Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film Eve's Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons's mission has been to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve's Bayou, her first feature film, Lemmons (b. 1961) accomplished the rare feat of creating a film that was critically successful and one of the highest-grossing independent films of the year. Moreover, the cultural impact of Eve's Bayou endures, and in 2018 the film was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film. Lemmons's directing credits also include The Caveman's Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and, most recently, Harriet, making Lemmons one of the most prolific and long-standing women directors in Hollywood. As a black woman filmmaker and a self-proclaimed black feminist, Lemmons breaks the mold of what is expected of a filmmaker in Hollywood. She began her career in Hollywood as an actor, with roles in numerous television series and high-profile films, including Spike Lee's School Daze and Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs. This volume collects fifteen interviews that illuminate Lemmons's distinctive ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art through film, intimately linked to her mission to protest culturally and structurally imposed limitations and push the boundaries imposed by Hollywood.

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts to have erupted since the end of the Second World War. But although the war occurred in 'Europe's backyard' and received significant media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to cultural representations of the conflict. Stephen Harper analyses how the war has been depicted in global cinema and television over the past quarter of a century. Focusing on the representation of some of the war's major themes, including humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide, rape and ethnic cleansing, Harper explores the role of popular media culture in reflecting, reinforcing -- and sometimes contesting -- nationalist ideologies.

In The Cinema of Catherine Breillat, Belot offers a detailed analysis of Breillat's past and recent films. Breillat is one of the most internationally renowned French women filmmakers whose notoriety is built on her explicit representation of women's sexuality. Most of her films rely on a female protagonist's personal and intimate search of her self, characterised by her sexual journey. Facing censorship and controversy, Breillat's films do not easily fit classification and place the viewer into an uncomfortable position. This study looks at Breillat as an independent cinema auteur entertaining a close relation with her films by exploring and positing women, from adolescence to adulthood, as sexual beings reflecting her films' identity emanating from Breillat's personal or intimate scenes.

The Ultimate Action Hero. For twenty years one man has dominated action cinema worldwide. He is adored by more fans than Stallone, Schwartzenegger or Willis and yet until recently was virtually ignored by America and the UK. All that has changed now. Welcome to the world of Jackie Chan, martial artist, comedian and stuntman. Most people associate Jackie Chan with the recent smash hit films Rush Hour and Rumble in the Bronx but there is a lot more of him to see. Jackie learnt his trade from the harsh world of Peking Opera School and began to appear in films as a child. He slowly progressed from minor roles to becoming a head stuntman and eventually lead actor in a number of kung fu movies in the 1970s. It was only when he began to direct his own films that the real Jackie Chan film was born. If you have never seen a Jackie Chan film before, you are in for one wild ride. They are a unique blend of visual comedy, incredible stunts and electrifying fights. What makes them so special is that Jackie performs all of his own stunts, no matter how crazy, no matter how dangerous. And they are dangerous. In the course of his career Jackie has broken nearly every bone in his body and come within a hair's breadth of death...No one will insure him. In this book we'll be taking a look at the world's most popular action hero - See! Jackie skateboard through rush hour traffic. Against the flow... See! Jackie fall from a tall building. Handcuffed... See! Jackie drive through a town. Literally through the town... See! Jackie run down the side of a building. While it is falling down... See! Jackie leap from the top of a car park.. Onto a balcony across the road... You'll laugh. You'll gasp. You'll wince. You've never seen anyone like Jackie Chan.

How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's 'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film authorship, given that several of them were released in different versions and his contributions to others were not always credited? How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.

Please visit our blog to read an interview with Daisy Yan Du. This volume on Chinese animation and socialism is the first in English that introduces the insider viewpoints of socialist animators at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in China. Although a few monographs have been published in English on Chinese animation, they are from the perspective of scholars rather than of the animators who personally worked on the films, as discussed in this volume. Featuring hidden histories and names behind the scenes, precious photos, and commentary on rarely seen animated films, this book is a timely and useful reference book for researchers, students, animators, and fans interested in Chinese and even world animation. This book originated from the Animators' Roundtable Forum (April 2017 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), organized by the Association for Chinese Animation Studies.

We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.

The acute processes of globalisation at the turn of the century have generated an increased interest in exploring the interactions between the so-called global cultural products or trends and their specific local manifestations. Even though cross-cultural connections are becoming more patent in filmic productions in the last decades, cinema per se has always been characterized by its hybrid, transnational, border-crossing nature. From its own inception, Spanish film production was soon tied to the Hollywood film industry for its subsistence, but other film traditions such as those in the Soviet Union, France, Germany and, in particular, Italy also determined either directly or indirectly the development of Spanish cinema. Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema reaches beyond the limits of the film text and analyses and contextualizes the impact of global film trends and genres on Spanish cinema in order to study how they helped articulate specific national challenges from the conflict between liberalism and tradition in the first decades of the 20th century to the management of the contemporary financial crisis. This collection provides the first comprehensive picture of the complex national and supranational forces that have shaped Spanish films, revealing the tensions and the intricate dialogue between cross-cultural aesthetic and narrative models on the one hand, and indigenous traditions on the other, as well as the political and historical contingencies these different expressions responded to.