Film theory is in crisis. The dominant psychoanalytical paradigm is contested by cognitive models and post-theory. In the background is a wider crisis in cultural studies, particularly as regards the public role of the politically engaged intellectual.
In this major new study Slavoj Zizek challenges both cognitivist-historicist accounts of cinema and conventional film theory. Arguing that the reading of Lacan operative in the '70s and '80s was particularly reductive, Zizek asserts that there is "another Lacan," in reference to whom film theory, cultural studies, and critical thought as such can be transformed and revitalized. He supports and expands this argument with an extensive reading of the work of Kieslowski and, in a substantial appendix, with a discussion of the relationship between Christianity, Gothicism and the "progressive digitalisation of our life-world."

This book is a thought-provoking study that expands on film scholarship on noir and feminist scholarship on postfeminism, subjectivity, and representation to provide an inclusive, sophisticated, and up-to-date analysis of the femme fatale , fille fatale , and homme fatal from the classic era through to recent postmillennial neo-noir .

Presenting a social history of British crime film, this book focuses on the strategies used in order to address more radical notions surrounding class, politics, sex, delinquency, violence and censorship. Spanning post-war crime cinema to present-day "Mockney" productions, it contextualizes the films and identifies important and neglected works.

The term "cult film star" has been employed, and used as a common-sense term, in publicity and popular journalistic writing for at least the last twenty-five years. However, what makes cult film stars or actors distinct or different from other film stars has rarely been addressed, with the cult star label often being attributed to particular stars or actors in an imprecise way. This edited collection provides a much-needed overview of the variety of processes through which film stars and actors become associated with the cult label. It brings together chapters from an international group of scholars which focus on a wide range of cult stars and actors, from Montgomery Clift and Bill Murray to Ruth Gordon and Ingrid Pitt. The collection makes important, previously under-explored, connections between two key disciplines within film and media studies: stardom/celebrity studies and cult film studies.

Until his early retirement at age 50, Hasse Ekman was one of the leading lights of Swedish cinema, an actor, writer, and director of prodigious talents. Yet today his work is virtually unknown outside of Sweden, eclipsed by the filmography of his occasional collaborator (and frequent rival) Ingmar Bergman. This comprehensive introduction-the first ever in English-follows Ekman's career from his early days as a film journalist, through landmark films such as Girl with Hyacinths (1950), to his retirement amid exhaustion and disillusionment. Combining historical context with insightful analyses of Ekman's styles and themes, this long overdue study considerably enriches our understanding of Swedish film history.

Visions of Empire explores film's function as a medium of political communication, recognizing not just the propaganda film, but the various ways that conventional narrative films embody, question, or critique established social values underlying American attitudes toward historical, social, and political events. Stephen Prince discusses Hollywood film productions of the 1980s in terms of salient political issues of the period, including anxieties about declining U.S. military power, the wars in Central America and the prospects for U.S. intervention, the legacy of the Vietnam War, and urban decay. In analyzing these images and narratives, the author also describes and evaluates the cinematic styles available in the Hollywood tradition to filmmakers who address political issues. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical framework by considering features of the political landscape of the Reagan era. Theories about political representation and the place of ideology in film are also examined. Chapters 2 through 5 focus on the major cycles of political films. Chapter 2 examines the new Cold War films which played upon fears of the Soviet menace (Rambo, Invasion USA, Red Dawn, and Top Gun). Chapter 3 discusses the small group of films--Under Fire, Salvador, El Norte and others--that addressed the wars in Latin America and the ways they explained the origins of the conflicts and the U.S. role therein. Various histories and mythologies on film of the Vietnam War are examined in Chapter 4 as examples of the symbolic reconstruction of social memory. Chapter 5 looks at politicized science fiction films (Blade Runner, Aliens, Robocop, and Total Recall) offering critical commentaries on the pathologies of contemporary urban society and capitalism.

"Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from WWII to the Present"""charts how the dominant white and black binary of American racial discourse influences Hollywood's representation of the Asian. The Orientalist buddy film draws a scenario in which two buddies, one white and one black, transcend an initial hatred for one another by joining forces against a foreign Asian menace. Alongside an analysis of multiple genres of film, Brian Locke argues that this triangulated rendering of race ameliorates the longstanding historical contradiction between U.S. democratic ideals and white America's persistent domination over blacks.

At the heart of Christian theology lies a paradox unintelligible to other religions and to secular humanism: that in the person of Jesus, God became man, and suffered on the cross to effect humanity's salvation. In his dual nature as mortal and divinity, and unlike the impassable God of other monotheisms, Christ thus became accessible to artistic representation. Hence the figure of Jesus has haunted and compelled the imagination of artists and writers for 2,000 years. This was never more so than in the 20th Century, in a supposedly secular age, when the Jesus of popular fiction and film became perhaps more familiar than the Christ of the New Testament. In Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film Graham Holderness explores how writers and film-makers have sought to recreate Christ in work as diverse as Anthony Burgess's Man of Nazareth and Jim Crace's Quarantine, to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. These works are set within a longer and broader history of 'Jesus novels' and 'Jesus films', a lineage traced back to Ernest Renan and George Moore, and explored both for their reflections of contemporary Christological debates, and their positive contributions to Christian theology. In its final chapter, the book draws on the insights of this tradition of Christological representation to creatively construct a new life of Christ, an original work of theological fiction that both subsumes the history of the form, and offers a startlingly new perspective on the biography of Christ.

'Rich girl meets poor boy who liberates her then dies.' Or, 'low-life girl is trashed by lower-life boy.' The contemporary middle-class fictions of poverty that inform films such as "Titanic" and "Kids" are a far cry from the nineteenth-century genres: rags-to-riches stories and seduction tales. Our fictions of class turn the older tales upside down. By the surprising juxtaposition of recent films and the classic writings and unusual lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen Crane, Henry Miller, and Michel Foucault, the book shocks the reader into a reappraisal of these authors' works and lives, our myths about class, and poststructural theory.

Devices of Curiosity excavates a largely unknown genre of early cinema, the popular-science film. Primarily a work of cinema history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science. Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about scientific topics for general audiences, inspired by a vision of cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era, from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around 1910. Devices of Curiosity also considers how popular-science films exemplify the circulation of knowledge. These films initially relied upon previous traditions such as the magic-lantern lecture for their representational strategies, and they continually had recourse to established visual iconography, but they also created novel visual paradigms and led to the creation of ambitious new film collections. Finally, the book discerns a transit between nonfictional and fictional modes, seeing affinities between popular-science films and certain aspects of fiction films, particularly Louis Feuillade's crime melodramas. This kind of circulation is important for an understanding of the wider relevance of early popular-science films, which impacted the formation of the documentary, educational, and avant-garde cinemas.

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick completed and released his magnum opus motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey; a time that was also tremendously important in the formation of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Bringing these figures together, Bristow offers a study that goes beyond, as the film did. He extends Lacan's late topological insights, delves into conceptualisations of desire, in G. W. F. Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve, and Lacan himself, and deals with the major themes of cuts (filmic and psychoanalytic); space; silence; surreality; and 'das Ding', in relation to the movie's enigmatic monolith. This book is a tour de force of psychoanalytic theory and space odyssey that will appeal to academics and practitioners of psychoanalysis and film studies, as well as to any fan of Kubrick's work.

A celebration of contemporary comedy which focuses on the trend for discomfort and the extreme, this title covers major hits of recent years from Borat, Little Britain and The Office.

This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author's own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O'Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O'Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

Marx and the Moving Image approaches cinema from a Marxist perspective. It argues that the supposed 'end of history', marked by the comprehensive triumph of capitalism and the 'end of cinema', calls for revisiting Marx's writings in order to analyse film theories, histories and practices.

What does it mean to regard cinema as technology? How do special effects change our experience of contemporary film? How important is the Internet to the film industry and film fans? "CineTech" explores these debates and examines the important intersection between film and new media. Providing a comprehensive introduction to the digital practices used in film, this book moves from historical perspectives to up-to-date analysis. Applying these debates through specific case studies, examples are drawn from recent Hollywood blockbusters such as the "Star Wars" prequels and the "Matrix" trilogy. Case studies, exercises, and suggestions for further study make this an ideal resource for courses and student assignments in both film and media studies.

Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze using the framework of Hollywood's current obsession with remaking and rebooting classic and foreign films. Through an analysis of cinematic repetition and difference, the book approaches remakes from a range of philosophical perspectives.

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney's Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called 'black magic'. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins' notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales.

Film noir may seem a familiar term to many, with its use of a complex narrative structure, flashbacks and voiceover narration, and with such archetypal characterisations as the femme fatale and private eye. But this introduction is not so much an account of what film noir is, but more an interrogation of the ways in which the term came to be applied to a particular group of American films of the 1940s and 1950s.Ian Brookes asks: 'What is film noir?' With this sharply focused question active throughout the book, students will benefit from an introductory text designed to provide a sophisticated treatment of the problems inherent in the category. This will be the first critical introduction to film noir which takes into account the complexity of the term and the difficulties of straightforward definition and classification.

Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism provides a platform for a new politics of criticism, a collaborative ethos for a different kind of relationship to cross-cultural cinema that invites further conversations between filmmakers and audiences, indigenous and others.

This study of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder focuses on what the common ethical themes in their Hollywood films unveil about the cultural and intellectual heritage of these German and Austrian emigres and their influence on American culture. Aware of the influential power of their films, these filmmakers strove to raise the intellectual standard and the positive educational value of the American film. Brief individual biographies describe their heritage, major influences, and goals and draw connections among the three filmmakers in their preference for German and Austrian literature, which focuses on social criticism, ethics, and the problem of identity. Detailed analyses of their individual styles of filmmaking and readings of selected films reveal how they put their philosophies into practice and to what extent they influenced one another. Films analyzed include "The Merry Widow, " "The Wedding March," "Heaven can Wait, To Be or Not To Be, Sunset Boulevard, "and "The Fortune Cookie "among others. By delineating their contributions to the development of modern film, this research explores the filmmakers impact on film and cultural history.

The convergence of social and philosophical inquiry film-history in this study of Lubitsch, Wilder, and von Stroheim will appeal to scholars of film, of German literature and culture, and of American cultural history. Separate chapters discuss each filmmaker and his movies. A glossary of technical terms and a selected filmography are included.