This bio-bibliography was designed to present a combined biographical, critical, and bibliographical portrait of the Marx Brothers. It examines their significance in film comedy in particular, and as popular culture figures in general. The book is divided into five sections, beginning with a biography which explores the public and private sides of the Marx Brothers. The second section is concerned with the influences of the Marx Brothers as icons of anti-establishment comedy, as contributors to developments in American comedy, as early examples of "saturation comedy," and as a crucial link between silent films and the "talkies." Three original articles, two by Groucho and one by Gummo, comprise part three. A bibliographical essay, which assesses key reference materials and research collections, is followed by two bibliographical checklists. Appendices containing a chronological biography with a timeline, a filmography, and a selected discography complete the work.

A critical survey of Hollywood film musicals from the 1960s to the present. This book examines how, in the post-studio system era, cultural, industrial and stylistic circumstances transformed this once happy-go-lucky genre into one both fluid and cynical enough to embrace the likes of "Rocky Horror" and pave the way for "Cannibal!" and "Moulin Rouge!."

The essays in A Moving Picture Feast discuss every Hollywood film made from a Hemingway work and represent the most diverse response yet to the Hemingway-Hollywood relationship. The contributors examine the popular public image Hollywood created of Hemingway the man and offer a provocative look at the esthetic relationship between fiction and cinema. They criticize the films themselves as art, in many cases with scene-by-scene analysis, and explore the process by which films are adapted from novels and short stories. Their research includes inside decisions made by producers and directors that affected the final versions of specific films. With its valuable bibliography, listing nearly 400 articles, reviews, and screenplay typescripts, A Moving Picture Feast will be an important resource for film buffs as well as any student or scholar of Hemingway. Oliver's collection of 15 articles about film versions of Ernest Heminway's works conducts an interesting and worthwhile conversation about the possible relationships between art in one media and the work it inspires in another. "Choice"

This collection of 15 chapters by Hemingway film scholars discusses every Hollywood film made from a Hemingway work and represents the most diverse response yet to the Hemingway-Hollywood relationship. The contributors go beyond discussing the failure of the film medium to be worthy of Hemingway to criticize the films themselves as art and in one case with scene-by-scene analysis. They explore the process by which films are adapted from novels and short stories. Their research includes inside decisions made by producers and directors that affected the final versions of specific films. Their analysis is of diverse subjects--from the dichotomy of Hemingway as private person and celebrity, to the prevailing film morality of revising original stories to fit Hollywood standards. This important addition to the small body of literature on Hemingway films will shed light on a neglected area of Hemingway studies. With its valuable bibliography listing nearly 400 titles--articles, reviews, and screenplay typescripts--"A Moving Picture Feast" will be an important resource for film buffs as well as for any student or scholar of Hemingway.

The book is divided into three sections. The chapters in the first section explore the similarities and vast differences between Hemingway's style and general cinematic techniques. The contributors examine the popular public image Hollywood created of Hemingway and offer a provocative look at the esthetic relationship between fiction and cinema. The chapters in the second section examine the films made from Hemingway novels. One chapter compares three different versions of "To Have and Have Not"; another discusses Hemingway's extensive collaboration on the documentary film "The Spanish Earth." The third section examines the films made from the short stories. This section includes a compelling discussion of film noir and how this technique applies to the film versions of "The KillerS." Another chapter offers a fascinating comparison of the esthetics of the short stories of "In Our Time" and the classic D. W. Griffith film "The Birth of a Nation."

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges of producing film adaptations of five of E. M. Forster's novels. Rather than follow the older comparative approach, which typically damned the film for not being "faithful" to the novel, this project explores the interactive relationship between film and novel. That relationship is implicit in the title "Filming" Forster, rather than "Forster Filmed," which would suggest a completed process. A film adaptation forever changes the novel from which it was adapted, just as a return to the novel changes the viewer's perceptions of the film. Adapting Forster's novels for the screen was postponed until well after the author's death in 1970 because the trustees of the author's estate fulfilled his wish that his work not be filmed. Following the appearance of David Lean's film A Passage to India in 1984, four other film adaptations were released within seven years. Perhaps the most important was the Merchant Ivory production of Maurice, based upon Forster's "gay" novel, published a year after his death. That film was among the first to approach same-sex relationships between men in a serious, respectful, and generally optimistic manner.

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany's first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich. This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola's various "incarnations."

Social realism has been a vital element of British culture over the past seventy years, yet it has not gained anywhere near the critical attention its impact warrants. It can be a highly responsive genre, one that confronts its contemporaneous social, economic and political contexts with visceral immediacy, while at the same time retaining a focus on the individual, the domestic and the private. This fascinating analysis of the intertwined histories and legacies of British social realism across disciplines reveals
how important the changing genre has been for creative works since the Second World War, and how it resonates within contemporary contexts. With original contributions from leading scholars, this collection provides chapters on film, theatre, fiction, visual art, poetry and television, that show how social realism speaks to our own times as well as of the past.

This book explores the ideas of the neglected English aesthetician and art historian, Adrian Stokes. Stokes's Kleinian-based concepts of carving and modelling are analyzed in relation to film, arguing that they replace the traditional notions of realism and montage in film theory and provide a set of aesthetics which encompasses mainstream and "art" cinema. This Kleinian psychoanalytic approach is applied to the films of Eisenstein, Rossellini, Hitchcock and others.

A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality. Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and "noir" literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virigina Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets is often what it tries hardest not to see.

" The book is] part of the Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context series. It] has an attractive typeface and a well-designed layout. In addition to Carter's introduction there is also a useful Glossary of terms and an Appendix with two reviews... In all, this book is a very good introduction to Balazs' film philosophy and a long overdue entry into the English-speaking world of film literature." . Screening the Past "An exemplary book in every way, this translation makes Balazs' revolutionary texts available in English for the first time ... Dating from 1924 and 1930 respectively, The Visible Man and The Spirit of Film had a decisive influence on such major Russian filmmakers as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, and were among the first studies to examine filmic syntax, grammar, and editorial structure. Including a detailed introduction and numerous illustrations, this volume is a must for anyone serious about film ... Highly recommended." . Choice Bela Balazs's two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balazs's detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.

..".contains useful and nuanced readings of the best-known films dealing with themes related to unification, as well as highlighting some equally interesting lesser-known works, in order to provide a rounded picture of German cinema's engagement with these issues in the past 17 years. I am not aware of any other publication that covers such a range of material and this in itself makes the book a valuable contribution to the field." . David Clarke, University of Bath

"This is an extremely rich study of the representation of east German identity and the former GDR in post-unification cinema. The author clearly has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the films of this period ... Hodgin's book breaks genuinely new ground." . Sean Allan, University of Warwick

"The book reveals an excellent knowledge of German culture and cinema, and combines methodological soundness with an ability to talk about films in a lively way free of jargon. Screening the East should not be missed by anybody interested in German cinema and culture, as well as cinema as discourse on history and space." . Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire

"Screening the East provides insightful readings of contemporary classics such as Good Bye, Lenin and The Lives of Others alongside films which complement these popular memories of life on the other side of the Wall by an eastern and, arguably, more authentic perspective. Surveying the post-Wall cinematic landscape from a number of different critical vantage points, Hodgin proposes that DEFA's legacy has not been obliterated but has evolved into a surprisingly diverse film culture. This is an engaging and important contribution to German cinema and cultural studies, providing a wealth of contextual detail." . Daniela Berghahn, Reader in Film Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London

Screening the East considers German filmmakers' responses to unification. In particular, it traces the representation of the East German community in films made since 1989 and considers whether these narratives challenge or reinforce the notion of a separate East German identity. The book identifies and analyses a large number of films, from internationally successful box-office hits, to lesser-known productions, many of which are discussed here for the first time. Providing an insight into the films' historical and political context, it considers related issues such as stereotyping, racism, regional particularism and the Germans' confrontation with the past."

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.

Screening Nostalgia provides a cogent summary of the history of America's love affair with nostalgia as well as offering useful examples of how to mobilize nostalgia in critically sophisticated ways. The text is engaging and accessible and should have wide appeal, particularly among scholars and students of film and American cultural history." . Southwest Journal of Cultures

"In this fascinating in-depth study of the impact of nostalgia on contemporary American cinema, Christine Sprengler unpicks the history of the concept and explores its significance in theory and practice. She offers a lucid analysis of the development of nostalgia in American society and culture, navigating a path through the key debates and aligning herself with recent attempts to recuperate its critical potential. This journey opens up the myriad permutations of nostalgia across visual and material culture and their interface with cinema, with the 1950s emerging as a privileged moment. Four case studies (Sin City, Far From Heaven, The Aviator and The Good German) analyse the ways in which aspects of visual design such as props, costume and colour contribute to the nostalgic aesthetic, allowing for both critical distance and emotion. Written with verve, style and impressive attention to detail, Screening Nostalgia is an invaluable addition to existing scholarship. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which we access the past through cinema." . Pam Cook, Professor Emerita in Film, University of Southampton"

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.

"Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels" serves as a corrective supplement to the extant, director-centric history of American cinema's most lauded period. In contrast to star studies that showcase disparate performances, this book focuses on a specific time and place - Hollywood in the crucible, formative years from 1968 through 1971 - and offers close analysis of star actors' deterministic influences over nine of the era's most hallowed films. By examining film reviews and 'star press' from the national magazines whose covers they then dominated, Smith-Rowsey shows how three emergent 'Rough Rebels' - Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Elliott Gould - were understood and contextualized as the best possible responses to Hollywood's twin crises of capital and creativity. As a summary, Hoffman, Nicholson, and Gould, as well as their peers and successors, were positioned and received as absurdist, ironic, and dismissive toward women, and these qualities cast a wide shadow over both their films and much Hollywood cinema in the following decades.

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.

The story of an immortal Scottish warrior battling evil down through the centuries, Highlander fused a high-concept idea with the kinetic energy of a pop promo pioneer and Queen's explosive soundtrack to become a cult classic. When two American producers took a chance on a college student's script, they set in motion a chain of events involving an imploding British film studio, an experimental music video director still finding his filmmaking feet, a former James Bond with a spiralling salary, and the unexpected arrival of low-budget production company, Cannon Films. Author Jonathan Melville looks back at the creation of Highlander with the help of more than 60 cast and crew, as they talk candidly about the gruelling shoot that took them from the back alleys of London, to the far reaches of the Scottish Highlands, and onto the mean streets of 1980s New York City. With insights from Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor on the film's iconic music, exclusive screenwriter commentary on unmade scripts, never-before-seen photos from private collections, and a glimpse into the promotional campaign that never was. If there can be only one book on Highlander then this is it!

Pop stars have provided audiences with performative moments that have become ingrained in popular consciousness. They are a lens through which deeper understandings about race, gender, politics, history and the artistic process can be understood. When combined with the most affective of mediums - cinema, the combination can be both thrilling and alarming. From the relatively early days of cinema, figures from the world of popular music have made forays into acting and contributed cameo appearances. From Little Richard and Kylie Minogue to Nick Cave and Tom Waits, Pop Stars On Film: Popular Culture in a Global Market offers a collection of essays on some of the most influential international performances from a diverse range of cultural icons. The book considers industry shifts, access and diversity, but also the notion of cultural appropriation, audience appeal, marketing and demographics. Perhaps most importantly, the publication will look at what happens when cultures collide and coalesce.

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).

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.