"Sympathetic Sentiments "develops an innovative interdisciplinary framework to explore the implications of living in a 'culture of feeling' that seems ill at ease with itself, one in which 'sentiments' are frequently denounced for being 'sentimental' and self-indulgent. This is traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy' in which sympathy seems inherently to entail public forms of expression whereby being 'on show' is both a condition of the authenticity of such affects "and" of their capacity to be masked and simulated - hence stimulating controversy, but also the exploration of the vicarious dimensions of modern experience so central to modern literature, art and culture. The implications of all this are further explored in the context of current debates over the display of trauma as the language of sympathetic engagement, and the alleged prevalence of 'compassion fatigue' in the era of media sensationalism. Overall, the book uncovers the patterns that both reproduce our capacity for 'sympathetic sentiments' while revealing the inherent underlying tensions.

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.

Disruptive Feminisms provides a revolutionary new approach to feminism as a disruptive force. By examining various films and filmmakers who are not so obviously read as feminist or Marxist, Gwendolyn Foster showcases their ability to disrupt and effectively challenge everything from class and racism, as well as sexism, ageism, and homophobia.

This collection brings together international experts on the cinema of migration and diaspora in postcolonial and postnational Europe. It offers a comprehensive theoretical and analytical discussion of a highly productive creative sector and documents the spectrum of this area of exploration in European, transnational and World Cinema studies.

"Translating Popular Film" is a ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenizing use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic.

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.

This book offers insightful analysis of cultural representation in Japanese cinema of the early 21st century. The impact of transnational production practices on films such as Dolls (2002), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), and 13 Assassins (2010) is considered through textual and empirical analysis. The author discusses contradictory forms of cultural representation - cultural concealment and cultural performance - and their relationship to both changing practices in the Japanese film industry and the global film market. Case studies take into account popular genres such as J Horror and jidaigeki period films, as well as the work of renowned filmmakers Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities.

The detective, as a preeminent figure in all forms of American popular culture, has become the subject of a variety of theoretical exploration. By investigating that figure, these essays demonstrate how the genre embodies all the contradictions of American society and the ways in which literature and the media attempt to handle those contradictions. Issues of class, gender, and race; the interaction of film and literature; and generic evolution are fundamental to any understanding of the American detective in all of his or her forms. Beginning with essays about Raymond Chandler's treatment of women, Part I concentrates on writers of the genre whose detectives embody aspects of American culture in the 20th century. Through examination of the work of Elmore Leonard, Chester Himes, Sue Grafton, and others, these essays look at the influence of film on literature, how ethnicity affects the genre's conventions, and gender issues. Part II looks closely at specific detectives in the media and demonstrates how the film detective has gone from one who upholds the moral order to one who contributes to the continuation of evil. A study of television detectives confirms the necessity of formula and variation to sustain a detective over many seasons.

The multiple award-winning Doctor Zhivago (1965) is one of America's finest films of all time. Ian Christie contextualizes the film as an epic Russian love story and a Cold War classic, charts its production and reception, including the contribution of designer John Box, and discusses the unique history of the Bruce Pasternak novel it is based on.

Exploring the dead/alive figure in such films as" The Ring," "American Beauty," ""and" The Elephant Man," Vincent Hausmann charts the spectacular reduction of psychic life and assesses calls for shoring up psychic/social spaces that transfer bodily drives to language. Drawing on expansive histories of cinema--including its relation to scientific/medical visual culture's tracking of the human/animal body, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and sexuality studies, the book demonstrates that conceptions of psychic (re)animation remain interwoven with notions of cinematic motion, and emerge, embedded, in narratives of relations among analog and digital arts/technologies.

This collection focuses on children and adolescents in Latin American and Spanish cinema from 1960 to the present as witnesses and objects of the spectatorial gaze. The carefully chosen essays survey the representation of the past and the definition of gender and class identity as experienced by young protagonists in films. This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Latin American and Spanish film as well as gender studies. Some of the questions addressed in this collection are: what do children and adolescents in Latin American and Spanish film see and how are they seen?

This book looks at a wide range of fiction and film texts, from the 1950s to the present, in order to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been represented in popular culture in Britain and the United States. It covers numerous genres, including spy fiction, science fiction, the Western and police thrillers. Each chapter focuses on key forms of masculinity found in each genre, such as the 'double agent', the 'rogue cop' and the 'citizen-soldier'. Brian Baker takes a broad, contextual approach, placing a detailed discussion of key texts and issues concerning masculinity in their historical and cultural context. Written in a clear, accessible way, it explores the changing representation of men over the last fifty years.

(Applause Books). William Goldman, who holds two Academy Awards for his screenwriting ( Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men ), and is author of the perennial best seller Adventures in the Screen Trade, scrutinizes the Hollywood movie scene of the past decade in this engaging collection. With the film-world-savvy and razor-sharp commentary for which he is known, he provides an insider's take on today's movie world as he takes a look at "the big picture" on Hollywood, screenwriting, and the future of American cinema. Paperback.

Inspired by Baudelaire's art criticism and contemporary theories of emotions, and developing a new aesthetic approach based on the idea that memory and imagination are strongly connected, Lombardo analyzes films by Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch and Van Sant as imaginative uses of the history of cinema as well as of other media.

Postmodern Metanarratives investigates the relationship between cinema and literature by analyzing the film Blade Runner as a postmodern work that constitutes a landmark of cyberpunk narrative and establishes a link between tradition and the (post)modern.

This book argues theoretically for, and exemplify through critical and historical analysis, the interrelatedness of discourses on scale, distance, identification and doubling in the cinema. It contains analyses of a wide variety of films, including Citizen Kane, The Double Life of Veronique, The Great Gatsby, Gilda, Vertigo and Wings of Desire.

Exploration, intertwined with home-seeking, has always defined America. Corbin argues that films about significant cultural landscapes in America evoke a sense of travel for their viewers. These virtual travel experiences from the mid-1970s through the 1990s built a societal map of "popular multiculturalism" through a movie-going experience.

This book offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film which foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions and analyses three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala ; Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry ; and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There .

The muscle-bound male body is a perennial feature of classically-inflected action cinema. This book reassesses these films as a cinematic form, focusing on the depiction of heroic masculinity. In particular, Hercules in his many incarnations has greatly influenced popular cultural interpretations of manliness and the exaggerated male form.

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, including film, magazines, conduct books, TV and digital networking sites, Alison Winch reveals the ways in which friendships are increasingly encouraged to be strategic. Girlfriendship is examined as an affective social relation where slut-shamers, frenemies and bridezillas bond by controlling each other's body image through a 'girlfriend gaze'. Through a combination of psychosociological theory and media analysis, this book offers a complex understanding of patriarchy, by looking at how neoliberalism penetrates the intimate relations between women.

Hollywood movies often portray gay people as being in some sense monstrous. This volume focuses on several filmmakers who have used the trope of the homosexual as monster in a way that subverts traditional cinema. Their movies reveal that the monster can be powerful and attractive, thereby showing gay people a way to claim power from being thought of as outcasts and obviating the notion of fitting in. This study will appeal to film scholars and to those interested in the portrayal of homosexuals in the media.