New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from - as opposed to being conflated with - the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the 'new nonfiction film,' and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.

The relationship of French national identity to its cinema is a well-established field. Yet so far, most studies have either taken a broad historical approach or focused on a particular director or period. Using various theoretical approaches, this book investigates an area that is--as of today--either ill or untreated by scholars: what is the relationship of film form to the historical and social reflections of a given work, whether they be overt or hidden? To answer this question, Noah McLaughlin conducts a close formal analysis of ten French war films from across the twentieth century. His subjects range from Abel Gance's 1919 J'Accuse to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2004 Un long dimanche de fianailles and his theoretical approaches change to best examine each one. This study builds upon the broader histories of French cinema by Alan Williams (Republic of Images) and Susan Hayward (French National Cinema). Its approaches to the intersection of cinema and history owe a particular debt to Robert Rosentstone (Film on History/History on Film). There are very few book-length studies of French films about war. A close look at French cinematic explorations of war gives us a glimpse at the evolution of French identity over the course of the 20th century. It equally illuminates the story of how that nation's cinema has spent the past hundred years growing up: from its first steps leaning upon the coffee table of older literary conventions to its current adulthood as a means of cultural expression and critical exploration. One significant challenge is that the French war film is quite different from its Anglo-American counterpart. This book works through to a useful definition. It is a kind of cinematic creation that treats through form or content real armed conflicts that have significance in French history. The genre is often hybrid in nature and frequently uses metaphor. Its subjects are most often characterized collectively and in order to understand the past, psychology is emphasized over physical violence. Its plot structure is frequently non-linear and other forms over time have developed to place modernist historiography in doubt. Increasingly sophisticated, it has attained a point where historic meditations are often seamlessly but visibly integrated into both form and content. This is an important book for people interested in film studies and French studies as well as historians and historiographers.

Science Fiction Film develops a historical and cultural approach to the genre that moves beyond close readings of iconography and formal conventions. It explores how this increasingly influential genre has been constructed from disparate elements into a hybrid genre. Science Fiction Film goes beyond a textual exploration of these films to place them within a larger network of influences that includes studio politics and promotional discourses. The book also challenges the perceived limits of the genre - it includes a wide range of films, from canonical SF, such as Le voyage dans la lune, Star Wars and Blade Runner, to films that stretch and reshape the definition of the genre. This expansion of generic focus offers an innovative approach for students and fans of science fiction alike.

Golden Age Movie Actors as Writers 'Hollywood Lives' is about the movies in the Golden Age (1930-1950). It reviews some 175 star autobiographies distilling out of them the actor's accounts of the Communist Witch Hunt, racial prejudice, studio pressures, the glamour of movie stardom, the bosses, fellow actors and much else. This is the first ever book about movie actors as writers and contains many surprises. Graham Bannock, a British author now in his seventies, has been watching movies and reading about them since he was in his teens. He has authored or co-authored some 30 books, mostly on economics and business.

JOHN HUGHES AND EIGHTIES CINEMA

John Hughes is the acclaimed writer and director of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink and many other classic movies of the 1980s.

This book is the first full-length analysis of all of John Hughes's films throughout the 1980s; not only the features that he directed, but also those for which he provided the screenplay. By analysing these pictures and discussing their social and cultural significance in the wider context of the decade, Hughes's importance as a filmmaker will be considered, and his prominent contribution to cinema assessed. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a film which is considered to be among Hughes's most critically successful works and also one of his most structurally refined.

REVIEW ON AMAZON

If like me, you were fortunate enough to live through and grow up during the 80's and early 90's, you'll remember just how rich comedy was back then. This book on it's own puts most comedies of the modern era to shame as it is a homage to one of the most talented minds in the game. I am of course speaking of none other than the late great John Hughes. This is a great book for getting into the details of how a master of his art came about and created such cinematic gems. Hughes will be sorely missed which is why books like this keep his spirit and work alive

I'd say this book is for people who are nostalgic 20-somethings or cinema buffs, but all-round a good book for just about anyone who would like to know what made one of the funniest minds of Hollywood tick.

EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Today John Hughes is just as well known for the scripts he created for hugely popular family films throughout the 1990s, including Chris Columbus's blockbuster Home Alone (1990), Brian Levant's Beethoven (1992) and Nick Castle's Dennis the Menace (1993), written under his pen-name of Edmond Dantes. But even these accomplishments couldn't compare to the artistic diversity of his output throughout the eighties. Although it is easy to remember Hughes for his meteorically successful teen movies right the way through the including The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day (1986), he was every bit as adroit in his handling of suburban satires such as Mr Mom (1983) and Uncle Buck (1989), his wry observations of the great American holiday in National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and The Great Outdoors (1988), the trials of an exasperated everyman commuter in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), and the expectation of anxious new parents in She's Having a Baby (1988). Throughout the course of Hughes's career, there has rarely been a lack of variety in his choice of subject matter.

The definitive reference for all Wes Anderson fans. Loaded with rich imagery and detailed analysis of his incredible films - including the classics The Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom as well as Anderson's highly anticipated new releaseThe French Dispatch - this is the first book to feature all of Wes Anderson's movies in a single volume. Acclaimed film journalist Ian Nathan provides an intelligent and thoughtful examination of the work of one of contemporary film's greatest visionaries, charting the themes, visuals, and narratives that have come to define Anderson's work and contributed to his films an idiosyncratic character that's adored by his loyal fans. From Anderson's regular cast members - including Bill Murray and Owen Wilson - to his instantly recognisable aesthetic, recurring motifs and his scriptwriting processes, this in-depth collection will reveal how Wes Anderson became one of modern cinema's most esteemed and influential directors. Presented in a slipcase with 8-page gatefold section, this stunning package will delight all Wes Anderson devotees and movie lovers in general. Unauthorised and Unofficial.

This book examines a corpus of films and TV series released since the global financial crisis, addressing them as emblematic expressions of our age of precarity. The analysis of the motifs and characters of these case studies is built around notions originating from Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory and, in particular, the concept of chronotope, affirming the material and dynamic connection between form and content in artistic experience. This book observes how precarious lives are enacted in forms of spatio-temporal compositions which carry conceptual and ethical challenges for their viewers. This book falls within the film-philosophy framework and, although primarily directed to an academic audience, it provides an interdisciplinary account of the notion of cinematic precarity. It puts the embodied analysis of viewers' ethical participation in close dialogical relationship with a philosophical and sociological examination of current dynamics of inequality and exclusion.

From the early days of "worker films" that attracted working-class audiences to tiny, storefront theaters in the first decades of the twentieth century to the gritty films of social realism that brought audiences to theaters during the Great Depression and beyond, Hollywood has played a major role in defining the working class in America. This power of film to define the working class was never more apparent than in the Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s. Films from that epoch continue to have a profound effect on America's political and cultural lives decades later. Although the plight of the working class has been a Hollywood subject for more than a century, no significant work has explored Hollywood's role in shaping the modern working class. Most studies of the films of the late 1960s and 1970s explore the "New Hollywood," or the "Hollywood Renaissance," a brief period of directorial creativity in the industry. Some studies analyze the emergence of the "blockbuster" film and "four-wall" distribution that rejuvenated Hollywood with films like Jaws and Star Wars, while others examine the effect of the Vietnam War on the film industry. This study, however, explains how Hollywood created a false binary of the counterculture vs. the working class in an effort to appeal to the largest possible audience and, in doing so, helped to draw the lines for cultural and political discourse four decades later. Through narrative repetition, film has the power to create a world that becomes accepted as "the way things are." This happened in the mid-1970s when several significant films depicted the white working class as victim of a system that privileged the broad "counterculture," creating a world view that still flourishes in some circles of the white working and middle classes. This study makes that connection for the reader through close readings of various films of the era. As the first study to establish a direct connection between popular films of the 1970s and right-wing populist movements of today, this book helps to provide context for the more extreme rhetoric and activities of the Tea Party and other more fringe groups of the 2010s. By analyzing the depiction of the working class in films of the late 1960s and 1970s, this study provides the first look at how films of the era changed how the working class is viewed by others and by itself. This study also examines the political climate of the Nixon and Carter eras and demonstrates how concepts like Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" found their way to the big screen and helped to shape the future of the working class. Finally, this unique study explores how Hollywood, given a choice of providing an honest rendering of the era or exploiting its tensions to ensure better box office, made the latter choice. By breaking down iconic films like Easy Rider, Dirty Harry, Jaws, and Rocky, character studies like Scarecrow, Blue Collar, and Hard Times, and cult favorites like Joe, Billy Jack, and Medium Cool, author Robert A. Marcink provides a comprehensive look at how Hollywood's choice played a significant role in shaping the modern working class. By exploring films from both the Left and the Right, he also demonstrates that in Hollywood the message rarely strays too far from the ideological center. The Working Class in American Film is an important volume for all film collections. It is also an important volume for communications, sociology, political science, and history collections that explore the relationship between popular media and the shaping of American society and political discourse.

What is 'fun' about the Hollywood version of girlhood? Through re-evaluating notions of pleasure and fun, The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film forms a study of Hollywood girl teen films between 2000-2010. By tracing the aesthetic connections between films such as Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Hairspray (Shankman, 2007), and Easy A (Gluck, 2010), the book articulates the specific types of pleasure these films offer as a means to understand how Hollywood creates gendered ideas of fun. Rather than condemn these films as 'guilty pleasures' this book sets out to understand how they are designed to create experiences that feel as though they express desires, memories, or fantasies that girls supposedly share in common. Providing a practical model for a new approach to cinematic pleasures The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film proposes that these films offer a limited version of girlhood that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters.

This is a superb new study of Japanese culture in the post-war period, focusing on a handful of filmmakers who created movies for a politically conscious audience. Out of a background of war, occupation and the legacies of Japan's post-defeat politics there emerged a dissentient group of avant-garde filmmakers who created a counter-cinema that addressed a newly constituted, politically conscious audience. While there was no formal manifesto for this movement and the various key filmmakers of the period (Oshima Nagisa, Imamura Shohei, Yoshida Yoshishige, Hani Susumu, Wakamatsu Koji and Okamoto Kihachi) experimented with very different conceptions of visual style, it is possible to identify a sensibility that motivated many of these filmmakers: a generational consciousness based on political opposition that was intimately linked to the student movements of the 1950s, and shared experiences as Japan's first generation of post-war filmmakers artistically stifled by a monopolistic and hierarchal commercial studio system that had emerged reinvigorated in the wake of the 'red purges' of the late-1940s. "Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s" provides a much needed overview of these filmmakers and reconsiders the question of dissent in the cultural landscape of Japan in the post-war period.

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.