This book explores how photography and documentary film have participated in the representation of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath. This in-depth analysis of professional and amateur photography and the work of Rwandan and international filmmakers offers an insight into not only the unique ability of images to engage with death, memory and the need for evidence, but also their helplessness and inadequacy when confronted with the enormity of the event. Focusing on a range of films and photographs, the book tests notions of truth, evidence, record and witnessing - so often associated with documentary practice - in the specific context of Rwanda and the wider representational framework of African conflict and suffering. Death, Image, Memory is an inquiry into the multiple memorial and evidentiary functions of images that transcends the usual investigations into whether photography and documentary film can reliably attest to the occurrence and truth of an event.

This volume explains how Star Trek allows viewers to comprehend significant aspects of Georg Hegel's concept the absolute, the driving force behind history. Gonzalez, with wit and wisdom, explains how Star Trek exhibits central elements of the absolute. He describes how themes and ethos central to the show display the concept beautifully. For instance, the show posits that people must possess the correct attitudes in order to bring about an ideal society: a commitment to social justice; an unyielding commitment to the truth; and a similar commitment to scientific, intellectual discovery. These characteristics serve as perfect embodiments of Hegel's conceptualization, and Gonzalez's analysis is sharp and exacting.

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing.

This includes a brilliant line-up of international contributors that examine the implications of the portrayals of Nazis in low-brow culture and that culture's re-emergence today. "Nazisploitation!" examines past intersections of National Socialism and popular cinema and the recent reemergence of this imagery in contemporary visual culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, films such as "Love Camp 7" and "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" introduced and reinforced the image of Nazis as master paradigms of evil in what film theorists deem the "sleaze" film. More recently, Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds", as well as video games such as "Call of Duty: World at War", have reinvented this iconography for new audiences. In these works, the violent Nazi becomes the hyperbolic caricature of the "monstrous feminine" or the masculine sadist. Power-hungry scientists seek to clone the Fuhrer, and Nazi zombies rise from the grave. The history, aesthetic strategies, and political implications of such translations of National Socialism into the realm of commercial, low brow, and "sleaze" visual culture are the focus of this book. The contributors examine when and why the Nazisploitation genre emerged as it did, how it establishes and violates taboos, and why this iconography resonates with contemporary audiences.

This book offers a new approach to film studies by showing how our brains use our interpretations of various other films in order to understand Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Borrowing from behavioral psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, author Robert J. Belton seeks to explain differences of critical opinion as inevitable. The book begins by introducing the hermeneutic spiral, a cognitive processing model that categorizes responses to Vertigo's meaning, ranging from wide consensus to wild speculations of critical "outliers." Belton then provides an overview of the film, arguing that different interpreters literally see and attend to different things. The fourth chapter builds on this conclusion, arguing that because people see different things, one can force the production of new meanings by deliberately drawing attention to unusual comparisons. The latter chapters outline a number of such comparisons-including avant-garde films and the works of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch-to shed new light on the meanings of Vertigo.

Film and theory have always gone hand in hand. In many ways, the professional academic study of cinema grew out of the revolutionary surges in literary and cultural theory in Europe. Since the 1970s, film theory has predominantly been a lens through which to wage philosophical and cultural war (in increasingly abstract terms), and cinema was in the right place at the right time. "Toward a New Film Aesthetic" argues that such an approach to film studies ultimately debilitates the study of film.How does film theory connect with an audience that experiences film far beyond the confines of the academy? How can film scholars remain relevant to film culture? These are the fundamental question that film scholars seem to have neglected. Film theory, simply put, has detached itself from meaningful discussions of cinema undertaken with mainstream audiences."Toward a New Film Aesthetic" is a radical attempt to connect the study of film with the actual viewing and consumption practices of mainstream cinematic culture. Isaacs argues that theory has rendered the majority of approaches to film insular, self-reflective, obtuse, and - in its worst incarnation - elitist. He redefines cinema aesthetics in terms of the obsessive consumption of cinematic texts that is the hallmark of contemporary film viewing.

The 1980s. A time of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of your neighbours, fear of drugs, fear of sex, fear of strangers, fear of videos, and the very real fear that the world would end at any moment in an awful, and very sudden, nuclear attack. However, in those times of turmoil and worry, there was a comfort that soothed the mind, and acted as a quiet balm: action movies. Video shops were bursting at the seams with rampant gunfire, sex, drugs, rock, roll, cars on fire, people on fire, guns, bombs, and people dressed in army fatigues (and that was just the staff). Heroes were born shrouded in fire and violent revenge, they were not only armed with guns, but also red-hot quips, that served as a muscly arm around the shoulder, and a wink that everything was going to be okay. So thank you Arnold, Sylvester, Sigourney, Bruce, Eddie, Charles, Patrick, Mel, Chuck and everyone else that made it happen. You saved the world, in your own inimitable way. Join John Rain, the author of the critically-acclaimed Thunderbook: The World of Bond According to Smersh Pod, as he examines a choice selection of the greatest action movies from the decade when the explosion was king.

This book comprises what may be called exercises in 'comparative cinema'. Its focus on endings, near-endings and 'late style' is connected with the author's argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polanski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

Martin McDonagh is one of the world's most popular dramatists. This is a highly readable and illuminating account of his career to date that will appeal to the legions of fans of his work for the stage and of his films Six Shooter and In Bruges. As a resource for students and practitioners it is unrivalled, providing an authoritative and enquiring approach to his work that moves beyond the tired discussions of national identity to offer a comprehensive critical exploration. Lonergan provides a detailed analysis of each of his plays and films, their original staging, critical reception, and the connections within and between the Leenane Trilogy, the Aran Islands plays and more recent work. It includes interviews with directors, designers and actors associated with his work and material from Druid Theatre Company, the RSC and the National Theatre relating to the original productions. It offers four critical essays on key features of McDonagh's work by leading international scholars and a series of further resources including a chronology, glossary, notes on McDonagh's use of language and a list of further reading.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. The murderer was never caught, yet film and television depicts a killer with a recognisable costume, motive and persona. This book examines the origins of the screen presentation of the four key elements associated with the murders - Jack the Ripper, the victims, the detective and Whitechapel. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

A HISTORY OF THE MOST CONTROVERSAL MOTION PICTURE EVERY MADE A hundred years have passed since the masterpiece of David Wark Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, first appeared on the screens of America, in the winter of 1915. It demonstrated that the cinema, no less than literature and no less than the stage, could become a topic of serious critical, esthetic, intellectual, political, social, and technical discussion. In this way it brought the motion picture into a position of commanding influence in the social life of the American nation. The denunciation continues, and the storm over the film serves as a barometer of the global conflict, involving forces and issues set in motion by, but no means limited to, race. From the beginning it touched off several emotionally and politically explosive, interrelated, parallel controversies-controversy over Griffith; controversy over the film; controversy over the subject-matter and its treatment; controversy over the controversy. As Griffith's official biographer Seymour Sterns main purpose of his book was to assemble, as extensively as possible, the rapidly vanishing record of what happened. You'll find Stern's writing on the subject as controversial as the film itself.

Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification. This new term refers to complex narrative strategies that produce intentionally disturbing effects such as surprise, confusion, doubt or disappointment - effects that interrupt or suspend immersion in the aesthetic reception process. The initial task, however, is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, or given new life by perturbatory narration. The key to our modeling lies in its combination of individual procedures of narrative strategies hitherto regarded as unrelated. Their interplay has not yet attracted scholarly attention. The essays in this volume present a wide range of contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. The perturbatory narration concept enables to typify and systematize moments of disruption in fictional texts, combining narrative processes of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement and to analyse these perturbing narrative strategies in very different filmic texts.

Visible and Invisible Whiteness examines the complicity between Classical Hollywood narratives or genres and representations of white supremacy in the cinema. Close readings of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation by James Agee and James Baldwin explore these authors' perspectives on the American mythologies which ground Griffith's film. The intersectionality of Bordwell's theories on Classical Hollywood Narrative versus Art Cinema and Richard Dyer's seminal work on whiteness forms the theoretical base for the book. Featured films are those which have been undervalued or banned due to their hybrid natures with respect to Hollywood and Art Cinema techniques, such as Samuel Fuller's White Dog and Jean Renoir's The Southerner. The book offers comparative analyses of American studio-based directors as well as European and European emigres directors. It appeals to scholars of Film Theory, African American and Whiteness Studies. It provides insight for readers concerned about the re-emergence of white supremacist tensions in contemporary America.

This book explores the use of Blockchain and smart contract technologies to develop new ways to finance independent films and digital media worldwide. Using case studies of Alibaba and in-depth, on-set observation of a Sino-US coproduction, as well as research collected from urban China, Hong Kong, Europe, and the USA, Online Film Production in China Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts explores new digital platforms and what this means for the international production of creative works. This research assesses the change in media consciousness from young urban audiences, their emergence as a potential participative and creative community within dis-intermediated, decentralised and distributed crowdfunding and crowdsourcing models. This research proposes solutions on how these young emerging local creative talents can be identified and nurtured early on, particularly those who now produce creative and artistic audiovisual content whether these works are related to film, Virtual Reality (VR), video game, graphic novels, or music. Ultimately, a new media content finance and production platform implementing blockchain is proposed to bring transparency in the film sector and open doors to emerging artists in digital media. Appropriate for both professionals and academics in the film industry as well as computer science.

The notion of evil- does it exist? what forms does it take? -has always fascinated humankind. The evil underlying such atrocities as the Holocaust, Communist China's Tibetan abattoir, and the murderous ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs and Croats seems beyond explanations or analysis. In this powerfully original work, Oppenheimer analyzes the phenomenon of evil in a mental behavior that emerges in particular conditions. Oppenheimer argues that evil contains specific, predictable ingredients. By understanding its nature, we can diagnose its specific manifestations in mass murder, genocide, and serial killings. Utilizing a variety of cinematic and literary genres in developing its evidence, the book considers such familiar films as "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Brazil," and draws upon such literary works as Richard III, Oedipus the King and the Picture of Dorian Gray. Evil and the Demonic takes a bold first step, providing a framework in which to place the horrors of human existence.

The definitive 30th-anniversary exploration of the beloved Jim Henson classic, featuring rare artwork, interviews, and on-set photos. Filled with a wealth of rare and unseen behind-the-scenes imagery, experience the film's creation as seen through the eyes of the artists, costume designers, and creature creators who gave the beloved fantasy classic its distinctive look. Featuring in-depth interviews with the talented crew and cast, and story notes from Henson.