Contributions by Apryl Alexander, Alisia Grace Chase, Brian Faucette, Laura E. Felschow, Lindsay Hallam, Rusty Hatchell, Dru Jeffries, Henry Jenkins, Jeffrey SJ Kirchoff, Curtis Marez, James Denis McGlynn, Brandy Monk-Payton, Chamara Moore, Drew Morton, Mark C. E. Peterson, Jayson Quearry, Zachary J. A. Rondinelli, Suzanne Scott, David Stanley, Sarah Pawlak Stanley, Tracy Vozar, and Chris Yogerst Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen fundamentally altered the perception of American comic books and remains one of the medium's greatest hits. Launched in 1986-"the year that changed comics" for most scholars in comics studies-Watchmen quickly assisted in cementing the legacy that comics were a serious form of literature no longer defined by the Comics Code era of funny animal and innocuous superhero books that appealed mainly to children. After Midnight: "Watchmen" after "Watchmen" looks specifically at the three adaptations of Moore's and Gibbons's Watchmen-Zack Snyder's Watchmen film (2009), Geoff Johns's comic book sequel Doomsday Clock (2017), and Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series on HBO (2019). Divided into three parts, the anthology considers how the sequels, especially the limited series, have prompted a reevaluation of the original text and successfully harnessed the politics of the contemporary moment into a potent relevancy. The first part considers the various texts through conceptions of adaptation, remediation, and transmedia storytelling. Part two considers the HBO series through its thematic focus on the relationship between American history and African American trauma by analyzing how the show critiques the alt-right, represents intergenerational trauma, illustrates alternative possibilities for Black representation, and complicates our understanding of how the mechanics of the show's production can complicate its politics. Finally, the book's last section considers the themes of nostalgia and trauma, both firmly rooted in the original Moore and Gibbons series, and how the sequel texts reflect and refract upon those often-intertwined phenomena.

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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.

Film World brings together key interviews with cinema's leading directors. The directors chosen represent many of the most influential film-makers of the last 50 years. All have been selected because of their cinematic vision, because they have a particular way of seeing the world and of filming it. All have created a body of work which is both hugely popular and critically acclaimed. This truly global range of directors hails from Australia, Britain, China and Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, North America, Poland, and Russia. Together, these illuminating interviews reveal how these visionary directors create images which speak to audiences the world over. The interviews are with: Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Robert Bresson, Jane Campion, John Cassavetes, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wei, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Takeshi Kitano, Im Kwon-taek, Mike Leigh, Manoel de Oliveira, Satyajit Ray, Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, Zhang Yimou

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.

Adaptations have occurred regularly since the beginning of cinema, but little recognition has been given to avant-garde adaptations of literary or other texts. This compelling study corrects such omissions by detailing the theory and practice of alternative adaptation practices from major avant-garde directors.

Avant-Garde films are often relegated to the margins because they challenge our traditional notions of what film form and style can accomplish. Directors who choose to adapt previous material run the risk of severe critical dismay; making films that are highly subjective interpretations or representations of existing texts takes courage and foresight. An avant-garde adaptation provokes spectators by making them re-think what they know about film itself, just as much as the previous source material.

"Adaptation and the Avant-Garde" examines films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, Guy Maddin, Jan Svankmajer and many others, offering illuminating insights and making us reconsider the nature of adaptation, appropriation, borrowing, and the re-imagining of previous sources.

Two horror films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2018, and one of them-The Shape of Water-won. Since 1990, the production of horror films has risen exponentially worldwide, and in 2013, horror films earned an estimated $400 million in ticket sales. Horror has long been the most popular film genre, and more horror movies have been made than any other kind. We need them. We need to be scared, to test ourselves, laugh inappropriately, scream, and flinch. We need to get through them and come out, blinking, still in one piece. Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film is a straightforward history written for the general reader and student that can serve as a comprehensive entry-level reference work. The volume provides a general introduction to the genre, serves as a guidebook to its film highlights, and celebrates its practitioners, trends, and stories. Starting with silent-era horror films and ending with 2020's The Invisible Man, Lost in the Dark looks at decades of horror movies. Author Brad Weismann covers such topics as the roots of horror in literature and art, monster movies, B-movies, the destruction of the American censorship system, international horror, torture porn, zombies, horror comedies, horror in the new millennium, and critical reception of modern horror. A sweeping survey that doesn't scrimp on details, Lost in the Dark is sure to satisfy both the curious and the completist.

While urban films often reinforce spatial stereotypes, they can also produce a resistant reading that helps transgress spatial boundaries, especially in in urban contexts where spatial inequalities and urban divisions are stark. This book reveals the nature of urban film's influence through the lens and space of Johannesburg.

In New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, editor Betty Kaklamanidou defiantly claims that "all films are adaptations". The wide-ranging chapters included in this book highlight the growing and evolving relevance of the field of adaptation studies and its many branding subfields. Armed with a wealth of methodologies, theoretical concepts, and sophisticated paradigms of case-studies analyses of the past, these scholars expand the field to new and exciting realms. With chapters on data, television, music, visuality, and transnationalism, this anthology aims to complement the literature of the field by asking answers to outstanding questions while proposing new ones: Whose stories have been adapted in the last few decades? Are films that are based on "true stories""simply adaptations of those real events? How do transnational adaptations differ from adaptations that target the same national audiences as the texts they adapt? What do long-running TV shows actually adapt when their source is a single book or novel? To attempt to answer these questions, New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation is organized in three parts. Part 1, "External Influences on Adaptation", delves into matters surrounding film adaptations without primarily focusing on textual analysis of the final cinematic product. Part 2, "Millennial TV and Franchise Adaptations", demonstrates that the contemporary television landscape has become fruitful terrain for adaptation studies. Part 3, "ElasTEXTity and Adaptation", explores different thematic approaches to adaptation studies and how adaptation extends beyond traditional media. Spanning media and the globe, contributors complement their research with tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, race studies, translation studies, and political science. Kaklamanidou makes it clear that adaptation is vital to sharing important stories and mythologies, as well as passing knowledge to new generations. The aim of this anthology is to open up the field of adaptation studies by revisiting the object of analysis and proposing alternative ways of looking at it. Scholars of cultural, gender, film, literary, and adaptation studies will find this collection innovative and thought-provoking.

There is no disputing that the coming of sound heralded a new era for adaptations. We take it for granted today that a film is enhanced by sound but it was not a view unanimously held in the early period of sound cinema. While there was a substantial degree of skepticism in the late 1920s and early 30s about the advantages of sound, what we would call technophobia today, the inclusion of speech in screen versions of literary and theatrical works, undeniably revised what it was to be an adaptation: words. Focusing on the promotional materials for "Adaptations in the Sound Era" Deborah Cartmell tracks early attempts to promote sound and the elevation of words in adaptations in the early sound period. The popular appeal of these films clearly stands in opposition to academic regard for them and the book accurately reflects on the presence and marketing of 'words' in a variety of adaptations from the introduction of sound to the mid 1930s. This book contextualizes a range of adaptations in relation to debates about 'picturizations' of books in the early sound era, including the reactions to the talking adaptation by writers such as F.R. Leavis, Irwin Panofsky, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene. Film adaptations of Shakespeare, Dickens, gothic fiction and biopics are also discussed in relation to their use and promotion of sound or, more precisely, words.

With more than 250 million speakers globally, the Lusophone world has a rich history of filmmaking. This edited volume explores the representation of the migratory experience in contemporary cinema from Portuguese-speaking countries, exploring how Lusophone films, filmmakers, producers, studios, and governments relay narratives of migration.

Morreale traces the development of the documentary films produced for presidential candidates from Calvin Coolidge in 1923 to George Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. The work provides insight into today's visually oriented presidential campaign by analyzing the production of candidates' images as the films evolve from classical to modern forms. Campaign films are usually overlooked by campaign scholars, yet they provide the fullest available visual portrait of a candidate during a campaign, they encapsulate persuasive appeals and strategies, and they illustrate Republican and Democratic candidates' different approaches to mediated communication. Morreale concludes that presidential campaign films provide a lens through which we can view both changes and continuities in American politics and culture. Recommended for scholars and students of communication, political science, and history.