If you've ever wondered what it's like to soar through space like a leaf on the wind in a Firefly spaceship, this is the manual for you. The Firefly-class transport ship was originally created by the Allied Spacecraft Corporation, but since the Browncoats' Independence War, it has become a favourite among smugglers on the Rim worlds. The aircraft's many nooks, crannies, and hidden compartments give it an incredible cargo capacity, and its speed and small size make it the perfect getaway vehicle. The many secrets of Serenity are revealed in this fascinating crew-created owner's manual, which features in-depth technical specifications and insightful commentary from the entire crew. Designed as an in-world crew-made manual for the ship, this book will allow fans of Firefly and Serenity to explore the iconic Firefly-class Series 3 ship in a whole new way.

Nancy Meyers is acknowledged as the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time, described by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times on the release of It's Complicated as "a singular figure in Hollywood - [she] may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working". Yet Meyers remains a director who, alongside being widely dismissed by critics, has been largely absent in scholarly accounts both of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and of feminism and film. Despite Meyers' impressive track record for turning a profit (including the biggest box-office return ever achieved by a woman filmmaker at that timefor What Women Want in 2000), and a multifaceted career as a writer/producer/director dating back to her co-writing Private Benjamin in 1980, Meyers has been oddly neglected by Film Studies to date. Including Nancy Meyers in the Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers rectifies this omission, giving her the kind of detailed consideration and recognition she warrants and exploring how, notwithstanding the challenges authorship holds for feminist film studies, Meyers can be situated as a skilled 'auteur'. This book proposes that Meyers' box-office success, the consistency of style and theme across her films, and the breadth of her body of work as a writer/producer/director across more than three decades at the forefront of Hollywood, (thus importantly bridging the second/third waves of feminism) make her a key contemporary US filmmaker. Structured to meet the needs of both the student and scholar, Jermyn's volume situates Meyers within this historical and critical context, exploring the distinctive qualities of her body of work, the reasons behind the pervasive resistance to it and new ways of understanding her films.

Place, Setting, Perspective examines the films of the Italian filmmaker, Nanni Moretti, from a fresh viewpoint, employing the increasingly significant research area of space within a filmic text. The book is conceived with the awareness that space cannot be studied only in aesthetic or narrative terms: social, political, and cultural aspects of narrated spaces are equally important if a thorough appraisal is to be achieved of an oeuvre such as Moretti's, which is profoundly associated with socio-political commentary and analysis. After an exploration of various existing frameworks of narrative space in film, the book offers a particular definition of the term based on the notions of Place, Setting, and Perspective. Place relates to the physical aspect of narrative space and specifically involves cityscapes, landscapes, interiors, and exteriors in the real world. Setting concerns genre characteristics of narrative space, notably its differentiated use in melodrama, detective stories, fantasy narratives, and gender based scenarios. Perspective encompasses the point of view taken optically by the camera which supports the standpoint of Moretti's personal philosophy expressed through the aesthetic aspects which he employs to create narrative space. The study is based on a close textual analysis of Moretti's eleven major feature films to date, using the formal film language of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. The aim is to show how Moretti selects, organizes, constructs, assembles, and manipulates the many elements of narrative space into an entire work of art, to enable meanings and pleasures for the spectator.

Will we ever get tired of watching Cher navigate Beverly Hills high school and discover true love in the movie Clueless? As if! Written by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone, Clueless is an enduring comedy classic that remains one of the most streamed movies on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes even twenty years after its release. Inspired by Jane Austen's Emma, Cluelessis an everlasting pop culture staple. In the first book of its kind, Jen Chaney has compiled an oral history of the making of this iconic film using recollections and insights collected from key cast and crew members involved in the making of this endlessly quotable, ahead-of-its-time production. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Emma influenced Heckerling to write the script, how the stars were cast into each of their roles, what was involved in creating the costumes, sets, and soundtrack, and much more. This wonderful twentieth anniversary commemoration includes never-before-seen photos, original call sheets, casting notes, and production diary extracts. With supplemental critical insights by the author and other notable movie experts about why Clueless continues to impact pop culture, As If!will leave fans new and old totally buggin' as they understand why this beloved film is timeless.

Beginning with his first film Reconstruction, released in 1970, Theo Angelopoulos's notoriously complex cinematic language has long explored Greece's contemporary history and questioned European culture and society. The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos offers a detailed study and critical discussion of the acclaimed filmmaker's cinematic aesthetics as they developed over his career, exploring different styles through which Greek and European history, identity, and loss have been visually articulated throughout his oeuvre, as well as his impact on both European and global cinema.

Discover the secrets of Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean with the first-ever under-the-bonnet user's manual featuring never-before-seen schematics and cutaways of cinema's most iconic car. One of the best-loved movie sagas of all time, the Back to the Future trilogy has left an indelible impact on popular culture. Back to the Future: DeLorean Time Machine: Owner's Workshop Manual delves into the secrets of the unique vehicle that transports Marty McFly and Doc Brown through time, including both the original version of the car and the updated flying model. From the DeLorean's unmistakable gull-wing doors to Doc's cutting-edge modifications, including the Flux Capacitor and Mr. Fusion, this manual offers unprecedented insight into the car's inner workings. Filled with exclusive illustrations and never-before-disclosed information, Back to the Future: DeLorean Time Machine: Owner's Workshop Manual is the perfect gift for the trilogy's legion of fans.

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's "words, words, words" into film's particular grammar and rhetoric

Anime: A Critical Introduction maps the genres that have thrived within Japanese animation culture, and shows how a wide range of commentators have made sense of anime through discussions of its generic landscape. From the battling robots that define the mecha genre through to Studio Ghibli's dominant genre-brand of plucky shojo (young girl) characters, this book charts the rise of anime as a globally significant category of animation. It further thinks through the differences between anime's local and global genres: from the less-considered niches like nichijo-kei (everyday style anime) through to the global popularity of science fiction anime, this book tackles the tensions between the markets and audiences for anime texts. Anime is consequently understood in this book as a complex cultural phenomenon: not simply a "genre," but as an always shifting and changing set of texts. Its inherent changeability makes anime an ideal contender for global dissemination, as it can be easily re-edited, translated and then newly understood as it moves through the world's animation markets. As such, Anime: A Critical Introduction explores anime through a range of debates that have emerged around its key film texts, through discussions of animation and violence, through debates about the cyborg and through the differences between local and global understandings of anime products. Anime: A Critical Introduction uses these debates to frame a different kind of understanding of anime, one rooted in contexts, rather than just texts. In this way, Anime: A Critical Introduction works to create a space in which we can rethink the meanings of anime as it travels around the world.

After 45 years, Steven Spielberg's Jaws remains the definitive summer blockbuster, a cultural phenomenon with a fierce and dedicated fan base. The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster is an exciting illustrated collection of new critical essays that offers the first detailed and comprehensive overview of the film's significant place in cinema history. Bringing together established and young scholars, the book includes contributions from leading international writers on popular cinema including Murray Pomerance, Peter Kramer, Sheldon Hall, Nigel Morris and Linda Ruth Williams, and covers such diverse topics as the film's release, reception and canonicity; its representation of masculinity and children; the use of landscape and the ocean; its status as a western; sequels and fan-edits; and its galvanizing impact on the horror film, action movie and contemporary Hollywood itself.

Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive - over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Film Theory in Practice Series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The first book in the series, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, offers a concise introduction to psychoanalytic film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Jean Renoir's classic film. It traces the development of psychoanalytic film theory through its foundation in the thought of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan through its contemporary manifestation in the work of theorists like Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec. This history will help students and scholars who are eager to learn more about this important area of film theory and bring the concepts of psychoanalytic film theory into practice through a detailed interpretation of the film.