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.

From the Academy Award--winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Academy Award--nominated Adaptation (2002) to the cult classic Being John Malkovich (1999), writer Charlie Kaufman is widely admired for his innovative, philosophically resonant films. Although he only recently made his directorial debut with Synecdoche, New York (2008), most fans and critics refer to "Kaufman films" the way they would otherwise discuss works by directors Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, or the Coen brothers. Not only has Kaufman transformed our sense of what can take place in a film, but he also has made a significant impact on our understanding of the role of the screenwriter. The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, edited by David LaRocca, is a collection of essays devoted to a rigorous philosophical exploration of Kaufman's work by a team of accomplished scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Including a new preface by the editor, this volume offers original philosophical analyses as well as extended reflections on the nature of film and innovative models of film criticism.

Longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Moving Image Category Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By addressing ordinary actors as a labor force, Kate Fortmueller proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood. Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood.

Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu's theories are, however, they have only intermittently been used to study some of the most important forms of cultural production today: cinema and new media. With topics ranging from film festivals and photography to constantly evolving mobile technologies, this collection demonstrates the enormous relevance that Bourdieu's key concepts hold for the field of media studies, deploying them as powerful tools of analysis and forging new avenues of inquiry in the process.

The secular, pluralist culture of the West encourages a subjective approach to spiritual truth where stimulating emotional experiences, such as those provided by film, can contribute to personal conceptions of the sacred. Examining Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the principal case-study and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) and Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) as comparative examples, Sarah Balstrup argues that these directors harness the affective properties of film to generate altered states of perception in a manner analogous to religious practice. Powerful feelings of dissociation and indescribable significance typical of mystical testimony appear in viewer responses to these films, demonstrating the continued sacralisation of such states of mind. In their own way, each film confronts the viewer with an apocalyptic revelation of the impersonal forces of the universe, moving away from personhood and the human narrative, into pure sensation. They present a non-deterministic spiritual truth that can be intuited but not explained, mirroring developments in the religious sphere. Investigating the relationship between cinematic technique and religious experience, Spiritual Sensations offers an alternative approach to the study of religion and film that has been principally focused on narrative symbolism and the dramatisation of values. Spiritual Sensations makes a further contribution to the field by analysing films contextually, considering viewers' subjective responses in light of religious and cultural change.

The historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States had a significant impact on both America and the world at large. By voting an African American into the highest office, those who elected Obama did not necessarily look past race, but rather didn't let race prevent them for casting their ballots in his favor. In addition to reflecting the changing political climate, Obama's presidency also spurred a cultural shift, notably in music, television, and film. In Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post-Racial and Neo-Racist Cinema, David Garrett Izzo presents a varied collection of essays that examine films produced since the 2008 election. The contributors to these essays comment on a number of films in which race and "otherness" are pivotal elements. In addition to discussing such films as Beasts of the Southern Wild, Black Dynamite, The Blind Side, The Butler, Django Unchained, The Help, and Invictus, this collection also includes essays that probe racial elements in The Great Gatsby, The Hunger Games, and The Mist. The volume concludes with several essays that examine the 2013 Academy Award winner for best picture, 12 Years a Slave. Though Obama's election may have been the main impetus for a resurgence of black films, this development is a bit more complicated. Moviemakers have long responded to the changing times, so it is inevitable that the Obama presidency would spark an increase in films that comment, either subtly or overtly, on the current cultural climate. By looking at the issue these films address, Movies in the Age of Obama will be of value to film scholars, of course, but also to those interested in other disciplines, including history, politics, and cultural studies.

Few filmmakers, if any, make the kind of impact that Martin Scorsese has made on American cinema. The winner of every prestigious film award, including the Oscar, Scorsese is a living legend. Bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker Mary Pat Kelly's groundbreaking biography reveals how this working-class boy from Manhattan's Little Italy became one of our most acclaimed, celebrated, and influential filmmakers. Martin Scorsese: A Journey maps Scorsese's personal and artistic evolution though his films, from early works like student films and Mean Streets through cinematic masterpieces like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas. Across interviews with Scorsese himself; stars like Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Liza Minelli, and Nick Nolte; colleagues including screenwriters and cinematographers; as well as family and friends, it reveals the story of a man in a way that only his community and fellow artists can, giving us unprecedented, intimate access to the making of these iconic films and the extraordinary mind behind them. Brimming with insight into Scorsese's life, values, process, humor, and inspirations, it is a remarkable account of America's premiere director, the shepherd of countless imaginations.

In Mexico, the confluence of the 1992 Quincentennial commemoration of Columbus's voyages and the neo-liberal "sexenio," or presidency, of Carlos Salinas de Gortari spurred artistic creations that capture the decade like no other source does. In the 1990s, Mexican artists produced an inordinate number of works that revise and rewrite the events of the sixteenth-century conquest and colonization. These works and their relationship to, indeed their mirroring of, the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Mexico during the Salinas presidency are of paramount importance if we are to understand the subtle but deep shifts within Mexico's national identity that took place at the end of the last century.

Throughout the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican State had used "mestizaje" as a symbol of national unity and social integration. By the end of the millennium, however, Mexico had gone from a PRI-dominated, economically protectionist nation to a more democratic, economically globalizing one. More importantly, the homogenizing, mestizophile national identity that pervaded Mexico throughout the past century had given way to official admission of Mexico's ethnic and linguistic diversity--or 'pluriculture' according to President Salinas's 1992 constitutional revision.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of literary, cinematic, and graphic images of Mexican national identity in the 1980s and '90s. Discussing, in depth, writings, films, and cartoons from a vast array of contemporary sources, Carrie C. Chorba creates a social history of this important shift.

Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen is a scholarly collection that provides expansive exploration of the auteur's use of intertexuality, referentiality, and fusion of media forms. Its scope is framed by Allen's intermedial phase beginning in 1983 with Zelig and his most recent film.

Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now a central feature of contemporary film studies, as well as primary concerns for film-makers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Germany and America, Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema.
In the first three Parts, contributors explore sociological approaches to nationalism, challenge the established definitions of 'national cinema', and consider the ways in which states - from the old Soviet Union to contemporary Scotland - aim to create a national culture through cinema. The final two Parts address the diverse strategies involved in the production of national cinema and consider how images of the nation are used and understood by audiences both at home and abroad.

Examines and interrogates the concept of the 'uncanny', and the cultural contexts which allow such experiences of disorientation and alienation.This book includes translation of Ernst Jensch's seminal essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) - first time this has been available in English. A timely collection - the term 'uncanny' has become confused in critical theory, and this book helps clarify what it means in contemporary culture. It has a broad appeal and illustrates the range and influence of the 'uncanny' in current research in the humanities and beyond (contributors work in a range of fields, from film studies, literary theory, to history and cultural studies).It includes well-known contributors such as Julian Wolfreys, David Punter and Roger Luckhurst.This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.

In this collection of essays, a range of scholars from different disciplines look through the prism of technology at the much-debated notion of cultural memory, analyzing how the past is shaped or unsettled by cultural texts including visual art, literature, cinema, photographs and souvenirs.

In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the "New Hollywood" films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly "grounded" cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.

As with many aspects of European cultural life, film was galvanized and transformed by the revolutionary fervor of 1968. This groundbreaking study provides a full account of the era's cinematic crises, innovations, and provocations, as well as the social and aesthetic contexts in which they appeared. The author mounts a genuinely fresh analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter, and Fassbinder to the "low" cinematic genres of horror, pornography, and the Western reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt-a cinema for the barricades.

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.

It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation's sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the 'political myth' and 'the film event' are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, Francois Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.

Black Mirror is a cultural phenomenon. It is a creative and sometimes shocking examination of modern society and the improbable consequences of technological progress. The episodes - typically set in an alternative present, or the near future - usually have a dark and satirical twist that provokes intense question both of the self and society at large. These kind of philosophical provocations are at the very heart of the show. Philosophical reflections on Black Mirror draws upon thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault to uncover how Black Mirror acts as 'philosophical television' questioning human morality and humanity's vulnerability when faced with the inexorable advance of technology.

The relationship between theology and film has always been a complicated one. When film was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, it quickly gained its place in popular culture, far from the orthodoxies of the scholarly world and of the Church. For the better part of the twentieth century popular cinema was considered off limits for serious studies of Bible and culture. Recently, however, there has been a growing understanding of how the Bible is being used in popular culture-not as a historical document or as an authoritative canon, but as part of the cultural intertext. Cinema is a vivid example of the role and impact of the Bible in contemporary society. In this well-theorized collection of essays the issue is treated from several angles. Using the methodology of theology, the question of the alleged escapism of popular cinema is explored. Using the methodology of media studies, the impact of the media on religious communication is analysed. And, using the methodology of religious studies, the influence of the cinema in the creation of new religions, religious behaviour and religious institutions is investigated. In addition, the book offers fruitful analyses of the cinematic use of biblical themes such as Eden, salvation, Mary Magdalene and Jesus-as well as of the cinematic application of ethical themes such as truth-telling, personal growth, suffering, the accomplishment of good and the creating of meaning for human beings.

The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.