from Helene Cixous, Etienne Balibar and Antonio Negri, as well as several significant figures in Greek cultural life. The volume includes full transcripts of the interviews with Cixous, Balibar and Negri, and a previously unpublished interview with Jacques Derrida on the question of Oedipus, as well as critical commentary from the filmmakers.

Spanning a broad trajectory, from the New Gaelic Man of post-independence Ireland to the slick urban gangsters of contemporary productions, this study traces a significant shift from idealistic images of Irish manhood to a much more diverse and gender-politically ambiguous range of male identities on the Irish screen.

Since the publication of Dracula in 1897, Bram Stoker's original creation has been a source of inspiration for artists, writers, and filmmakers. From Universal's early black-and-white films and Hammer's Technicolor representations that followed, iterations of Dracula have been cemented in mainstream cinema. This anthology investigates and explores the far larger body of work coming from sources beyond mainstream cinema reinventing Dracula. Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms assembles provocative essays that examine Dracula films and their movement across borders of nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and genre since the 1920s. The essays analyze the complexity Dracula embodies outside the conventional landscape of films with which the vampire is typically associated. Focusing on Dracula and Dracula-type characters in film, anime, and literature from predominantly non-Anglo markets, this anthology offers unique perspectives that seek to ground depictions and experiences of Dracula within a larger political, historical, and cultural framework.

The film theories of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Bela Balazs, and Siegfried Kracauer have long been studied separately from each other. In Doubting Vision, film scholar Malcolm Turvey argues that their work constitutes a distinct, hitherto neglected tradition, which he calls revelationism, and which differs in important ways from modernism and realism. For these four theorists and filmmakers, the cinema is an art of mass enlightenment because it escapes the limits of human sight and reveals the true nature of reality. Turvey provides a detailed exegesis of this tradition, pointing to its sources in Romanticism, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, modern science, and other intellectual currents. He also shows how profoundly it has influenced contemporary film theory by examining the work of psychoanalytical-semiotic theorists of the 1970s, Stanley Cavell, the modern-day followers of Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze.
Throughout, Turvey offers a trenchant critique of revelationism and its descendants. Combining the close analysis of theoretical texts with the philosophical method of conceptual clarification pioneered by the later Wittgenstein, he shows how the arguments theorists and filmmakers have made about human vision and the cinema's revelatory powers often traffic in conceptual confusion. Having identified and extricated these confusions, Turvey builds on the work of Epstein, Vertov, Balazs, and Kracauer as well as contemporary philosophers of film to clarify some legitimate senses in which the cinema is a revelatory art using examples from the films of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Tati.

As the inaugural volume in the Docalogue series, this book models a new form for the discussion of documentary film. James Baldwin's writing is intensely relevant to contemporary politics and culture, and Peck's strategies for representing him and conveying his work in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) raise important questions about how documentary can bring the work of a complex thinker like Baldwin to a broader public. By combining five distinct perspectives on a single documentary film, this book offers different critical approaches to the same media object, acting both as an intensive scholarly treatment of a film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary. Undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of film and media studies, communication studies, African American studies, and gender and sexuality studies will find this book extremely useful in understanding the significance of this film and the ways in which it offers insight into not only Baldwin and his writings but also wider historical and contemporary realities.

Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (b. 1946). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as "The Grandmother" or the break-out surrealist feature "Eraserhead," the hit TV series "Twin Peaks" or his Oscar-nominated "The Elephant Man" or "Blue Velvet" or his most recent experimental tours de force, "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire," he stresses the power of image and sound to communicate his vision.

"David Lynch: Interviews" is the first survey of conversations with the director covering the broad spectrum of his artistic activities throughout his career, including filmmaking, painting, music production, and furniture design. It documents the evolution of Lynch's role in discussing his movies, from his self-described "pre-verbal stage" in the early years to his increasingly elaborate, though persistently elusive, articulations. It also registers the intense international interest in Lynch's work, with interviews from French and Spanish sources translated here for the first time.

The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side. Recognising the circularity of patterns in each generational manifestation of horror censorship, The Myth of Harm draws upon cases such as the Slenderman stabbing and the James Bulger murder amongst many others in order to explore the manner in which horror has been repeatedly cast as a harmful influence upon children at the expense of scrutinising other more complex social issues. Focusing on five major controversies beginning in the 1930's Golden Age of Horror Cinema and ending on a more contemporary note with Cyber-Gothic horror - this book identifies and considers the various myths and false hoods surrounding the genre of horror and question the very motivation behind the proliferation and dissemination of these myths as scapegoats for political and social issues, platforms for "moral entrepreneurs" and tools of hyperbolae for the news industry.

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany's first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich. This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola's various "incarnations."

Traditionally, university students have gained access to world religions by reading primary texts. Discovering World Religions at 24 Frames Per Second takes students beyond the written page, offering an exploration of the same religious traditions through the study of feature films. The many definitions of religion are examined along with its various components, including doctrine, myth, ethics, ritual, and symbol. Specific religious traditions, including Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, popular religion, and Shinto are examined. Biographical sketches of directors whose films tend to focus on a particular religious tradition are also included, such as Zhang Yimou, Hayao Miyazaki, Deepa Mehta, and Akira Kurosawa. Discovering World Religions at 24 Frames Per Second is unique in the area of religion and film studies in that it isn't just a collection of essays. Instead it provides the introductory student with the necessary background information on the various religions before looking at how their ideas can be understood not through texts but through the cinematic medium. To keep the conversation fresh, most of the films used in the book were made within the last decade. Furthermore, examples range from popular, mainstream fare, such as Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings trilogy to lesser-known foreign films, such as The Wooden Man's Bride and The Great Yokai War. Several films with a "cult-like" following are also discussed, including Fight Club, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Jacob's Ladder. This book is also unique in that instead of drawing upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, it draws from Eastern traditions.

"Amores Perros" (2000), directed by first-time film-maker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, with its intersecting storylines and treatment of urban violence and decay, kick-started a renaissance for Mexico's film industry. It was the first Mexican film for generations to achieve major international success, winning many awards, including the Critics' Prize at Cannes. An edgy, complex and sometimes shocking view of life, love and death in the most populous metropolis on the planet, Amores Perros achieves the rare feat of speaking to an international audience while never oversimplifying its indigenous culture.
In the first book-length study of this remarkable film, Paul Julian Smith opens up that culture, revealing the film's relationship to television soap operas, pop music and contemporary debates about what it means to be Mexican. Having researched into the production records and interviewed key personnel, he also shows how the film came to be such a success before going on to analyse how its outstanding acting, music and cinematography combine to create 'a uniquely powerful work in world cinema'.

There is a hidden question at the heart of media studies, so fundamental that it has largely remained implicit and unexamined. Where do you end, and where do media begin? In Media in Mind, author Daniel Reynolds draws upon naturalist philosophies of the mind from John Dewey through contemporary theories of embodied and extended cognition to make the case that the lines separating media from the minds of their users are not blurry or variable so much as they never existed to begin with. Through analyses of films and video games from 1900 to the present, Media in Mind shows how media forms and technologies challenge dominant models of perception and mental representation, and how they complicate theoretical understanding of concepts like the platform and the interface. In order to do justice to the profound and literally mind-changing power of media, Reynolds argues, we need to think not so much about the relationship between media and the mind as about the roles that media play in our minds. Through this crucial distinction, Media in Mind surveys more than a century of media theory to illustrate the ways that scholars of film and digital media have situated and reconsidered a series of divisions between media, user, and world, and how these these conceptual divisions have reflected and inflected their ways of understanding the mind.

First released in 1987, Near Dark is a vampire film set in the contemporary American Midwest that tells the story of Caleb, a half-vampire trying to decide whether to embrace his vampire nature or return to his human family. The film, an early work of the now-established director Kathryn Bigelow, skilfully mixes genre conventions, combining gothic tropes with those of the Western, road movie and film noir, while also introducing elements of the outlaw romance genre. Stacey Abbott's study of the film addresses it as a genre hybrid that also challenges conventions of the vampire film. The vampires are morally ambiguous and undermine the class structures that have historically defined stories of the undead. These are not aristocrats but instead they capture the allure and horror of the disenfranchised and the underclass. As Abbott describes, Near Dark was crucial in consolidating Bigelow's standing as a director of significance at an early point in her career, not simply because of her visual art background, but because of the way in which she would from Near Dark onward re-envision other traditionally mainstream genres of filmmaking.

This collection was inspired by the observation that film remakes offer us the opportunity to revisit important issues, stories, themes, and topics in a manner that is especially relevant and meaningful to contemporary audiences. Like mythic stories that are told again and again in differing ways, film remakes present us with updated perspectives on timeless ideas. While some remakes succeed and others fail aesthetically, they always say something about the culture in which_and for which_they are produced. Contributors explore the ways in which the fears of death, loss of self, and bodily violence have been expressed and then reinterpreted in such films and remakes as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead. Films such as Rollerball, The Ring, The Grudge, The Great Yokai Wars, and Insomnia are discussed as well because of their ability to give voice to collective anxieties concerning cultural change, nihilism, and globalization. While opening on a note that emphasizes the compulsion of filmmakers to revisit issues concerning fear and anxiety, this collection ends by using films like Solaris, King Kong, Star Trek, Doom, and Van Helsing to suggest that repeated confrontation with these issues allows the opportunity for creative and positive transformation.

Because of our film-oriented culture, the study of cinema's potential influence on the theater has become particularly relevant. When applied to the stage and space of theater, film theory and aesthetics open new possibilities, heightening the theater's capacity to respond to and engage with contemporary culture. Director Babak Ebrahimian examines and explores the similarities and differences between cinema and theater, and in doing so, defines a new theater form that uses film theories and aesthetics as its foundation. The book begins by locating the need for cinematic theater in contemporary, image-based perceptions of the "real," and lays out the basic form and aesthetics that make up the cinematic theater. To illustrate this approach, Ebrahimian analyzes the work of major film directors, including Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, and Orson Welles. He also draws upon the perspectives of prominent contemporary theater directors and writers, among them Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Heiner Muller. Bridging the gap between the two mediums, The Cinematic Theater will be of interest to students and practitioners of both theater and film. Illustrated with photos.

Is media changing the way we see transgender people or is it the other way around? In the past twenty to thirty years, transgender people have gradually appeared in films and television shows with more and more frequency. However, more visibility does not always translate to a higher degree of acceptance of trans people. Authors in this book studied the most popular programs and movies of all times to see how much (and how little) media portrayals have changed when it comes down to trans folks. Although in recent years openly transgender celebrities and fictional characters have broken into the mainstream to challenge hegemonic understandings of this population, productions such as Transparent and Orange Is the New Black fall victim to commonplace portrayals, repeating the negative tropes they were trying to resist. Nevertheless, nuanced interpretations and thorough analyses from this collection show evidence that movies and programs with transgender people make progress from total erasure or invisibility. Transmedia and Public Representation: Transgender People in Film and Television is as complex and diverse as the authors, productions, and characters in it. It is a must-have, must-read book for anyone who studies or works in areas related to media, social sciences, and LGBTQ studies and activism. But it is also an appealing invitation to understand the current media landscape through the eyes and voices of trans and queer people, their relatives, and their allies.

This concise and accessible critical introduction examines the world of popular fairy-tale television, tracing how fairy tales and their social and cultural implications manifest within series, television events, anthologies, and episodes, and as freestanding motifs. Providing a model of televisual analysis, Rudy and Greenhill emphasize that fairy-tale longevity in general, and particularly on TV, results from malleability-morphing from extremely complex narratives to the simple quotation of a name (like Cinderella) or phrase (like "happily ever after")-as well as its perennial value as a form that is good to think with. The global reach and popularity of fairy tales is reflected in the book's selection of diverse examples from genres such as political, lifestyle, reality, and science fiction TV. With a select mediagraphy, discussion questions, and detailed bibliography for further study, this book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of television studies, popular culture, and media studies, as well as dedicated fairy-tale fans.

Leading scholar Paul G. Pickowicz traces the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking and discusses its course of development from the early days to the present. Moving decade by decade, he explores such key themes as the ever-shifting definitions of modern marriage in 1920s silent features, East-West cultural conflict in the movies of the 1930s, the strong appeal of the powerful melodramatic mode of the 1930s and 1940s, the polarizing political controversies surrounding Chinese filmmaking under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s, and the critical role of cinema during the bloody civil war of the late 1940s. Pickowicz then considers the challenging Mao years, including chapters on legendary screen personalities who tried but failed to adjust to the new socialist order in the 1950s, celebrities who made the sort of artistic and political accommodations that would keep them in the spotlight in the post-revolutionary era, and insider film professionals of the early 1960s who actively resisted the most extreme forms of Maoist cultural production. The book concludes with explorations of the highly cathartic films of the early post-Mao era, edgy postsocialist movies that appeared on the eve of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, the relevance of the Eastern European "velvet prison" cultural production model, and the rise of underground and independent filmmaking beginning in the 1990s. Throughout its long history of film production, China has been embroiled in a seemingly unending series of wars, revolutions, and jarring social transformations. Despite daunting censorship obstacles, Chinese filmmakers have found ingenious ways of taking political stands and weighing in-for better or worse-on the most explosive social, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Exploring the often gut-wrenching controversies generated by their work, Pickowicz offers a unique and perceptive window on Chinese culture and society.