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.

This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel films and videogames. In turn, it uncovers how performance and new media can challenge common assumptions about tragic causality and fate. Traditional tragedies may present us with a present when a calamity is staged, a decisive moment in which everything changes. However, modern performance, adaptation and new media can question the premises of that kind of present crisis and its fatality. By offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre, adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic experience of irreversible present time. This book offers the reader a fresh understanding of tragic character and agency through these new media's exposure of the genre's deep structure.

Because of his lengthy screen resume that includes almost eighty appearances in such movies as Camille and Waterloo Bridge, as well as a marriage and divorce to actress Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor was a central figure of Hollywood's classical era. Despite this, he can be regarded as a "lost" star, an interesting contradiction given the continued success he enjoyed during his lifetime. In Robert Taylor: Male Beauty, Masculinity, and Stardom in Hollywood, author Gillian Kelly investigates the initial construction and subsequent developments of Taylor's star persona across his thirty-five-year career. By examining concepts of male beauty, men as object of the erotic gaze, white American masculinity, and the unusual longevity of a career initially based on looks, Kelly highlights how gender, masculinity, and male stars and the ageing process affected Taylor's career. Placing Taylor within the histories of both Hollywood's classical era and mid-twentieth-century America, this study positions him firmly within the wider industrial, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which he worked. Kelly examines Taylor's film and television work as well as ephemeral material, such as fan magazines, to assess how his on- and off-screen personas were created and developed over time. Taking a mostly chronological approach, Kelly places Taylor's persona within specific historical moments in order to show the complex paradox of his image remaining consistently recognizable while also shifting seamlessly within the Hollywood industry. Furthermore, she explores Taylor's importance to Hollywood cinema by demonstrating how a star persona like his can "fit" so well, and for so long, that it almost becomes invisible and, eventually, almost forgotten.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus films arose with cinema itself. Richard Walsh and Jeffrey L. Staley introduce students to these films with a general overview of the Jesus film tradition and with specific analyses of 22 of its most influential exemplars, stretching from La vie du Christ (1906) to Mary Magdalene (2018). The introduction to each film includes discussion of plot, characters, visuals, appeal to authority, and cultural location as well as consideration of the director's (and/or other filmmakers') achievements and style. Several film chapters end with reflections on problematic issues bedeviling the tradition, such as cultural imperialism and patriarchy. To assist teachers and researchers, each chapter includes a listing of DVD chapters and the approximate "time" (for both DVDs and streaming platforms) at which key film moments occur. The book also includes a Gospels Harmony cataloging the time at which key gospel incidents appear in these films. Extensive endnotes point readers to other important work on the tradition and specific films. While the authors strive to set the Jesus film tradition within cinema and its interpretation, the DVD/streaming listing and the Gospels Harmony facilitate the comparison of these films to gospel interpretation and the Jesus tradition.

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.

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.

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.

"O'Shaughnessy's book succeeds in bringing to light a new tendency in French political cinema, and as such will reward the attention of those interested in political cinema as well as French cinema more generally. The book also further opens up fertile terrain in the 'aesthetic of the fragment'." Senses of Cinema

"This volume is a major statement on contemporary politically committed cinema. Its strength is that it proposes a careful mapping of the field, teasing out different shades of commitment within the films themselves, and showing the richness of contemporary French cinema in its social-realist mode." H-France Reviews

"O'Shaughnessy has written a powerful and eloquent polemic for retaining a class analysis of film. Theoretically sophisticated, the book also provides a model of what form that analysis might take, directing us to the signs of resistance which criticism can make politically meaningful." Cineaste

"His analysis is aptly articulated around influential French theoretical frameworks...It is also usefully informed by the critical debates of Cahiers du cinema and Positif. The book is particularly engaging in its exploration of the strategies mobilized to replace the politics of the past and open up possible future channels." French Studies

..".a persuasive survey of politics in current French cinema." Choice

Since 1995 there has been a widespread return of commitment to French cinema taking it to a level unmatched since the heady days following 1968. But this new wave of political film is very different and urgently calls out for an analysis that will account for its development, its formal characteristics and its originality. This is what this book provides. It engages with leading directors such as Cantet, Tavernier, Dumont, Kassovitz, Zonca and Guediguian, takes in a range of less well known but important figures and strays across the Belgian border to engage with the seminal work of the Dardenne brothers. It shows how the works discussed are helping to reinvent political cinema by finding stylistic and narrative strategies adequate to the contemporary context.

Martin O'Shaughnessy is Reader in French Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He has written widely on French cinema and is the author of Jean Renoir (Manchester University Press, 2000) and La Grande Illusion (I. B. Tauris, 2009) and co-editor of Cinema et engagement (L'Harmattan, 2005).

Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world in ways that transcended the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it not only as a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies. McSweeney argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008-). The MCU has become the largest film franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an African nation-never colonized by Europe-as the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American history.

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.

"London Eyes provides paths through the city, chancing upon those stories that ultimately have the potential to change London, to see it with new eyes, casting new shadows and seeing new stories open up at many turns. This collection has at its heart a joyous fascination with the city and the texts, images and films that have contributed to our ideas about London. It was a wonderful opportunity to stumble upon some new panoramas." Film Philosophy

London incessantly generates and incites cultural responses, pre-eminently in the interconnected domains of literature and film. This book demonstrates that those responses have been sustained as vital experiments and engagements in configuring the city and its inhabitants. Including essays by prominent cultural, literary and film historians this volume forms an original and incisive contribution to ongoing debates about the city's intricate cultural history and its construction through both language and image, as a crucial site of identity, desire, exile and displacement.

Gail Cunningham is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University. Her recent publications include Houses in Between (CUP, 2004) Anna Lombard (Birmingham University Press, 2002) and He-Notes: Reconstructing Masculinity (Palgrave, 2000).

Stephen Barber is a Professor of Media Arts at Kingston University. His most recent publications include The Vanishing Map (Berg, 2006), Hijikata (Creation, 2006) and The Art of Destruction (Creation 2004). He has been awarded international prizes and awards for his work by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Program, the Ford Foundation, the DAAD Berlin Artists and Writers Programme, the Annenberg Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Foundation, the British Academy, the Daiwa Foundation, the Saison Foundation, and the London Arts Board.

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.

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.

One of the twentieth century's most significant artists, Cindy Sherman has quietly uprooted conventional understandings of portraiture and art, questioning everything from identity to feminism. Critics around the world have taken Sherman's photographs and extensively examined what lies underneath. However, little critical ink has been spilled on Sherman's only film, "Office Killer," a piece that plays a significant role both in Sherman's body of work and in American art in the late twentieth century. Dahlia Schweitzer breaks the silence with her trenchant analysis of "Office Killer" and explores the film on a variety of levels, combating head-on the art world's reluctance to discuss the movie and arguing instead that it is only through a close reading of the film that we can begin to appreciate the messages underlying all of Sherman's work.
The first book on this neglected piece of an esteemed artist's oeuvre, "Cindy Sherman's "Office Killer"" rescues the film from critical oblivion and situates it next to the artist's other iconic works.

- 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.