Will appeal to scholars across both film studies and psychoanalysis Uses a range of contemporary films to illustrate Combines socio-political commentary and psychological insight

There's a Body in the Window Seat! is a detailed history of one of the most beloved American murder-mysteries and comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace. Actor, director, and playwright Charles Dennis investigates the mystery behind the play: how did a true-life crime in Connecticut turn into a comedy? And who are the real writers that deserve credit for its long-lasting success? Dennis brings an insider's view to Joseph Kesselring's attempts to write Arsenic and Old Lace and how producers had to step in to save the play from his heavy hand. He also follows the actors, both on the stage and on the screen, as they handle the demands of the roles and behind-the-scenes relationships. Why didn't Boris Karloff recreate his stage role, even though Jean Adair and John Alexander did? Why did Cary Grant hate his performance in Arsenic-was it because Frank Capra deceived him or because of costume designer Orry Kelly? And why did the movie never receive Academy Award consideration? Learn the answers to these intriguing questions and more in There's a Body in the Window Seat!

Film and Television Analysis is especially designed to introduce undergraduate students to the most important qualitative methodologies used to study film and television. The methodologies covered include: ideological analysis auteur theory genre theory semiotics and structuralism psychoanalysis and apparatus theory feminism postmodernism cultural studies (including reception and audience studies) contemporary approaches to race, nation, gender, and sexuality. With each chapter focusing on a distinct methodology, students are introduced to the historical developments of each approach, along with its vocabulary, significant scholars, key concepts and case studies. Other features include: Over 120 color images throughout Questions for discussion at the end of each chapter Suggestions for further reading A glossary of key terms. Written in a reader-friendly manner Film and Television Analysis is a vital textbook for students encountering these concepts for the first time.

Film, Form, and Culture (4th edition) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film. With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores film from part to whole; from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. It then examines those narratives (both fiction and non-fiction) as stories and genres that speak to the culture of their time and our perceptions of them today. Composition, editing, genres (such as the gangster film, the Western, science fiction, and melodrama) are analyzed alongside numerous images to illustrate the discussion. Chapters on the individuals who make films - the production designer, cinematographer, editor, composer, producer, director, and actor - illustrate the collaborative nature of filmmaking. This new edition includes: An expanded discussion of the digital 'revolution" in filmmaking: exploring the movement from celluloid to digital recording and editing of images, as well as the use of CGI A new chapter on international cinema that covers filmmaking from Italy to Mumbai offering students a broader understanding of cinema on a worldwide scale A new chapter on film acting that uses images to create a small catalogue of gestures and expressions that are recognizable in film after film Expanded content coverage and in-depth analysis throughout, including a visual analysis of a scene from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight An expanded chapter on the cultural contexts of film summarizes the theories of cultural and media studies, concluding with a comparative analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Judd Apatow's This is 40 Over 260 images, many in color, that create a visual index to and illustration of the discussion of films and filmmaking Each chapter ends with updated suggestions for further reading and viewing, and there is an expanded glossary of terms. Additional resources for students and teachers can also be found on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/kolker), which includes additional case studies, discussion questions and links to useful websites. This textbook is an invaluable and exciting resource for students beginning film studies at undergraduate level.

There is something weird and eerie going on in the oneiric Iranian ghost-town Bad City. A mysterious female vampire, clad in a long-black veil, imbued with occult and erotic power, has newly arrived in town and is summarily dispensing with its unsavory characters. Through a chance encounter in a night of luminal darkness, an eternally dark romance begins - baptized in love's blood. Shot in dazzling anamorphic black and white cinematography and accompanied with an intoxicating and mesmeric soundtrack, Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), was an instant popular and critical success. Dubbed 'the first Iranian vampire western' the genre-bending film is a pastiche of genres such as vampire cinema, gothic and horror films, spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, and Iranian cinema; yet the film stands as a new vampire fairy-tale with a unique style all its own. The first full-length study dedicated to the film since its release, this book in the Devil's Advocate series provides a unique approach to the film situated within three theoretical coordinates: the vampire genre, psychoanalytic (film) theory and German Idealism.

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

Reissuing works originally published between 1968 and 1993, Routledge Library Editions: Film and Literature offers a selection of scholarship covering the crossover of novels and the movies. Volumes on Shakespearean and Greek Tragedy films among others round this out to be an interesting compact collection of previously out-of-print works.

This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s, the most stirring early work was likely Mary Poppins. This 1964 film captivated young audiences, earning top-grossing ticket sales, multiple Oscars, and landmark status as a cultural phenomenon. The book illuminates Mary Poppins as a musical teeming with preoccupations of American youth in the early-to-mid-1960s, including antiestablishment desires, anxieties, and pleasures. Reading against the dominant grain, this book deciphers Mary Poppins as a mid-century reflection that spans the generation gap, dysfunctional nuclear family, youth unrest, activism including feminist advocacy, counterculturalism, capitalist imperialism, race relations, socially conscious music, and hallucinogenic consciousness expansion. Conjunctively, the book explores tensions inherent in this studio production as a mainstream Disney release evoking imperatives of 1960s American youth while sanitizing figures and values representing radical change. Further, examining the film's collective authorship, this volume traces Mary Poppins' origins in the writings and life of nonconformist author P.L. Travers as well as in Disney cinema and the studio's adaptation processes. Analysis extends to diverse facets of Mary Poppins' reception, including the shifting image of its star, Julie Andrews, the film's influence on popular culture and controversy among some as an adaptation, its appropriation by drug culture, association with the teenpic, and status as cinema of social consciousness. This book is ideal for students, researchers, and scholars of cinema studies and youth culture.

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change. Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film - the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media

A great movie's first few minutes are the key to the rest of the film. Like the opening paragraphs of a novel, they draw the viewer in and set up the thematic concerns and stylistic approach that will be developed over the course of the narrative. A strong opening sequence leads the viewer to trust the filmmakers. Other times, opening shots are intentionally misleading as they invite alert, active participation with the film. In Cinematic Overtures, Annette Insdorf discusses the opening sequence so that viewers turn first impressions into deeper understanding of cinematic technique. From Joe Gillis's voice-over in Sunset Boulevard as he lies dead in a swimming pool to the hallucinatory opening of Apocalypse Now, from a stream-of-consciousness montage as found in Hiroshima, mon amour to the slowly unfolding beginning of Schindler's List, Cinematic Overtures analyzes opening shots from a range of Hollywood and international films. Insdorf pays close attention to how the viewer makes sense of these scenes and the cinematic world they are about to enter. As she looks at the strategies of opening scenes, Insdorf also examines how films critique and explore the power of the camera's gaze. Along with analyses of opening scenes, the book offers a series of revelatory and surprising readings of individual films and the works of some of the leading directors of the past seventy-five years.Erudite but accessible, Cinematic Overtures will lead film scholars and ardent movie fans alike to greater attentiveness to those fleeting opening moments.

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.

- provides a new perspective in understanding our relationship with death, mourning and recovery - the topic of traumatic grief is timely and of popular interest to Jungians

Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early British film culture in literature, thus providing the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism. Shail's study draws on little-known sources to create a detailed picture of cinema following its 'second birth' as both institution and medium. The book presents a comprehensive account of how UK-based modernism originated as a consequence of-rather than a conscious aesthetic response to-this new component of the cultural landscape. Film's new accounts of language, endeavor, time, collectivity and political change are first considered, then related to the patterns that comprised modernist texts. Authors discussed include Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.

New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in film. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in films of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of "agitated urban modernity" articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of film, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City.

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

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.

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 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.

It is a common assertion that the history of America is written in its Westerns, but how true is this?

In this guidebook John White discusses the evolution of the Western through history and looks at theoretical and critical approaches to Westerns such as genre analysis, semiotics, representation, ideology, discourse analysis, narrative, realism, auteur and star theory, psychoanalytical theory, postmodernism and audience response. The book includes case studies of 8 key westerns:

• Stagecoach
• My Darling Clementine
• Shane
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
• McCabe and Mrs Miller
• Unforgiven
• Brokeback Mountain
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Including a chronology of significant events for the Western genre, a glossary and further reading, this introduction to an important genre in film studies is a great guide for students.

Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies.

In this enlightening new volume in the AFI Film Readers series, an international group of leading scholars revisits Arnheim's legacy for film and media studies. In fourteen essays, the contributors bring Arnheim's later work on the visual arts to bear on film and media, while also reassessing the implications of his film theory to help refine our grasp of Film as Art and related texts. The contributors discuss a broad range topics including Arnheim's film writings in relation to modernism, his antipathy to sound as well as color in film, the formation of his early ideas on film against the social and political backdrop of the day, the wider uses of his methodology, and the implications of his work for digital media.

This is essential reading for any film and media student or scholar seeking to understand the meaning and contemporary impact of Arnheim's foundational work in film theory and aesthetics.

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.

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.

The 1980s. A time of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of your neighbours, fear of drugs, fear of sex, fear of strangers, fear of videos, and the very real fear that the world would end at any moment in an awful, and very sudden, nuclear attack. However, in those times of turmoil and worry, there was a comfort that soothed the mind, and acted as a quiet balm: action movies. Video shops were bursting at the seams with rampant gunfire, sex, drugs, rock, roll, cars on fire, people on fire, guns, bombs, and people dressed in army fatigues (and that was just the staff). Heroes were born shrouded in fire and violent revenge, they were not only armed with guns, but also red-hot quips, that served as a muscly arm around the shoulder, and a wink that everything was going to be okay. So thank you Arnold, Sylvester, Sigourney, Bruce, Eddie, Charles, Patrick, Mel, Chuck and everyone else that made it happen. You saved the world, in your own inimitable way. Join John Rain, the author of the critically-acclaimed Thunderbook: The World of Bond According to Smersh Pod, as he examines a choice selection of the greatest action movies from the decade when the explosion was king.