"For more than half a century now, scholars have debated over what comprises a genuinely religious film one that evinces an authentic manifestation of the sacred. Often these scholars do so by pitting the successful films against those which propagate an inauthentic spiritual experience with the biblical spectacular serving as their most notorious candidate. This book argues that what makes a filmic manifestation of the sacred true or authentic, may say more about a spectator or critics particular way of knowing, as influenced by alphabetic literacy, than it does about the aesthetic or philosophical and sometimes even faith-based dimensions of the sacred onscreen. Engaging with everything from Hollywood religious spectaculars, Hindu mythologicals, and an international array of films revered for their transcendental style, The Sacred and the Cinema unveils the epistemic pressures at the heart of engaging with the sacred onscreen. The book also provides a valuable summation of the history of the sacred as a field of study, particularly as that field intersects with film. "

The prospect of dinner and a movie is always an enticing one. Whether it is a date early on in a relationship with all the apprehension and barely contained frisson that that entails or an opportunity for a child free evening and the chance to watch a full length film of your choice without having to keep your finger on the remote to pause for toilet breaks, the combination of food and cinema is a winning one. Food is inextricably linked to all aspects of our lives, food for feasts, food to comfort, food to harm and always food to raise the sexual tension. Cinematographers know this too. So often there are dishes in a movie that deserve a mention in the credits so pivotal are they to the storyline. You only have to mention "Silence of the Lambs" for fava beans and chianti spring into the conversation and apple pie is often off or suddenly back on the menu for anyone who has recently watched American Pie for the first time. Let us get one thing straight here the dishes celebrated in this book are not physically available at the pictures. Food served in containers too large to be used as airline carryon baggage is not what this book is about. The recipes here are for those movie moments that made you step away from the popcorn bucket. Who doesn't want to slice garlic with a razor blade to create the garlicky spaghetti sauce so lovingly made in Goodfellas or jump through the screen to nibble absolutely everything in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (including Johnny Depp although that may be just my own fantasy) and every woman on this planet wants "what she's having" in When Harry met Sally! So this is your chance, if it was eaten on screen then the recipe for it may well be in this book. Unless of course you fancy making the chilled monkey brains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which case I suggest you still buy the book but change your dessert plans. What about a nice Apple Strudel from the Sound of Music instead?

The site of cinema is on the move. The extent to which technologically mediated sounds and images continue to be experienced as cinematic today is largely dependent on the intensified sense of being 'here, ' 'now' and 'me' that they convey. This intensification is fundamentally rooted in the cinematic's potential to intensify our experience of time, to convey time's thickening, of which the sense of place, and a sense of self-presence are the correlatives. In this study, Pepita Hesselberth traces this thickening of time across four different spatio-temporal configurations of the cinematic: a multi-media exhibition featuring the work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987); the handheld aesthetics of European art-house films; a large-scale media installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; and the usage of the trope of the flash-forward in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Only by juxtaposing these cases by looking at what they have in common, this study argues, can we grasp the complexity of the changes that the cinematic is currently undergoing

"Imagine sneaking away to spend seven days with the most famous woman in the world..."

In 1956, fresh from Oxford University, twenty-three-year-old Colin Clark began work as a lowly assistant on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl," the film that united Sir Laurence Olivier with Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell and the legendary actor were ill suited from the start. Monroe, on honeymoon with her new husband, the celebrated playwright Arthur Miller, was insecure, often late, and heavily medicated on pills. Olivier, obsessively punctual, had no patience for Monroe and the production became chaotic. Clark recorded it all in two unforgettable diaries--the first a charming fly-on-the- wall account of life as a gofer on the set; the other a heartfelt, intimate, and astonishing remembrance of the week Clark spent escorting Monroe around England, earning the trust and affection of one of the most desirable women in the world. Published together here for the first time, the books are the basis for the upcoming major motion picture "My Week with Marilyn" starring Michelle Williams, Judi Dench, and Kenneth Branagh.

England was abuzz when Monroe arrived to shoot "The Prince and the Showgirl." She hoped working with the legendary Olivier would give her acting further credibility, while he hoped the film would give his career a boost at the box office and some Hollywood glamour. But Monroe, feeling abandoned when Miller left the country for Paris, became difficult on the set. Clark was perceptive in his assessment of what seemed to be going wrong in Monroe's life: too many hangers-on, intense insecurity, and too many pills. Olivier, meanwhile, was impatient and condescending toward her. At a certain point, feeling isolated and overwhelmed, Monroe turned her attention to Clark, who gave her comfort and solace. Before long, she escaped the set and a remarkable true adventure took place. Monroe and Clark spent an innocent week together in the English countryside and Clark became her confidant and ally. And, like any man would be expected to, he fell a bit in love. Clark understood how best to handle Monroe and became Olivier's only hope of getting the film finished. Before long, young Colin was in over his head, and his heart may well have been broken by the world's biggest movie star.

A beguiling memoir that reads like a fable, "My Week with Marilyn" is above all a love letter to one of our most enduring icons.

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like "Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros," and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In "Screening Neoliberalism," Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, "Screening Neoliberalism" explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. "Screening Neoliberalism" exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

In recent years biblical scholars and students have become increasingly interested in studying retellings of biblical stories in the arts, not only for their relation to the biblical text but also for the 'story' they have to tell (or, if they are not strictly 'retellings', for the light they might shed on the biblical text). The eight lively contributions to this volume illustrate a range of exciting approaches to retellings of the Bible in literature, music, art and film and reveal something of the scope of this fascinating and rapidly expanding area of inquiry. The present collection of essays appears concurrently in a special issue of the journal Biblical Interpretation. Since it was founded in 1993, Biblical Interpretation has played a key role in fostering the publication of articles in the newly developing area of the reception history of the Bible in the arts.

Let Maleficent, Captain Hook, and other classic baddies guide your tarot practice with the only official tarot deck featuring Disney's most wicked villains. Disney's most iconic villains have taken over tarot in this dastardly take on a traditional 78-card deck. Featuring the notorious ne'er-do-wells from classic animated films like 101 Dalmations, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, and more, this tarot deck reimagines Cruella de Vil, Ursula, Maleficent and the whole motley crew in original illustrations based on classic tarot iconography. Including both the Major and Minor Arcana, the set also comes with a helpful guidebook with explanations of each card's meaning, as well as simple spreads for easy readings. Packaged in a sturdy, decorative gift box, this devious deck of tarot cards is the perfect gift for Disney fans and tarot enthusiasts everywhere.

Few European male actors have been as iconic and influential for generations of filmgoers as Alain Delon. Emblematic of a modern, European masculinity, Delon's appeal spanned cultures and continents. From his breakthrough as the first on-screen Tom Ripley in Purple Noon in 1960, through two legendary performances in Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard in the early 1960s, to his roles in some of Jean-Pierre Melville's most celebrated films noirs, Delon came to embody the flair and stylishness of the European thriller as one of France's most recognizable film stars. This collection examines the star's career, image and persona. Not only focusing on his spectacular early performances, the book also considers less well documented aspects of Delon's long career such as his time in Hollywood, his work as director, producer and screenwriter, his musical collaborations, his TV appearances, and his enduring role as a fashion icon in the 21st century. Whether the object of reverence or ridicule, of desire or disdain, Delon remains a unique figure who continues to court controversy and fascination more than five decades after he first achieved international fame.

Noel Carroll, a brilliant and provocative philosopher of film, has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television--what Carroll calls "moving images." The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll's earlier work Theorizing the Moving Image and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll's essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.

Eye of the Taika: New Zealand Comedy and the Films of Taika Waititi is the first book-length study of comic film director and media celebrity Taika Waititi. Author Matthew Bannister analyses Waititi's feature films and places his other works and performances-short films, TV series, advertisements, music videos, and media appearances-in the fabric of popular culture. The book's thesis is that Waititi's playful comic style draws on an ironic reading of NZ identity as Antipodean camp, a style which reflects NZ's historic status as colonial underdog. The first four chapters of Eye of the Taika explore Waititi's early life and career, the history of New Zealand and its film industry, the history of local comedy and its undervaluation in favor of more ""serious"" art, and ethnicity in New Zealand comedy. Bannister then focuses on Waititi's films, beginning with Eagle vs Shark (2007) and its place in ""New Geek Cinema,"" despite being an outsider even in this realm. Bannister uses Boy (2010) to address the ""comedian comedy,"" arguing that Waititi is a comedic entertainer before being a director. With What We Do in The Shadows (2014), Bannister explores Waititi's use of the vampire as the archetypal immigrant struggling to fit into mainstream society, under the guise of a mockumentary. Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), Bannister argues, is a family-friendly, rural-based romp that plays on and ironizes aspects of Aotearoa/New Zealand identity. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) launched Waititi into the Hollywood realm, while introducing a Polynesian perspective on Western superhero ideology. Finally, Bannister addresses Jojo Rabbit (2019) as an ""anti-hate satire"" and questions its quality versus its topicality and timeliness in Hollywood. By viewing Waititi's career and filmography as a series of pranks, Bannister identifies Waititi's playful balance between dominant art worlds and emergent postcolonial innovations, New Zealand national identity and indigenous Aotearoan (and Jewish) roots, and masculinity and androgyny. Eye of the Taika is intended for film scholars and film lovers alike.

This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of "family resemblance and language games" provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of "movement as meaning" to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.

In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all representations associated with African American people. Most of these caricatures were rendered by whites in blackface.

Few people realize that from 1915 through 1929 a number of African American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist definitions of black manhood found in films like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. In the wake of the film's phenomenal success, African American filmmakers sought to defend and redefine black manhood through motion pictures.

Gerald Butters's comprehensive study of the African American cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African American-produced and -directed films and white independent productions of all-black features. Using these "race movies" to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical reality: the myth of the Euro American-controlled cinematic portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience.

Through intense archival research, Butters reconstructs many lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation beyond the debate about "good" and "bad" imagery to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in the context of Western popular culture. He particularly examines the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and controversial of all African American silent film directors and creator of the recently rediscovered Within Our Gates-the legendary film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward blacks.

"Black Manhood on the Silent Screen" is unique in that it takes contemporary and original film theory, applies it to the distinctive body of African American independent films in the silent era, and relates the meaning of these films to larger political, social, and intellectual events in American society. By showing how both white and black men have defined their own sense of manhood through cinema, it examines the intersection of race and gender in the movies and offers a deft interweaving of film theory, American history, and film history.

New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from - as opposed to being conflated with - the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the 'new nonfiction film,' and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.

For decades postwar Austrian literature has been measured against and moulded into a series of generic categories and grand cultural narratives, from nostalgic 'restoration' literature of the 1950s through the socially critical 'anti-"Heimat"' novel to recent literary reckonings with Austria's Nazi past. Peering through the lens of film adaptation, this book rattles the generic shackles imposed by literary history and provides an entirely new critical perspective on Austrian literature. Its original methodological approach challenges the primacy of written sources in existing scholarship and uses the distortions generated by the shift in medium as a productive starting point for literary analysis. Five case studies approach canonical texts in post-war Austrian literature by Gerhard Fritsch, Franz Innerhofer, Gerhard Roth, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Schindel, through close readings of their cinematic adaptations, concentrating on key areas of narratological concern: plot, narrative perspective, authorship, and post-modern ontologies. Setting the texts within the historical, cultural and political discourses that define the 'Alpine Republic', this study investigates fundamental aspects of Austrian national identity, such as its Habsburg and National Socialist legacies.

From early twentieth-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the boom in 1970s "porno chic," adult cinema's vintage forms are now being reappraised by a new generation of historians, fans, preservationists, and home video entrepreneurs-all of whom depend on and help shape the archive of film history. But what is the present-day allure of these artifacts that have since become eroticized more for their "pastness" than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering these rare but still-visceral films from a less "enlightened," pre-feminist past? Drawing on media industry analysis, archival theory, and interviews with adult video personnel, David Church argues that vintage pornography retains its retrospective fascination precisely because these culturally denigrated texts have been so poorly preserved on political and aesthetic grounds. Through these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a "striptease," permitting tangible contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the overall physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Disposable Passions explores the historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, and how a long-neglected genre is primed for serious rediscovery as more than mere autoerotic fodder.

This collection is the first to bring together scholars to explore the ways in which various people and groups in Italian society reacted to the advent of cinema. Looking at the responses of writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, philosophers, members of parliament, and more, the pieces collected here from that period show how Italians developed a common language to describe and discuss this invention that quickly exceeded all expectations and transcended existing categories of thought and artistic forms. The result is a close-up picture of a culture in transition, dealing with a 'scandalous' new technology that appeared poised to thoroughly change everyday life.