Departing from the approach of its pre-decessors, this third volume is not a collection of essays by a diverse assembly of critics and scholars but a collection of interviews largely by the book's editors, its focus mainly on directors responsible for many of the land-mark films of the Classic Noir Period. Few of them are alive today, which makes this book all the more remarkable. Appropriately enough, perhaps from beyond the grave thoughts filmmakers expressed long ago are presented here for the first time, to help us better understand their vision and their techniques.

"Brief on brilliant cocktail conversation? This reader-friendly collection will help you apply Foucault to Keanu, Derrida to Spielberg, Macbeth to Blair Witch, and pull it off with panache. Stimulating in small doses, its 34 essays deconstruct 1990s cinema, and the decade too, with intellectual vigor and a wry sense of humor."
--"Variety"

"The End of Cinema As We Know It is at once academic and popular in the best sense of both terms-intelligent and erudite critical analysis conveyed through accessible and gracefully written prose. Just like the cinema of the '90s itself, this collection of thirty-four smart and sprightly essays refuses to be bound by traditional categories. Free from the homogenized consensus that too often results from the supposed advantage of historical distance, these broadly ranging essays on a period still fresh in our memory necessarily pose more questions than they answer. But they are good provocative questions and it is precisely this spirit of free-wheeling inquiry and fearless speculation that makes the book so enjoyable to read."
--Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television

""The End of Cinema" provides an enjoyable reading with a good balance of academic and popular qualities."
--American Studies International, June 2002

"The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties, is an encouraging step in a new direction. In it, we find an impressive assembly of established as well as younger scholars grappling both with pop-film and industry concerns."
--"Cineaste"

Almost half a century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, "I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have beenwaiting forand wondering aboutthis prophecy ever since. The way films are made and exhibited has changed significantly. Films, some of which are not exactly "films" anymore, can now be projected in a wide variety of wayson screens in revamped high tech theaters, on big, high-resolution TVs, on little screens in minivans and laptops. But with all this new gear, all these new ways of viewing films, are we necessarily getting different, better movies?

The thirty-four brief essays in The End of Cinema as We Know It attend a variety of topics, from film censorship and preservation to the changing structure and status of independent cinemafrom the continued importance of celebrity and stardom to the sudden importance of alternative video. While many of the contributors explore in detail the pictures that captured the attention of the nineties film audience, such as "Jurassic Park," "Eyes Wide Shut," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "The Wedding Banquet," "The Matrix," "Independence Day," "Gods and Monsters," "The Nutty Professor," and "Kids," several essays consider works that fall outside the category of film as it is conventionally definedthe home "movie" of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon and the amateur video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King.

Examining key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles and audio-visual technologies, the contributors to this volume spell out the end of cinema in terms of irony, cynicism and exhaustion, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the decline of what we once used to call film culture.

Contributors include: Paul Arthur, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Thomas Doherty, Thomas Elsaesser, KrinGabbard, Henry Giroux, Heather Hendershot, Jan-Christopher Hook, Alexandra Juhasz, Charles Keil, Chuck Klienhans, Jon Lewis, Eric S. Mallin, Laura U. Marks, Kathleen McHugh, Pat Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, Hillary Radner, Ralph E. Rodriguez, R.L. Rutsky, James Schamus, Christopher Sharrett, David Shumway, Robert Sklar, Murray Smith, Marita Sturken, Imre Szeman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Maureen Turim, Justin Wyatt, and Elizabeth Young.

This collection brings together international experts on the cinema of migration and diaspora in postcolonial and postnational Europe. It offers a comprehensive theoretical and analytical discussion of a highly productive creative sector and documents the spectrum of this area of exploration in European, transnational and World Cinema studies.

The brilliant screenplay of the forthcoming film The Trial of the Chicago 7 by Academy and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin's film dramatizes the 1969 trial of seven prominent anti-Vietnam War activists in Chicago. Originally there were eight defendants, but one, Bobby Seale, was severed from the trial by Judge Julius Hoffman-after Hoffman had ordered Seale bound and gagged in court. The defendants were a mix of counterculture revolutionaries such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and political activists such as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger, the last a longtime pacifist who was a generation older than the others. Their lawyers argued that the right to free speech was on trial, whether that speech concerned lifestyles or politics. The Trial of the Chicago 7 stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Frank Langella, and Mark Rylance, among others, directed by Aaron Sorkin. This book is Sorkin's screenplay, the first of his movie screenplays ever published.

Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with "getting on" with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British.

Stephen Frears has a career approaching over half-a-century, directing films of astonishing variety, beauty, and daring, and yet many often have trouble remembering his name. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears celebrates this great filmmaker, beginning with a short biography of Frears, general observations on unifying themes and styles in his oeuvre, and the characterization of his manner of directing. By focusing on 10 key films, Lesley Brill finds coherence in Frears' characteristic irony and in his concentration on many kinds of love. In movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen, Philomena, and many others, Frears portrays widely varied situations and characters with a combination of insight, skepticism, and sympathy. He has the passionate, unjudgmental focus of an artist who stands simultaneously at a distance from his subjects and within their worlds. Through Frears' work is widely admired, Brill argues that he has attracted little scholarly writing because of a combination of the diffidence of his self-presentation and the difficulty of explicating the complex ideas and characters of his films. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears is meant to inspire others to further examine his films individually and his career as a whole.

Genre - or 'type' - is a core concept in both film production and the history of film. Genres play a key role in how moviegoers perceive and rate films, and is likely to determine a film's production values and costs.
Written in a clear, engaging, jargon-free style, this volume offers a cutting-edge theoretical overview of the topic of genre as practiced in British, American and French film criticism. Organized by a series of simple but fundamental questions, the book uses numerous examples from classic Hollywood cinema (the western, drama, musical comedy, and film noir) as well as some more contemporary examples from European or Asian cinema that are so often neglected by other studies in the field. How do we characterize genre and what are its various functions? In what ways does genre give a film its identity? How do genres emerge? What is the cultural significance of genre and how does it circulate within and across national boundaries? Informative and user-friendly, Moine's book is accessible to general readers and adapts easily to a wide range of teaching approaches.

"Translating Popular Film" is a ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenizing use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Born in 1916 in La Jolla, California, Gregory Peck took up acting in college on a lark that would lead to a career. In his early years, he appeared in a series of summer stock engagements and Broadway shows. He became a star within a year after arriving in Hollywood during World War II, and he won an Academy Award nomination for his second film. From the 1940s to the present, he has played some of film's most memorable and admired characters. This volume provides complete information about Gregory Peck's work in film, television, radio, and the stage. Entries are included for all of his performances, with each entry providing cast and credit information, a plot summary, excerpts from reviews, and critical commentary. A biography and chronology highlight significant events in his life, while a listing of his honors and awards summarizes the recognition he has received over the years. For researchers seeking additional information, the book includes descriptions of special collections holding material related to Peck's work, along with an extensive bibliography of books and articles.

Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic.

Examining Brazilian and Argentine cinema of the last fifteen years, this volume charts the emergence of a new concern with the real, bringing together contributions from leading film scholars and critics from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Comparing 'New Argentine Cinema" and the Brazilian 'Retomada, ' the contributors read across the boundaries between documentary and fiction and trace new modes of deploying performance and re-enactment, found footage, and the interplay between film and television and theater. They shed light on similarities between and variations in different Latin American national cinemas' filmic discourses and production contexts and map these findings onto the larger context of current film theory.

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.

Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing form we encounter them, our collective repertoire of symbolic forms, historical sensibilities, modes of representation, and patterns of imagination determine how we identify, analyze and deal with catastrophes and crises.This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire's eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.

This book offers insightful analysis of cultural representation in Japanese cinema of the early 21st century. The impact of transnational production practices on films such as Dolls (2002), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), and 13 Assassins (2010) is considered through textual and empirical analysis. The author discusses contradictory forms of cultural representation - cultural concealment and cultural performance - and their relationship to both changing practices in the Japanese film industry and the global film market. Case studies take into account popular genres such as J Horror and jidaigeki period films, as well as the work of renowned filmmakers Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

This book provides an interdisciplinary and collaborative anthology that seeks to make a compelling and exciting analysis of contemporary Hollywood film texts (and the larger industry and society to which they are dialectically related) in light of Giroux's ideas about public pedagogy. Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg.

Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities.

This volume brings together a range of voices from across the global environmental media community to build a comparative international set of perspectives on 'green' film and television production. Through this, it provides a necessary intervention in environmental media studies that actively foregrounds media infrastructure, production, policy, and labour - that is, the management and practice of media production cultures. Due to its immense sociocultural influence and economic resources, the global screen media industry is at the forefront of raising awareness for the political and social issues resulting from accelerated environmental instability. However, the 21st century relationship between screen media and the environment has another face that demands urgent scrutiny. The advent of the digital age and the vast electrical and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructures required to support digital production, distribution, and archiving has resulted in the rapid expansion and diversification of the industry's resource use, infrastructure construction, energy dependency, and consequent waste and emissions production. Addressing these structures is essential to alleviating their environmental and social impact and ensuring that the industry's rhetoric on environmental responsibility is reflected in its practice. As a mitigating counterbalance to the above trends, there has been a heightenedpush for sustainability measures along various lines of industry management, policy, and practice. These initiatives-including the cultural values they reflect, the political economies that form their logic, the managerial and marketing tactics that orchestrate them, and the environmental realities of their implementation-form the central object of inquiry for this collection.

It is often suggested that there are 'secrets' to comedy or that it is 'lightning in a bottle', but the craft of comedy writing can be taught. While comedic tastes change, over time and from person to person, the core underpinning still depends on the comedic geniuses that have paved the way. Great comedy is built upon a strong foundation. In Writing the Comedy Movie, Marc Blake lays out - in an entertainingly readable style - the nuts and bolts of comedy screenwriting. His objective is to clarify the 'rules' of comedy: to contextualize comedy staples such as the double act, slapstick, gross-out, rom com, screwball, satire and parody and to introduce new ones such as the bromance or stoner comedy. He explains the underlying principles of comedy and comedy writing for the screen, along with providing analysis of leading examples of each subgenre.

The life and career of Henry Fonda, one of Hollywood's greatest stars, are detailed in this bio-bibliography that places equal emphasis on the actor's professional and private lives. The reference provides a complete and detailed guide to Fonda's films, television, theater, radio, recordings, awards, video releases, and a comprehensive bibliography. A detailed index makes it easy to look up every significant actor and filmmaker with whom Fonda worked. Also included are filmographies of Jane and Peter Fonda.

Examines the social and historical significance of women's contributions to American silent Film comedy. For many people the term ""silent comedy"" conjures up images of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Buster Keaton's Stoneface, or Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the side of a skyscraper. Even people who have never seen a silent film can recognize these comedians at a glance. But what about the female comedians? Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda, Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge-these and numerous others were wildly popular during the silent fi lm era, appearing in countless motion pictures and earning top salaries, and yet their names have been almost entirely forgotten. As a consequence, recovering their history is all the more compelling given that they laid the foundation for generations of funny women, from Lucille Ball to Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. These women constitute an essential and neglected sector of film history, reflecting a turning point in women's social and political history. Their talent and brave spirit continues to be felt today, and Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film seeks to provide a better understanding of women's experiences in the early twentieth century and to better understand and appreciate the unruly and boundary-breaking women who have followed. The diversity and breadth of archival materials explored in Comic Venus illuminate the social and historical period of comediennes and silent film. It is the first book to explore the overlooked contributions made by comediennes in American silent fi lm. Those with an interest in fi lm and representations of femininity in comedy will be fascinated by the analytical connections and thoroughly researched histories of these women and their groundbreaking movements in comedy and stage.

The detective, as a preeminent figure in all forms of American popular culture, has become the subject of a variety of theoretical exploration. By investigating that figure, these essays demonstrate how the genre embodies all the contradictions of American society and the ways in which literature and the media attempt to handle those contradictions. Issues of class, gender, and race; the interaction of film and literature; and generic evolution are fundamental to any understanding of the American detective in all of his or her forms. Beginning with essays about Raymond Chandler's treatment of women, Part I concentrates on writers of the genre whose detectives embody aspects of American culture in the 20th century. Through examination of the work of Elmore Leonard, Chester Himes, Sue Grafton, and others, these essays look at the influence of film on literature, how ethnicity affects the genre's conventions, and gender issues. Part II looks closely at specific detectives in the media and demonstrates how the film detective has gone from one who upholds the moral order to one who contributes to the continuation of evil. A study of television detectives confirms the necessity of formula and variation to sustain a detective over many seasons.