What's your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can't protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA's image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s. The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA's public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA's role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency's and its officers' involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image.

Charting new territory in filmmaking technologies and Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, Minority Report (2002) portrays a dystopian near-future that comments on our increasingly science-fictional world and pays homage to the history of SF cinema. In this comprehensive monograph, D. Harlan Wilson recounts the film's inception, production, reception, and afterlife since its release in 2002 while depicting it as a symptom of contemporary media pathology, post-9/11 paranoia, consumer-capitalist aggression, religious mania, and above all, the screen culture that has come to define the human condition. At the same time, Wilson explores the many self-reflexive flourishes that render the movie a commentary on Spielberg's style and the precession of the SF genre.

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).

Taking the turn of this century as a starting point, when new legislation around detention, deportation and dispersal began to take effect, "Contemporary Asylum Narratives" identifies an emerging cultural engagement with asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century Britain. Through a focus on authors, playwrights and filmmakers this study brings literary and cultural criticism to bear on asylum issues by exploring the representational politics that determine our responses to the stateless individuals whose numbers are certain to increase in line with global economic and ecological crises.
Making productive links between refugee studies and narrative fiction, "Contemporary Asylum Narratives" challenges critical concepts related to migration such as hospitality, cosmopolitanism and globalization. In doing so, the book marks a transition from older, diasporic modes of belonging to the need for identifications that account for the increasingly precarious and contingent migrations of the contemporary era.

This book presents a comprehensive history and analysis of Secret Cinema - the leading producer of large-scale immersive experiences in the UK. It examines how the company has evolved over twelve years from an experimental and artisanal organisation to a global leader in the field. The book focuses on the UK in late-2019, a point at which the immersive sector had grown significantly through its increasing contribution to GDP and its widespread recognition as a legitimate cultural offering. It captures an organisation and a sector transitioning from marginal and subcultural roots to a commodifiable and commercial form, now with recognisable professional roles and practices, which has contributed to the establishment of an immersive experience industry of national importance and global reach. -- .

Clothes make the man" (or woman). This is especially true in early Hollywood silent films where a character's appearance could show an immense number of different things about them. For example, Theda Bara's role in A Fool There Was (1915) was known for her revealing clothing, seductive appearance, and being the first "Vamp." Wardrobe and costume design played a larger role in silent films than in modern movies. The character's clothes told the audience who they were and what their role was in the movie. In this in-depth analysis, the author provides examples and explanations about noteworthy characters who used their appearance to further their fame.

Why does oppression by censorship affect the film industry far more frequently than any other mass media? Silencing Cinema brings together the key issues and authors to examine instances of film censorship throughout the world. Including essays by some of today's leading film historians, the book offers groundbreaking historical research on film censorship in major film production countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia/Soviet Union, India, China, and Nigeria, among others. The contributors explore such innovative themes and topics as film censorship and authorship, genre, language, religion, audiences, political economy, international policy, and colonialism. This exciting collection is thoroughly unique in its broad geographical scope and its comprehensive look at film censorship.

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott's Alien to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century - consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) - begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.

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.

This interdisciplinary study offers an introduction to the relatively unexplored area of the form of cinematic space referred to as "the landscape of the mind." Exploring the psychological use of natural setting in both avant-garde and mainstream cinema, this study seeks to understand how these settings serve as outward manifestations of characters' inner subjective states. David Melbye traces cultural trajectories of landscape depiction as far back as the Middle Ages in painting and literature to nurture a greater awareness of visual allegory in the films of the silent era up through the present, focusing specifically on the prolific appearance of landscape allegory in films of the 1960s and '70s.

American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings argues that film noir style evolved out of American literature prior to the 1930s and continues to evolve long after the classic films that defined its presence in cinema. While many critics suggest that the film noir tradition ceased after the mid-1950s, labeling similar films produced later as 'neo-noir', Harold Hellwig contends that film noir itself has continued to evolve beyond cinema to include television series such as CSI, Have Gun Will Travel, and Seinfeld, among others. Hellwig posits that, rather than being a single genre in and of itself, film noir comprises several genres, including detective procedurals, science fiction, the Western, and even comedy. This book examines different elements of American film noir - including the characters and settings it is often defined by - and its contexts within different adaptations in both film and television. Scholars of film studies, American literature, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.

Stanley Kubrick hailed The Shining as 'the scariest horror film of all time' before its release in 1980. Though the film opened to poor reviews, it has since become one of the most admired horror films in cinema history. Exerting an enormous influence on popular culture, The Shining has spawned a vast array of interpretations and conspiracy theories. Roger Luckhurst's illuminating study explores the film's themes, tropes and resonances through a detailed analysis of sequences and performances. Situating The Shining in a series of fresh contexts, Luckhurst looks at the complex nature of horror cinema at the end of the 1970s and early 80s. Taking the maze of the haunted hotel as a key motif, he offers numerous threads with which to navigate the strange twists and turns of this enigmatic film. This limited edition features original cover artwork by Mark Swan.

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.

Featuring more than 6,500 articles, including over 350 new entries, this fifth edition of The Encyclopedia of British Film is an invaluable reference guide to the British film industry. It is the most authoritative volume yet, stretching from the inception of the industry to the present day, with detailed listings of the producers, directors, actors and studios behind a century or so of great British cinema. Brian McFarlane's meticulously researched guide is the definitive companion for anyone interested in the world of film. Previous editions have sold many thousands of copies, and this fifth instalment will be an essential work of reference for universities, libraries and enthusiasts of British cinema. -- .

'Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire' explores the desires and the futures of Shakespeare's language and cinematographic adaptations of Shakespeare. Tracing ways that film offers us a rich new understanding of Shakespeare, it highlights issues such as media technology, mourning, loss, the voice, narrative territories and flows, sexuality and gender.

Directed by Richard Donner and written by David Seltzer, The Omen (1976) is perhaps the best in the devil-child cycle of movies that followed in the wake of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. Released to a highly suggestible public, The Omen became a major commercial success, in no small part due to an elaborate pre-sell campaign that played and preyed on apocalyptic fears and a renewed belief in the Devil and the supernatural. Since polarising critics and religious groups upon its release, The Omen has earned its place in the horror film canon. It's a film that works on different levels, is imbued with nuance, ambiguity and subtext, and is open to opposing interpretations. Reflecting the film's cultural impact and legacy, the name 'Damien' has since become a pop culture byword for an evil child. Adrian Schober's Devil's Advocate entry covers the genesis, authorship, production history, marketing and reception of The Omen, before going on to examine the overarching theme of paranoia that drives the narrative: paranoia about the 'end times'; paranoia about government and conspiracy; paranoia about child rearing (especially, if one strips away the layer of Satanism); and paranoia about imagined threats to the right-wing Establishment from liberal and post-countercultural forces of the 1970s.

By exploring the concept of the "tender gaze" in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors. The gaze, understood as a way of looking at others that involves contemplation and the operation of power, has an extensive history of iterations such as the male gaze (Mulvey), the oppositional gaze (hooks), and the postcolonial gaze (Said). This essay collection develops a supplemental theory of what Muriel Cormican has coined the "tender gaze" and traces its occurrence in German film, theater, and literature. More than qualifying the primarily voyeuristic, narcissistic, and sexist impetus of the male gaze, the tender gaze also allows for a differentiated understanding of the role identification plays in reception, and it highlights various means of eliciting a sociopolitical critique in works of art. Emphasizing the humanizing potential of the tender gaze, the contributors argue that far from simply exciting emotional contagion, affect in art promotes an altruistic, rational, and fundamentally ethical relationship to the other. The tender gaze elucidates how perspective-taking operates in art to foster empathy and prosocial behaviors. Though the contributors identify instances of the tender gaze in artistic production since the early nineteenth century, they focus on its pervasiveness in contemporary works, corresponding to twenty-first-century concerns with implicit bias and racism.

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.

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.

Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images whose work is overdue for attention from English-language readers. Since the publication of his first book in 1982, he has published 46 essays, mostly with the prestigious Editions de Minuit, on topics ranging from monographs on individual artists to critical excursions into political philosophy. He is recognised in France and elsewhere in Europe as one of the foremost philosophers of the image writing today. In Georges Didi-Huberman and Film, Alison Smith concentrates on how Didi-Huberman's work has been informed by cinema, especially in his major (and ongoing) recent work L'Oeil de l'Histoire (The Eye of History). The book traces the development of Didi-Huberman's visual thought towards a cinematic sensibility already inherent in his early work on images in relationship to each other. After exploring his increasingly political understanding of the vital role of cinematic montage, it traces his growing understanding of cinema as a medium for expressing a dynamic representation of peoples' memory and experience, and documents his engagement with contemporary filmmakers such as Laura Waddington and Vincent Dieutre.

This book examines the reverberations of key components of Ronald Reagan's ideology in selected Hollywood blockbuster movies. The aim of this analysis is to provide a clearer understanding of the intertwinement of cinematic spectacles with neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The analysis comprises a dissection of Reagan's presidential rhetoric and the examination of four seminal Hollywood blockbuster movies. The time range for analysis stretches from the 1980s until the 2010s. Among the key foci are filmic content as well as production and distribution contexts. It is concluded that Reagan's political metaphors and the corporatization of film studios in the 1970s and 1980s continue to shape much of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking.

'Nosferatu' in the 21st Century is a celebration and a critical study of F. W. Murnau's seminal vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens on the 100th anniversary of its release in 1922. The movie remains a dark mirror to the troubled world we live in seeing it as striking and important in the 2020s as it was a century ago. The unmistakable image of Count Orlok has traveled from his dilapidated castle in old world Transylvania into the futuristic depths of outerspace in Star Trek and beyond as the all-consuming shadow of the vampire spreads ever wider throughout contemporary popular culture. This innovative collection of essays, with a foreword by renowned Dracula expert Gary D. Rhodes, brings together experts in the field alongside creative artists to explore the ongoing impact of Murnau's groundbreaking movie as it has been adapted, reinterpreted, and recreated across multiple mediums from theatre, performance and film, to gaming, music and even drag. As such, 'Nosferatu' in the 21st Century is not only a timely and essential book about Murnau's film but also illuminates the times that produced it and the world it continues to influence.