Lois Weber (1879-1939) was one of early Hollywood's most successful screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached from street corners, Weber began working in the American film industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the positions of screenwriter and director. She wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, and drug abuse. She gained international fame in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson. Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal studio's biggest box-office hit the following year and played to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class filmmaker. Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood's institutionalized sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and the changing business in which she worked.

There are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to researching how film spectators make sense of film texts, from the film text itself, the psychological traits and sociocultural group memberships of the viewer, or even the location and surroundings of the viewer. However, we can only understand the agency of film spectators in situations of film spectatorship by studying actual spectators' interactions with specific film texts in specific contexts of engagement. Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship uses a number of empirical approaches (ethnography, focus groups, interviews, historical, qualitative experiment and physiological experiment) to consider how the film spectator makes sense of the text itself or the ways in which the text fits into his or her everyday life. With case studies ranging from preoccupations of queer and ageing men in Spanish and French cinema and comparative eye-tracking studies based on the two completely different soundscapes of Monsters Inc. and Saving Private Ryan to cult fanbase of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and attachment theory to its fictional characters, Making Sense of Cinema aligns this subset of film studies with the larger fields of media reception studies, allowing for dialogue with the broader audience and reception studies field.

Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope offers the first sustained analysis of the current oeuvre of the film director, screenwriter, and producer Darren Aronofsky. Including Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), and Noah (2014), Aronofsky's filmography is discussed with respect to his style and the themes of his films, making astute connections with the work of other directors, other movies and works of art, and connecting his films with other disciplines such as math, philosophy, psychology, and art history. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov deploys her background in philosophy and math to analyze an American filmmaker with an individual voice, working on both independent productions and big-budget Hollywood films. Aronofsky is revealed to be a philosopher's director, considering the themes of life and death, addiction and obsession, sacrifice, and the fragility of hope. Skorin-Kapov discusses his ability to visually present challenging intersections between art and philosophy. Concluding with a transcript of a conversation between the author and Aronofsky himself, Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope is a much-needed study on this American auteur.

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such. Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Exploring the controversial history of an aesthetic - realism - this book examines the role that realism plays in the negotiation of social, political, and material realities from the mid-19th century to the present day. Examining a broad range of literary texts from French, English, Italian, German, and Russian writers, this book provides new insights into how realism engages with themes including capital, social decorum, the law and its politicisation, modern science as a determining factor concerning truth, and the politics of identity. Considering works from Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell, Docherty proposes a new philosophical conception of the politics of realism in an age where politics feels increasingly erratic and fantastical.