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.

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophuls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

This book explores cultural conceptions of the child and the cinematic absence of black children from contemporary Hollywood film. Debbie Olson argues that within the discourse of children's studies and film scholarship in relation to the conception of "the child," there is often little to no distinction among children by race-the "child" is most often discussed as a universal entity, as the embodiment of all things not adult, not (sexually) corrupt. Discussions about children of color among scholars often take place within contexts such as crime, drugs, urbanization, poverty, or lack of education that tend to reinforce historically stereotypical beliefs about African Americans. Olson looks at historical conceptions of childhood within scholarly discourse, the child character in popular film and what space the black child (both African and African American) occupies within that ideal.

Screenwriters and Screenwriting is an innovative, fresh and lively book that is useful for both screenwriting practice and academic study. It is international in scope, with case studies and analyses from the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland and Denmark. The book presents a distinctive collection of chapters from creative academics and critical practitioners that serve one purpose: to put aspects of screenwriting practice into their relevant contexts. Focusing on how screenplays are written, developed and received, the contributors challenge assumptions of what 'screenwriting studies' might be, and celebrates the role of the screenwriter in the creation of a screenplay. It is intended to be thought provoking and stimulating, with the ultimate aim of inspiring current and future screenwriting practitioners and scholars.

Screenplay and Narrative Theory draws attention to the notion that in order to comprehend complex narrative dynamics, which are encountered in a great variety of narrative genres, forms, and formats, a more comprehensive theory of narrative is required. George Varotsis explains how a work of narrative functions synergistically and systemically, as well as elucidates the heuristic problem-solving mechanisms that are employed in various structural levels of thought processes, which allow the coherent accumulative derivative we call a story to emerge. The transition from an empirical to theoretical perspective is achieved by introducing characteristics of complex narrative systems: a network of narrative components, i.e. characters, structure, goals, motivations, theme, plot and subplots, narrative action, etc., which are arranged hierarchically over three fundamental levels of structure, i.e. deep, intermediate, and surface structure, that interact parallel to one another in non-linear ways. Varotsis tackles questions about how stories semantically emerge in the underlying dynamics that allow a work of narrative to function as a unified whole.

As in western cinema, cross-dressing is a recurrent theme in Turkish film. But what do these films, whose characters typically cross-dress in order to escape enemies or other threats, tell us about the modern history of the Turkish Republic? This book examines cross-dressing in Turkish films in the context of formative events in modern Turkish political history, arguing that this trope coincides with and is illustrative of trauma induced by Turkey's multiple coup d'etats, periods of authoritarianism, enforced secularism and 'modernization'. Burcu Dabak Ozdemir analyses five case study films wherein she reveals that cross-dressing characters are able to escape persecutors and surveillance - key instruments of oppression during Turkey's coups. She shows how cross-dressing in the films examined become a destabilising force, a form of implicit resistance against state power, both political and in terms of binaries of gender and identity, and a means to register moments of national trauma. The book historicises the concept of cross-dressing in modern Turkey by examining what the author argues is a formative trauma worked through in the films examined: the westernization policies of the Kemalist regime whose most immediate symbolic presence was worn - the enforced adoption of western dress by citizens. Of interest to scholars of gender, queer, film and trauma studies, the book will also appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Turkish culture and society.

This book presents a historical overview of the Indonesian film industry, the relationship between censorship and representation, and the rise of Islamic popular culture. It considers scholarship on gender in Indonesian cinema through the lens of power relations. With key themes such as nationalism, women's rights, polygamy, and terrorism which have preoccupied local filmmakers for decades, Indonesia cinema resonates with the socio-political changes and upheavals in Indonesia's modern history and projects images of the nation through the debates on gender and Islam. The text also sheds light on broader debates and questions about contemporary Islam and gender construction in contemporary Indonesia. Offering cutting edge accounts of the production of Islamic cinema, this new book considers gendered dimensions of Islamic media creation which further enrich the representations of the 'religious' and the 'Islamic' in the everyday lives of Muslims in South East Asia.

Satire is often defined as a moral and rhetorical art that engages in social critique through wit and ridicule. During its long history it has come in many forms and genres as well as in different types of media (verse, drama, rhetorical performance, prose, cartoons, journalism, film, TV, internet). Here, Nilsson examines American film satire produced during the 1990s and how its style and form cue viewers towards constructing satirical meaning. The study offers an explanation for how a particular selection of films turned material circulating in American culture of the 1990s into satirical experiences for viewers and finds that there are elements of resistance to mainstream culture in the original material: resistance to norms and conventions in politics, to mainstream news channels and Hollywood, and to official American history.

Here is the astonishing true story of Bollywood, a sweeping portrait about a country finding its identity, a movie industry that changed the face of India, and one man's struggle to become a star. Shah Rukh Khan's larger than life tale takes us through the colorful and idiosyncratic Bollywood movie industry, where fantastic dreams and outrageous obsessions share the spotlight with extortion, murder, and corruption. Shah Rukh Khan broke into this $1.5 billion business despite the fact that it has always been controlled by a handful of legendary film families and sometimes funded by black market money. As a Muslim in a Hindu majority nation, exulting in classic Indian cultural values, Shah Rukh Khan has come to embody the aspirations and contradictions of a complicated culture tumbling headlong into American style capitalism. His story is the mirror to view the greater Indian story and the underbelly of the culture of Bollywood.

"A bounty for cinema lovers everywhere."
--Mira Nair, Director, The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding

"King of Bollywood is the all-singing, all-dancing back stage pass to Bollywood. Anupama Chopra chronicles the political and cultural story of India with finesse and insight, through fly-on-wall access to one of its biggest, most charming and charismatic stars."
-- Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend it Like Beckham
"The "Easy Rider Raging Bull" of the Bollywood industry and essential reading for any Shah Rukh Khan fan."
--Emma Thompson, actress
"Anu Chopra infuses the pivotal moments of Shah Rukh Khan's life with an edge-of-your-seat tension worthy of the best Bollywood blockbusters."
--Kirkus

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.

Since the earliest days of the nation, US citizenship has been linked to military service. Even though blacks fought and died in all American wars, their own freedom was usually restricted or denied. In many ways, World War II exposed this contradiction. As demand for manpower grew during the war, government officialsand military leaders realized that the war could not be won without black support. To generate African American enthusiasm, the federal government turned to mass media. Several government films were produced and distributed, movies that have remained largely unexamined by scholars. Kathleen M. German delves into the dilemma of race and the federal government's attempts to appeal to black patriotism and pride even while postponing demands for equality and integration until victory was achieved. German's study intersects three disciplines: the history of the African American experience in World War II, the theory of documentary film, and the study of rhetoric. One of the main films of the war era, The Negro Soldier, fractured the long tradition of degrading minstrel caricatures by presenting a more dignifiedpublic image of African Americans. Along with other government films, the narrative within The Negro Soldier transformed the black volunteer into an able soldier. It included African Americans in the national mythology by retelling American history to recognize black participation. As German reveals, through this new narrative with more dignified images, The Negro Soldier and other films performed rhetorical work by advancing the agenda of black citizenship.

This is a beautifully written study, mixing film studies with cultural studies, of how the Hollywood film industry has treated the 'Other' throughout its history. In "Otherness in Hollywood Cinema", Michael Richardson argues that the Hollywood system has been the only national cinema with the resources and inclination to explore images of others through stories set in exotic and faraway places. He traces many of the ways in which Hollywood has constructed otherness, and discusses the extent to which those images have persisted and conditioned today's understanding. Hollywood was from the beginning teeming with people who had experienced cultural displacement. Coaxing the finest talents from around the world and needing to produce films with an almost universal appeal, Hollywood confounded American insularity while simultaneously presenting a vision of 'America' to the world. The book examines a range of genres from the perspective of otherness, including the Western, film noir, and zombie movies. Films discussed include "Birth of a Nation", "The New World", "The Searchers", "King Kong", "Apocalypse Now", "Blade Runner", "Jaws", and "Dead Man". Erudite and highly informed, this is a sweeping survey of how the American film industry has portrayed the foreign and the exotic.

A volume in Research in Queer Studies Series Editors Paul Chamness Miller and Hidehiro Endo, Akita International University The book examines the links between literature and film in Latin America by using queer theory and a series of recent cultural productions whose arguments destabilize traditional gender roles and heteronormative masculinity. For many years, the connections between a literary text and its film adaptation have been considered only from the point of view of the latter's fidelity to the written work, which many scholars imagined to be the original that filmmakers needed to respect. Within the last two decades, however, the idea of adaptation fidelity has been challenged by a number of critics who refute the existence of an original text and promote the notion of an ambiguous and complex relationship between a literary work and its film adaptation. Based on such developments and with the help of queer theory, this book questions and revises several crucial theoretical approximations that analyze the relations between the two art forms in an attempt to overcome the limitations of fidelity discourse. This is the first book-length study that seeks to examine, with the appropriate detail, the connections between film and literature in Latin America through the lenses of queer theory and by focusing on the representations of numerous practices that do not fit within the general framework of heteronormative sexuality.

An approachable guide to Shakespeare on film, this book establishes the differences between stage and screen. It covers the history of Shakespeare on the screen since 1899, and discusses various modes and conventions of adaptations. Thoroughly updated to include the most recent films, for instance Joss Whedon's 2013 Much Ado About Nothing, it also explores the latest technology, such as DVD and Blu-ray, as well as live stage-to-screen productions. It also includes an exclusive interview with filmmaker John Wyver, discussing his own adaptations for the small screen.

Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DusanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.

In this book, Tal S. Shamir sets out to identify cinema as a novel medium for philosophy and an important way of manifesting and developing philosophical thought. The volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the nature of philosophy's potential-or, more strongly put, its need-to be manifested cinematically. Drawing on the fields of cinema, philosophy, and media studies, Cinematic Philosophy adds film to the traditional list of ways through which philosophy can be created, concentrating on the unique potential of the cinematic medium to effectively put forward and create philosophy. In the process, the book opens up innovative horizons for new types of knowledge and wisdom grounded in contemporary contexts and philosophical thought. Philosophy, best characterized as the love of wisdom, is not dependent on a specific medium nor solely situated within written text or oral lectures. Shamir asserts that philosophy can, should, and must be manifested and identified in a range of different platforms.

Meta-Narrative in the Movies investigates narrative theory through close analysis of films featuring stories and storytelling. The cinematic interpretations investigate the role of story creation in knowing ourselves and planning our future, in structuring social relationships, and in sharpening our experience of popular culture.

This ground-breaking volume is the first of its kind to examine the extraordinary prevalence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre and performance. Chapters range from considerations of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to explorations of the Gothic's power to haunt contemporary playwriting, macabre tourism and site-specific performance. By taking familiar Gothic motifs, such as the Gothic body, the monster and Gothic theatricality, and bringing them to a new contemporary stage, this collection provides a fresh and comprehensive take on a popular genre. Whilst the focus of the collection falls upon Gothic drama, the contents of the book will embrace an interdisciplinary appeal to scholars and students in the fields of theatre studies, literature studies, tourism studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and history.

Both film noir and the Weimar street film hold a continuing fascination for film spectators and film theorists alike. The female characters, especially the alluring femmes fatales, remain a focus for critical and popular attention. In the tradition of such attention, "Dangerous Dames" focuses on the femme fatale and her antithesis, the femme attrapee.
Unlike most theorists, Jans Wager examines these archetypes from the perspective of the female spectator and rejects the persistence of vision that allows a reading of these female characters only as representations of unstable postwar masculinity. Professor Wager suggests that the woman in the audience has always seen and understood these characters as representations of a complex aspect of her existence.
"Dangerous Dames" looks at the Weimar street films "The Street," "Variety," "Asphalt," and "M" and the film noir movies "The Maltese Falcon," "Gun Crazy," and "The Big Heat." This book opens the doors to spectators and theorists alike, suggesting cinematic pleasures outside the bounds of accepted readings and beyond the narrow categorization of film noir and the Weimar street film as masculine forms.

This book brings specialists in religious studies, African-American studies, history, and political science, together with a media librarian to examine violence as it is presented in films and how instructors can use films to teach about violence. The object of inquiry is the vulnerability of socially oppressed people to physical violence and to institutionalized patterns of discrimination, herein termed structural violence. The susceptibility of women to violence provides an example that is discussed in detail, revealing both merits and weaknesses in film treatment of gender. The full effect of violence is considered, from the abuse of the individual to the wartime mobilization of entire societies. Chapters also look at the benefits and problems of using films in the classroom and provide resources helpful to instructors, such as sample discussion and study guides, a bibliography, and a filmography.

This turn-of-the-century moment - when queer love has become increasingly visible in both popular culture and socio-political realms - provides an ideal occasion for a critical examination of same-sex love stories in the media. Focusing primarily on film and televisual texts from the ten years before and after the millennium, the essays collected in Queer Love in Film and Television ask how recent films and television programs play with, imitate, subvert, mock, critique, and queer the romantic narrative conventions so common in Western culture. The collection follows the trajectory of the conventional romance narrative, from the pursuit of romantic love to the creation of families, and then it pushes further, into marginal regions where conventional narratives fail to venture, and then turns back to consider how that narrative is itself transformed (or queered) through adaptation.