Hotbeds of Licentiousness is the first substantial critical engagement with British pornography on film across the 1970s, including the "Summer of Love," the rise and fall of the Permissive Society, the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, and beyond. By focusing on a series of colorful filmmakers whose work, while omnipresent during the 1970s, now remains critically ignored, author Benjamin Halligan discusses pornography in terms of lifestyle aspirations and opportunities which point to radical changes in British society. In this way, pornography is approached as a crucial optic with which to consider recent cultural and social history.

America Reflected offers eclectic film criticism and considerations of distinctive American voices from the ante-bellum era to the present.The much-loved Will Rogers reassured Americans that 19th-century pioneer values would survive in an age of machines, media, and political bunk. Deprecating changes of the post-WWI era, he proved-by his own example-that ordinary people could still practice neighborliness in an increasingly impersonal world. Benjamin Lee Whorf believed fervently that conflicts between science and religion could be resolved. All war films, even documentaries, are presented as interpretations that require additional interpretation by scholars-as well as media literacy on the part of audiences. Especially in the Vietnam chapters, Rollins taps his experiences as scholar, combat officer, and filmmaker-as well as his fervent commitment to America's fighting men and women. Other essays address questions of national vision: how do Harriet Beecher Stowe, Amy Lowell, John James Audubon, and Frederick Henry Hedge contribute to our understanding of the American spirit? Environmental issues are engaged in discussions of John James Audubon and the oil field films. America Reflected closes with a discussion of New Deal documentaries about the environment.Praise"From cowboy philosopher Will Rogers to popular perceptions of two world wars and Vietnam, from the history of language to the language of film and television, Peter Rollins has devoted his career to exploring the intriguing ways in which the creative impulse both shapes and reflectsAmerican culture. His observations are fresh, illuminating and of enduring value." John E. O'Connor, co-founder and long-term editor of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies "Even those who have known and admired Peter Rollin's acclaimed works will here find enlightening surprises. Epistemology, language theory, war's polemics, filmed history, and an array of significant creators of American culture are all elegantly displayed. This book will make you a wiser person and charm you while it does it." John Shelton Lawrence, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Morningside College."Two decades ago I was privileged to work on a book, America Observed, with Alistair Cooke. Now we have America Reflected by Peter Rollins, one of the most respected cultural historians working today. Not only does Rollins make good observations about our lives and times, his reflections on a diverse set of subjects helps us to see the meanings of our observations." Ronald A. Wells is Professor of History Emeritus at Calvin College, Michigan."In America Reflected, Rollins gathers together glimpses of our shared worlds, so that we may observe their interconnections across media, genres, and time. From down-home values and front-porch philosophy, to tales of wars and chronicles of lives, the subjects considered here are all part of the stories we tell about ourselves and our social worlds." Cynthia J. Miller, President, Literature/Film Association."Rollins examines the roles of language, satire, and film in reflecting the American consciousness through such diverse sources as Orestes Brownson, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Will Rogers, and Hollywood. Readers of America Reflected are in for a delightful voyage as they travel through American history and culture with Peter Rollins as their guide providing personal and scholarly insights into the shaping of the American mind." Ron Briley is the Assistant Schoolmaster, Sandia Preparatory School, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and editor, The Politics of Baseball: Essays on the Pastime and Power at Home and Abroad (2010).

Issues surrounding precarity, debility and vulnerability are now of central concern to philosophers as we try and navigate an increasingly uncertain world. Matthew R. McLennan delves into these subjects enthusiastically and sensitively, presenting a vision of the discipline of philosophy which is grounded in real, lived experience. Developing an invigorating, if at times painful, sense of the finitude and fragility of human life, Philosophy and Vulnerability provocatively marshals three disciplinary "nonphilosophers" to make its argument: French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat, journalist and masterful cultural commentator Joan Didion and feminist poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. Through this encounter, this book suggests ways in which rigorous attention to difference and diversity must nourish a militant philosophical universalism in the future.

Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.

The idea that pain can be a pleasure is a troubling one, and yet it informs cultural practices ranging from extreme sports to BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism). This book considers how mainstream cinema borrows heavily from these cultural activities for its imagery, but typically rejects their social motivations founded on masochistic pleasure and an assertion of autonomy. Noting a shift in the late twentieth century to narratives that highlight subjection, endurance and willed-acquiescence, it probes the confluence of pain, pleasure and consent to analyse the implications of the change. Films addressed include Crash, Fight Club, Saw, Se7en and Sick. Individual chapters focus on the influence of BDSM, body modification, provocative artwork, dangerous games and torture, and collectively they offer an address of how cinema's viscerally dominated, marked and suffering body - the controlled body - destabilizes the pain/pleasure dichotomy, as well as other binaries founded on gender, sexuality and disfigurement/beauty.

The BBC TV series Doctor Who celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013; this book analyses how promotion, commemorative merchandise and 3D cinema screenings worked paratextually to construct a 'popular media event' while sometimes uneasily integrating public service values and consumerist logics.

Drawing on a variety of film semiotic theories, this book sheds light on works by four generations of mainland Chinese directors, Hong Kong New Wave directors, Taiwan New Cinema directors, and overseas Chinese directors. The cultural and historical implications of exile are examined through the detailed analysis of film language and theoretical exploration balanced by insightful close reading. Zeng establishes a semiotics of exile film as reflected in genre-upsetting, semiotics of photography, displaced film codes, Taoist pitfalls, postmodernism, and the symbol of female doubling.

Using silent cinema as a critical lens enables us to reassess Katherine Mansfield's entire literary career. Starting from the awareness that innovation in literature is often the outcome of hybridisation, this book discusses not only a single case study, but also the intermedia exchanges in which literary modernism at large is rooted.

This timely book provides new insights into debates around the relationship between women and film by drawing on the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray. Arguing that female-directed cinema provides new ways to explore ideas of representation and spectatorship, it also examines the importance of contexts of production, direction and reception.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors. This survey outlines the influence of screen adaptation of important texts from the national literature on the construction of an Irish cinema, many of whose films because of cultural constraints were produced and exhibited outside the country until very recently. Authors discussed include George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Liam O'Flaherty, Christy Brown, Edna O'Brien, James Joyce, and Brian Friel. The films analysed in this volume include THE QUIET MAN, THE INFORMER, MAJOR BARBARA, THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES, MY LEFT FOOT, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE SNAPPER, and DANCING AT LUGHNASA. The introduction features a detailed discussion of the cultural and political questions raised by the promotion of forms of national identity by Ireland's literary and cinematic establishments.

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study closely explores emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing, with new readings of works by Agnes Varda, Pedro Almodovar, Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Calle, and many others.

This is a hugely important collection of essays on Deleuze and Cinema from an international panel of experts.In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work, "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" caused an international sensation by fusing Marx with a radically rewritten Freud to produce a new approach to critical thinking they provocatively called schizoanalysis. "Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema" explores the possibilities of using this concept to interrogate cinematic works in both the Hollywood and non-Hollywood tradition. It attempts to define what a schizoanalysis of cinema might be and interrogates a variety of ways in which a schizoanalysis might be applied.This collection opens up a fresh field of inquiry for Deleuze scholars and poses an exciting challenge to cinema studies in general. Featuring some of the most important cinema studies scholars working on Deleuze and Guattari today, "Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema" is a cutting-edge collection that will set the agenda for future work in this area.

This book presents an analysis of Lieutenant Columbo's investigative method of rhetorical inquiry as seen in the television police procedural Columbo (1968-2003). With a barrage of questions about minute details and feigned ignorance, the iconic detective enacts a persona of 'antipotency' (counter authoritativeness) to affect the villains' underestimation of his attention to inconsistencies, abductive reasoning, and rhetorical efficacy. In a predominantly dialogue-based investigation, Columbo exhausts his suspects by asking a battery of questions concerning all minor details of the case, which evolves into an aggravating tedious provocation for the killer trying to maintain innocence. Based on the Ancient Greek ideal of Sophrosyne (temperance, restraint) and the Socratic method of questioning to discover truths, the Lieutenant models effective rhetorical inquiry with resistant responders: shy, secretive, anxious, emotionally-disconnected, angry, arrogant, jealous, and, in this case, murderous conversants. While designed to be critical and theoretical, this text strives to be accessible to interdisciplinary readers, practical in application, and amusing for Columbo buffs.

By breaking down classic films from the nineteen-nineties such as Forest Gump and Titanic, this book offers a reel-to-reel cultural analysis, chronicling the concept of 'spin' as a major sociopolitical persuasion strategy.

Taking as its point of departure the three recurrent themes of nostalgia, memory and local histories, this book is an attempt to map out a new poetics -- the post-nostalgic imagination -- in Hong Kong cinema in the first decade of Chinese rule.

This critical introduction to gay and lesbian identity within the media explores the concept of 'new storytelling.' The case studies look at film, television and online media, focussing on the narrative potential of individual storytellers who, as producers, writers and performers, challenge identity concerns and offer new expressions of liberty.

This book provides wide-ranging commentary on depictions of the black male in mainstream cinema. O'Brien explores the extent to which counter-representations of black masculinity have been achieved within a predominately white industry, with an emphasis on agency, the negotiation and malleability of racial status, and the inherent instability of imposed racial categories. Focusing on American and European cinema, the chapters highlight actors (Woody Strode, Noble Johnson, Eddie Anderson, Will Smith), genres (jungle pictures, westerns, science fiction) and franchises (Tarzan, James Bond) underrepresented in previous critical and scholarly commentary in the field. The author argues that although the characters and performances generated in these areas invoke popular genre types, they display complexity, diversity and ambiguity, exhibiting aspects that are positive, progressive and subversive. This book will appeal to both the academic and the general reader interested in film, race, gender and colonial issues.

This volume addresses the underscrutinised topic of cinema newsreels. These short, multi-themed newsfilms, usually accompanied by explanatory intertitles or voiceovers, were a central part of the filmgoing experience around the world from 1910 through the late 1960s, and in many cases even later. As the only source of moving image news available before the widespread advent of television, newsreels are important social documents, recording what the general public was told and shown about the events and personalities of the day. Often disregarded as quirky or trivial, they were heavily utilised as propaganda vehicles, offering insights into the socio-political norms reflected in cinema during the first half of the twentieth century. The book presents a range of current research being undertaken in newsreel studies internationally and makes a case for a reconsideration of the importance of newsreels in the wider landscape of film history.

Martin Scorsese is one of the world's great filmmakers, and a genuine auteur. A follow up to The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963-77, this book covers his work from The Last Waltz to Bringing Out the Dead. Central is the detailed, theoretically informed discussion of all of the Scorsese-directed features released during this period, which, for Scorsese, was marked by both considerable artistic achievement and a shifting and at times uncertain relationship with the Hollywood film industry. Filmic discussion is correspondingly situated in relation to a range of forces and developments - institutional, but also of larger historical reference - that shape the films and Scorsese's authorial discourse. Another stimulating demonstration of sustained textual analysis, The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1978-99 presents an extended critical affirmation of the continuing pertinence of the concept of film authorship and illuminates Hollywood cinema from the late 1970s to the turn of the millennium. Like its predecessor, the book is about authorship and context. Discussion of the films is founded upon a combination of formal, psychoanalytic, and ideological approaches.