In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenzi provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous 'German-Jewish symbiosis' before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German 'national' film in the years leading to Hitler's regime.

This monograph offers a cutting edge perspective on the study of Chinese film stars by advancing a "linguaphonic" model, moving away from a conceptualization of transnational Chinese stardom reliant on the centrality of either action or body. It encompasses a selection of individual personalities from the most iconic Bruce Lee, Michelle Yeoh, and Maggie Cheung to the not-yet-full-fledged Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jay Chou, and Tang Wei to the newest Fan Binging, Liu Yifei, Wen Ming-Na, and Sammi Cheng who are exemplary to the star-making practices in the designated sites of articulations. This volume notably pivots on specific phonic modalities - spoken forms of tongues, manners of enunciation, styles of vocalization -- as means to mine ethnic and ideological underpinnings of Chinese stardom. By indicating a methodological shift from the visual-based to aural-based vectors, it asserts the phonic as a legitimate bearing that can generate novel vigor in the reimagination of Chineseness. By exhausting the critical affordability of the phonic, this book unravels the polemics of visuality and aurality, body and voice, as well as onscreen personae and offscreen existence, remapping the contours of the ethnic fame-making in the global mediascape.

Cohesion in Film is a comprehensive account of how meanings in film are constructed coherently, offering practical methods for analysing concrete elements of film images and relating them to empirical investigation. Tseng addresses several empirical issues and provides specific analytical tools for tracking and patterning film elements such as characters, objects, settings and character action. In particular, she shows how the framework of film cohesion represents new ground for unravelling the ways in which film meanings are communicated to and interpreted by viewers. Through her analysis of several extracts from television and film texts, Tseng demonstrates the potential of the framework for comparing and contrasting media genres.

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event - itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

A dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction - remaking and remodelling - which considers a wide range of film adaptations, remakes and fan productions from various industrial, textual and critical perspectives.

Kristi McKim offers close-analyses of films in which attachment and detachment, intimacy and distance, ephemera and endurance become more visible and meaningful. Films discussed include Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire , Agnes Varda's Jacquot de Nantes , Doris Doerrie's Cherry Blossoms and Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours.

Although American films, especially Hollywood fare, are often belittled for their one-dimensional portrayal of sex, a close examination of the history of sex in American motion pictures reveals that American cinema has actually represented sex in myriad ways. A more complete understanding of the ways in which sex has been represented onscreen requires an approach that pays equal attention to cinematic techniques and to the diversity of sexual values and behaviors in American society. It is necessary to frame this discussion within the multiple contradictions of an industry that has both repressed and represented sex with equal fervor over the course of its history; of audiences that have both taken offense at and flocked to films with sexual themes; and a body politic that has regulated the sexual in popular culture even as its discourse has been saturated with sexual images and topics. The History of Sex in American Cinema moves seamlessly between general film and social history to clarify how exactly sex has been expressed cinematically, and how we have responded to those expressions as a culture. In March of 1965 the Supreme Court put into motion legal changes that marked the end of local film censorship as it had existed since the early years of the twentieth century. In Hollywood that same year, The Pawnbroker was released with a Production Code Seal of Approval, despite nudity that violated that Code. As sexual liberation occurred onscreen, parallel developments occurred in the way we lived our lives, and by the end of the 1960s Americans were having sex more often, and with more partners, than ever before. There was also now a public debate surrounding sexuality, and one of the loudest and most continually active voices in this debate was that of American film. This work begins with an examination of some of the earliest altercations in what later came to be known as the culture wars, and follows those skirmishes, more often than not provoked by American film, up to the modern day. By looking at how sex in the cinema has contributed to the demise of the fragile consensus between liberals and conservatives on freedom of expression, The History of Sex in American Film suggests a perspective from which today's culture wars can be better understood. This work combines close readings of many representative films-including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Blue Velvet, Philadelphia, L.A. Confidential, and Closer-with a social and historical account of the most significant changes in American sexual behavior and sexual representation over the past fifty years.

The study of Hollywood detectives has often overlooked the B-Movie mystery series in favour of hard-boiled film. 'Hollywood's Detectives' redresses this oversight by examining key detective series of the 1930s and 1940s to explore their contributions to the detective genre.

Italy gave us the words 'fascism' and 'totalitarianism', yet globally the dominant image of the regime is one of an incompetent dictatorship served by soldiers who 'would not fight for love nor money on account of their languorous Latin character', as Noel Coward wrote. This book investigates Italian cinema's contribution to stereotypes of victimhood and innocence, otherwise known as Italiani brava gente, by tracing across the postwar period filmmakers, audiences, censors and the unforgettable characters of Italian cinema. The author casts an innovative eye on classic films like Rome Open City and 1900, and analyses in depth many lesser known works, to tease out recurrent trends and ongoing taboos of representation and assess them in a comparative European perspective. From the desperate resolve of neorealism to the bloated mediocrity of Berlusconian revisionist melodramas, Italian cinema has remembered selectively and silently forgotten the most shameful pages of Italy's history.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

This edited collection explores the relationship between urban space, architecture and the moving image. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to film and moving image practices, the book explores the recent developments in research on film and urban landscapes, pointing towards new theoretical and methodological frameworks for discussion.

Science fiction--one of the most popular literary, cinematic and television genres--has received increasing academic attention in recent years. For philosophers, critical theorists and others it opens up a space in which the here-and-now can be made strange or remade; where virtual reality and cyborg are no longer gimmicks or predictions, but new spaces and subjects.Lost in Space brings together an international collection of authors to explore the diverse spatialities and geographies of space. A diverse range of themes are examined--from geographical and sociological imaginations to nature, scale, geopolitics, modernity, time, identity, the body, power relations and the representation of space.Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches, the essays explore the writings of a broad selection of SF writers and films, including J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, William Gibson, Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson; the films include Aliens, Bladerunner, Dark City, The Fly, The Invisible Man and Metropolis.Contributors: Stuart C. Aitken, Nick Bingham, David Clarke, Marcus Doel, Sheila Hones, Shaun Huston, Michelle Kendrick, Paul Kingsbury, Michael W. Longan, Barbar J. Morehouse, Timothy Oakes, Jon Taylor Barney Warf

This book addresses what a superhero body can do by developing several "x-rays" of the superbody's sensoria, anatomic structures, internal systems, cellular organizations, and orthotic, chemical, or technological enhancements. In short, these x-rays offer what we might describe as a metamorpho-physiological approach to the superheroes in feature films, theatrical cartoon shorts, and Netflix television series. This approach examines the ways in which the "substance" of superheroes, which includes their masks, costumes, chevrons, weapons, and auras, extends into the diegetic environment of the film, transgressing it, transforming it, and corporealizing it, making it emblematic of the shape, dimensions, contours, and organismic workings of one or more of our major organs, members, orifices, fluids, or cell clusters. Thus the superhero film, as this study claims, works to make us more aware of the mutability, adaptability, modifiability, and virtual capabilities of our own flesh.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com "A film that will let you see the music and listen to drawings; in a word, a film full of Fantasia!" Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro non Troppo tips its hand right away: it is an unabashed, yet full of admiration, retake on Walt Disney's 1940 "concert feature". The obvious nod to that model fuels many tongue-in-cheek jokes in the film; however, Allegro non Troppo soon departs from mere parody, and becomes a showcase for the multifaceted aesthetics of Italian animation in 1976, as well as a witty social satire and a powerful rethinking of the music-image relationship in cinema. Marco Bellano reconstructs the history of the production of Allegro non Troppo, on the basis of an original research developed with the contribution of Bozzetto himself; it also presents an audiovisual analysis of the work, as to reassess the international relevance of Bozzetto's achievements by giving insight into the director's creative process.

This title combines, in a unique and innovative way, analytical approaches from literary narratology, film studies and new media studies.This title examines the recent cinematic trend of 'modular' narrative form, in which the temporal flow of the narrative is disrupted. It identifies and describes four different models of cinematic modular narrative. There is increasing academic interest in the topic of narrative complexity in film, illustrated by significant recent attention in journal articles, but this is the first monograph to study the phenomenon exclusively. It combines analytical approaches from literary narratology, film studies and new media studies. It includes analysis of a number of 'cult' films that are popular among film students both in the UK and the US e.g. Run Lola Run, 21 Grams, and Memento.Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.

This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers - pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen. Reviews of the original edition: 'An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work is sensitive both to cinema history and to the literary origins of the "swashbuckler"....Essential for any library with books on film, it may very well be the definitive book on its subject.' - Library Journal

Branigan effectively criticizes the communication model of narration, a task long overdue in Anglo-American circles. The book brings out the extent to which mainstream mimetic theories have relied upon the elastic notion of an invisible, idealized observer, a convenient spook whom critics can summon up whenever they desire to "naturalize" style. The book also makes distinctions among types of subjectivity; after this, we will have much more precise ways of tracing the fluctuations among a character's vision, dreams, wishes, and so forth. Branigan also explains the necessity of distinguishing levels of narration.

This collection brings together leading international scholars and filmmakers focusing on Latin American cinema. The themes discussed include subjectivity, history, memory, representations of reality, cinema's relation to the public sphere, and issues of production, distribution and marketing.

'Screenwriting in a Digital Era' examines the practices of writing for the screen from early Hollywood to the new realism. Looking back to prehistories of the form, Kathryn Millard links screenwriting to visual and oral storytelling around the globe, and explores new methods of collaboration and authorship in the digital environment.

From a screenwriting perspective, Batty explores the idea that the protagonist's journey is comprised of two individual yet interwoven threads: the physical journey and the emotional journey. His analysis includes detailed case studies of the films Muriel's Wedding , Little Voice , Cars , Forgetting Sarah Marshall , Sunshine Cleaning and Up.