Transatlantic Crossings is a major study of the distribution and exhibition of British films in the USA. Charting the cross-cultural reception of many British films, Sarah Street draws on a wide range of sources including studio records, film posters, press books and statistics. While the power of Hollywood made it difficult for films that crossed the Atlantic, Street's research demonstrates that some strategies were more successful than others. She considers which British films made an impact and analyzes conditions that facilitated a positive reception from critics, censors, exhibitors and audiences. Case studies include Nell Gwyn (1926), The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), The Ghost Goes West (1935), Henry V (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), Ealing comedies, The Horror of Dracula (1958), Tom Jones (1963), A Hard Day's Night (1964), Goldfinger (1964), The Remains of the Day (1993), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Trainspotting (1996). Against a background of the economic history of the British and Hollywood film industries, Transatlantic Crossings considers the many fascinating questions surrounding the history of British films in the USA, their relevance to wider issues of Anglo-American relations and to notions of "Britishness" on screen.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY: POCKET GUIDE

A new pocket guide to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), director of seven feature films, including Mirror, Andrei Roublyov, Solaris and The Sacrifice. This book explores every aspect of Andrei Tarkovsky's output, including scripts, budget, production, shooting, editing, camera, sound, music, acting, themes, symbols, motifs, and spirituality. Tarkovsky's films are analyzed in depth, with scene-by-scene discussions. Fully illustrated.

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most fascinating of filmmakers. He is supremely romantic, an old-fashioned, traditional artist - at home in the company Leonardo da Vinci, Pieter Brueghel, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoievsky andByzantine icon painters. Tarkovsky is a magician, no question, but argues for demystification (even while films celebrate mystery). His films are full of magical events, dreams, memory sequences, multiple viewpoints, multiple time zones and bizarre occurrences.

As genre films, Andrei Tarkovsky's movies are some of the most accomplished in cinema. As science fiction films, Stalker and Solaris have no superiors, and very few peers. Only the greatest sci-fi films can match them: Metropolis, King Kong, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tarkovsky happily and methodically rewrote the rules of the sci-fi genre: Stalker and Solaris are definitely not routine genre outings. They don't have the monsters, the aliens, the visual effects, the battles, the laser guns, the stunts and action set-pieces of regular science fiction movies.

No one could deny that Andrei Roublyov is one of the greatest historical films to explore the Middle Ages, up there with The Seventh Seal, El Cid, The Navigator and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Life' trilogy. If you judge Andrei Roublyov in terms of historical accuracy, epic spectacle, serious themes, or cinematic poetry, it comes out at the top. Finally, in the religious film genre, The Sacrifice and Nostalghia are among the finest in cinema, the equals of the best of Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Robert Bresson and Carl-Theodor Dreyer. The text for this new edition has been updated and revised.

Includes illustrations, bibliography and notes. ISBN 978186171834.

www.crmoon.com

Religious Communication Association's Book of the Year
Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable.
In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. He shows how a broad spectrum of religious forces have played a role in Hollywood, from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched sources, he describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation's moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. "It is this human choice," noted one Protestant leader, "that is the basis of our religion." Tensions with Catholics, too, have loomed large--many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood's corrupting power. Romanowski shows that the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture, in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced "Hollywood elites," major studios noted the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. 20th Century-Fox formed FoxFaith to go after the "Passion dollar," and Disney took on evangelical Philip Anschutz as a partner to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen.
William Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture. Reforming Hollywood is his most revealing, provocative, and groundbreaking work on this vital area of American society.

"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.

When it was released, "Dead Man" puzzled many audiences and critics. Here, the author argues that the film is both a quantum leap and a logical step in the director's career, and it's a film that speaks powerfully of contemporary concerns.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Feminist Film Theory and Cleo from 5 to 7 offers a concise introduction to feminist film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Agnes Varda's critically acclaimed 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7. Hilary Neroni employs the methodology of looking for a feminist alternative among female-oriented films. Through three key concepts-identification, framing the woman's body, and the female auteur-Neroni lays bare the debates and approaches within the vibrant history of feminist film theory, providing a point of entry to feminist film theory from its inception to today. Picking up one of the currents in feminist film theory - that of looking for feminist alternatives among female-oriented films - Neroni traces feminist responses to the contradictions inherent in most representations of women in film, and she details how their responses have intervened in changing what we see on the screen.

What makes a film a teen film? And why, when it represents such powerful and enduring ideas about youth and adolescence, is teen film usually viewed as culturally insignificant? Teen film is usually discussed as a representation of the changing American teenager, highlighting the institutions of high school and the nuclear family and experiments in sexual development and identity formation. But not every film featuring these components is a teen film, and not every teen film is American. Arguing that teen film is always a story about becoming a citizen and a subject, "Teen Film" presents a new history of the genre, surveys the existing body of scholarship, and introduces key critical tools for discussing teen film. Surveying a wide range of films including "The Wild One," "Heathers," "Donnie Darko" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the book's central focus is on what kind of adolescence teen film represents, and on teen film's capacity to produce new and influential images of adolescence.

Taking its cue from Deleuze's definition of minor cinema as one which engages in a creative act of becoming, this collection explores the multifarious ways that music has been used in the cinemas of various countries in Australasia, Africa, Latin America and even in Europe that have hitherto received little attention, with a focus on the role it has played creating, problematizing, and sometimes contesting, the nation. Deleuze's lens suits these cinemas because they are precisely not like Hollywood, and the key issue is national identity."Film Music in 'Minor' National Cinemas "addresses the relationships between film music and the national cinemas beyond Hollywood and the European countries that comprise most of the literature in the field. Broad in scope, it includes chapters that analyze the contribution of specific composers and songwriters to their national cinemas, and the way music works in films dealing with national narratives or issues; the role of music in the shaping of national stars and specific use of genres; audience reception of films on national music traditions; and the use of music in emerging digital video industries.

"A History of Visual Culture" is a history of ideas. The recent explosion of interest in visual culture suggests the phenomenon is very recent. But visual culture has a history. Knowledge began to be systematically grounded in observation and display from the Enlightenment. Since them, from the age of industrialization and colonialism to today's globalized world, visual culture has continued to shape our ways of thinking and of interpreting the world. Carefully structured to cover a wide history and geography, "A History of Visual Culture" is divided into themed sections: Revolt and Revolution; Science and Empiricism; Gaze and Spectacle; Acquisition, Display, and Desire; Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization; Image and Reality; Media and Visual Technologies. Each section presents a carefully selected range of case studies from across the last 250 years, designed to illustrate how all kinds of visual media have shaped our technology, aesthetics, politics and culture.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

This text seeks to revise notions of film genre. It connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. In a critique of major voices in the history of genre theory from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played. Recognizing that the very term "genre" has different meaning for different groups, he bases his genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discusses a range of films from "The Great Train Robbery" to "Star Wars," and from "The Jazz Singer" to "The Player."

"The New York Times" bestseller that follows the making of five films at a pivotal time in Hollywood history
In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like "Mary Poppins" swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like "Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night," and box-office bomb "Doctor Doolittle" signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS MOVIES: POCKET GUIDE

A pocket guide to the Hollywood adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. The book tells you everything you need to know about these very popular films, from writing the script through casting and financing, to shooting and performances, to visual effects, editing and theatrical distribution.

The pocket guide includes discussions of every single scene in the three movies, including the Special Extended Editions (some scenes are explored in great detail, as well as some key individual shots). There are sections on the all of the important differences between The Lord of the Ring book and the Hollywood movies (including numerous details), as well as a chapter exploring the additions and the omissions. Looks at behind the scenes stories, and also the critical response to the movies.

There are chapters on the visual effects, on the casting and key personnel of the movies, on the studio and the financing of the films, on the music and sound, and the marketing and release of the movies in 2001-2003 (including the home entertainment releases on DVD and video). There is also a chapter on the critical response to the movies.

There is also an appendix on other adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien's books.

Jeremy Robinson has written many critical studies, including Steven Spielberg, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Russell, Walerian Borowczyk, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; J.M.W. Turner; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; Arthur Rimbaud; Andre Gide; John Cowper Powys; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell.

Includes bibliography, illustrations, appendices and notes. ISBN 9781861713780. 496 pages.

www.crmoon.com

Migration documentary films played an important role in promoting Australian images to the outside world. Many films were made in this period to fulfill the function of migrant-recruiting and nation-building objectives. In these films, Australia was presented as a progressive and liberal nation seeking to establish her identities. The slogan "Australia for the White Man" prevailed over the entire period from 1908 to 1961. It was not until 1972 that The White Australia Policy was officially abolished. The historical meanings of these transformations are definitely worth exploring. The relationships among immigration policies, documentary films and the construction of national identities become valuable subjects for examination. This innovative book is the first in the field that comes with a systematic and comprehensive study of migration documentary films in post-war Australia. In the analysis of the sixty-seven films, this book reveals that the project for recruiting migrants to settle in Australia was not a simple matter of overseas campaigns. The terrain for media publicity was never just the emigrant countries and the target audience were both foreigners and local Australians. These migration documentary films are actually propaganda films in nature. However, visual images, narratives, and myths represented in these films were important in the self-depiction of Australian and in the formative discourse of national identity. This book shows how absences and under-representations of film images are important to examine in order to fully understand the particular, utopian visions of the post-war period. This book argues that open-door policies, coastal images, and modernization narratives gradually became a new "maritime myth" in the quest of a redefined Australian identity, and "new Australians," the post-war immigrants, became battlers, echoing the "bush legend" existing in the Australian narrative. Themes of modernization, industrialization, Anglo-centric identity, "the Australian way of life" itself, political freedom, and democracy of the overall films were stressed.

Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France argues that, between World Wars I and II, documentary film made a substantial contribution to the rewriting of the French national narrative to include rural France and the colonies. The book mines a significant body of virtually unknown films and manuscripts for their insight into revisions of French national identity in the aftermath of the Great War. From 1918 onwards, government institutions sought to advance social programs they believed were crucial to national regeneration. They turned to documentary film, a new form of mass communication, to do so.

Many scholars of French film state that the French made no significant contribution to documentary film prior to the Vichy period. Using until now overlooked films, Framing the Nation refutes this misconception and shows that the French were early and active believers in the uses of documentary film for social change - and these films reached audiences far beyond the confines of commercial cinema circuits in urban areas.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics. Catherine Russell's highly accessible book approaches Japanese cinema as an industry closely modeled on Hollywood, focusing on the classical period - those years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. Respectful and thoroughly informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the Japanese canon, Russell is also critical of some of its ideological tendencies, and her analyses provide new insights on class and gender dynamics. Russell demonstrates how Japanese classical cinema has had enormous influence on other Asian cinemas, especially in TV broadcast form, and she highlights the importance of the accounting for the industrial production context when discussing these films. Including studies of landmark films by Ozu, Kurosawa and other directors, this book provides a perfect introduction to a crucial and often misunderstood Japanese cultural output. With a critical approach that highlights the "everydayness" of Japanese studio-era cinema, Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics.

Once heralded and defined by the likes of Francois Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.