This book investigates representations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Hollywood films, and the synergies between Hollywood product, U.S. military/defense interests and U.S. foreign policy. As probably the best known of the many different intelligence agencies of the US, the CIA is an exceptionally well known national and international icon or even "brand," one that exercises a powerful influence on the imagination of people throughout the world as well as on the creative minds of filmmakers. The book examines films sampled from five decades - the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s - and explores four main issues: the relative prominence of the CIA; the extent to which these films appeared to be overtly political; the degree to which they were favorable or unfavorable to the CIA; and their relative attitude to the "business" of intelligence. A final chapter considers the question: do these Hollywood texts appear to function ideologically to "normalize" the CIA? If so, might this suggest the further hypothesis that many CIA movies assist audiences with reconciling two sometimes fundamental opposites: often gruesome covert CIA activity for questionable goals and at enormous expense, on the one hand, and the values and procedures of democratic society, on the other. This interdisciplinary book will be of much interest to students of the CIA/Intelligence Studies, media and film studies, US politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

By the 1990s the Pentagon had greatly expanded its global and imperial reach and deeply embedded itself into the commerce and ideology of Hollywood war movies, video games, television, and the private arms industry. Post-Vietnam Hollywood attempted to resurrect the 'good war.' The Pentagon, Hollywood, video games, and the arms industry were now working in tandem, all hugely profiting. As always, paying the ultimate price for this commercial success were the working-class men and women who actually fight these wars. No other media genre more sharply illustrates the contradictions of American society - notions about social class, politics, and socio-economic ideology - than the war film. American War Cinema and Media Since Vietnam examines the representations of war in feature films and documentaries, television, and war video games since Vietnam to reveal how they illustrate the complexities and contradictions of America's post-Vietnam wars of 'discretion, ' class issues, commerce, and politics.

Cinema frequently depicts various types of work, but this representation is never straightforward. It depends on and reflects many factors, most importantly the place and time the film is made and the type of audience it addresses. In this volume, the contributors employ transnational and transhistorical perspectives to compare films from different countries, periods, and genres. Rather than prescribe a specific meaning of work, the collection explores its fuzzy edges, including sex work, criminal work, situations where the jobs' purpose is to reduce work, and other marginal types of labor. The contributors draw attention to the paradox that although there is seemingly less work to be done now than it was in the past, the central role of work in human life has not been challenged: it is seen as the human condition.

Mediating Memory in the Museum is a contribution to an emerging field of research which is situated at the interface between memory studies and museum studies. It highlights the role of museums in the proliferation of the so-called memory boom as well as the influence of memory discourses on international trends in museum cultures. By looking at a range of museums in Germany, Britain, France and Belgium, which address a diverse spectrum of topics such as migration, difficult and dark heritage, war, slavery and the GDR, Arnold-de Simine outlines the paradigm shifts in exhibiting practices associated with the transformation of traditional history museums and heritage sites into 'spaces of memory' over the past thirty years. She probes the political and ethical claims of new museums and maps the relevance of key concepts such as 'vicarious trauma', 'secondary witnessing', 'empathic unsettlement', 'prosthetic memory' and 'reflective nostalgia' in the museum landscape.

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a potent metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects - migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons - are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this impacts on their ability to develop agency. From detailed readings of films (Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, Nick Broomfield's Ghosts and Robert Altman's Gosford Park), a television series (Upstairs, Downstairs) and novels (Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Sarah Waters's Affinity, Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park) emerges an inventive account of how the spectral metaphor, in its association with various modes of invisibility, can signify both dispossession and empowerment. In reworking the spectral insights of, among others, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri and Achille Mbembe, Peeren suggests new responses to the practices of marginalization and exploitation that characterize our globalized world.

This is the first book-length study to systematically and theoretically analyse the use and representation of individual body parts in Gothic fiction. Moving between filmic and literary texts and across the body-from the brain, hair and teeth, to hands, skin and the stomach-this book engages in unique readings by foregrounding a diversity of global representations. Building on scholarly work on the 'Gothic body' and 'body horror', Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature dissects the individual features that comprise the physical human corporeal form in its different functions. This very original and accessible study, which will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in the Gothic, centralises the use (and abuse) of limbs, organs, bones and appendages. It presents a set of unique global examinations; from Brazil, France and South Korea to name a few; that address the materiality of the Gothic body in depth in texts ranging from the nineteenth century to the present; from Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Roald Dahl and Chuck Palahniuk, to David Cronenberg, Freddy Krueger and The Greasy Strangler.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, as Film Studies crystallized into an academic discipline, psychological realism became linked to both classical Hollywood and continuity editing. The style was derided as theatrical, or worse, bourgeois, a product of a capitalism that valorized individual personality. This view persists, though often tacitly. However, we must attribute some degree of mindedness to any figure that we might call a character, even if that psyche is established not by a performer but by another aspect of the film, such as editing. Through the study of performer and director Mike Nichols, Kyle Stevens questions the aesthetic-ideological stance against psychological realism. He argues that characters' actions are not just filmed concepts but can be film concepts whose forms resonate politically. Nichols' oeuvre centers on moments when words and gestures cease to mean, or to mean in typical ways. In doing so, he exposes the pretense of tropes that constitute conventionally realist characters, and participates in changes in U.S. cultural attitudes toward language, subjectivity, embodiment, and the social, particularly with regard to sexual politics. This book thus sheds light on Hollywood history, historicizes Film Studies' turn away from humanism, and reassesses paradigms that hold psychological realism to be "transparent"-thereby blinding us to potentially subtle and subversive uses of this aesthetic choice.

Exploring research into mobile phone use as props to subjective identity, Norman Taylor employs concepts from Michelle Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and actor network theory to discuss the affect of mechanisms of make-believe, from celebrity culture to avatar-obsessed game players, and digital culture.

Since 2001, Trevor Lynch's witty, pugnacious, and profound film essays and reviews have developed a wide following among cinephiles and White Nationalists alike. Lynch deals frankly with the anti-white bias and Jewish agenda of many mainstream films, but he is even more interested in discerning positive racial messages and values, sometimes in the most unlikely places. Trevor Lynch's White Nationalist Guide to the Movies gathers together some of his best essays and reviews covering 32 movies, including his startling philosophical readings of Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Mishima; his racialist interpretations of The Lord of the Rings and Gangs of New York; his masculinist readings of The Twilight Saga and A History of Violence; his insights into the Jewish nature of the superhero genre occasioned by Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies; and his hilarious demolitions of The Matrix Trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, and the detritus of Quentin Tarantino's long decline. Trevor Lynch's White Nationalist Guide to the Movies establishes its author as a leading cultural theorist and critic of the North American New Right. "Trevor Lynch provides us with a highly literate, insightful, and even philosophical perspective on film-one that will send you running to the video rental store for a look at some very worthwhile movies-although he is also quite willing to tell you what not to see. He sees movies without the usual blinders. He is quite aware that because Hollywood is controlled by Jews, one must typically analyze movies for their propaganda value in the project of white dispossession. Trevor Lynch's collection is a must read for anyone attempting to understand the deep undercurrents of the contemporary culture of the West." - Kevin MacDonald, author of The Culture of Critique, from the Foreword "Hollywood has been deconstructing the white race for nearly a century. Now Trevor Lynch is fighting back, deconstructing Hollywood from a White Nationalist point of view. But these essays are not just of interest to White Nationalists. Lynch offers profound and original insights into more than 30 films, including Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy, and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. These essays combine a cultural and philosophical sophistication beyond anything in film studies today with a lucid, accessible, and entertaining prose style. Every serious cineaste needs to read this book." - Edmund Connelly "The Hollywood movie may be the greatest vehicle of deception ever invented, and the passive white viewer is its primary target. Yet White Nationalist philosopher and film critic Trevor Lynch demonstrates that truth is to be found even in this unlikeliest of places. If American audiences could learn the kind of critical appreciation Mr. Lynch demonstrates for them, their seductive enemies in Tinseltown wouldn't stand a chance." - F. Roger Devlin, author of Alexandre Kojeve and the Outcome of Modern Thought "Trevor Lynch's White Nationalist Guide to the Movies is not some collection of vein-popping rants about Hollywood's political agendas. It's a thoughtful and engaging examination of ideas in popular films from a perspective you won't find in your local newspaper or in Entertainment Weekly. Lynch has chosen films that-in many cases-he actually enjoyed, and playfully teased out the New Right themes that mainstream reviewers can only afford to address with a careful measure of scorn. How many trees have been felled to print all of the Marxist, feminist, minority-pandering 'critiques' of contemporary celluloid over the past fifty years? Isn't it about time we read an explicitly white review of The Fellowship of the Ring, or Traditionalist take on take on The Dark Knight?" - Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men

"Django Unchained "is certainly Quentin Tarantino's most commercially-successful film and is arguably also his most controversial. Fellow director Spike Lee has denounced the representation of race and slavery in the film, while many African American writers have defended the white auteur. The use of extremely graphic violence in the film, even by Tarantino's standards, at a time when gun control is being hotly debated, has sparked further controversy and has led to angry outbursts by the director himself. Moreover, " Django Unchained" has become a popular culture phenomenon, with t-shirts, highly contentious action figures, posters, and strong DVD/BluRay sales. The topic (slavery and revenge), the setting (a few years before the Civil War), the intentionally provocative generic roots (Spaghetti Western and Blaxploitation) and the many intertexts and references (to German and French culture) demand a thorough examination.""Befitting such a complex film, the essays collected here represent a diverse group of scholars who examine "Django Unchained" from many perspectives.

Based on her award-winning blog, "The Feminist Spectator," Jill Dolan presents a lively feminist perspective in reviews and essays on a variety of theatre productions, films and television series--from The Social Network and Homeland to Split Britches' Lost Lounge.
Demonstrating the importance of critiquing mainstream culture through a feminist lens, Dolan also offers invaluable advice on how to develop feminist critical thinking and writing skills. This is an essential read for budding critics and any avid spectator of the stage and screen.

Imaginary beasts have figured prominently in literary works ever since the ancient world, when these myths were first formulated. But the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of science, the discovery of geological findings that challenged the biblical myth of creation, and the birth of Darwin's theory of evolution. Since then, monsters have evolved from supernatural creatures to natural ones endowed with exceptional size, strength, or intelligence. This book explores both literary and cinematic texts that are especially explicit in their Darwinian portrayal of monstrous beasts, though these creatures retain an archaic mythological quality. The myth of Leviathan and Behemoth, for instance, is as central to Jaws as it is to Moby-Dick; indeed, Jaws inherits the myth directly from Moby-Dick, as does King Kong. These and other monster tales, such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Grendel, keep the ancient myth alive and relevant by recasting it in the context of biological and cultural evolution. There is a pattern of alternating bestialization and anthropomorphism in many monster tales, suggesting that these images are being displayed in repeated attempts to define who we are in relation to animals. Thus the more beastly the monster, the more insistently we erect the old paradigm of the Ladder of Being, placing ourselves on a higher and separate rung; but the more human-like the creature, the more readily we shift to the paradigm of the Tree of Life, in which all creatures are more closely related. Since the matter of distinctions between species also involves questions of race, the monster myth is often conscripted to serve racist agendas. But more often than not, the myth has ananti-racist subtext that undercuts the hierarchy. The closing chapters of the volume consider the notion of artificial evolution in works such as The Island of Dr. Moreau, and human-machine interaction in Gravity's Rainbow. As fables of identity, monster tales dramatize our anxieties and fears about our own animal nature and provide a means of coming to terms with our evolution.

In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future. By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the museum film, this collection includes detailed discussions of installation art, and close analyses of media relations which range from dance to painting to performance art. Thanks to the title of Andre Malraux's famous project, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? invites readers to reflect on the museum of the future, where twentieth-century cinema will play a pivotal role by interrogating the relation between art and science, technology and nature, from the side of photography in dialogue with digitalization.

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives of art, literature and music, Lucy Fife Donaldson develops a stimulating understanding of a concept that has received little detailed attention in relation to film. Based on close analysis, 'Texture in Film' brings discussion of style and affect together in a selection of case studies drawn from American cinema.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of visual artists in downtown New York City returned to an exploration of the cinematic across mediums. Vera Dika considers their work within a greater cultural context and probes for a deeper understanding of the practice.

"How do East Asian cultural heritages in shape film? How are these legacies being revived, or even re-created, by contemporary filmmakers? This collection examines the dynamic interactions between East Asian culture heritages - "traditional" elements including martial arts, music, landscape, aesthetics, stage performances, and legends - and cinemas in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea"--

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

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and its various offshoots, such as Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic, have been making fun of movies for over thirty years. In the process, they captured the spirit of what had been a beloved pastime for generations of wags, wiseacres, and smartalecks, and inspired countless more. The Worst We Can Find looks at how "riffing" of films came about, the history of the shows, and why what could be an annoying habit in the theater has become a long-lasting franchise in entertainment over the years. Mystery Science Theater 3000 first aired on a small television station in St. Paul, Minnesota. In a twist on programs of the past where movie hosts introduced films on local television channels, MST3K would liberate not very good or horribly bad films through humor with the help of a handful of writers, puppeteers, and performers who never could let a chance to make fun of what was happening on the screen get away from them. Dale Sherman covers where creative heckling came from in the years before the program, through the way MST3K and its progeny-including Rifftrax, Cinematic Titanic, and The Mads Are Back, have redirected the art of riffing into a style that manages to be both affectionate and cutting.

Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's 'The Idiots' to Michael Haneke's 'Cache', Asbjorn Gronstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.

This title looks at films that map the spectator's private fantasy onto the one being played out on the screen, following Kristeva's sparse, but revolutionary, film theory. Informed by the theory of Julia Kristeva, Frances Restuccia analyzes a variety of contemporary films replete with psychoanalytic subject matter and styles. She examines films that present elaborate fantasies and, through them, prompt the viewer to cut across a crippling fundamental fantasy - by enabling a mapping of his or her private fantasy onto the one being played out on the screen. Such absorption is a function of the semiotic dimension of the film, which offers the spectator an experience of intimacy, negativity, the gaze, and death. Kristeva stresses that cinema has the power to bestow desiring subjectivity as a way of resisting the society of the spectacle through the specular. Through analyses of complex films such as Streitfeld's "Female Perversions", Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", Almodovar's "Volver", and Haneke's "Cache", "The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film" demonstrates Julia Kristeva's concept of the "thought specular", from her fascinating chapter "Fantasy and Cinema" in "Intimate Revolt". Kristeva deserves our full attention as a film theorist.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory.

Recent years have seen a striking surge in the production of literary biopics. Writers turned cinema subject in recent films include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lillian Hellman, Allen Ginsberg, Kafka, Keats, Kaufman, and many more. This cultural phenomenon prompts a re-examination of a long and varied history of cinematic engagements with authorial creativity. The Writer on Film examines films about writers, real and fictional, from the silent era to the present. It asks how filmmakers have narratively and iconographically configured writers' lives and acts of writing. How might the mysterious processes of a literary imagination at work be cinematically expressed? What views of inspiration, muses, redrafting and publication have films taken and how, in cinematic representation, have these been gendered? How has cinema chosen to configure the tools and symbols of writing - quills, pens, ink pots, desks, studies, typewriters, keyboards and books? And what cultural and commercial agendas are revealed in cinema's compulsive return not just to literary material (whose story is already well told) but, specifically, to literary process (whose story is not)? Case studies include Diary of a Country Priest, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Julia, My Brilliant Career, Prospero's Books, Adaptation, Shakespeare in Love, Sylvia, The Lives of Others, Becoming Jane, Atonement, Bright Star, Enid and Howl.

This book examines postmodern theology and how it relates to the cinematic style of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Bunuel. Ponder demonstrates how these filmmakers forefront religious issues in their use of mise en scene. He investigates both the technical qualities of film "flesh" and its theological features. The chapters show how art cinema uses sound, editing, lighting, and close-ups in ways that critique doctrine's authoritarianism, as well as philosophy's individualism, to suggest postmodern theologies that emphasize community. Through this book we learn how the cinematic style of modernist auteurs relates to postmodern theology and how the industry of art cinema constructs certain kinds of film-watching subjectivity.

This book contains a biography of one of the screen's most loved actresses whose career has spanned five decades. Her life's story is as dramatic and compelling as many of her famous roles. From her country roots to her world travels, Ava Gardner was a constant favorite of the media. Personal strengths and tragic weaknesses have assured her of a perennial place in the public eye. In Ava Gardner: A Bio-Bibliography the actress's marriages to three of the entertainment business's most unique and influential contributors are highlighted as are her dozens of classic roles. This bio-bibliography is made complete by a careful list of sources and a generous view of her life through pictures. In Ava Gardner: A Bio-Bibliography, Fowler traces the actress's life from a possible family tree to her smalltown beginning to world stardom. This biography comprises most of the book. A chronological listing of her life achievements follows. Fowler also provides a complete listing of Ava's film, television, and radio appearances as well as her musical recordings. The book is completed by a bibliography of the writings on Ava Gardner, a record of the archival sources used in researching the book, and an index of personal names and titles. Interesting and personal photographs provide a rare glimpse of one of America's best loved screen personalities. This book will be of extreme interest to film lovers, library, or drama instructors and historians.