Examines the role that parenting, as a theme and practice, plays in film and media cultures. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor constructs a feminist genealogy that foregrounds the relationship between acts of production on the one hand and reproduction on the other. In this interdisciplinary collection, editors So Mayer and Corinn Columpar bring together film and media studies with parenting studies to stake out a field, or at least a conversation, that is thick with historical and theoretical dimension and invested in cultural and methodological plurality. In four sections and sixteen contributions, the manuscript reflects on how caregiving shapes the work of filmmakers, how parenting is portrayed on screen, and how media contributes to radical new forms of care and expansive definitions of mothering. Featuring an exciting array of approaches-including textual analysis, industry studies, ethnographic research, production histories, and personal reflection-Mothers of Invention is a multifaceted collection of feminist work that draws on the methods of both the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the insights borne of both scholarship and lived experience. Grounding this inquiry is analysis of a broad range of texts with global reach-from the films Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beyzai, 1989), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016), and A Deal with the Universe (Jason Barker, 2018) to the television series Top of the Lake(2013-2017) and Jane the Virgin (2014-2019), among others-as well as discussion of the creative practices, be they related to production, pedagogy, curation, or critique, employed by a wide variety of film and media artists and/or scholars. Mothers of Invention demonstrates how the discourse of parenting and caregiving allows the discipline to expand its discursive frameworks to address, and redress, current theoretical, political, and social debates about the interlinked futures of work and the world. This collection belongs on the bookshelves of students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist and queer media studies, labor studies, filmmaking and production, and cultural studies.

This graphically compelling, diversely illustrated volume is a behind-the-scenes look at Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee's most ambitious film to date, "Life of Pi", an adaptation of Yann Martel's international bestseller and Man Booker Prize-winning novel. The book includes a foreword by Martel and an introduction by Lee. This 3-D film is released on December 21, 2012.

This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and 1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity, individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film, this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural history more broadly.

Cult Film as a Guide to Life investigates the world and experience of cult films, from well-loved classics to the worst movies ever made. Including comprehensive studies of cult phenomena such as trash films, exploitation versions, cult adaptations, and case studies of movies as different as Showgirls, Room 237 and The Lord of the G-Strings, this lively, provocative and original book shows why cult films may just be the perfect guide to making sense of the contemporary world. Using his expertise in two fields, I.Q. Hunter also explores the important overlap between cult film and adaptation studies. He argues that adaptation studies could learn a great deal from cult and fan studies about the importance of audiences' emotional investment not only in texts but also in the relationships between them, and how such bonds of caring are structured over time. The book's emergent theme is cult film as lived experience. With reference mostly to American cinema, Hunter explores how cultists, with their powerful emotional investment in films, care for them over time and across numerous intertexts in relationships of memory, nostalgia and anticipation.

This is an original investigation of how movies have reflected and helped to shape the values of a generation. From All the President's Men to Wall Street, US films of the 1970s and 80s were a kaleidoscope of shifting values and contrasting moral viewpoints. Knowing that movies mirror the way we think we are - or would like to be - O'Brien focuses on the key values (or their absence) found in films from this period in order to see more clearly what Americans really cherished in life, and how these values have evolved or changed. Comprehensive and thought provoking, this book addresses how and why movies glamorized and portrayed certain professions; the changing role of women; the targeting of religion for satire; the addressing of environmental issues and film's representation of and engagement with history.

Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.