Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney. Reviews of the original edition: '...fills a gap in film studies...the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.'

This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority - school, church, family. Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston, Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, Theodor Adorno, Simon Frith, and Dick Hebdige, the author draws an innovative and flexible model of a cultural history of youth. Originally published in 1992.

An increasingly pervasive influence on contemporary European cinema and mainstream Hollywood, American independent films have frequently provided the most experimental and distinctive voices in US cinema. A whole generation of innovative and idiosyncratic American film-makers, including Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes, Hal Hartley and Spike Lee, emerged during the critical and commercial renaissance of the late 1980s and 90s.
In this revised and updated new edition, Jason Wood provides a guide to one hundred of the most interesting and influential American independent films, featuring indie classics such as "Shadows," "Blood Simple "and"""Reservoir Dogs," with twenty-five brand new entries, including recent releases such as "Old Joy," "Junebug" and "Me and You and Everyone We Know." Each entry includes a plot synopsis, a commentary on the film's significance, production and exhibition history and cross-references to other films. The new edition also includes prefaces by film-makers Tom Kalin and Scott McGehee and David Siegel, as well as an introduction by Jason Wood charting the history and defining features of American independent film.

As a rapidly aging continent, Europe increasingly depends on the successful integration of migrants. Unfortunately, contemporary political and media discourses observe and frequently also support the development of nationalist, eurosceptic and xenophobic reactions to immigration and growing multiethnicity. Confronting this trend, European cinema has developed and disseminated new transcultural and postcolonial alternatives that might help to improve integration and community cohesion in Europe, and this book investigates these alternatives in order to identify examples of good practices that can enhance European stability. While the cinematic spectrum is as wide and open as most notions of Europeanness, the films examined share a fundamental interest in the Other. In this qualitative film analysis approach, particular consideration is given to British, French, German, and Spanish productions, and a comparison of multiethnic conviviality in Chicano cinema.

Part romantic comedy, part sitcom, part social drama, L'Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment) recounts a familiar 'youth' ritual - the move from university to 'the real world', the often complicated personal, romantic and cultural encounters that ensue, and the moral uncertainties that characterize that key biological and physiological developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood. French director Cedric Klapisch showcases the extraordinary colour and beauty of Barcelona's architecture, and places his hero Xavier at the heart of this smartly written film, which makes a series of wry observations on educational exchange programmes, multi-culturalism, and the direction European youth might take in the twenty-first century. This book addresses the topic of Europe's youth generation, paying particular attention to the ways in which the film depicts the transition from adolescence to adulthood as allegory for the experiences of European society as it moves through periods of readjustment towards uncertain futures. It also looks into the ecosystem of contemporary French cinema, the Erasmus programme and its influence on youth experience, and identity politics in relation to 'nationhood' and 'European-ness'. The book also examines the two sequels to the film - Russian Dolls (2005) and Chinese Puzzle (2013) - and how the complications faced by the main characters across the trilogy suggest that the move to adulthood is a never-ending process of growing up and reaching a level of self-actualization.

Easy A (2010) is the last significant box-office success in the high-school teen movie subgenre and a film that has already been deemed a 'classic' by many cultural commentators and popular film critics. By applying interdisciplinary insight to a relatively overlooked movie in academic discussion, Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? is the first in-depth volume that places the movie within several key contexts and concepts of intertextuality, gender, genre and adaptation, and social discourse. Through the unpacking of a complex narrative that draws its plot from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and shares affinities with John Hughes' paradigmatic films from the 1980s and key films from the 1990s, this volume presents Easy A as a palimpsest for the millennial generation. Clear and comprehensive, the book argues that Easy A marks the end of the commercially successful high-school teen comedy and discusses the reasons through a comparative synchronic and semi-diachronic historical comparison of the film with contemporary cinematic texts and those of the 1980s and 1990s.

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater's Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film's many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater's singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all people.

Superheroes have been the major genre to emerge from comics and graphic novels, saturating popular culture with images of muscular men and sexy women. A major aspect of this genre is identity in the roles played by individuals, the development of identities through extended stories and in the ways the characters inspire audiences. This collection analyses stories from popular comics franchises such as Batman, Captain America, Ms Marvel and X-Men, alongside less well known comics such as Kabuki and Flex Mentallo. It explores what superhero narratives can reveal about our attitudes towards femininity, race, maternity, masculinity and queer culture. Using this approach, the volume asks questions such as why there are no black supervillains in mainstream comics, how second wave feminism and feminist film theory may help us to understand female comic book characters, the ways in which Flex Mentallo transcends the boundaries of straightness and gayness and how both fans and industry appropriate the sexual identity of superheroes. The book was originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

There are many books on the technical aspects of film and video editing. Much rarer are books on how editors think and make creative decisions. Filled with timeless principles and thought-provoking examples from a variety of international films, the second edition of Karen Pearlman's Cutting Rhythms offers an in-depth study of the film editor's rhythmic creativity and intuition, the processes and tools editors use to shape rhythms, and how rhythm works to engage audiences in film. While respecting the importance of intuitive flow in the cutting room, this book offers processes for understanding what editing intuition is and how to develop it. This fully revised and updated edition contains: New chapters on collaboration and "editing thinking"; Advice on making onscreen drafts before finalizing your story Tips on how to create and sustain audience empathy and engagement; Explanations of how rhythm is perceived, learned, practiced and applied in editing; Updated discussions of intuition, structure and dynamics; An all-new companion website (www.focalpress.com/cw/pearlman) with video examples and links for expanding and illustrating the principles of key chapters in the book.

Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era. The anthology highlights geographically and thematically diverse examples of documentaries that have expanded the scope and impact of non-fiction cinema and captured the attention of global audiences over the past three decades. It also explores the experience of documentary today, with its changing dynamics of production, collaboration, distribution, and exhibition, and its renewed political and cultural relevance. The twelve chapters - featuring engaging case studies and written from a wide range of perspectives including film theory, social theory, ethics, new media, and experience design - invite students to think critically about documentary as a vibrant field, unrestricted in its imagination and quick in its response to new forms of filmmaking. Offering a methodical exploration of the expansive reach of documentary as a creative force in the media and society of the twenty-first century, Contemporary Documentary is an ideal collection for students of film, media, and communication who are studying documentary film.

First full-length book examining the film Examines the representation of Black, queer youth in America and its relation to the social and political turmoil of the time of the film's release. Ideal for students and scholars of film, Queer theory and Black studies.

As blockbusters employ ever greater numbers of dazzling visual effects and digital illusions, this book explores the material roots and stylistic practices of special effects and their makers. Gathering leading voices in cinema and new media studies, this comprehensive anthology moves beyond questions of spectacle to examine special effects from the earliest years of cinema, via experimental film and the Golden Age of Hollywood, to our contemporary transmedia landscape. Wide-ranging and accessible, this book illuminates and interrogates the vast array of techniques film has used throughout its history to conjure spectacular images, mediate bodies, map worlds and make meanings. Foreword by Scott Bukatman, with an Afterword by Lev Manovich.

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes's award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world's top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, to Jan Svankmajer's Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen. Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers-including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja'Tovia Gary-create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Marguerite Duras is France's best-known and most controversial contemporary woman writer. Duras' influence extends from her early novels of the 1950's to her radically innovative experimental autobiographical text of the 1980's The Lover
Leslie Hill's book throws new light on Duras' relationship to feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, literature, film, politics, and the media. Feted by Kristeva, and Laca who claimed her as almost his other self, Duras is revealed to be a profoundly transgressive thinker and artist. It will be a must for all concerned with contemporary writing, writing by women, recent European cinema, film and literature.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Horror Film is an in-depth exploration of one of the most consistently popular, but also most disreputable, of all the mainstream film genres. Since the early 1930s there has never been a time when horror films were not being produced in substantial numbers somewhere in the world and never a time when they were not being criticised, censored or banned. The Horror Film engages with the key issues raised by this most contentious of genres. It considers the reasons for horror's disreputability and seeks to explain why despite this horror has been so successful. Where precisely does the appeal of horror lie? An extended introductory chapter identifies what it is about horror that makes the genre so difficult to define. The chapter then maps out the historical development of the horror genre, paying particular attention to the international breadth and variety of horror production, with reference to films made in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Subsequent chapters explore: The role of monsters, focusing on the vampire and the serial killer. The usefulness (and limitations) of psychological approaches to horror. The horror audience: what kind of people like horror (and what do other people think of them)? Gender, race and class in horror: how do horror films such as Bride of Frankenstein, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blade relate to the social and political realities within which they are produced? Sound and horror: in what ways has sound contributed to the development of horror? Performance in horror: how have performers conveyed fear and terror throughout horror's history? 1970s horror: was this the golden age of horror production? Slashers and post-slashers: from Halloween to Scream and beyond. The Horror Film throws new light on some well-known horror films but also introduces the reader to examples of noteworthy but more obscure horror work. A final section provides a guide to further reading and an extensive bibliography. Accessibly written, The Horror Film is a lively and informative account of the genre that will appeal to students of cinema, film teachers and researchers, and horror lovers everywhere.

This book examines the ways in which the house appears in films and the modes by which it moves beyond being merely a backdrop for action. Specifically, it explores the ways that domestic spaces carry inherent connotations that filmmakers exploit to enhance meanings and pleasures within film. Rather than simply examining the representation of the house as national symbol, auteur trait, or in terms of genre, contributors study various rooms in the domestic sphere from an assortment of time periods and from a diversity of national cinemas-from interior spaces in ancient Rome to the Chinese kitchen, from the animated house to the metaphor of the armchair in film noir.

Hindi Cinema is full of instances of repetition of themes, narratives, plots and characters. By looking at 60 years of Hindi cinema, this book focuses on the phenomenon as a crucial thematic and formal code that is problematic when representing the national and cinematic subject. It reflects on the cinema as motivated by an ongoing crisis of self-formation in modern India. The book looks at how cinema presents liminal and counter-modern identities emerging within repeated modern attempts to re-enact traumatic national events so as to redeem the past and restore a normative structure to happenings. Establishing structure and event as paradigmatic poles of a historical and anthropological spectrum for the individual in society, the book goes on to discuss cinematic portrayals of violence, gender embodiment, religion, economic transformations and new globalised Indianness as events and sites of liminality disrupting structural aspirations. After revealing the impossibility of accurate representation of incommensurable and liminal subjects within the historiography of the nation-state, the book highlights how Hindi cinema as an ongoing engagement with the nation-state as a site of eventfulness draws attention to the problematic nature of the thematic of nation. It is a useful study for academics of Film Studies and South Asian Culture.

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes's award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world's top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, to Jan Svankmajer's Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen. Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.

The last decade has marked the growing visibility and worldwide interest in Israeli cinema. Films such as Walk on Water, Or, My Treasure, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir have been commercially and critically successful both in Europe and the United States and have won a number of prestigious international awards. This book examines for the first time the new ideological and aesthetic trends in contemporary Israeli cinema. More specifically, it critically explores the complex and crucial role of Israeli cinema in remembering and restaging traumas and losses that were denied entry into the shared national past. One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema is the number and scope of films dealing with past traumatic events - events that were repressed or insufficiently mourned, such as the memory of the Holocaust, traumas from wars and terrorist attacks, and the losses entailed by the experience of immigration. Current Israeli cinema exposes and highlights a radical discontinuity between history and memory. Traumatic events from Israeli society's past are represented as the private memory of distinct social groups - soldiers, immigrants, women, queers - and not as collective memory, as a lived and practiced tradition that conditions Israeli society. This detachment from national collective memory pulls the films into a world marked by a persistent blurring of the historical context and by private and subjective impressions - a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and myths. These groups feel duty-bound to remember the past, recasting repressed memories through the cinema in order to return and to give meaning to their identity.

Music in Action Film is the first volume to address the central role of music and sound in action film-arguably the most dominant form of commercial cinema today. Bringing together 15 essays by established and emerging scholars, the book encompasses both Hollywood blockbusters and international films, from classic works such as The Seven Samurai to contemporary superhero franchises. The contributors consider action both as genre and as a mode of cinematic expression, in chapters on evolving musical conventions; politics, representation, and identity; musical affect and agency; the functional role of music and sound design in action film; and production technologies. Breaking new critical ground yet highly accessible, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music and film studies.

Fritz Lang's 'M' (1931) is an undisputed classic of world cinema. Lang considered it his most lasting work. Peter Lorre's extraordinary performance as the childlike misfit Hans Beckert was one of the most striking of film debuts, and it made him an international star. Lang's vision of a city gripped with fear, haunted by surveillance and total mobillization, is still remarkably powerful today. And 'M' resonates too in the serial-killer genre which is so prominent in contemporary cinema. 'M' speaks to us as a timeless classic, but also as a Weimar film that has too often been isolated from its political and cultural context. In this groundbreaking book, Anton Kaes reconnects 'M''s much-studied formal brilliance to its significance as an event in 1931 Germany, recapturing the film's extraordinary social and symbolic energy. Interweaving close reading with cultural history, Kaes reconstitutes 'M' as a crucial modernist artwork. In addition he analyzes Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir remake and, in an appendix, publishes for the first time 'M''s missing scene.

Spectacle is not often considered to be a significant part of the style of 'classical' cinema. Indeed, some of the most influential accounts of cinematic classicism define it virtually by the supposed absence of spectacle. Spectacle in 'Classical' Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s brings a fresh perspective on the role of the spectacular in classical sound cinema by focusing on one decade of cinema (the 1930s), in two 'modes' of filmmaking (musical and historical films), and in two national cinemas (the US and France). This not only brings to light the special rhetorical and affective possibilities offered by spectacular images but refines our understanding of what 'classical' cinema is and was.