This is a unique study of the use of cinematic space by four important directors in American cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s: Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and William Wyler. Barbara Bowman examines each of their distinctive styles and diverse backgrounds and shows how these unique visual styles complement each other--representing the best in classic American cinema, from Ninotchka and Shanghai Express to Best Years of Our Lives to It's a Wonderful Life. These great directors viewed space not as simple emptiness, nor as something to be manipulated pragmatically, but as a frame or palette in which to work. Their arrangements of cinematic space become not just visually recurrent techniques, but aesthetic touchstones that alert spectators to the narrative shape of the film and invite the spectator to have a more self-conscious relation to the film. Bowman explains how Capra's challenge was to take what is spatially familiar, like James Stewart's or Gary Cooper's neighborhood or small town, and defamiliarize it enough so that we see it for the first time. Lubitsch's creation of film space relies on the indirection so apparent in his scripts by Samuel Raphaelson; he depends on what the spectator cannot yet see or only anticipates, relying upon our imaginations, especially our potential lasciviousness. Sternberg's veiled shots of Marlene Dietrich and others convey a very basic skepticism about human capacity for both sight and insight, and Wyler emotionalizes his films's space by having characters like Bette Davis confront each other in triangular groups or by double framing his figures with architectural second frames. Each director approached film space with his ownsingular style, but all four techniques shared a common purpose to explain characters or to teach the spectator to see more intensely.

The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.

This book explores the depiction of suicide in American youth films from 1900 to 2019. Anchored in Sociology, this multidisciplinary study investigates the causes and consequences of suicide and uncovers the socio-cultural context for the development of youth, film, and suicide. While such cinematic portrayals seem to privilege external explanations of suicide versus internal or psychological ones, overall they are neither rich nor sensitive. Most are simplistic, limited or at the very least unbalanced. At times, they are flatly controversial. In light of this overall problematic depiction of suicide, this book offers a proactive approach to empower young audiences-a media literacy strategy to embrace while watching these films.

Martin Dines explores the relationship between the physical & metaphorical spaces of suburbia & the evolution of modern gay identities across a range of British & American film & fiction, looking at the work of Dennis Cooper, Quentin Crisp, Todd Haynes, Christopher Isherwood, Kevin Killian, David Leavitt, Oscar Moore & Edmund White.

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.

Exploring the multiple aesthetic and cultural links between French and Japanese cinema, The Cinematic Influence is packed with vivid examples and case studies of films by Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Claire Denis, Naomi Kawase, Michel Gondry and many others. It illustrates the vast array of cinematic connections that mark a long history of mutual influence and reverence between filmmakers in France and Japan. The book provides new insights into the ways that national cinemas resist Hollywood to maintain and strengthen their own cultural practices and how these national cinemas perform the task of informing and enlightening other cultures about what it means to be French or Japanese. This book also deepens our understandings of film's role as a viable cultural and economic player in individual nations. Importantly, the reader will see that film operates as a form of cultural exchange between France and Japan, and more broadly, Europe and Asia. This is the first major book to investigate the crossover between these two diverse national cinemas by tracking their history of shared narrative and stylistic techniques.

What can film tell us about enjoyment and sexual difference? Can cinematic fiction be more Real than reality? Fabio Vighi looks at Jacques Lacans theory of sexuality alongside some of the best-known works of European cinema, including films by Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni and Bergman.

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.

This book explores how British filmmakers of the 2000s engaged with the themes of love, sex and desire in a wide variety of movies. It ranges from powerful contemporary dramas such as Kidulthood, Closer and Disobedience to the lighter mood of the Bridget Jones series. It also analyses how the lives, loves and traumas of historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath and Iris Murdoch were dramatised on film. The book will appeal to literature enthusiasts, film students and readers interested in exploring how we may currently live out our hopes, fears and dreams in relation to sexual matters and affairs of the heart. -- .

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.

"Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media" contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding echoes of the evangelical movement's abstinence-only rhetoric in everything from Easy A to Taken. Casey Ryan Kelly tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. As he demonstrates, these movies are particularly disempowering for young women, concocting plots in which the decision to refrain from sex until marriage is the young woman's primary source of agency and arbiter of moral worth. Locating these regressive sexual politics not only in expected sites, like the Twilight films, but surprising ones, like the raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow, Kelly makes a compelling case that Hollywood films have taken a significant step backward in recent years. Abstinence Cinema offers close readings of movies from a wide spectrum of genres, and it puts these films into conversation with rhetoric that has emerged in other arenas of American culture. Challenging assumptions that we are living in a more liberated era, the book sounds a warning bell about the powerful cultural forces that seek to demonize sexuality and curtail female sexual agency.

Films are full of words on the screen. There are letters that come in the post, written and printed papers, and epitaphs. They can be declarations of love, or the words that tell us where we are or what is happening, varying from the most intimate confessions to straightforward signs. We do not often pause to think about our own interpretation of them, yet our response to reading and writing can be an important part of how we understand films. This book looks in detail at five films - Letter from an Unknown Woman; All This, and Heaven Too; The Man who Shot Liberty Valance; Into the Wild; and The Reader - and reveals how words work on screen, and the importance of literacy in their worlds. It sheds new light on some classic films and explores the uses of this form of expression in the work of modern film makers.

When the first Fast & Furious film was released in June 2001, few predicted that it would be a box office hit, let alone the launchpad for a multi-billion-dollar franchise. A mid-budget crime movie set around L.A.'s underground car-racing scene, featuring a cast of relative unknowns, the film became one of the surprise hits of that summer, earning more than 5 times its budget in worldwide ticket sales. 2 decades and 9 films later, Fast & Furious today ranks among the 10 highest-grossing movie franchises of all time, with a box office total of $6.6 billion and has also given rise to an animated TV show and theme park ride. Full-Throttle Franchise is the first book to offer an in-depth analysis of the Fast & Furious, bringing together a range of scholars to explore not only the style and themes of the franchise, but also its broader cultural impact and legacy. The collected essays establish the franchise's importance in cinematic and ideological terms, linking their discussions to wider issues of genre, representation, adaptation, and industry. Topics range from stardom and performance, focusing on key actors Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, to the way in which Fast & Furious intersects with dominant ideas of racial, gender, and sexual identity. Aimed at both scholars and fans, Full-Throttle Franchise seeks to uncover just what has made Fast & Furious so enduringly popular, mapping its outrageous set pieces, ever-expanding universe, and growing cast of global megastars in terms of wider cultural and industrial forces.

Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.

In this study, William C. Carroll analyses a wide range of adaptations and appropriations of Macbeth across different media to consider what it is about the play that compels our desire to reshape it. Arguing that many of these adaptations attempt to 'improve' or 'correct' the play's perceived political or aesthetic flaws, Carroll traces how Macbeth's popularity and adaptability stems from several of its formal features: its openly political nature; its inclusion of supernatural elements; its parable of the dangers of ambition; its violence; its brevity; and its domestic focus on a husband and wife. The study ranges across elite and popular culture divides: from Sir William Davenant's adaptation for the Restoration stage (1663-4), an early 18th-century novel, The Secret History of Mackbeth and Verdi's Macbeth, through to 20th- and 21st-century adaptations for stage and screen, as well as contemporary novelizations, young adult literature and commercial appropriations that testify to the play's absorption into contemporary culture.

Considered a notorious subset of horror in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a massive revitalization and diversification of rape-revenge in recent years. This book analyzes the politics, ethics, and affects at play in the filmic construction of rape and its responses.

This collection examines two recent phenomena: the return of realist tendencies and practices in world cinema and television, and the rehabilitation of realism in film and media theory. The contributors investigate these two phenomena in detail, querying their origins, relations, divergences and intersections from a variety of perspectives.

From the very first book publication in 1920 to the recent film release of Death on the Nile, this investigation into Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world's favourite fictional detective. This book tells his story decade-by-decade, exploring his appearances not only in the original novels, short stories and plays but also across stage, screen and radio productions. Poirot has had near-permanent presence in the public eye ever since the 1920 publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. From character development, publication history and private discussion concerning the original stories themselves, to early forays on to the stage and screen, the story of Poirot is as fascinating as it is enduring. Based on the author's original research, review excerpts and original Agatha Christie correspondence, Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World is a lively and accessible history of the character, offering new information and helpful pieces of context, that will delight all Agatha Christie fans, from a new generation of readers to those already highly familiar with the canon.

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock celebrates the remarkable depth and scope of his artistic achievement in film. It explores his works in relationship both to their social context and to the traditions of critical theory they continue to inspire. The collection draws on the best of current Hitchcock scholarship, featuring the work of both new and established scholars. It displays the full diversity of critical methods that have characterized the study of this director's films in recent years. The articles are grouped into four thematic sections: "Authorship and Aesthetics" examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. "French Hitchcock" looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. "Poetics and Politics of Identity" explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work, and the final section, "Death and Transfiguration" addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece "Psycho,"