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.

First published in 2002, Marek Haltof's seminal volume was the first comprehensive English-language study of Polish cinema, providing a much-needed survey of one of Europe's most distinguished-yet unjustly neglected-film cultures. Since then, seismic changes have reshaped Polish society, European politics, and the global film industry. This thoroughly revised and updated edition takes stock of these dramatic shifts to provide an essential account of Polish cinema from the nineteenth century to today, covering such renowned figures as Kieslowski, Skolimowski, and Wajda along with vastly expanded coverage of documentaries, animation, and television, all set against the backdrop of an ever-more transnational film culture.

Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world. Screened Encounters represents the definitive history of this key event, recounting the political and artistic exchanges it enabled from its founding until German unification, and tracing the outsize influence it exerted on international cultural relations during the Cold War.

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. "

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.

This book explores the idiosyncratic effects generated as fairytale and gothic horror join, clash or merge in cinema. Identifying long-held traditions that have inspired this topical phenomenon, the book features close analysis of classical through to contemporary films. It begins by tracing fairytale and gothic origins and evolutions, examining the diverse ways these have been embraced and developed by cinema horror. It moves on to investigate films close up, locating fairytale horror, motifs and themes and a distinctively cinematic gothic horror. At the book's core are recurring concerns including: the boundaries of the human; rational and irrational forces; fears and dreams; 'the uncanny' and transitions between the wilds and civilization. While chronology shapes the book, it is thematically driven, with an interest in the cultural and political functions of fairytale and gothic horror, and the levels of transgression or social conformity at the heart of the films.

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.

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.

The Internet is the most terrifying and most beautifully innovative invention of the twentieth century. Using film theory and close textual analysis, Tucker offers an explanation of the Internet and a brief history of its portrayal on film in order examine how it has shaped contemporary versions of self-identity, memory, and the human body.

This book interrogates the relation between film spectatorship and film theory in order to criticise some of the disciplinary and authoritarian assumptions of 1970s apparatus theory, without dismissing its core political concerns. Theory, in this perspective, should not be seen as a practice distinct from spectatorship but rather as an integral aspect of the spectator's gaze. Combining Jacques Ranciere's emancipated spectator with Judith Butler's queer theory of subjectivity, Spectatorship and Film Theory foregrounds the contingent, embodied and dialogic aspects of our experience of film. Erratic and always a step beyond the grasp of disciplinary discourse, this singular work rejects the notion of the spectator as a fixed position, and instead presents it as a field of tensions-a "wayward" history of encounters.

The Lola film is a distinct subgenre of the woman's film in which woman's claim to pleasure is entertained without recourse to the figure of the femme fatale. Lola embodies a recognizable set of characteristics through which over time a select group of directors, actors, and audiences have responded in ways that do not succumb to the imperatives of gender. There are over thirty-five Lola films, starting with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel: many are German, others are French, American, British, Italian, and Spanish, but her claim has also resonated in Argentina, China, Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, and the Philippines. Lola can be working class, lesbian, transgender, ethnic, suburban, or any combination. This book examines Lola as a specific and enduring aspect of the early twentieth-century "new woman": woman's forthright claim to pleasure on her own terms, liberated, if only as a cinematic fantasy, from the usual constraints of sex and gender.

Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship and social audience as several lenses of both 'mutual understanding' and 'galvanizing extension' in ways of seeing this object of 'real-sex cinema'. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This is a book which substantively, methodologically and theoretically is embracing and engaging in its consideration of the images, ethics, 'double standards' and embodiments of brutal cinema. Written in a style free of jargon, and crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics as well as general and professional audiences.

Cinema, literature, and television shape our collective political understanding. Their dramas enact and test political ideas, especially when they use the political myths widely available in popular forms such as epics, noirs, and satires. Popular Cinema as Political Theory explores mythmaking in popular genres, demonstrating how to see political arguments in the conventional characters, deeds, and settings that enable movies to entertain us. Analyzing favorites such as The Prestige, L.A. Confidential, Star Trek Into Darkness, No Country for Old Men, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, John Nelson provides a provocative and original account of political lessons from summer blockbusters and cinematic masterpieces alike.

This comprehensive revision guide contains everything students need to know to succeed on their A Level Film Studies course. Essential Revision for A Level Film Studies features engaging and accessible chapters to help learners develop a deeper understanding of the key elements of film form, including cinematography, mise en scene, performance, lighting, editing and sound. The book offers detailed explanations of the specialist study areas required for the A Level course, including auteur theory, spectatorship, genre, key critical debates, narrative and ideology, as well as overviews of key film movements like French New Wave cinema, German Expressionism and Soviet Montage. Also included are practical exercises designed to help students apply essential concepts to film set texts, sample exam responses for both Eduqas and OCR exam boards, and challenge activities designed to help students secure premium grades. With its practical approach and comprehensive scope, Essential Revision for A Level Film Studies is the ideal resource for students and teachers. The book also features a companion website at EssentialFilmRevision.com, which includes a wide range of supporting resources including revision flashcards and worksheets, a bank of film set text applications for exam questions for all film specifications, and classroom-ready worksheets that teachers can use alongside the book to help students master A Level Film exam content.

Examining post-1990s Indie cinema alongside more mainstream films, Brereton explores the emergence of smart independent sensibility and how films break the classic linear narratives that have defined Hollywood and its alternative "art" cinema. The work explores how bonus features on contemporary smart films speak to new generational audiences.

Best known as the woman who "ran MGM," Ida R. Koverman (1876-1954) served as talent scout, mentor, executive secretary, and confidant to American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for twenty-five years. She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman is the first full account of Koverman's life and the true story of how she became a formidable politico and a creative powerhouse during Hollywood's Golden Era. For nearly a century, Koverman's legacy has largely rested on a mythical narrative while her more fascinating true-life story has remained an enduring mystery - until now. This story begins with Koverman's early years in Ohio and the sensational national scandal that forced her escape to New York where she created a new identity and became a leader among a community of women. Her second incarnation came in California where she established herself as a hardcore political operative challenging the state's progressive impulse. During the Roaring Twenties, she was a key architect of the Southland's conservative female-centric partisan network that refashioned the course of state and national politics and put Herbert Hoover in the White House. As ""the political boss of Los Angeles County,"" she was the premiere matchmaker in the courtship between Hollywood and national partisan politics, which, as Mayer's executive secretary, was epitomized by her third incarnation as ""one of the most formidable women in Hollywood,"" whose unparalleled power emanated from her unique perch inside the executive suite of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Free to adapt her managerial skills and political know-how on behalf of the studio, she quickly drew upon her artistic sensibilities as a talent scout, expanding MGM's catalog of stars and her own influence on American popular culture. Recognized as ""one of the invisible power centers in both MGM and the city of Los Angeles,"" she nurtured the city's burgeoning performing arts by fostering music and musicians and the public financing of them. As the ""lioness"" of MGM royalty, Ida Koverman was not just a naturalized citizen of the Hollywood kingdom; at times during her long reign, she ""damn near ran the studio.