From the silent era through the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the preeminent government filmmaking organization. In the United States, USDA films were shown in movie theaters, public and private schools at all educational levels, churches, libraries and even in open fields. For many Americans in the early 1900s, the USDA films were the first motion pictures they watched. And yet USDA documentaries have received little serious scholarly attention. The lack of serious study is especially concerning since the films chronicle over half a century of American farm life and agricultural work and, in so doing, also chronicle the social, cultural, and political changes in the United States at a crucial time in its development into a global superpower.

Focusing specifically on four key films, Winn explicates the representation of African Americans in these films within the socio-political context of their times. The book provides a clearer understanding of how politics and filmmaking converged to promote a governmentally sanctioned view of racism in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

This book analyzes Walt Disney's impact on entertainment, new media, and consumer culture in terms of a materialist, psychoanalytic approach to fantasy. The study opens with a taxonomy of narrative fantasy along with a discussion of fantasy as a key concept within psychoanalytic discourse. Zornado reads Disney's full-length animated features of the "golden era" as symbolic responses to cultural and personal catastrophe, and presents Disneyland as a monument to Disney fantasy and one man's singular, perverse desire. What follows after is a discussion of the "second golden age" of Disney and the rise of Pixar Animation as neoliberal nostalgia in crisis. The study ends with a reading of George Lucas as latter-day Disney and Star Wars as Disney fantasy. This study should appeal to film and media studies college undergraduates, graduates students and scholars interested in Disney.

From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing the movies he discusses in a historical and literary context, Gehring explores the genre's obession with death and the characters' failure to be shocked by it. Movies discussed include: Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22, Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Heathers, and Natural Born Killers.

A key collection of essays that looks at the specific issues related to the documentary form. Questions addressed include `What is documentary?' and `How fictional is nonfiction?'

From the precocious charms of Shirley Temple to the box-office behemoth Frozen and its two young female leads, Anna and Elsa, the girl has long been a figure of fascination for cinema. The symbol of (imagined) childhood innocence, the site of intrigue and nostalgia for adults, a metaphor for the precarious nature of subjectivity itself, the girl is caught between infancy and adulthood, between objectification and power. She speaks to many strands of interest for film studies: feminist questions of cinematic representation of female subjects; historical accounts of shifting images of girls and childhood in the cinema; and philosophical engagements with the possibilities for the subject in film. This collection considers the specificity of girls' experiences and their cinematic articulation through a multicultural feminist lens which cuts across the divides of popular/art-house, Western/non Western, and north/south. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, the contributors bring a new understanding of the global/local nature of girlhood and its relation to contemporary phenomena such as post-feminism, neoliberalism and queer subcultures. Containing work by established and emerging scholars, this volume explodes the narrow post-feminist canon and expands existing geographical, ethnic, and historical accounts of cinematic cultures and girlhood.

This book proposes an interpretive strategy by which religious film-analysts can develop the kind of analysis that engages with and critiques both cultural and religious practice. In their study of religion and film, religious film-analysts have tended to privilege religion. Uniquely, this study treats the two disciplines as genuine equals, by regarding both liturgy and film as representational media. Steve Nolan argues that, in each case, subjects identify with a represented 'other' which joins them into a narrative where they become participants in an ideological 'reality'. Finding many current approaches to religious film-analysis lacking, "Film, Lacan and the Subject of Film" explores the film theory other writers ignore, particularly that mix of psychoanalysis, Marxism and semiotics - often termed Screen theory - that attempts to understand how cinematic representation shapes spectator identity. Using translations and commentary on Lacan not originally available to Screen theorists, Nolan returns to Lacan's contribution to psychoanalytic film theory and offers a sustained application to religious practice, examining several 'priest films' and real-life case study to expose the way liturgical representation shapes religious identity. "Film, Lacan and the Subject of Film" proposes an interpretive strategy by which religious film-analysts can develop the kind of analysis that engages with and critiques both cultural and religious practice.

Canadian film director David Cronenberg has long been a figure of artistic acclaim and public controversy. Bursting into view with a trio of shocking horror films in the 1970s, Cronenbergs work has become increasingly complex in its sensibilities and inward-looking in its concerns and themes. This trajectory culminates in the multiplex successes of his most recent films, which appear to conclude a straightforward evolutionary arc that begins in the cold outside of shock-horror and arrives in the warm embrace of commercial and critical success.Scott Wilsonargues persuasivelythat Cronenbergs career can be divided into broad thematic stages and instead offers a complex examination of the relationship between three inter-related terms: the director as auteur; the industry that support or denies commercial opportunity; and the audience who receive, interpret and support (or decry) the vision represented on screen. The Politics of Insects provides an opportunity to explore Cronenbergs films in relation to each other in terms of their thematic continuity, and in terms of their relationship to industrial concerns and audience responses.

This first comprehensive and most in-depth history of cinematic pornography details sex in film from 100 years ago to today, concentrating on the quarter-century since Deep Throat, when pornography became a subject of popular culture.
Luke Ford is the best-known source on the porn film world today-the only journalist writing about the industry who is not also employed by it. This unique position gives Ford the objectivity to report without bias, and he is often consulted as a trusted news source on the porn industry by many major news publications.
Insightful, entertaining, and bold, A History of X takes us from the primitive film studios of the 1900s, where porn got its start as a daring experiment in sexual freedom, to the closed-door, multi-million-dollar porn-film corporations of today. Ford includes exclusive interviews with the stars, the producers, and the distributors as well as detailed data on censorship attempts from the early days to the present. He documents the controversial careers of top porn stars Marilyn Chambers, John Holmes, Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, Gerard Damiano, Georgina Spelvin, Traci Lords, Max Hardcore, Ginger Lynn, and others, revealing both the great benefits and the tragic consequences that often come from fame and fortune in the porn industry.
He also discusses the many controversial aspects to the business, including Mafia influences, the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the industry, and the myths and realities behind child pornography.
Extensively researched and documented, A History of X is a fascinating expose of a business few dare to touch.

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation's social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan's past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Brooks Landon's book is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and near state-of-the-art. It concerns science fiction film and, toward the end, almost becomes SF in its provocative speculations on the future of such film. His study is really two books in one. The first part argues that most criticism of SF film has been inadequate because it is based on literary rather than film-specific standards. The second argues that SF film will soon become either obsolete or be totally transformed through new computer technology. What ties them together is the author's concern with what might be called the SF ethos or SF thinking, so that science fiction can be seen to encompass not only SF in print, film, TV and comic books, but has become all-pervasive in contemporary culture. At present, Landon argues that SF film may have exhausted itself as a genre but new electronic technology--computer animation, interactive narratives, and virtual reality--promises to radically transform SF film and possibly create a synthesis of the divergent trends of SF literature and film. Production technology has become the new story, one more interesting than the narrative it ostensibly supports. Landon believes we are at the threshold of a new age, similar to the pioneer years of filmmaking a hundred years ago.

Traditionally identified with screwball comedies, Frank Capra has seldom been considered a conduit for populist concerns and issues. In this book, Gehring examines the influence of both Will Rogers and Frank Capra on modern populist movies, providing important background on Capra's links to the crackerbarrel personality of Rogers. He follows this theme forward, examining the populist roots in such films as "The Electric Horseman," "Field of Dreams," "Dave," "Grand Canyon," and others. A final chapter is a close-up of the contemporary, Capra-like director, Ron Howard. The inclusion of a bibliography and selected filmography makes this book an important contribution to film studies, popular culture, and American humor.

While the myth of a classless America endures in the American Dream, the very stratification that it denies unfairly affects the majority of Americans. Study after study shows that it's increasingly difficult for working class people to achieve upward mobility in the US - so how does the American Dream continue to thrive? J. Emmett Winn shows us that the American Dream continued glorification in contemporary Hollywood cinema should not be ignored. Through his thoughtful analysis of films as diverse as Working Girl, Titanic, Pretty Woman, Flashdance, The Firm, Good Will Hunting, Saturday Night Fever, Wall Street and many others, Winn shows that contemporary Hollywood is very much in the business of keeping the Dream alive.

Narrative Theory and Adaptation offers a concise introduction to narrative theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Spike Jonze's critically acclaimed 2002 film Adaptation. Understanding narrative theory is crucial to make sense of the award-winning film Adaptation. The book explicates, in clear prose for beginners, four key facets important to the narrative theory of film: the distinction between practical vs. critical theory, the role of adaptation, the process of narrative comprehension, and notions of authorship. It then works to unlock Adaptation using these four keys in succession, considering how the film demands a theoretical understanding of the storytelling process. In using this unusual case study of a film, the author makes the case for the importance of narrative theory as a general perspective for filmmakers, critics, and viewers alike.

In this book, scholars from across the world explore the appearance, portrayal and significance of the suburb on film. By the mid-20th Century, supported by changes in transportation, suburbs became the primary location of entire national populations and films about the suburbs began to concertedly reflect those suburbs' significance as well as their increasingly lively cultures! Suburbia very soon became filmurbia, as films of the suburbs and those made in the suburbs reflected both the positive and the negative aspects of burgeoning suburban life. Film-makers explored the existences of new suburbanites, their interests, their newly emerging neighbourhood practices, their foibles, their fantasies and their hopes. Whether depicting love, ambition, commerce, family, home or horror, whether traveling to or living in suburban spaces, whether exhibiting beauty, brazenness or brutality, the films of suburbia capture human life in all its diverse guises.

From "Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western" is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film.
Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre
Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present
Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires
Deepens an audience's understanding of the genre's most important works, including "Shane, Stagecoach," "The Searchers, Unforgiven," and "Kill Bill"
Contains numerous illustrations of the films and issues discussed.

This book discusses the collapse and transformation of the Hollywood movie machine in the twenty-first century, and the concomitant social collapse being felt in nearly every aspect of society. Wheeler Winston Dixon examines key works in cinema from the era of late-stage capitalists, analyzing Hollywood films and the current wave of cinema developed outside of the Hollywood system alike. Dixon illustrates how movies and television programs across these spaces have adopted, reflected, and generated a society in crisis, and with it, a crisis for the cinematic industry itself.

This book investigates the ways in which Charles Dickens's mature fiction, prison novels of the twentieth century, and prison films narrate the prison. To begin with, this study illustrates how fictional narratives occasionally depart from the realities of prison life, and interprets these narrations of the prison against the foil of historical analyses of the experience of imprisonment in Britain and America. Second, this book addresses the significance of prison metaphors in novels and films, and uses them as starting points for new interpretations of the narratives of its corpus. Finally, this study investigates the ideological underpinnings of prison narratives by addressing the question of whether they generate cultural understandings of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the prison. While Dickens's mature fiction primarily represents the prison experience in terms of the unjust suffering of many sympathetic inmates, prison narratives of the twentieth century tend to focus on one newcomer who is sent to prison because he committed a trivial crime and then suffers under a brutal system. And while the fate of this unique character is represented as being terrible and unjust, the attitude towards the mass of ordinary prisoners is complicit with the common view that 'real' criminals have to be imprisoned. Such prison narratives invite us to sympathize with the quasi-innocent prisoner-hero but do not allow us to empathize with the 'deviant' rest of the prison population and thus implicitly sanction the existence of prisons. These delimitations are linked to wider cultural demarcations: the newcomer is typically a member of the white, male, and heterosexual middle class, and has to go through a process of symbolic 'feminization' in prison that threatens his masculinity (violent and sadistic guards, 'homosexual' rapes and time in the 'hole' normally play an important role). The ill-treatment of this prisoner-hero is then usually countered by means of his escape so that the manliness of our hero and, by extension, the phallic power of the white middle class are restored. Such narratives do not address the actual situation in British and American prisons. Rather, they primarily present us with stories about the unjust victimization of 'innocent' members of the white and heterosexual middle class, and they additionally code coloured and homosexual inmates as 'real' criminals who belong where they are. Furthermore, Dickens's mature fiction focuses on 'negative' metaphors of imprisonment that describe the prison as a tomb, a cage, or in terms of hell. By means of these metaphors, which highlight the inmates' agony, Dickens condemns the prison system as such. Twentieth-century narratives, on the other hand, only critique discipline-based institutions but argue in favour of rehabilitative penal styles. More specifically, they describe the former by using 'negative' metaphors and the latter through positive ones that invite us to see the prison as a womb, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, a catalyst of intense friendship or as an 'academy'. Prison narratives of the twentieth century suggest that society primarily needs such reformative prisons for coloured and homosexual inmates.

This entertaining and insightful book is the first devoted exclusively to the films that have earned a special place in motion picture history by pushing the 'cinematic envelope' with their treatment of provocative subjects and themes. "Obscene, Indecent, Immoral & Offensive: 100+ Years of Censored, Banned and Controversial Films" chronicles the history of Hollywood censorship and the films that were banned, censored, and condemned by the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency. Stephen Tropiano offers readers insightful and accessible analysis of films that were branded 'controversial' at the time of their release due to explicit language, nudity, graphic sex, violence, and their treatment of 'adult' subject matter and themes.The films profiled include "The Birth of a Nation", "Anatomy of a Murder", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", "Baby Doll", "Blackboard Jungle", "Bonnie and Clyde", "The Wild Bunch", "A Clockwork Orange", "Natural Born Killers", "Caligula", "Rosemary's Baby", "Life of Brian", "The Last Temptation of Christ", and "The Passion of the Christ".

Modernism both influenced and was fascinated by the rhetorical and aesthetic manifestations of fascism. In examining how four artists and writers represented fascist leaders, Annalisa Zox-Weaver aims to achieve a more complex understanding of the modernist political imagination. She examines how photographer Lee Miller, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, writer Gertrude Stein and journalist Janet Flanner interpret, dramatize and exploit Hitler, Goering and Petain. Within their own artistic medium, each of these modernists explore confrontations between private and public identity, and historical narrative and the construction of myth. This study makes use of extensive archival material, such as letters, photographs, journals, unpublished manuscripts and ephemera, and includes ten illustrations. This interdisciplinary perspective opens up wider discussions of the relationship between artists and dictators, modernism and fascism, and authority and representation.