Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, transnational European cinema has risen, not only in terms of production but also in terms of a growing focus on multiethnic themes within the European context. This shift from national to trans-European filmmaking has been profoundly influenced by such historical developments as the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent ongoing enlargement of the European Union. In European Cinema after the Wall: Screening East-West Mobility, Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heuckelom have brought together essays that critically examine representations of post-1989 migration from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe, uncovering an array of common tropes and narrative devices that characterize the influences and portrayals of immigration. Featuring essays by contributors from backgrounds as divergent as film studies, Slavic and Russian studies, comparative literature, sociology, contemporary history, and communication and media studies, this volume will appeal to scholars of film, European history, and those interested in the impact of migration, diaspora, and the global flow of cinematic culture.

Since Toy Story, its first feature in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios has produced a string of commercial and critical successes including Monsters, Inc.; WALL-E; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; and Up. In nearly all of these films, male characters are prominently featured, usually as protagonists. Despite obvious surface differences, these figures often follow similar narratives toward domestic fulfillment and civic engagement. However, these characters are also hypermasculine types whose paths lead to postmodern social roles more revelatory of the current "crisis" that sociologists and others have noted in boy culture. In Pixar's Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age, Shannon R. Wooden and Ken Gillam examine how boys become men and how men measure up in films produced by the animation giant. Offering counterintuitive readings of boy culture, this book describes how the films quietly but forcefully reiterate traditional masculine norms in terms of what they praise and what they condemn. Whether toys or ants, monsters or cars, Pixar's males succeed or fail according to the "boy code," the relentlessly policed gender standards rampant in American boyhood. Structured thematically around major issues in contemporary boy culture, the book discusses conformity, hypermasculinity, social hierarchies, disability, bullying, and an implicit critique of postmodern parenting. Unprecedented in its focus on Pixar and boys in its films, this book offers a valuable perspective to current conversations about gender and cinema. Providing a critical discourse about masculine roles in animated features, Pixar's Boy Stories will be of interest to scholars of film, media, and gender studies and to parents.

Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film examines the portrayal of youth in American cinema with Jean Baudrillard's radical social theory and philosophical system. Kline uses Baudrillard's corpus to analyze the troubling effects of the portrayal of youth in American teen films, namely, its contribution to discursive violence against young people which holds such a prominent place in many adult-controlled, modern institutions like schools. This kind of violence has multiple iterations, including the inability to imagine youth as meaningful political actors, the insistence on taking teenagers to be morally impoverished, and the propensity for viewing young people as thoroughly heteronomous. While there are certainly pockets of exception, violent discourses often animate institutional disregard for youth. Kline promotes Baudrillard's fatal theory as a way for critical educators, philosophers, sociologists, and other concerned pedagogues to argue for an alteration in the way that youth is portrayed in American films, and to discourage the negative discourse that have colonized conceptions and treatment of young people.

This is the first book to examine the various uses of the Arthurian legend in Hollywood film, covering films from the 1920s to the present. The authors use five representational categories: intertextual collage (or "cult" film); melodrama, which focuses on the love triangle; conservative propaganda, pervasive during the Cold War; the Hollywood epic; and the postmodern quest, which commonly employs the grail portion of the legend. Arguing that filmmakers rely on the audience's rudimentary familiarity with the legend, the authors show that only certain features of the legend are activated at any particular time. This fascinating study shows us how the legend has been adapted and how through the popular medium of Hollywood films, the Arthurian legend has survived and flourished.

The cinematic tale of Harrison Marks' nudist feature "Naked As Nature Intended, the iconic naturist film that brought us bare breasts on Porthcurno beach, donkey-stroking in Clovelly and Pamela Green in her birthday suit. Behind the scenes exclusives and never before seen pictures.

This book maps father failure and redemption through three decades of Hollywood family films, revealing how libertarian notions that align agency with autonomy lead to new conflicts for the contemporary father. The films find resolution to these conflicts through a re-gendering of parenting as relationship. In their creation of a 'pure' fatherhood that is valorised as authentic for its lack of parental responsibilities, the films serve to challenge the perception that fathering enacted outside the nuclear family structure is fragile. McNulty Norton finds in the films a new essentialism that secures the pure relationship to the biological father, reinforcing his position in the face of changing family forms.

The pervasive image of New York's 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where "grindhouse cinema," the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind's eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate "exploitation" films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres. The contributors to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond consider "grindhouse cinema" from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of "grindhouse" itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the term's contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew.

This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott's original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.

A perfect blend of characterization, action and poetic images, John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made "A" Westerns a viable product for Hollywood in the sound era. By 1990, the Western had again been on a downswing when Dances with Wolves became both a critical and commercial success. This work examines these two films and twelve others--Red River, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Alamo, The Magnificent Seven, Ride the High Country, How the West Was Won, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Unforgiven--that hold unique spots in the genre's history. Full filmographic data are provided for each, along with an essay that blends plot synopsis, historical perspectives and the movie's place in the Western genre.

Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years. In the German Democratic Republic during the 1970s and 1980s, more than two hundred films and videos, many of them experimental, were made outside government-run institutions despite legal restrictions on independent filmmaking, and despite the state-owned DEFA studio system's resistance to experimental film. Many were by professional artists who incorporated their painted, sculpted, and performed works in their films and then re-integrated their films into their other artistic endeavors. In addition to showing and debating their films informally in private, these artists worked within existing institutions, establishing annual meetings at Dresden's Academy of Fine Arts, publishing on experimental film in official journals, and even exhibiting films at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Though pursued as political subversives by the Stasi and dismissed as dilettantes by older critics, these artists frequently engaged their detractors in open debate, advancing their creative itineraries by exposing conceptual problems lurking in the histories of art and cinema. Through extensive archival research, formal analyses of over a dozen films, and interpretation of their relation to their creators' work in other media, Seth Howes documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking in East German socialism's final years. Individual chapters examine Lutz Dammbeck's incorporation of painting, dance, literature, and experimental film into a critique of the (mass-)mediation of experience; the Autoperforationsartisten's use of film to problematize the notion of the "performance document"; Greifswald-based artists' integration of film into mail-art projects that crossed political borders and boundaries between media; and Yana Milev's blending of film and installation art to theorize the organization and segmentation of urban spaces. Seth Howes is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri.

Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in "star studies," Brazilian film has received comparatively little attention. As this volume demonstrates, however, the richness of Brazilian stardom extends well beyond the ubiquitous Carmen Miranda. Among the studies assembled here are fascinating explorations of figures such as Eliane Lage (the star attraction of Sao Paulo's Vera Cruz studios), cult horror movie auteur Coffin Joe, and Lazaro Ramos, the most visible Afro-Brazilian actor today. At the same time, contributors interrogate the inner workings of the star system in Brazil, from the pioneering efforts of silent-era actresses to the recent advent of the non-professional movie star.

The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir probes the meanings behind the depiction of psychiatry and psychological illness in film noir, and how these depictions contribute to an overall understanding about the noir cycle itself. In this study, Marlisa Santos examines the role that the popularization of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the use of psychoanalytic techniques to treat World War II soldiers, had on writers and filmmakers of noir. This popularization had a lasting effect on American culture, especially as ideas such as introspection and a morally neutral universe became status quo, and thereby became reflected in the noir series. The films analyzed in this study reveal a distillation of such ideas, a bringing to the surface concerns and fears regarding the contradictory, yet thrilling nature of psychoanalysis: the ability of a "science of the mind" to eliminate the mysteries of the human psyche and the simultaneous nature of this science to expose the fundamental unknowability of the human psyche. Indeed, Santos argues that noir itself might not have existed without the introduction of psychoanalysis into American culture.

This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the "truth" promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the "economic miracle" in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.

Philip D. Beidler, who served as an armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam, sees less and less of the hard-won perspective of the common soldier in what America has made of that war. Each passing year, he says, dulls our sense of immediacy about Vietnam's costs, opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary, neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become. Here Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war's lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with them. Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature, and film. His catalog of soldier slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one's sense of absurdity. His survey of the war's pop hits looks for meaning in the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads. Beidler also explains how ""Viet Pulp"" literature about snipers, tunnel rats, and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like Duong Thu Huong's Novel without a Name. Likewise we learn why the movie The Deer Hunter doesn't ""get it"" about Vietnam but why Platoon and We Were Soldiers sometimes nearly do. As Beidler takes measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at My Lai, and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a schoolteacher and hospital worker. Beidler also looks at Vietnam alongside other conflicts--including the war on international terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our sense of providential destiny and geopolitical invincibility but now realizes, with dismay, that those myths are still with us. ""Americans have always wanted their apocalypses,"" writes Beidler, ""and they have always wanted them now.

Film and theory have always gone hand in hand. In many ways, the professional academic study of cinema grew out of the revolutionary surges in literary and cultural theory in Europe. Since the 1970s, film theory has predominantly been a lens through which to wage philosophical and cultural war (in increasingly abstract terms), and cinema was in the right place at the right time. "Toward a New Film Aesthetic" argues that such an approach to film studies ultimately debilitates the study of film.How does film theory connect with an audience that experiences film far beyond the confines of the academy? How can film scholars remain relevant to film culture? These are the fundamental question that film scholars seem to have neglected. Film theory, simply put, has detached itself from meaningful discussions of cinema undertaken with mainstream audiences."Toward a New Film Aesthetic" is a radical attempt to connect the study of film with the actual viewing and consumption practices of mainstream cinematic culture. Isaacs argues that theory has rendered the majority of approaches to film insular, self-reflective, obtuse, and - in its worst incarnation - elitist. He redefines cinema aesthetics in terms of the obsessive consumption of cinematic texts that is the hallmark of contemporary film viewing.

This includes a brilliant line-up of international contributors that examine the implications of the portrayals of Nazis in low-brow culture and that culture's re-emergence today. "Nazisploitation!" examines past intersections of National Socialism and popular cinema and the recent reemergence of this imagery in contemporary visual culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, films such as "Love Camp 7" and "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" introduced and reinforced the image of Nazis as master paradigms of evil in what film theorists deem the "sleaze" film. More recently, Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds", as well as video games such as "Call of Duty: World at War", have reinvented this iconography for new audiences. In these works, the violent Nazi becomes the hyperbolic caricature of the "monstrous feminine" or the masculine sadist. Power-hungry scientists seek to clone the Fuhrer, and Nazi zombies rise from the grave. The history, aesthetic strategies, and political implications of such translations of National Socialism into the realm of commercial, low brow, and "sleaze" visual culture are the focus of this book. The contributors examine when and why the Nazisploitation genre emerged as it did, how it establishes and violates taboos, and why this iconography resonates with contemporary audiences.

Providing intriguing insights for students, film buffs, and readers of various genres of fiction, this fascinating book delves into the psychology of 100 well-known fictional characters. Our favorite fictional characters from books and movies often display an impressive and wide range of psychological attributes, both positive and negative. We admire their resilience, courage, humanity, or justice, and we are intrigued by other characters who show signs of personality disorders and mental illness-psychopathy, narcissism, antisocial personality, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among many other conditions. This book examines the psychological attributes and motivations of 100 fascinating characters that include examples of both accurate and misleading depictions of psychological traits and conditions, enabling readers to distinguish realistic from inaccurate depictions of human behavior. An introductory section provides a background of the interplay between psychology and fiction and is followed by psychological profiles of 100 fictional characters from classic and popular literature, film, and television. Each profile summarizes the plot, describes the character's dominant psychological traits or mental conditions, and analyzes the accuracy of such depictions. Additional material includes author profiles, a glossary of psychological and literary terms, a list of sources, and recommended readings. Provides an engaging and entertaining way to learn about both positive psychology and mental health issues through the behavior of interesting and often familiar characters, leading to a better understanding of human behavior Helps readers distinguish realistic depictions of psychological disorders from inaccurate ones, providing a basis for avoiding negative mental health stereotypes and stigma associated with mental illness Covers a wide range of behaviors and psychological disorders arranged in a convenient format, making it easy to find and learn about particular topics that can be read in or out of order

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art-the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe-proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

A HISTORY OF THE MOST CONTROVERSAL MOTION PICTURE EVERY MADE A hundred years have passed since the masterpiece of David Wark Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, first appeared on the screens of America, in the winter of 1915. It demonstrated that the cinema, no less than literature and no less than the stage, could become a topic of serious critical, esthetic, intellectual, political, social, and technical discussion. In this way it brought the motion picture into a position of commanding influence in the social life of the American nation. The denunciation continues, and the storm over the film serves as a barometer of the global conflict, involving forces and issues set in motion by, but no means limited to, race. From the beginning it touched off several emotionally and politically explosive, interrelated, parallel controversies-controversy over Griffith; controversy over the film; controversy over the subject-matter and its treatment; controversy over the controversy. As Griffith's official biographer Seymour Sterns main purpose of his book was to assemble, as extensively as possible, the rapidly vanishing record of what happened. You'll find Stern's writing on the subject as controversial as the film itself.

Recounts the life and career of Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlic in the form of a lexicon of film terms tied to anecdotes spanning Grlic's life. "I read a lot this year. Old, new, borrowed, blue. This was the best. The paradox of reading something so avidly that you can't put it down and then I got to the last 20 pages slowing down to a snail's pace and reading so slowly so that it wouldn't be over so quickly."-Mike Downey, European Film Academy From his post-Nazi-era childhood in Yugoslavia to his college years during the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Yugoslav dissolution wars, and his subsequent exile in the United States, these personal stories combine to provide insight into socialist film industries, contextualizing south Slavic film while also highlighting its contacts with Western filmmakers and film industry. From the introduction by Aida Vidan: The one hundred and seventy-seven film terms provide sometimes a direct and at other times a metaphoric path to Grlic's stories and concurrently serve as a self-referential mechanism to comment on a series of film attributes. The entries can be read in any order, allowing for the reader's own "montage" of the book's universe.... Grlic adroitly captures the absurdities and paradoxes in one's life resulting from the sort of tectonic shifts with which East European history abounds.

From David Lean's big screen Great Expectations to Alejandro Amenabar's reinvention of The Turn of the Screw as The Others, adaptations of literary classics are a constant feature of popular culture today. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies helps students master the history, theory and practice of analysing literary adaptations. Following an introductory overview of major debates and concepts, each chapter focuses on a canonical text and features: - Case study readings of adaptations in a variety of media, from film to opera, televised drama to animated comedy show, YA fiction to novel/graphic novel. - Coverage of popular appropriations and re-imaginings of the text. - Discussion questions and creative exercises throughout to guide students through their own analyses. - Annotated guides to further reading and viewing plus online resources. - The book also includes chapter overviews and a glossary of critical terms to give students quick access to key information for further study, reference and revision. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies covers adaptations of: Jane Eyre; Great Expectations; The Turn of the Screw; The Great Gatsby.

The notion of evil- does it exist? what forms does it take? -has always fascinated humankind. The evil underlying such atrocities as the Holocaust, Communist China's Tibetan abattoir, and the murderous ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs and Croats seems beyond explanations or analysis. In this powerfully original work, Oppenheimer analyzes the phenomenon of evil in a mental behavior that emerges in particular conditions. Oppenheimer argues that evil contains specific, predictable ingredients. By understanding its nature, we can diagnose its specific manifestations in mass murder, genocide, and serial killings. Utilizing a variety of cinematic and literary genres in developing its evidence, the book considers such familiar films as "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Brazil," and draws upon such literary works as Richard III, Oedipus the King and the Picture of Dorian Gray. Evil and the Demonic takes a bold first step, providing a framework in which to place the horrors of human existence.