In 2005, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, was published to wide acclaim, and in 2007, Ethan and Joel Coen brought their adaptation of McCarthy's novel to the screen. The film earned praise from critics worldwide and was honored with four Academy Awards (R), including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.

The U.S. Constitution is often depicted in popular films, teaching lessons about what this founding document means and what it requires. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington educates how a bill becomes a law. 12 Angry Men informs us about the rights of the accused. Selma explores the importance of civil rights, voting rights, and the freedom of speech. Lincoln shows us how to amend the Constitution. Not only have films like these been used to teach viewers about the Constitution; they also express the political beliefs of directors, producers, and actors, and they have been a reflection of what the public thinks generally, true or not, about the meaning of the Constitution. From the indictment of Warren Court rulings in Dirty Harry to the defense of the freedom of the press in All the President's Men and The Post, filmmakers are often putting their stamp on what they believe the Constitution should mean and protect. These films can serve as a catalyst for nationwide conversations about the Constitution and as a way of either reinforcing or undermining the constitutional orthodoxies of their time. Put another way, these films are both symbols and products of the political tug of war over the interpretation of our nation's blueprint for government and politics. To the contemporary student and the casual reader, popular films serve as an understandable way to explain the Constitution. This book examines several different areas of the Constitution to illuminate how films in each area have tried to engage the document and teach the viewer something about it. We expose myths where they exist in film, draw conclusions about how Hollywood's constitutional lessons have changed over time, and ultimately compare these films to what the Constitution says and how the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted it. Given the ever-present discussion of the Constitution in American politics and its importance to the structure of the U.S. government and citizens' rights, there is no question that the popular perceptions of the document and how people acquire these perceptions are important and timely.

Much has been written about the history of Communism in America, including the Party's appeal to many in the Hollywood community of the 1930s and 40s. While several books have offered standard accounts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and the blacklist in the entertainment industry, Alan Casty provides a fresh and provocative perspective. In Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal, Casty challenges the absolute dualisms of the period: cowardly informers and heroic martyrs. Drawing on newly available material, Casty illustrates the control by the international Communist movement and the role of the Hollywood Communists themselves in fomenting the intense hostilities of the period. Casty juxtaposes the actions and statements of those who testified and "named names" before HUAC with Communists who refused to testify and remained silent about the atrocities of the Soviet Union. By providing a scrupulous account of the full scope of the Communist Party in Hollywood, this book presents a more accurate picture of the moral quandaries faced during this dark period in American history.

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).

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.

Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.

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.

Poetic Acts & New Media advances the fields of literary and new media studies by clarifying boundaries between competing genres and media through the creation of a new artistic genre, "media poetry." This aesthetic mode of expression/becoming seeks to transform mass culture (our codes of communication) by self-consciously acknowledging how textual, audio, and/or visual signs are constructed according to their simulation and not their representation. This study draws heavily upon literary media theories that intersect with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of 'Sense' as a simulated power of sensory transformations. Media poetry becomes a complex power of 'Sense' by blending conventional mass-media codes with poetic simulations that provide alternative forms of creating meaning. Poetic Acts & New Media specifically examines the works of several poets that exemplify this multi-sensory approach to printed-text poetry, especially: * Langston Hughes * Tony Medina * David Wojahn * John Kinsella * David Trinidad. It also analyzes several contemporary films that embody the multi-modal logic of media poetry: * David Lynch's Mullholland Drive * Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky * Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. In addition, this study interprets two influential primetime TV shows as exemplars of media poetry: Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All media poetry, regardless of genre or medium, allows readers/viewers to envision "reality production" as a rewriteable and poetic enterprise that can productively remediate any transparent abstraction or common-sense realism.

"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.

Quentin Tarantino's films beg to be considered metafiction: metacommentaries that engage with the history of cultural representations and exalt the aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of creation as re-re-creation and resignification. Covering all eight of Quentin Tarantino's films according to certain themes, David Roche combines cultural studies and neoformalist approaches to highlight how closely the films' poetics and politics are intertwined. Each in-depth chapter focuses on a salient feature, some which have drawn much attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality). Roche sets Tarantino's films firmly in the legacy of Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and the New Hollywood, revising the image of a cool pop-culture purveyor that the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career. Roche emphasizes the breadth and depth of his films' engagement with culture, highbrow and lowbrow, screen and print, American, East Asian, and European.

Cinemulacrum, a conflation of "cinema," the art of the Hollywood film, and simulacrum, a reality counterfeit, was coined to designate contemporary media culture. This period is distinguished by the advent of digital film/video, an ideology of fantasy as the central narrative of movies and television, and a ruling audience demographic of the young adult. A pre-cinemulacrum era (1960-1980) and Age of Cinemulacrum (1980 to the present day) are demarcated to examine the fall-and rise-of classical Hollywood and the hegemony of television in a media dyad of movies and television. Cinemulacrum argues that the convergence of technology, ideology, and audience represent the primary factors surrounding the social immediacy of movies and television, and that video, fantasy, and the young adult have replaced film, realism, and the family as the outstanding attributes of contemporary media culture. A contemporary vision of media culture emerges in the 1980s. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg lead a populist new wave, combining technological modernity with a retro sensibility grounded both in B-movie melodramas and the genteel, domesticated television sit-coms of the 1950s. Television, however, gains an unrivaled authority through the spinoff production model and the expanded resources of cable with its 24/7 news, sports, and movies. Advocating a new or alternate history of movies and television, the author assesses critical trends from America's hybrid media culture. The pre-cinemulacrum era is unraveled through an "apocrypha of violence"-a cycle of conflicting portrayals of movie violence and heroism in Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Rocky. The Age of Cinemulacrum is then characterized by the 'making of simulacra'-the proliferating nature of movie sequels, prequels, and "special editions"-and by television's multi-generational young adult demographic of The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons. The author concludes his study with an annotated timeline-"The Seven Ages of Cinemulacrum"-listing the history-making movies and television programs in contemporary media culture.

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.

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.

This timely book provides new insights into debates around the relationship between women and film by drawing on the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray. Arguing that female-directed cinema provides new ways to explore ideas of representation and spectatorship, it also examines the importance of contexts of production, direction and reception.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. "Hip Hop on Film" reclaims and reexamines productions such as "Breakin'" (1984), " Beat Street" (1984), and "Krush Groove" (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood's fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are also part of the broader history of teen cinema, and films such as Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions. As suburban teen films banished parents and children to the margins of narrative action, hip hop musicals, by contrast, presented inclusive and unconventional filial groupings that included all members of the neighborhood. These alternative social configurations directly referenced specific urban social problems, which affected the stability of inner city families following diminished governmental assistance in communities of color during the 1980s.

Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained widespread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters, but the nation's newly discovered dance form was embattled--caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning, particularly in relation to delineations of gender. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and "remasculinize" European dance, while young women simultaneously critiqued conventional masculinities through an appropriation of breakdance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop films, and even structured the sleeper hit "Flashdance" (1983). This forgotten, ignored, and maligned cinema is not only an important aspect of hip hop history, but is also central to the histories of teen film, the postclassical musical, and even institutional dance. Kimberley Monteyne places these films within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre's influence.

This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors. This survey outlines the influence of screen adaptation of important texts from the national literature on the construction of an Irish cinema, many of whose films because of cultural constraints were produced and exhibited outside the country until very recently. Authors discussed include George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Liam O'Flaherty, Christy Brown, Edna O'Brien, James Joyce, and Brian Friel. The films analysed in this volume include THE QUIET MAN, THE INFORMER, MAJOR BARBARA, THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES, MY LEFT FOOT, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE SNAPPER, and DANCING AT LUGHNASA. The introduction features a detailed discussion of the cultural and political questions raised by the promotion of forms of national identity by Ireland's literary and cinematic establishments.

Constantine Santas encourages us to wonder why film critics have so routinely dismissed the epic film. In The Epic in Film, he argues that 'blockbuster' and 'artistic' are not mutually exclusive terms, and, perhaps more importantly, epic film is an inherently profound genre in its ability to tap into a nation's, and sometimes humanity's, dreams and fears. Why do we see dozens and dozens of films based on the King Arthur legend? Why would a presidential-hopeful borrow a phrase, 'Read my lips,' from Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry? Why do war epics proliferate in times of war or national crisis? Why are epics as a whole the most popular movie genre? Start with an individual quest of some kind undertaken by an attractive hero or heroine, add the weight of a nation, and perhaps humanity, into that character's struggle, sprinkle some awe-inspiring special effects and a general sense of largesse, and don't forget the happy ending; and there you have a recipe for a film that can contain the deepest emotions_fear, hope, insecurity, pride_of a nation, and, sometimes, a world. Whether you love Gone with the Wind and hate Troy; find Akira Kurosawa's films brilliant; or marvel over the depth of the Matrix trilogy, film buffs will want to read this first book-length treatment of the epic, a wildly popular, infinitely fascinating, and critically underappreciated genre.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.