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.

Fully updated and expanded throughout, this second edition of Film Theory: The Basics provides an accessible introduction to the key theorists, concepts, and debates that have shaped the study of moving images. The book examines film theory from its emergence in the early twentieth century to its study in the present day, and explores why film has drawn special attention as a medium, as a form of representation, and as a focal point in the rise of modern visual culture. It also emphasizes how film theory has developed as a historically contingent discourse, one that has evolved and changed in conjunction with different social, political, and intellectual factors. This second edition offers a detailed account of new theoretical directions at the forefront of film studies in the twenty-first century, and draws additional attention to how theory engages with today's most pressing questions about digital technologies, the environment, and racial justice. Complete with questions for discussion and a glossary of both key terms and key theorists, this book in an invaluable resource for those new to film theory and for anyone else interested in the history and significance of critical thinking in relation to the moving image.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

This book demonstrates how social distress or anxiety is reflected, modified, and evolves through the medium of the motion picture. Tracing cinema from its earliest forms, the authors show how film is a perfect medium for generating and projecting dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, on the individual as well as the societal level.Arising at the same time as Freud s influential ideas, cinema has been intertwined with the wishes and fears of the greater culture and has served as a means of experiencing those feelings in a communal and taming environment. From Munsterberg s original pronouncements in the early 20th century about the psychology of cinema, through the pioneering films of Melies, the works of the German expressionists, to James Bond and today s superheroes this book weaves a narrative highlighting the importance of the social dream.It develops the idea that no art form goes beyond the ordinary process of consciousness in the same way as film, reflecting, as it does, the cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects of human nature. "

Between the end of the Civil War (1949) and the colonels' military coup (1967) Greece underwent tremendous political, economic, and social transformations which influenced gender identities and relations. During the same period, Greece also witnessed an unparalleled bloom in cinema productions. Based on the recently established paradigm that cinema and popular culture viewed as social institutions can inform a historical study, this book explores the relationship between Greek cinema and the society within which it was created and viewed. The book's double analytical perspective on cinema and masculinity advances both the study of cinema and popular culture as historical sources, and of masculinity and gender relations as valid categories of historical analysis. Cinema as a medium of representation, not only managed to reflect on these issues, it also provided a whole new field for their interpretation. This is the first study to explore the dramatic transformation of masculinity and gender roles, as represented in Greek cinema during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Flanagan uses Bakhtins notions of dialogism, chronotope and polyphony to address fundamental questions about film form and reception, focusing particularly on the way cinematic narrative utilizes time and space in its very construction.

The ravages of the First World War ensured that the deeply cherished Enlightenment ideals of reason, individualism, and intellectual supremacy finally crumbled and dissolved. As the Dadaists and Surrealists demonstrated in overtly defiant avant-garde postures and various public spectacles, the essential purposelessness and futility of such unprecedented carnage and bloodshed had finally shattered all intellectual illusions ever pertaining to human meaning and logic. The steady stream of political developments which led to the onset of war were equally incidental and senseless, while incessant killings between deadlocked armies exposed the equal guilt and reprehensibility of all warring parties. Numerous artists--many of whom perished during the war--found themselves involved in the bloody battles, and their chilling accounts--the cultural canons of poems, novels, essays, paintings, and diaries on the horrors of this war--are all dominated by genocidal images of mass human slaughter, inhumane massacre, unspeakable atrocities, and the profound despair that arises from utter senselessness. The Second World War, however, was not simply a repeat of the First World War in terms of its devastating effects, its atrocities, massacres, and widespread carnage. The Nazi era manifested a completely different reality, an unprecedented phenomenon with new and unfamiliar cultural implications. The carnage was not 'senseless', for it was highly rationalized and systematised; bloodshed was motivated by fierce ideological convictions. Many of these ideologies were nourished and inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche concerning the imposition of a 'super regime', able to rise above the restrictive morality of ordinary men. While it is impossible to create a clear division between categories of right and wrong, evil and good, throughout the career of the Third Reich, the ambiguities and perceptions of equal guilt and equal reprehensibility that overshadowed the previous world war were largely absent from the second. Highly masterminded and systematised evil forces were responsible for the bloodshed which took place, for in full operation was a rationalised, strategic regime which meticulously orchestrated, calculated, and supervised a systematic process of ethnic cleansing. The rationale of the concentration camp universe indicates not merely the decline and dissolution of reason in the face of absolute evil, but something other than this, something much deeper. This war was to do with 'presence' rather than 'absence'. It was a war of extreme, conceived purpose involving the presence of a new collective political force and new methods: 'lebensraum', autarky, world domination. This book seeks to establish a new way of examining not only history but contemporary manners of historical representation on film, as well as their cultural and philosophical implications. It aims to advance new ways of investigating the past with films that are, on the surface, only tangentially related to traditional manners of historical representation. The work forwards two unconventional movies Docteur Petiot and Delicatessen as objects of historical film-making. The reasoning for this departure from convention, that the Holocaust itself requires a peripheral, even postmodern approach to not only its representation but that of the past in general. On a more specific level, France during the 1990s experienced a heightened period of political debate regarding its collaboration during the Vichy period. Various contemporary films focused on national complicity and crisis of identity. The two films studied may be viewed as discourses that each relate to this crisis not only in the light of their content but through diversity and departure from accepted traditions within cinematic representation.

This book pairs close readings of some of the classic writings of existentialist philosophers with interpretations of films that reveal striking parallels to each of those texts, demonstrating their respective philosophies in action. Individual chapters include significant excerpts from the original texts being discussed and illustrated. Pairings cover Schopenhauer and Waking Life, Stirner and Hud, Kierkegaard and Winter Light, Nietzsche and The Fountainhead, Heidegger, Blade Runner and The Thin Red Line, Camus, Leaving Las Vegas and Missing, Sartre, Husbands and Wives, and Michael Collins, de Beauvoir and Revolutionary Road, and Foucault and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Movies with Meaning offers a clear and insightful examination of the relationships between existential philosophers and film, providing both digests of their most significant texts and cinematic illustrations of what each had in mind. For the first time in one place, this book analyses the implications for film of the perspectives of a wide array of the most significant existentialist thinkers. Organized chronologically, like most existentialism anthologies, this is an ideal textbook for an intermediate level existentialism course, or as a companion to a selection of primary texts.