In contemporary film theory, body and mind have been central to explorations of film form, representation, and spectatorship. While the soul may seem to have no place here, the history of film theory and its legacy to the present suggest otherwise. From the origins of film theory - from Hugo Munsterberg through French Impressionism to writings of the Weimar Republic - to the mid-twentieth century work of Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre, as well as Edgar Morin, the soul emerges as a multi-faceted, if contested, concept. By revisiting such key moments in the history of film theory, and tracing the survival of this concept through to a range of cutting-edge debates today, from the work of Vivian Sobchack to Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze to Torben Grodal, The Soul of Film Theory tells the heretofore tacit tale of the relation between cinema and the soul, from classical to contemporary times, in dialogue with philosophy, religion, and science.

Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action brings together scholars who examine depictions of abortion in film, television, literature, and social media. By examining texts ranging from medical dramas of the 1960s and recent films such as Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Unpregnant to dystopian novels and social-media campaigns, the essays analyze a range of narrative styles, rhetorical strategies, and cinematic techniques, all of which shape cultural attitudes toward abortion. They also analyze cultural shifts, including the willingness or reluctance of networks and cable channels to acknowledge medication abortion and the role that abortion plays in family planning. As a whole, however, the essays argue that popular culture can play a significant role in destigmatizing abortion by including a wider range of narratives and doing so with nuance and empathy. With reproductive rights under attack in the United States, each essay is a call to action for writers, producers, directors, showrunners, authors, and musicians to use their platforms to tell more positive and accurate stories about abortion.

Eisenstein's reputation has long been secure as creator of the Soviet cinema's earliest and most enduring classics, and as a pioneer theorist and teacher. Yet the English-speaking world has not kept pace with a rising tide of Eisenstein scholarship further enriched by new publications emerging from the former Soviet Union.
"Eisenstein Rediscovered" presents the first true East-West symposium on Eisenstein with an unparalleled diversity of views and methodologies. Scholars from ten countries examine the vast legacy he bequeathed, and offer important new perspectives for reinterpreting Russian culture of the Soviet period. They explore how much Eisenstein owed to the Symbolist culture of his youth; how his involvement in theatre has been undervalued; what role he played in both the artistic and philosophical avant-gardes of the '20s; and how both Pushkin and the English Elizabethans shaped his later concept of tragedy. Including two newly discovered texts by Eisenstein which are translated for the first time, this collection makes extensive use of material only recently available. The new' Eisenstein that emerges is a far more eclectic and engaging figure than is traditionally perceived.

The legacy of Italy's experience of political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo ('years of lead', c. 1969-83) continues to exercise the Italian imagination to an extraordinary degree. Cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the atrocities and traumas of those years. Terrorism, Italian Style brings together some of the most important scholars contributing to the study of cinematic representations of the anni di piombo. Drawing on a comparative approach and a broad range of critical perspectives (including genre theory, family and gender issues, trauma theory and ethics), the book addresses an extensive range of films produced between the 1970s and the present and articulates their significance and relevance to contemporary Italian society and culture. Ruth Glynn is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol.Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian Literature at the City University of New York. Alan O'Leary is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds.

Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from classical Hollywood through to our digital era. So, too, have the ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style. This book explores two central style concepts, mise en scene and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples.

This volume is dedicated to the elusive category of the Hitchcock Touch, the qualities and techniques which had manifested in Alfred Hitchcock's own films yet which cannot be limited to the realm of Hitchcockian cinema alone. While the first section of this collection focuses on Hitchcock's own films and the various people who made important artistic contributions to them, the subsequent chapters draw wider circles. Case studies focusing on the branding effects associated with Hitchcockian cinema and its seductive qualities highlight the paratextual dimension of his films and the importance of his well-publicized persona, while the final section addresses both Hitchcock's formative period, as well as other filmmakers who drew upon the Hitchcock Touch. The collection not only serves as an introduction to the field of Hitchcock scholarship for a wider audience, it also delivers in-depth assessments of the lesser-known early period of his career, in addition to providing new takes on canonical films like Vertigo (1958) and Frenzy (1972).

Vampires are back - and this time they want to be us, not drain us. This collection considers the recent phenomena of 'Twilight' and 'True Blood', as well as authors such as Kim Newman and Matt Haig, films such as 'The Breed' and 'Interview with the Vampire', and television programmes such as 'Being Human' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.

What is the fundamental nature of the filmic object: is it a commodity or is it, can it be, art? This book introduces the thought of Theodor Adorno into film studies to repair the schism that characterizes the field today, as historical and cultural modes of analysis have come to displace theoretical and philosophical ones. Adorno's scathing critique of the culture industry has been thought to close off any possible rapprochement between his philosophy and film, but through a deployment of some of the key ideas drawn from his aesthetics and philosophy - immanent critique and negative dialectics - Wall traces what "might be" in film more than its "being" as a product. Four singular films - The Maltese Falcon (1941), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Repo Man (1984), and The Big Lebowski (1998) - each come to reflect (though in very different ways) on both their status as commodities and their desire to be more than commodities, even their aspirations to art.

Examines portrayals of plants and landscapes in recent German novels and films, addressing the contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, and social and ecological injustice that they expose. Plants, Places, and Power is a study of plants and landscapes in and beyond contemporary German-language literature and film. Stories and images of plants and landscapes in cultural productions are key sites for exposing the violent legacies of German colonialism and Nazism and for addressing contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, social and ecological injustice, and gender inequity. The novels and films discussed in this book address these key political issues in contemporary Europe and propose alternative ways for people to live together on this planet by formulating more inclusive and sustainable concepts of belonging. The book has two main objectives: to offer new approaches to contemporary literature and film from an intersectional, ecological perspective, and to form a canon. All of the works focused on, from Mo Asumang's documentary film Roots Germania (2007) through Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020) and from Yoko Tawada's novel Das nackte Auge (2004) to Sasa Stanisic's Herkunft (2019), are by female artists, artists of color, artists who have experienced forced displacement, and/or queer artists. In five chapters, Maria Stehle reads artworks in reference to ecological systems, develops forms of eco- and social criticism based on art, and intertwines ecological and critical thinking with questions of form, affect, and aesthetics.

We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.

This book examines how Italian Americans have been represented in cinema, from the depiction of Italian migration in New Orleans in the 1890s (Vendetta) to the transition from first- to second-generation immigrants (Ask the Dust), and from the establishment of the stereotype of the Italian American gangster (Little Caesar, Scarface) to its re-definition (Mean Streets), along with a peculiar depiction of Italian American masculinity (Marty, Raging Bull). For many years, Italian migration studies in the United States have commented on the way cinema contributed to the creation of an identifiable Italian American identity. More recently, scholars have recognized the existence of a more nuanced plurality of Italian American identities that reflects social and historical elements, class backgrounds, and the relationship with other ethnic minorities. The second part of the book challenges the most common stereotypes of Italian Americanness: food (Big Night) and Mafia, deconstructing the criminal tropes that have contributed to shaping the perception of Italian-American mafiosi in The Funeral, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco, and the first two chapters of the Godfather trilogy. At the crossroads of the fields of Italian Culture, Italian American Culture, Film Studies, and Migration Studies, Italian Americans in Film is written not only for undergraduate and graduate students but also for scholars who teach courses on Italian American Cinema and Visual Culture.

Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

In this three-part book-length study of the work of Gregg Toland, Philip Cowan explores approaches to co-authorship in collaborative filmmaking to propose new ways of identifying, attributing, and evaluating the creative work of cinematographers. In the first part of the study, Cowan challenges the dominant, director-centered auteur approach to film studies, critiquing the historical development of authorship theory and providing a contemporary analysis of the cinematographer's authorial role in creating images that communicate meaning through content and construction. By synthesizing and updating the work of previous film theorists to define the complexities of composition, movement, and lighting in the second part of the study, Cowan develops a new, comprehensive taxonomy of functional and aesthetic elements of the moving image. Finally, by using the co-author approach and the analytical tools developed in part two of the book, Cowan provides an in-depth re-examination of Toland's work, highlighting the historical neglect of the cinematographer's artistic contribution to filmmaking and developing a fresh approach to the analysis of contemporary cinematography in film.

Despite Soho's rich cultural history, there remains an absence of work on the depiction of the popular neighbourhood in film. Soho on Screen provides one of the first studies of Soho within postwar British cinema. Drawing upon historical, cultural and urban studies of the area, this book explores twelve films and theatrically released documentaries from a filmography of over one hundred Soho set productions. While predominantly focusing on low-budget, exploitation films which are exemplars of British and international filmmaking, Young also offers new readings of star and director biographies, from Laurence Harvey to Emeric Pressburger, and in so doing enlivens discussion on filmmaking in a time and place of intense social transformation, technological innovation and growing permissiveness.

Atmosphere, Cinema, Architecture: Thematic Reflections on Ambiance and Place explores cinema and architecture as ambient and affective settings or circumstances that can enable the emergence of atmosphere. This book is an interdisciplinary reading of cinematographic practice which develops useful implications for spatial composition in art and architectural design. The way a film is set up, directed, composed, framed, and technically constructed can provide parallels, analogies and metaphors for the spatial organisation of cities, landscapes and buildings. Likewise, the way a built setting is conceived and devised can inform approaches to framing and spatial organisation in cinematography. The book begins on a personal note with a series of recollected atmospheric experiences, leading to an investigation of ambiguity and consilient discrepancy as circumstantial conditions necessary for the production of atmosphere. The mood of melancholia is explored to show the pivotal role that ambiguity, discrepancy and irresolution play in its distinctive ambiance. Atmosphere is then defined as an emergent condition arising between an ambient, affective circumstance and a mooded human being. The book then moves to analyse the inherent conditions in the setup of filmic and architectural settings that render them atmospheric. Reference is made to the cinema of Bresson, Resnais, Lynch, Tarr, Malik and Campion, and to Romanesque tympanae, the architectonic scenography of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle and the work of Spanish architects Flores Prats. The concluding section, Anatomy of Atmosphere, is a lexicon of concepts, themes and tactics around atmosphere that might usefully inform creative practice.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock's sixth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. It seems likely that one of the reasons he liked Shadow so much is that is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system, a meticulous cause and effect chain that melds its various scenes and sequences together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters. This scrupulously organized film operates as a masterclass on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analysing the film's narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and 'family values', Diane Negra shows how the film's impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film's terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director's emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life and opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.

In this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland's struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation's growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation's foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland's key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.

When the World Laughs is a book about the intersection of humor, history, and culture. It explores how film comedy, one of the world's most popular movie genres, reflects the values and beliefs of those who enjoy its many forms, its most enduring characters and stories, its most entertaining routines and funniest jokes. What people laugh at in Europe, Africa, or the Far East reveals important truths about their differences and common bonds. By investigating their traditions of humor, by paying close attention to what kinds of comedy cross national boundaries or what gets lost in translation, this study leads us to a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves. Section One begins with a survey of the theories and research that best explain how humor works. It clarifies the varieties of comic forms and styles, identifies the world's most archetypal figures of fun, and traces the history of the world's traditions of humor from earliest times to today. It also examines the techniques and aesthetics of film comedy: how movies use the world's rich repertoire of amusing stories, gags, and wit to make us laugh and think. Section Two offers a close look at national and regional trends. It applies the concepts set forth earlier to specific films-across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, historical eras, and cultural contexts-providing an insightful comparative study of the world's great traditions of film comedy.

This book provides a groundbreaking exploration of silent film performance. It combines close reading of silent screen acting with theoretically informed analysis, stressing the overlap between different performative arts, such as film and stage acting, dance, mime, and pantomime. The boundary between silent and sound films is also challenged. Anna Pavlova's acting in The Dumb Girl of Portici is read through Freud's work on the uncanny, disability studies, and notions of intermediality. Vladimir Mayakovsky's performance in The Young Lady and the Hooligan is approached as a silent soliloquy and a representation of loneliness. Ivan Mozzhukhin's tour de force in The Late Mathias Pascal is discussed through a queer failure lens, while Pola Negri's presence in Hotel Imperial is analysed with the aid of texts on wartime anxiety. Harald Kreutzberg's stunning number in Paracelsus is examined in the light of theories of mime and pantomime, arguing for its subversive potential in a Third Reich sound film.

In recent years there has been a remarkable surge in Iranian films expressing contentious issues which would otherwise be very difficult to discuss publicly inside the Islamic Republic of Iran -- such as the role of clergy in Iranian society. Nacim Pak-Shiraz here highlights how many Iranian film directors concern themselves with the content of the religious and historical narratives of culture and society, sparking debate about the medium's compatibility or incongruity with religion and spirituality. She explores the various ways that Shi'i discourse emerges on screen, and offers groundbreaking insights into both the role of film in Iranian culture and society, and how it has become a medium for exploring what it means to be Iranian and Muslim after thirty years of Islamic rule. This is invaluable reading students and scholars of Film Studies and contemporary Iranian cinema, but also of the culture and identity of Iran more widely.

In December 1967, Time magazine put Bonnie and Clyde on its cover and proudly declared that Hollywood cinema was undergoing a 'renaissance'. For the next few years, a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films were produced at the very centre of the American film industry, often (but by no means always) combining success at the box office with huge critical acclaim, both then and later. This collection brings together acknowledged experts on American cinema to examine thirteen key films from the years 1966 to 1974, starting with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a major studio release which was in effect exempted from Hollywood's Production Code and thus helped to liberate American filmmaking from (self-)censorship. Long-standing taboos to do with sex, violence, race relations, drugs, politics, religion and much else could now be broken, often in conjunction with extensive stylistic experimentation. Whereas most previous scholarship has examined these developments through the prism of auteurism, with its tight focus on film directors and their oeuvres, the contributors to this collection also carefully examine production histories and processes. In doing so they pay particular attention to the economic underpinnings and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the influence of European art cinema as well as of exploitation, experimental and underground films, and the connections between cinema and other media (notably publishing, music and theatre). Several chapters show how the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance relate to further changes in American cinema from the mid-1970s onwards.

Film and terrorism go back a long way. The very birth of cinema in the 1890s coincided with an early golden age of terrorism, as bomb-throwing anarchists and nationalists captured headlines in countries as far apart as France and India. "Cinematic Terror" provides the first history of cinema's depiction of terrorism from the early 1900s to the present day. It looks at how cinema has been the site of conflict between filmmakers and terrorists for over a century and identifies important trends in the ways that film industries in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have framed terrorism. From the birth of moving pictures to the internet age, the author explains how filmmakers from around the world have depicted terrorists, have made money and propaganda out of terrorism, and have died at the hands of terrorists. Professor Shaw shows that for over a century, cinema has had a profound impact on peoples' understanding of terrorism.

Popular Spanish Film Under Franco is the first book of its kind to analyze cinematic comedy during the initial two decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Focusing on the intersection between popular culture and political populism, it breaks new theoretical ground in re-evaluating the policies of the regime and the tactics employed by those who sought to undermine it. Its cultural studies approach - combining Gramsci, de Certeau and Bakhtin - interrogates the ambiguous nature of subversion and challenges common assumptions concerning post-war Spanish film.