Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson's persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson's career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aLindvallas book provides a wonderful and wonderfully readable history of this important period. Issues that churches and those interested in communication, culture, and religion wrestle with today turn out to have appeared almost 100 years ago. Anyone interested in film, religion, theology, and culture should read this book.a
--Paul A. Soukup, S.J., Santa Clara University

aThoroughly researched and free of jargon, this book fills the gap in film history.a
--"Choice"

aLindvall offers a history of the Protestant Church's role in making and promoting Christian movies, from the very beginning of the industry (circa 1895) through the end of the silent era. . . . This well-researched book is recommended for large academic and theology collection.a
--"Library Journal XPress"

"Provides a masterful and fascinating survey of the history of the Christian silent film industry and its demise."
--John Lyden, author of "Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals"

aLindvall provides his readers with the largely untold story of the beginning decades of the Christian film industry. Now, almost a hundred years later, message movies with a religious core are re-emerging. To understand their current pitfalls and promise, Sanctuary Cinema is important reading. It's also great fun!a
--Robert K. Johnston, Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary, and author of "Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue"

Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came toadopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media.

Despite early successes in attracting new adherents with the lure of the film, the early Christian film industry ultimately failed, in large part due to growing fears that film would corrupt the church by substituting an American "civil religion" in place of solid Christian values and amidst continuing Christian unease about the potential for the glorification of images to revert to idolatry. While radio eclipsed the motion picture as the Christian communication media of choice by the 1920, the early film makers had laid the foundations for the current re-emergence of Christian film and entertainment, from "Veggie Tales" to "The Passion of the Christ,"

Anita Page (1910-2008) first captured moviegoers' attention near the end of the silent film era in such classics as While the City Sleeps (1928) with Lon Chaney, The Flying Fleet (1929) with Ramon Novarro, and her own favorite film, Our Dancing Daughters (1928) with Joan Crawford. Throughout her relatively short career, Page enjoyed popular and critical acclaim and appeared in the first full-sound movie to win Best Picture, The Broadway Melody (1929). With foreword by her close friend, actor Randal Malone, this reference work is the first to fully detail Page's remarkable career, including a biography and a complete listing of all her films, along with her one stage appearance and her returns to the limelight in later years. Entries provides complete production information, reviews and behind-the-scenes commentary. Dozens of photos and revealing anecdotes complete a portrait of a fascinating yet underappreciated performer.

Intervening at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and cinema, this book argues that the career of Robert Guediguian is the result of one of the most original and coherent projects in contemporary French cinema: to make a committed, historically-conscious cinema, in a local space, over a long period of time, but most especially with friends. The account starts with in-depth consideration of friendship and its relation to philosophy, politics, time, and space. The book chronologically traces this project as it begins in Guediguian's hometown, the Communist-leaning Marseille. It further unfolds through the political transformations of the 1980s Left and the local activism and utopias of the 1990s, and spreads into Guediguian's varied explorations of genre and register. Close analysis is accompanied with historical and social contextualization, but also with a consistent return to the underlying, radical and philosophically rich project. -- .

The Desiring-Image yields new models of queer cinema produced since the late 1980s, based on close formal analysis of diverse films as well as innovative contributions to current film theory. The book defines "queer cinema" less as a specific genre or in terms of gay and lesbian identity, but more broadly as a kind of filmmaking that conveys sexual desire and orientation as potentially fluid within any individual's experience, and as forces that can therefore unite unlikely groups of people along new lines, socially, sexually, or politically. The films driving this analysis range from celebrated fixtures of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s (including Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman and Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine) to sexually provocative films of the same era that are rarely classified as queer (David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch) to breakout films by 21st-century directors (Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother, John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus). To frame these readings and to avoid heterosexist assumptions in other forms of film analysis, The Desiring-Image revisits the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose two major works on cinema somehow never address the radical ideas about desire he expresses in other texts. This book brings those notions together in innovative ways, making them clear and accessible to newcomers and field specialists alike, with clear, illustrated examples drawn from a wide range of movies extending beyond the central case studies. Thus, The Desiring-Image speaks to readers interested in queer and gay/lesbian studies, in film theory, in feminist and sexuality scholarship, and in theory and philosophy, putting those discourses into rich, surprising conversations with popular cinema of the last 30 years.

A compelling account of the role of Fado and the fadista in Portuguese film and the wider culture. Colvin studies the evolution of Fado music as the soundtrack to the Portuguese talkie. He analyzes the most successful Portuguese films of the first two decades of the Estado Novo era, showing how directors used the national songto promote the values of the young Regime regarding the poor inhabitants of Lisbon's popular neighborhoods. He considers the aesthetic, technological, and social advances that accompany the progress of the Estado Novo---Futurism;the development of sound film; the inception of national radio broadcast; access to the automobile; and urban renewal---within a historical context that considers Portugal's global profile at the time of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's rise to power and the inauguration of Antonio Ferro's Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional; Portugal's role as a secret ally of the Falange during the Spanish Civil War; Lisbon's role as a neutral refuge during World War II; and the Portuguese colonial empire as an anachronism in the post-World War II years. Colvin argues that Portuguese directors have exploited the growing popularity of the Fado and Lisbon's fadistas to dissuade citizens from alien values that promote individual ambitions and the notion of an easy life of poverty in the capital. As the public image of the Fado evolves, the fadista's role in film becomes more prominent and eventually the fadista is the protagonist and the Fado the principal concern of national film. The author exposes the irony that as the social profile of the Lisbon fadista improves with the international fame of singer Amalia Rodrigues, Portuguese film perpetuates and validates the outdated characterization of the fadista as a social pariah that Leitao de Barros proposed in the first Portuguese talkie, A Severa (1931). Michael Colvin is Associate Professor of HispanicStudies at Marymount Manhattan College.

One of the most acclaimed debut features of this century, Moon (2009) tells the superficially simple story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who mines Helium-3 on the dark side and comes face to face with his doppelganger. Out of this scenario, director and co-writer Duncan Jones explores ethical questions that can be examined for philosophical depths, calling back to such 1970s and 1980s science fiction films as Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Logan's Run (1976), Alien (1979), and Outland (1981). Just as the moon so often visible above Earth has been interpreted in a variety of ways throughout human history, so the film Moon is open to various readings and interpretations. Brian Robb's Constellation volume begins by covering the early filmmaking and influences of director Jones, and briefly look at past depictions of the moon in science fiction cinema. He goes on to provide a production history of the film, with a particular focus on how the constraints of British low-budget filmmaking inspire creativity, and how the creative team envisioned the future. Subsequent chapters examine questions of isolation and identity as raised in Moon - what defines a human being? How does differing experience change each of the Sam Bell clones? - and issues of theology by examining notions of curiosity and investigation. Finally, the critical reception of Moon is will be examined, with a consideration of the way film's themes were further developed and extrapolated upon in Duncan Jones' next film, Source Code (2011).

In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure's protean temporality and revisionist capabilities and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity. Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini's proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verite experiments, a heightened self-critique in France and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late fifties. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star's iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia her Own Story and the docudrama Torero!). In Person traces a shift from the exemplary and transformative ethos of fifties reenactment towards the un-redemptive stance of contemporary reenactment films such as Lanzmann's Shoah, Zhang Yuan's Sons, Andrea Tonacci's Hills of Chaos. It defines continuities between verite testimony (Chronicle, and Moi un Noir) and later para-juridical films such as the Karski Report and Rithy Panh's S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine suggesting the power of co-presence and in person actualization for an ethics of viewership.

This book is a scholarly investigation of the historical development and contemporary transformation of film noir in today's Hong Kong. Focusing on the evolvement of cinematic narratives, aesthetics, and techniques, the author balances a deep reading of the multiple filmic plots with a discussion of the cinematic portrayals of gender, romance, identities and power relations. Nuancing the prototypical cinematic form and tragic sense of classical film noir, the recent Hong Kong cinema turns around the classical generic role of film noir at the turn of the century to convey very different messages-joy, hope or love. This book examines how the mainstream cinema, or pre-and-post-Hong Kong cinema in particular, applies a peculiar strategy that makes rooms for the audience to enjoy a pleasure-giving process of reflexivity and also critique the mainstream ideology. With new analytical approaches and angles, this book breaks new ground in offering transcultural and cross-genre analyses on the cinema and its impact in local and international markets. This book is the first major scholarly investigation of the historical development and contemporary transformation of film noir in today's Hong Kong. Focusing on the evolvement of cinematic narratives, aesthetics, and techniques, the author balances a deep reading of the multiple filmic plots with a refreshing discussion of the cinematic portrayals of gender, romance, identities and power relations. This book also revisits conceptual categories developed by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Butler.

How do perceptions of the past-not just of particular events, but of the trajectory of history as a whole-shape our experience of the world? To answer this (and other) questions, Jim Cullen looks closely at the work of what might be considered an unlikely source of historical insight-the work of six major Hollywood stars. Indeed, Cullen offers a fascinating portrait of pivotal movements that have shaped our history as reflected in the work of Clint Eastwood, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Jodie Foster. By focusing on the career choices made by these powerful actors, all of whom have the rare ability to put their personal stamp on their work, Cullen reveals a discrete set of historical narratives, including a surprising strain of Jeffersonian communitarianism that runs through Eastwood's work, a sense of how the frontier shaped American character as reflected in the roles chosen by Day-Lewis, the Lincoln-styled belief in institutions and the power of ordinary people that runs through the films of Tom Hanks (like Jimmy Stewart before him), and the history of liberal feminism of the last century captured in the movies of Meryl Streep. That these historical patterns emerge in the work of these six artists-almost certainly unintentionally-sheds much light on the way that, for all of us, historical forces can shape our understanding of the world without our being aware of them.

Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clementine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Bjoern Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb. Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need. Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional connections between generations by representing intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between generations. However, Disney-Pixar's Up and Coco instead portray intergenerational alliances - young collaborating with old, the living working alongside the dead - as necessary to achieving goals. The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political significance of children's culture in the development of generational intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of children's literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity, opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the culture of childhood.

Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream-but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages explore Disney's mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the middle ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.

Film has always been a key technology for producing and disseminating attachments to 'the social.' Making Audiences explores the century-old relationships between Japanese media and social subjects, analyzing the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms: minshu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), toa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Fujiki narrates the history of Japan's transmedia ecology, illuminating cinema's enmeshment with other forms of media, from vaudeville to the internet, so that cinema audiences emerge as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. His extensive empirical research and commitment to interdisciplinarity bring new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the beginning of the twenty-first century, setting his insights within the context of total wars, imperialism, gender, ethnicity, mass society and communication, the ethics of care, citizenship, globalization, neoliberalism, social movements, digital media, and public and intimate spheres. By reorganizing the study of film and its audiences as central players of the history and politics of the 20th century, Fujiki writes the history of Japan and East Asia anew.

Focusing on Netflix's child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science-fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix's 'Family Watch Together TV' tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate, family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. Chapters explore how this 'Netflixication' of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations. This book will be of particular interest to upper level undergraduates, graduates and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

In 1995 and 1996 six film or television adaptations of Jane Austen's novels were produced -- an unprecedented number. More amazing, all were critical and/or box office successes. What accounts for this explosion of interest? Much of the appeal of these films lies in our nostalgic desire at the end of the millennium for an age of greater politeness and sexual reticence. Austen's ridicule of deceit and pretentiousness also appeals to our fin de si?cle sensibilities. The novels were changed, however, to enhance their appeal to a wide popular audience, and the revisions reveal much about our own culture and its values. These recent productions espouse explicitly twentieth-century feminist notions and reshape the Austenian hero to make him conform to modern expectations. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield present fourteen essays examining the phenomenon of Jane Austen as cultural icon, providing thoughtful and sympathetic insights on the films through a variety of critical approaches. The contributors debate whether these productions enhance or undercut the subtle feminism that Austen promoted in her novels. From Persuasion to Pride and Prejudice, from the three Emmas (including Clueless ) to Sense and Sensibility, these films succeed because they flatter our intelligence and education. And they have as much to tell us about ourselves as they do about the world of Jane Austen. This second edition includes a new chapter on the recent film version of Mansfield Park.

This updated volume is the perfect gift for any fan of horror movies and pop culture's most iconic monsters. The year 2021 is a milestone anniversary year for horror's most iconic films-Universal Studios' Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. Those landmark movies-as well as Universal's new releases-are celebrated through this beautiful and frighteningly informative volume, newly expanded to include what the present and future holds for these venerable characters. With a foreword by Jason Blum that places horror in the context of our modern culture, the monster movie is new again-and no fan can afford to be without this book. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Universal Studios was Hollywood's number one studio for horror pictures worldwide. This official illustrated history is the comprehensive and definitive volume of cinema's most enduring genre. Lavishly illustrated with production stills, posters, and rare behind-the-scenes shots, the book tells the complete history of these fascinating characters and the captivating films through which they achieved international recognition. Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror is a one-book library on horror films.

Beginning film studies offers the ideal introduction to this vibrant subject. Written accessibly and with verve, it ranges across the key topics and manifold approaches to film studies. Andrew Dix has thoroughly updated the first edition, and this new volume includes new case studies, overviews of recent developments in the discipline, and up-to-the-minute suggestions for further reading. The book begins by considering some of film's formal features - mise-en-scene, editing and sound - before moving outwards to narrative, genre, authorship, stardom and ideology. Later chapters on film industries and on film consumption - where and how we watch movies - assess the discipline's recent geographical 'turn'. The book references many film cultures, including Hollywood, Bollywood and contemporary Hong Kong. Case studies cover such topics as sound in The Great Gatsby and narrative in Inception. The superhero movie is studied; so too is Jennifer Lawrence. Beginning film studies is also interactive, with readers enabled throughout to reflect critically upon the field. -- .

This collection of new writing on contemporary Greek cinema builds and expands on existing work in the field, providing a coherent analysis of films which, despite their international importance, have so far received limited critical attention. The volume maps key trends in Greek cinema since the 1990s within the wider context of production and consumption at both national and international levels. It offers a wide range of critical analyses of documentary and avant-garde filmmaking, art house and popular cinema, and the work of established and new directors as well as deliberations on teaching methodologies and marketing strategies. The book seeks to highlight the continuities, mutual influences and common contexts that inform, shape and inspire filmmaking in Greece today.

A unique cocktail of personal memoir, cultural criticism and Hollywood history by the one and only Quentin Tarantino. The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the number one New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino. In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with CINEMA SPECULATION, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans - and all movie lovers - could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT's and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.

Most scholarship on Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary (1989) overarchingly focuses on the Stephen King novel (1983), and tends strongly towards housing the story within the Gothic literary tradition. The film itself is often absent from considerations of North American horror cinema of the 1980s, and from wider horror scholarship in general. This Devil's Advocate stands as a corrective, and provides a holistic analysis - textual, contextual, and industrial - of the film, in order to properly situate it as an important entry into the history of horror cinema. This book joins a growing body of works - both journalistic and academic - that aim to revisit older films in order to call attention to and/or redress the gendered imbalance in our written horror histories. McMurdo charges Pet Sematary with several contributions to the horror genre: as an important entry within the tradition of "grief horror"; as a horror film that both adheres to and defies the generic conventions of its historical context, one both engaged with and respondent to its time of creation; as a film that changed the fortunes of the cinematic Stephen King "brand" on the cusp of a new decade. Pet Sematary is the highest grossing horror film directed by a woman in cinematic history, and it stands as a story that we keep returning to - as seen by the 1992 sequel, the 2019 remake, and a forthcoming prequel. Pet Sematary's modern relevance and importance to genre history then, is manifold, and this book argues it is past time for its reconsideration as a classic of horror cinema.

Learning With the Lights Off is the first collection of essays to address the phenomenon of film's educational uses in twentieth century America. Nontheatrical films in general and educational films in particular represent an exciting new area of inquiry in media and cultural studies. This collection illuminates a vastly influential form of filmmaking seen by millions of people around the world. The essays reveal significant insights into film's powerful role in twentieth century American culture as a medium of instruction and guidance. The book features an ambitious introductory overview of educational film practices that provides readers with a sense of how important a role film has played in producing knowledge in America both inside the classroom and out. Each essay analyzes in close detail some crucial aspect of educational film history, ranging from case studies of films and filmmakers, to analyses of genres, to broader historical assessments. Offering links to many of the films under discussion at the Internet Archive, readers will be able to easily watch for themselves many of the films studied within the book's pages. Learning With the Lights Off is both reader and classroom friendly, affording new opportunities for studying these often hard-to-find films.

Since 1993, Hollywood has been rendering popular video games on the silver screen, mainly to critical derision and box office failure. While a few have succeeded, many have been hailed as the "worst movie ever" and left gamers asking: how did that get made? Super Mario fans expecting plumbers jumping on Goombas got an inter-dimensional battle between humans and evolved dinosaurs. Players expecting to see Ryu, Ken, and the rest of the World Warriors compete in the Street Fighter Tournament instead got a live-action GI Joe. This in-depth and entertaining work recounts the production histories of many of these movies, revealing the sometimes inspired and convoluted path Hollywood took to turn pixels into living flesh, with insights from more than 40 industry insiders, including film directors Paul W. S. Anderson (Resident Evil), Simon West (Tomb Raider), and Steven de Souza (Street Fighter).

This indispensable collection offers 51 chapters, each focused on a distinct American independent film. Screening American Independent Film presents these films chronologically, addressing works from across more than a century (1915-2020), emphasizing the breadth and long duration of American Independent Cinema. The collection includes canonical examples as well as films that push against and expand the definitions of "independence." The titles run from micro-budget films through marketing-friendly indiewood projects, from auteur-driven films and festival darlings to B-movies, genre pics, and exploitation films. The chapters introduce students to different approaches within film studies from historical and contextual framing, industrial and institutional analysis, politics and ideology, genre and authorship, representation, film analysis, exhibition and reception, and technology. Written by leading international scholars and emerging talents in film studies, this volume is the first of its kind. Paying particular attention to issues of diversity and inclusion for both the participating scholars and the content and themes within the selected films, Screening American Independent Film is an essential resource for anyone teaching or studying American cinema.