In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it." This collection examines how filmmakers have tried to change the world by engaging in emancipatory politics through their work, and how audiences have received them. It presents a wide spectrum of case studies, covering both film and digital technology, with examples from throughout cinematic history and around the world, including Soviet Russia, Palestine, South America, and France. Discussions range from the classic Marxist cinema of Aleksandr Medvedkin, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard, to recent media such as 5 Broken Cameras (2010), the phenomena of video-blogging, and bicycle activism films.

Contrary to theories of single person authorship, "America's Corporate Art" argues that the corporate studio is the author of Hollywood motion pictures, both during the classical era of the studio system and beyond, when studios became players in global dramas staged by massive entertainment conglomerates. Hollywood movies are examples of a commodity that, until the digital age, was rare: a self-advertising artifact that markets the studio's brand in the very act of consumption.
The book covers the history of corporate authorship through the antithetical visions of two of the most dominant Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. and MGM. During the classical era, these studios promoted their brands as competing social visions in strategically significant pictures such as MGM's "Singin' in the Rain" and Warner's "The Fountainhead." Christensen follows the studios' divergent fates as MGM declined into a valuable and portable logo, while Warner Bros. employed "Batman," "JFK," and "You've Got Mail" to seal deals that made it the biggest entertainment corporation in the world. The book concludes with an analysis of the Disney-Pixar merger and the first two "Toy Story" movies in light of the recent judicial extension of constitutional rights of the corporate person.

In a market long dominated by Hollywood, French films are consistently the most widely distributed non-English language work. French cinema, however, appears to undergo a transformation as it reaches Britain, becoming something quite different to that experienced by audiences at home. Drawing on extensive archival research the authors examine in detail the discourses, debates, and decisions which have determined the place accorded to French cinema in British film culture. In so doing they provide a fascinating account of this particular instance of transnational cinematic traffic while simultaneously shedding new light on British film history. From the early days of the Film Society, via the advent of the X certificate to the new possibilities of video and DVD, this book reveals the complex and detailed history of the distribution, exhibition, marketing, and reception of French cinema in Britain.

The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays expanding the concepts of "ghost" and "haunting" beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, including fiction and film, this collection explores the phenomenon of social ghosts. What does it mean, for example, to be invisible, to be a ghost, particularly when that ghost is representative of a person or group living on the margins of society? Why do specific types of ghosts tend to haunt certain cultures and/or places? What is it about a people's history that invites these types of hauntings? The essays in this book, like pieces of a puzzle, approach the larger questions from diverse individual perspectives, but, taken together, they offer a richly detailed composite discussion of what it means to be haunted.

Today the world's media have a pressing need to understand and interpret the modern Middle East. In this timely book, Lina Khatib examines how contemporary American cinema and the cinemas of the Arab world contribute to this global preoccupation in their representations of Middle Eastern politics. This examination of Hollywood as the dominant Western interpreter of the Arab World also views the Arab world in terms of how it perceives itself and others through its films. It covers films made in the USA, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine over the final two decades of the last century and into the present, showing how these cinemas represent major political issues in the Middle East, from the Arab-Israeli conflict, through the Gulf War, to Islamic fundamentalism. It also uncovers the challenges presented by Arab cinemas to Hollywood's ways of representing Middle East politics. The book goes beyond an analysis of difference, to address similarities in how political themes are selected as well as in the cinematic language that gives them life. For example, it looks at cinema as a tool of nationalism in the USA and the Arab world and at how the representations of political issues by Hollywood and Arab cinemas are informed by the political and historical contexts in which they occur. This book is inspired by Edward Said's writing on Orientalism, but it goes further, to show not only how the 'Orient' is constructed by the 'Occident', but also how the 'Orient' itself is consumed by power struggles both internal and external. "Filming The Modern Middle East" therefore establishes an important link between discourses of the West and those of the East.

" The book is] part of the Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context series. It] has an attractive typeface and a well-designed layout. In addition to Carter's introduction there is also a useful Glossary of terms and an Appendix with two reviews... In all, this book is a very good introduction to Balazs' film philosophy and a long overdue entry into the English-speaking world of film literature." . Screening the Past "An exemplary book in every way, this translation makes Balazs' revolutionary texts available in English for the first time ... Dating from 1924 and 1930 respectively, The Visible Man and The Spirit of Film had a decisive influence on such major Russian filmmakers as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, and were among the first studies to examine filmic syntax, grammar, and editorial structure. Including a detailed introduction and numerous illustrations, this volume is a must for anyone serious about film ... Highly recommended." . Choice Bela Balazs's two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balazs's detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.

In 2005, Scarecrow published Movies Made for Television, 1964-2004, a five-volume reference set commemorating 40 years of every made for TV film since See How They Run debuted in 1964. These books provided a comprehensive listing of every television film and mini-series, detailing each film's original network, airdate, and length of broadcast. In this latest volume, Marill adds another five years of television films, providing information for an additional 400 works produced between 2005 and 2009. Along with a brief summary, entries also include extensive production credits (director, writer, producer, composer, director of photography, and editor) and a complete cast and character listing. With a chronology of the films, an appendix of movies adapted from other sources, and separate indexes for actors and directors, Movies Made for Television, 2005-2009 is a welcome addition to a resource highly regarded by scholars and historians of television and popular culture.

Gothic Heroines on Screen explores the translation of the literary Gothic heroine on screen, the potential consequences of these adaptations, and contemporary interpretations of the form. Each chapter illuminates the significance of this moving image mediation, relating its screen topics to their various historical, social, and geographical moments of production, while maintaining a focus on the key figure of the investigating woman. Many chapters - perhaps inescapably - delve into the point of adaptation: the Bluebeard story and du Maurier's Rebecca as two key examples. Moving beyond the Old Dark House that frequently forms both the Gothic heroine's backdrop and her area of investigation, some chapters examine alternative locations and their impact on the Gothic heroine, some leave behind the marital thriller to explore what happens when the Gothic meets other genres, such as comedy, while others travel away from the usual Anglo-American contexts to European ones. Throughout the collection, the Gothic heroine's representation is explored within the medium, which brings together image, movement, and sound, and this technological fact takes on varied significance. What does remain constant, however, is the emphasis on the longevity, significance, and distinctiveness of the Gothic heroine in screen culture.

Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how media forms like photography, video, radio, television, and the Internet have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. In producing and consuming self-determined media genres, actors in Tamazulapam Mixe and its diaspora community in Los Angeles open up media spaces and seek to forge more equal relations both within Mexico and beyond its borders. It is within these spaces that Ayuujk people carve out their own, at times conflicting, visions of development, modernity, gender, and what it means to be indigenous in the twenty-first century.

This is an exploration of Shakespeare films as interpretations of Shakespeare's plays as well as interpreting the place of Shakespeare on screen within the classroom and within the English curriculum. Shakespeare on screen is evaluated both in relation to the play texts and in relation to the realms of popular film culture. The book focuses on how Shakespeare is manipulated in film and television through the representation of violence, gender, sexuality, race and nationalism. Cartmell discusses a wide range of films, including Orson Welles' Othello (1952), Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996) and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998).

As the American government uses the threat of terrorist violence to justify stringent domestic and exploitative foreign policies, Arab communities in the United States face the injustice of racial profiling and harrassment. The reaction of Americans to the genre of action-adventure film and its increasing use of Arabs as villians shows how our perceptions of Arab communities and individuals has been skewed. Using focus groups composed of a diverse cross-section of Americans, Karin Gwinn Wilkins analyzes how participants differ in their perception of specific action-adventure films and their Arab villains. More specifically, Wilkins interviews participants and asks them questions directly related to three topics: villains as threats to national security, film settings in relation to fear within global space and the Middle East, and heroes conquering evil. This book addresses the neglected empirical link between documented media stereotypes of Arab communities and the lived consequences of these portrayals, in terms of discriminatory practices and generalizations.

Reconsidering the German tendency to define itself vis-a-vis an eastern "Other" in light of fresh debate regarding the Second World War, this volume and the cultural products it considers expose and question Germany's relationship with its imagined East. Germany has long defined itself in opposition to its eastern neighbors: its ideas around cultural prestige and its expressions of xenophobia seem inevitably to return to an imagined eastern "Other." Central to the consideration of such projections is the legacy of the Second World War, the subject of fresh debate since 1989: after four decades of political antagonism and cultural disjuncture, the events of the war on the Eastern Front have been rediscovered by Western audiences and have come to occupy complex, shifting positions in the memory culture of the postsocialist states. However, German ignorance of Eastern European experiences of war and genocide, enduring stereotypes, and prescriptive ideas about remembrance have been major stumbling blocks to the emergence of a transnational memory culture considered just by all parties. Despite mass immigration to Germany from the east and intensive contact between German speakers and its cultures, German-language cultural production continues largely to represent Eastern Europe as unknown, wild, and inaccessible. By contrast, the writers and filmmakers under discussion in the present volume have worked with and against such tropes to put forward alternative perspectives. Like their works, the contributions to this volume place the conflicts and prejudices of the twentieth century into a wider historical perspective, exposing and questioning the nature of Germany's relationship with its imagined East. Contributors: Deirdre Byrnes, Raluca Cernahoschi, Shivani Chauhan, Eniko Dacz, Olha Flachs, Daniel Harvey, Jakub Kazecki, Amy Leech, Paul Peters, Ernest Schonfield, Karolina Watroba.

Digital media delivers movies, music, and archives of information to our fingertips but not long ago morality police controlled content. This book focuses on the flamboyant state censors who tried to tame media and the filmmaking mavericks as they challenged the system. Forbidden films, banned b-movies, and European art house pictures are not just entertainment-they paved the way for greater free expression in America. In this state-by-state guide to battles over banned films, colorful characters come to life. Readers will discover the handlebar mustachioed, iron willed Major Metallus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, censor of Chicago, Lloyd T. Binford, the backwoods race-bating Memphis regulator, and Myrtelle Snell, the Alabama authority who popularized the slogan "Banned in Birmingham." On the other side are filmmakers who pushed the limits: including Robert Rodriguez who fought the Texas Film Commission over Machete Kills (2013), Ryan Reynolds's Deadpool (2016), charged with obscenity in Utah, and documentarians like Josh Fox and Frederick Wiseman, who clashed against whistleblower laws across the nation. These personalities, both familiar and newly rediscovered, tell an exciting story of the history of movies and the battle for free speech.

Africa has long gripped the American imagination. From the Edenic wilderness of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels to the 'black Zion' of Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement, all manner of Americans - whether white or black, male or female - have come to see Africa as an idealized stage on which they can fashion new, more authentic selves. In this remarkable, panoramic work, David Peterson del Mar explores the ways in which American fantasies of Africa have evolved over time, as well as the role of Africans themselves in subverting American attitudes to their continent. Spanning seven decades, from the post-war period to the present day, and encompassing sources ranging from literature, film and music to accounts by missionaries, aid workers and travel writers, African, American is a fascinating deconstruction of 'Africa' as it exists in the American mindset.

Beginning with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about the contemporary global Far North. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, contributors from a variety of scholarly and artistic backgrounds come together to provide a comprehensive study of Arctic documentary cinemas from a transnational perspective. This book offers a thorough analysis of the concept of the Arctic as it is represented in documentary filmmaking, while challenging the notion of "The Arctic" as a homogenous entity that obscures the environmental, historical, geographic, political, and cultural differences that characterize the region. By examining how the Arctic is imagined, understood, and appropriated in documentary work, the contributors argue that such films are key in contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, from early cinema to the present. Understanding the role of these films becomes all the more urgent in the present day, as conversations around resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage in the Arctic's representation.

This volume investigates the ways in which Italian women writers, filmmakers, and performers have represented female identity across genres from the immediate post-World War II period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Considering genres such as prose, poetry, drama, and film, these essays examine the vision of female agency and self-actualization arising from women artists' critique of female identity. This dual approach reveals unique interpretations of womanhood in Italy spanning more than fifty years, while also providing a deep investigation of the manipulation of canvases historically centered on the male subject. With its unique coupling of generic and thematic concerns, the volume contributes to the ever expanding female artistic legacy, and to our understanding of postwar Italian women's evolving relationship to the narration of history, gender roles, and these artists' use and revision of generic convention to communicate their vision.

Through a study of the contemporary German film movement the Berlin School, Olivia Landry examines how narrative film has responded to our highly digitalized and mediatized age, not with a focus on stasis and realism, but by turning back to movement, spectacle, and performance. She argues that a preoccupation with presence, liveness, and affect-all of which are viewed as critical components of live performance-can be found in many of the films of the Berlin School. Challenging the perception that the Berlin School is a sheer adherent of "slow cinema," Landry closely analyzes the use of movement, dynamism, presence, and speed in a broad selection of films to show how filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Thomas Arslan, and Christoph Hochhausler invoke the pulse of the kinesthetic and the tangibly affective. Her analysis draws on an array of film theories from early materialism to body theories, phenomenology, and contemporary affect theories. Arguing that these theories readily and energetically forge a path from film to performance, Landry traces a trajectory between the two through which live experience, presence, spectacle, intersubjectivity, and the body in motion emerge and powerfully intersect. Ultimately, Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema expands the methodological and disciplinary boundaries of film studies by offering new ways of articulating and understanding movement in cinema.

This exploration of the ways in which pregnancy affects narrative, begins with two canonical American texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1848) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and relying on such diverse works as Frankenstein, Peyton Place, Beloved and I Love Lucy, the book chronicles how pregnancy evolves from a conventional plot device into a fully developed theme. Especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, the pregnancy narrative in fiction and film acts as a lightning rod with the power to electrify all genres of fiction and film, from early melodrama (Way Down East) to noir (Leave Her to Heaven); from horror (Rosemary's Baby) to science fiction and dystopia (Alien, The Handmaid's Tale); and from iconic (Lolita) to independent (Juno, Precious). Ultimately, the pregnancy narrative in popular film and fiction provides a remarkably clear lens by which we can gauge how popular American film and fiction express our most profound - and most private - fears, values and hopes.

In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)-which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments-filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.

A sequel to the author's earlier work Plato and Popcorn: A Philosopher's Guide to 75 Thought-Provoking Movies, this book presents analyses of 95 movies from the Americas and 20 other countries. Each entry includes a brief introduction to the film along with a list of philosophical questions to ponder after viewing it. Most entries also include a list of additional recommended films.

The films cover a wide range of genres and topics--from the haunting tale of doomed Polish freedom fighters in Kanal's World War II Warsaw to the romantic and passionate story of rekindled love in Australia's Innocence.

Romance Film is a critical history of significant romance films from Hollywood and abroad. Kagan discusses, among others, Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and Woody Allen in Annie Hall. Each chapter analyzes a type of lover, including the siren, rake, intriguer, dandy, innocent, coquette, charmer, charismatic, comic, and the self-destructive lover." The book discusses each type's continuities and the social forces and emotions that shape it. It also deals with films of first love-True Heart Susie (1930), Tarzan the Ape Man (1934), Picnic (1955), Rebel without a Cause (1955), The Sure Thing (1985), Dirty Dancing (1994), Titanic (1997)-and the ways in which youth discovers passion, frustration, and fulfillment.

In Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akin. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akin makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some of Akin's key works-In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among others-Gueneli identifies Akin's unique stylistic use of multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Akin's films-including music and multiple languages, dialects, and accents-create an "aesthetic of heterogeneity" that envisions an expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature of Akin's decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli demonstrates how Akin's aesthetics intersect with politics to reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.

Gothic Heroines on Screen explores the translation of the literary Gothic heroine on screen, the potential consequences of these adaptations, and contemporary interpretations of the form. Each chapter illuminates the significance of this moving image mediation, relating its screen topics to their various historical, social, and geographical moments of production, while maintaining a focus on the key figure of the investigating woman. Many chapters - perhaps inescapably - delve into the point of adaptation: the Bluebeard story and du Maurier's Rebecca as two key examples. Moving beyond the Old Dark House that frequently forms both the Gothic heroine's backdrop and her area of investigation, some chapters examine alternative locations and their impact on the Gothic heroine, some leave behind the marital thriller to explore what happens when the Gothic meets other genres, such as comedy, while others travel away from the usual Anglo-American contexts to European ones. Throughout the collection, the Gothic heroine's representation is explored within the medium, which brings together image, movement, and sound, and this technological fact takes on varied significance. What does remain constant, however, is the emphasis on the longevity, significance, and distinctiveness of the Gothic heroine in screen culture.

The Word Made Flesh is an exploration of the thematic concerns and the underlying humanism and morality found in Martin Scorsese's films. It contains individual chapters on fifteen Scorsese films, the most complete Scorsese filmography available, and a host of illustrations. Generally acknowledged as one of the most important and influential directors of his generation, Scorsese has directed a wide range of films, from documentaries to musicals to comedies to dramas. Although Scorsese has a well-known penchant for violence, as in the films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Cape Fear, he is also a master of the character study. The Word Made Flesh is an essential addition to any film collection.