Went the Day Well? is one of the most unusual pictures Ealing Studios produced, a distinctly unsentimental war film made in the darkest days of World War II, and nothing like the loveable comedies that later became the Ealing trademark. Its clear-eyed view of the potential for violence lurking just below the surface in a quiet English village possibly owes something to the Graham Greene story on which it is based, though, as Penelope Houston shows, there remains a mystery about the extent to which Greene was actually involved in the scripting. Or perhaps the direction by the Brazilian born Cavalcanti, a maverick within the Ealing coterie, is the chief reason why Went the Day Well? avoids the cosy feel of later, more familiar, Ealing films. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Geoff Brown pays homage to Penelope Houston's astute study, and places the book in the context of Went the Day Well?'s changing critical reception. Brown discusses the non-English qualities of the film's narrative, and the extent to which Cavalcanti brought a foreign sensibility to its very English setting.

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on 'Western' ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of 'the West and the rest' in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures 'connect' globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saer Maty Ba, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

"Aesthetics and film" is a philosophical study of the art of film. Its motivation is the recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers in the philosophical implications of central issues in film theory and the application of general issues in aesthetics to the specific case of film. Of particular interest are questions concerning the distinctive representational capacities of film art, particularly in relation to realism and narration, the influence of the literary paradigm in understanding film authorship and interpretation, and our imaginative and affective engagement with film. For all of these questions, Katherine Thomson-Jones critically compares the most compelling answers, driving home key points with a wide range of film examples. Students and scholars of aesthetics and cinema will find this an illuminating, accessible and highly enjoyable investigation into the nature and power of a technologically evolving art form.

In Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, Warren Buckland asks a series of questions about how film theory gets written in the first place:

• How does it select its objects of study and its methods of inquiry?
• How does it make discoveries and explain filmic phenomena? And,
• How does it formulate and solve theoretical problems?

He asks these questions of film theory through a rational reconstruction and a classical commentary. Both frameworks clarify and reformulate vague and inexact expressions, redefine obscure concepts, and examine the underlying logic of film theory arguments. This not only subjects film theory to rigorous examination; it also teaches students how to write theory, by enabling them to question and critically interrogate the logic of previous film theory arguments.

The book consists of nine chapters that closely examine a series of canonical film books and essays in great detail, by Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Heath, and Slavoj i ek, among others.

Drawing on the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Cinema and Contact investigates the aesthetics and politics of touch in the cinema of three of the most prominent and distinctive filmmakers to have emerged in France during the last fifty years: Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis. Countering the dominant critical account of touch elaborated by recent models of embodied spectatorship, Laura McMahon argues that cinema offers a privileged space for understanding touch in terms of spacing and withdrawal rather than immediacy an continuity. Such a deconstructive configuration of touch is shown here to have far-reaching implications, inviting an innovative rethinking of politics, aesthetics and theology via the textures of cinema. The first study to bring the thought of Nancy into sustained dialogue with a series of detailed analyses of films, Cinema and Contact also forges new interpretative perspectives on Bresson, Duras and Denis, tracing a compelling two-way exchange between cinema and philosophy throughout.

- Seeks to bridge the divide between scholarly work on critical aesthetics vs. audience expectations in relation to film and television studies. - Draws on a comprehensive and original data-set from a national survey that examined audience perceptions of film genres and television formats, associated viewing patterns, and the current usage of streaming and other newer moving image adjuncts. - Reflects on how the pandemic has impacted viewing patterns and genre and format expectations moving forward.

Human rights film festivals have been steadily growing in number in recent years. They are all bound by a common thread, human rights, and yet show distinctly different films. What leads them to be so different, and how is the universalism of human rights made sense by each?

This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory, including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced layout structure, provides a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step with extensive examples drawn from a broad range of films. The book aims to provide an analytic tool set that will enable the reader to approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail, probing deeply into the fundamental question of film as to just how it is that films reliably communicate meaning.

Film, media, and cultural theorists have long appealed to Lacanian theory in order to discern processes of subjectivization, representation, and ideological interpellation. Here, the contributors take up a Zizekian approach to studies of cinema and media, raising questions about power, ideology, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

The Routledge new edition of this classic book functions as an accessible introduction to the historical and theoretical exchanges between film and literature and also includes the key critical readings necessary for an understanding of this increasingly vibrant and popular field of adaption studies. This new edition has been fully updated and is usefully separated into three sections: in the first section Timothy Corrigan guides readers through the history of film and literature to the present; the second section has expanded to reprint 28 key essays by leading theorists in the field including Andre Bazin, Linda Hutcheon and Robert Stam, as well as new essays by Timothy Corrigan and William Galperin; and the third section offers hands-on strategies and advice for students writing about film and literature. Film and Literature will fill a gap for many film and literature courses and courses concentrating on the interplay between the two. The companion website features an interactive timeline, extended filmography and comprehensive bibliography, by Geoff Wright, Samford University, USA. www.routledge.com/cw/corrigan

This title recaptures the lost history of the physical and moral perils that faced audiences at American movie theatres during the first fifty years of the cinema. During the first fifty years of the American cinema, the act of going to the movies was a risky process, fraught with a number of possible physical and moral dangers. Film fires were rampant, claiming many lives, as were movie theatre robberies, which became particularly common during the Great Depression. Labor disputes provoked a large number of movie theatre bombings, while low-level criminals like murderers, molesters, and prostitutes plied their trades in the darkened auditoriums. That was all in addition to the spread of disease, both real (as in the case of influenza) and imagined ("movie eyestrain"). Audiences also confronted an array of perceived moral dangers. Blue Laws prohibited Sunday film screenings, though theatres ignored them in many areas, sometimes resulting in the arrests of entire audiences. Movie theatre lotteries became another problem, condemned by politicians and clergymen throughout America for being immoral gambling. "The Perils of Moviegoing in America: 1896-1950" provides the first history of the many threats that faced film audiences, threats which claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

In this second edition of her exploration of Catholic women in film and television, author Kathryn Schleich presents an in-depth, feminist point of view while addressing important questions about the role of women in both the Church and Hollywood.

Throughout Schleich's extensive research, she noticed that themes of fear, mistrust, and even hatred of women were prevalent. While examining such deeply ingrained attitudes, it soon became evident to Schleich that Catholic women still have a long way to go in Hollywood. As she carefully explores the sexual tension between Sister Benedict and Father O'Malley in "The Bells of St. Mary's," the brutal murder of Theresa Dunn in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," and the stereotype shattering Grace Hanadarko of "Saving Grace," Schleich offers an insightful portrayal of women's oppression within the Catholic Church and explores whether Catholic women are better off today.

This study encourages contemplation of the place of Catholic women within the ever-changing spheres of cinema and television, ultimately encouraging movement toward the goal of achieving equal status for women in all realms of life.

Hollywood film music is often mocked as a disreputably 'applied' branch of the art of composition that lacks both the seriousness and the quality of the classical or late-romantic concert and operatic music from which it derives. Its composers in the 1930s and '40s were themselves often scornful of it and aspired to produce more 'serious' works that would enhance their artistic reputation.
In fact the criticism of film music as slavishly descriptive or manipulatively over-emotional has a history that is older than film - it had even been directed at the relatively popular operatic and concert music written by some of the emigre Hollywood composers themselves before they had left Europe. There, as subsequently in America, such criticism was promoted by the developing project of Modernism, whose often high-minded opposition to mass culture used polarizing language that drew, intentionally or not, upon that of gender difference. Regressive, late-romantic music, the old argument ran, was -- as women were believed to be -- emotional, irrational, and lacking in logic.
This book seeks to level the critical playing field between film music and "serious music," reflecting upon gender-related ideas about music and modernism as much as about film. Peter Franklin broaches the possibility of a history of twentieth-century music that would include, rather than marginalize, film music -- and, indeed, the scores of a number of the major Hollywood movies discussed here, like The Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong, Rebecca, Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane and Psycho. In doing so, he brings more detailed music-historical knowledge to bear upon cinema music, often discussed as a unique and special product of film, and also offers conclusions about the problematic aspects of musical modernism and some arguably liberating aspects of "late-romanticism."

Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy. American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history. The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

The Language and Style of Film Criticism brings together original essays from an international range of academics and film critics highlighting the achievements, complexities and potential of film criticism.

In recent years, in contrast to the theoretical, historical and cultural study of film, film criticism has been relatively marginalised, especially within the academy. This book highlights the distinctiveness of film criticism and addresses ways in which it can take a more central place within the academy and develop in dynamic ways outside it.

The Language and Style of Film Criticism is essential reading for academics, teachers, students and journalists who wish to understand and appreciate the language and style of film criticism.

1) This book analyses the role of cosmopolitan ideals in the science fiction cinemas of twenty-first century. 2) It deals with diverse topics like economic precarity, climate change, kinship, romance, networks, and colonialism through films like Elysium and Cloud Atlas, among others. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of film & media studies and cultural studies across UK.

Seeing is an act of relating. Being in relation, according to much of feminist theology, can be an ethical activity. This book is based on the assumption that seeing can be an ethical way of relating to the other. Through looking, on the one hand, at films that describe women artists who see another person, and, on the other, at feminist theology, this book puts forward an original view of the act of seeing as a gesture of respect for and belief in another person's visible and invisible sides, which guarantees the safekeeping of the other's memory.

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman's birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman's films and writings with more traditional analyses. Established themes such as Bergman's interest in philosophy and psychology are addressed, but also less familiar topics, notably his relationship with Hollywood and his elaborate use of film music and autobiographical writing that characterised his later work. There are new analyses of aspects of Bergman's most famous films, including Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, but also insightful readings of lesser-known works, such as Saraband and Sawdust and Tinsel. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9789198557718/9789198557718.xml -- .