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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of
Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers,
filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school
experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations
discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David
Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse
Anderson's Speak and Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the
light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy
Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai's autobiography for young readers,
I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as
their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire's Push and films
including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their
accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of
crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity
(the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair
chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent
to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength,
confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention
to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience,
this book considers what it means when learning and success are
measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive
individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in
which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and
social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The
School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks
profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in
the twenty-first century.
A full-colour illustrated compendium chronicling the magical
twenty-year journey of acclaimed art and design studio, MinaLima,
the creative genius behind the graphics for the Harry Potter film
series. "It all started with a letter . . ." Miraphora Mina and
Eduardo Lima began their extraordinary partnership in 2001 when
Warner Bros. invited them to realize the imaginative visual
universe of the Harry Potter film series. The two artists would
never have guessed that the graphic props they designed for the
films - including the Hogwarts acceptance letter, Marauder's Map,
Daily Prophet newspaper, The Quibbler and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes
- would become cultural icons loved by Wizarding World fans around
the world. Eight years later, the pair formed their own design
studio, MinaLima, and expanded their work to include the graphics
for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Diagon Alley and
Hogsmeade at Universal Orlando Resort and the Fantastic Beasts film
series. To showcase their treasury of designs, the studio has
opened House of MinaLima, its immersive art galleries and shops in
London and across the world. The Magic of MinaLima is an
illustrated history and celebration of Mina and Lima's twenty-year
evolution and groundbreaking vision. Their wondrous creations
illuminate the Wizarding World as never before, and their
commentary offers insights into the imaginative thinking that
shaped their designs. This collection showcases the very best works
from the award-winning studio's two decades and includes
interactive elements such as the Marauder's Map, the Black Family
Tapestry, and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Designed to delight and
enchant, The Magic of MinaLima will be an invaluable resource for
Wizarding World and graphic art fans alike.
This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow
cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New
York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years
after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well
as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy
Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude
Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang
Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the
beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of
filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically
representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust,
deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other
marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying
differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's
durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's
durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz' durational
sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking
studies of African-American working people.
In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to
tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely
divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the
immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions
in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the
gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi
film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed
with such films as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man
I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While
these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood's output,
senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly
"agitating us for war" and launched an investigation that resulted
in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio
and movies that "have been extensively used for propaganda purposes
designed to influence the public mind in the direction of
participation in the European War". When the Senate approved a
subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio
bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to
defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete
embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for
Hollywood as well as freedom of speech. Many works of American film
history only skim the surface of the 1941 investigation of
Hollywood. In Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and
the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures,
author Chris Yogerst examines the years leading up to and through
the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda,
detailing the isolationist senators' relationship with the America
First movement. Through his use of primary documents and lengthy
congressional records, Yogerst paints a picture of the
investigation's daily events both on Capitol Hill and in the
national press.
How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure
promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's
'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader
set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film
authorship, given that several of them were released in different
versions and his contributions to others were not always credited?
How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is
sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses
these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting
reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the
formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an
emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and
the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with
different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult
classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an
August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror
Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be
ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.
Examines the role that parenting, as a theme and practice, plays in
film and media cultures. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and
Caregiving Labor constructs a feminist genealogy that foregrounds
the relationship between acts of production on the one hand and
reproduction on the other. In this interdisciplinary collection,
editors So Mayer and Corinn Columpar bring together film and media
studies with parenting studies to stake out a field, or at least a
conversation, that is thick with historical and theoretical
dimension and invested in cultural and methodological plurality. In
four sections and sixteen contributions, the manuscript reflects on
how caregiving shapes the work of filmmakers, how parenting is
portrayed on screen, and how media contributes to radical new forms
of care and expansive definitions of mothering. Featuring an
exciting array of approaches-including textual analysis, industry
studies, ethnographic research, production histories, and personal
reflection-Mothers of Invention is a multifaceted collection of
feminist work that draws on the methods of both the humanities and
the social sciences, as well as the insights borne of both
scholarship and lived experience. Grounding this inquiry is
analysis of a broad range of texts with global reach-from the films
Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beyzai, 1989), Prevenge (Alice
Lowe, 2016), and A Deal with the Universe (Jason Barker, 2018) to
the television series Top of the Lake(2013-2017) and Jane the
Virgin (2014-2019), among others-as well as discussion of the
creative practices, be they related to production, pedagogy,
curation, or critique, employed by a wide variety of film and media
artists and/or scholars. Mothers of Invention demonstrates how the
discourse of parenting and caregiving allows the discipline to
expand its discursive frameworks to address, and redress, current
theoretical, political, and social debates about the interlinked
futures of work and the world. This collection belongs on the
bookshelves of students and scholars of cinema and media studies,
feminist and queer media studies, labor studies, filmmaking and
production, and cultural studies.
This book uses popular films to understand the convergence of crime
control and the ideology of repression in contemporary capitalism.
It focuses on the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian, a
protagonist who, in the course of a narrative, falls from grace and
becomes an enemy of the established social order. The fallen
guardian is a figure that allows for the analysis of a particular
crime control measure through the perspective of both an enforcer
and a target. The very notion of 'justice' is challenged, and
questions are posed in relation to the role that films assume in
the reproduction of policing as it is. In doing so, the book
combines a historical far-reaching perspective with popular culture
analysis. At the core remains the value of the cinematic figure of
the fallen guardian for contemporary understandings of urban space
and urban crime control and how films are clear examples of the
ways in which the ideology of repression is reproduced. This book
questions the justifications that are often given for social
control in cities and understands cinema as a medium for offering
critique of such processes and justifications. Explored are the
crime control measures of private policing in relation to RoboCop
(1987), preventative policing and Minority Report (2002), mass
incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and extra-judicial
killing in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The book speaks to those
interested in crime control in critical criminology, cultural
criminology, urban studies, and beyond.
The revival of the Olympic games in 1896 and the subsequent rise of
modern athletics prompted a new, energetic movement away from more
sedentary habits. In Russia, this ethos soon became a key facet of
the Bolsheviks' shared vision for the future. In the aftermath of
the revolution, glorification of exercise persevered, pointing the
way toward a stronger, healthier populace and a vibrant Socialist
society. With interdisciplinary analysis of literature, painting,
and film, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! traces how physical
fitness had an even broader impact on culture and ideology in the
Soviet Union than previously realized. From prerevolutionary
writers and painters glorifying popular circus wrestlers to Soviet
photographers capturing unprecedented athleticism as a means of
satisfying their aesthetic ideals, the nation's artists embraced
sports in profound, inventive ways. Though athletics were used for
doctrinaire purposes, Tim Harte demonstrates that at their core,
they remained playful, joyous physical activities capable of
stirring imaginations and transforming everyday realities.
Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so
that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the
constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from
notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think
differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in
the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity
of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are
marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers
demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films
such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus
as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the
foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and
spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and
analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the
Americas.
This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and
1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes
in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the
cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More
specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity,
individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed
into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the
historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes
away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and
opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent
decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic
literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to
illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s
and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film,
this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural
history more broadly.
The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has
usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a
fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs
in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not
about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather,
it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic
on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering
interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on
television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers
rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet,
shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with
the contemporary world has led to television developing many
different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization.
The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the
key to understanding secular magic on television and film and
exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the
real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss
Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the
hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006
films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the
lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of
representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical
oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only
re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further
questions about entertainment and how the relations between the
program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror
and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and
tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media
screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of
inter-medial relations.
The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive
analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in
relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents.
Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its
various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's
primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative;
production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing,
distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of
celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and
argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and
distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex
engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of
Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where
fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The
Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not
stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing
characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost
in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on
approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art
history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities
of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The
Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color
images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising
artefacts.
In Film and Video Intermediality, Janna Houwen innovatively
rewrites the concept of medium specificity in order to answer the
questions "what is meant by video?" and "what is meant by film?"
How are these two media (to be) understood? How can film and video
be defined as distinct, specific media? In this era of mixed moving
media, it is vital to ask these questions precisely and especially
on the media of video and film. Mapping the specificity of film and
video is indispensable in analyzing and understanding the many
contemporary intermedial objects in which film and video are mixed
or combined.
With impeccable timing, outrageous humor, irreverent wit, and a
superb sense of the ridiculous, Groucho tells the saga of the Marx
Brothers: the poverty of their childhood in New York's Upper East
Side; the crooked world of small-time vaudeville (where they
learned to carry blackjacks); how a pretzel magnate and the
graceless dancer of his dreams led to the Marx Brothers' first
Broadway hit, "I'll Say She Is!"; how the stock market crash in
1929 proved a godsend for Groucho (even though he lost nearly a
quarter of a million dollars); the adventures of the Marx Brothers
in Hollywood, the making of their hilarious films, and Groucho's
triumphant television series, "You Bet Your Life!" Here is the life
and lunatic times of the great eccentric genius, Groucho, a.k.a.
Julius Henry Marx.
Contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Marc DiPaolo, Emine
Akkulah Do?fan, Caroline Eades, Noelle Hedgcock, Tina Olsin Lent,
Rashmila Maiti, Jack Ryan, Larry T. Shillock, Richard Vela, and
Geoffrey Wilson In Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and
Process, editor Allen H. Redmon brings together eleven essays from
a range of voices in adaptation studies. This anthology explores
the political and ethical contexts of specific adaptations and, by
extension, the act of adaptation itself. Grounded in questions of
gender, genre, and race, these investigations focus on the ways
attention to these categories renegotiates the rules of power,
privilege, and principle that shape the contexts that seemingly
produce and reproduce them. Contributors to the volume examine such
adaptations as Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, Jacques Tourneur's
Out of the Past, Taylor Sheridan's Sicario and Sicario: Day of the
Soldado, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wolf Totem, Spike Lee's He's Got
Game, and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Each chapter considers the
expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their
capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples,
two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase
another. Building on the growing trends in adaptation studies,
these essays explore the ways filmic texts experienced as
adaptations highlight ethical or political concerns and argue that
spectators are empowered to explore implications being raised by
the adaptations.
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