Ninety-nine years ago, a new form of storytelling emerged from the ruins of World War I. Different in scope and power from theater or literature, and unlike any film that had come before, F. W. Murnau's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari addressed a direct challenge to its audience, demanding to be viewed as something other than what was immediately presented. Unfortunately, criticism has not risen to the challenge. Relegating the film condescendingly to the horror genre, or treating it merely as a case study in style, critics have failed to look at it with due seriousness. On the other hand, the film's ambiguity, structural devices, and psychological depth gave cinema a number of tools that other filmmakers were quick to start using. This book examines a spectrum of narrative films that can be seen in new ways with methods derived and evolved from the techniques of Caligari. The intention is not only to offer new interpretations of classic and neglected films, but to open further discussion and exploration. It is written with optimism that movie lovers will see more in the movies they love, that critics will find new paths of investigation, and that filmmakers will benefit from greater awareness of what movies can do. Secrets of Cinema began in 1994, in discussions among friends after weekly movie nights hosted by the late Lawrence N. Fox on the 73rd floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago. The movies selected are not necessarily the greatest ever made (although some of them surely are), but rather movies that offer new and useful lessons in how movies work. Among the secrets of cinema revealed in this book are at least three movies that are stealth remakes of The Wizard of Oz, hidden meanings behind films made under political repression, and why Hitchcock's Psycho is a remake of his Vertigo. Persistent enigmas are clarified, including the logic of Persona, the riddle of Last Year at Marienbad, and the endings of Blow-Up and The Shining. More importantly, by showing how much there is to discover in movies, the book encourages its readers to continue in their own ways the quest to see movies whole.

From the early days of "worker films" that attracted working-class audiences to tiny, storefront theaters in the first decades of the twentieth century to the gritty films of social realism that brought audiences to theaters during the Great Depression and beyond, Hollywood has played a major role in defining the working class in America. This power of film to define the working class was never more apparent than in the Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s. Films from that epoch continue to have a profound effect on America's political and cultural lives decades later. Although the plight of the working class has been a Hollywood subject for more than a century, no significant work has explored Hollywood's role in shaping the modern working class. Most studies of the films of the late 1960s and 1970s explore the "New Hollywood," or the "Hollywood Renaissance," a brief period of directorial creativity in the industry. Some studies analyze the emergence of the "blockbuster" film and "four-wall" distribution that rejuvenated Hollywood with films like Jaws and Star Wars, while others examine the effect of the Vietnam War on the film industry. This study, however, explains how Hollywood created a false binary of the counterculture vs. the working class in an effort to appeal to the largest possible audience and, in doing so, helped to draw the lines for cultural and political discourse four decades later. Through narrative repetition, film has the power to create a world that becomes accepted as "the way things are." This happened in the mid-1970s when several significant films depicted the white working class as victim of a system that privileged the broad "counterculture," creating a world view that still flourishes in some circles of the white working and middle classes. This study makes that connection for the reader through close readings of various films of the era. As the first study to establish a direct connection between popular films of the 1970s and right-wing populist movements of today, this book helps to provide context for the more extreme rhetoric and activities of the Tea Party and other more fringe groups of the 2010s. By analyzing the depiction of the working class in films of the late 1960s and 1970s, this study provides the first look at how films of the era changed how the working class is viewed by others and by itself. This study also examines the political climate of the Nixon and Carter eras and demonstrates how concepts like Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" found their way to the big screen and helped to shape the future of the working class. Finally, this unique study explores how Hollywood, given a choice of providing an honest rendering of the era or exploiting its tensions to ensure better box office, made the latter choice. By breaking down iconic films like Easy Rider, Dirty Harry, Jaws, and Rocky, character studies like Scarecrow, Blue Collar, and Hard Times, and cult favorites like Joe, Billy Jack, and Medium Cool, author Robert A. Marcink provides a comprehensive look at how Hollywood's choice played a significant role in shaping the modern working class. By exploring films from both the Left and the Right, he also demonstrates that in Hollywood the message rarely strays too far from the ideological center. The Working Class in American Film is an important volume for all film collections. It is also an important volume for communications, sociology, political science, and history collections that explore the relationship between popular media and the shaping of American society and political discourse.

Neo-Noir as Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema suggests the terms "noir" and "neo-noir" have been rendered almost meaningless by overuse. The book seeks to re-establish a purpose for neo-noir films and re-consider the organization of 60 years of neo-noir films. Using the notion of post-classical, the book establishes how neo-noir breaks into many movements, some based on time and others based on thematic similarities. The combined movements then form a mosaic of neo-noir. The time-based movements examine Transitional Noir (1960s-early 1970s), Hollywood Renaissance Noir in the 1970s, Eighties Noir, Nineties Noir, and Digital Noir of the 2000s. The thematic movements explore Nostalgia Noir, Hybrid Noir, and Remake and Homage Noir. Academics as well as film buffs will find this book appealing as it deconstructs popular films and places them within new contexts.

Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition. Moving chronologically, eleven essays highlight cinematic versions of military and cultural conflicts spanning from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. Each focuses on a selection of films about a specific war or historical period, often foregrounding recent productions that remain understudied in the critical literature on cinema, history, and cultural memory. Scrutinizing cinema through the lens of nationalism and its "invention of tradition", Martial Culture, Silver Screen considers how movies possess the power to frame ideologies, provide social coherence, betray collective neuroses and fears, construct narratives of victimhood or heroism, forge communities of remembrance, and cement tradition and convention. Hollywood war films routinely present broad, identifiable narratives such as that of the rugged pioneer or the "good war" through which filmmakers invent representations of the past, establishing narratives that advance discrete social and political functions in the present. As a result, cinematic versions of wartime conflicts condition and reinforce popular understandings of American national character as it relates to violence, individualism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, masculinity, race, class, and empire. Approaching war movies as identity-forging apparatuses and tools of social power, Martial Culture, Silver Screen lays bare how cinematic versions of warfare have helped define for audiences what it means to be American.

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.

This book examines the treatment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his work in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, drama, music, and film, specifically since 1950. The author uses these genres to examine how text, music, performance, and visual images work as a system of representation. In this book, the author strives to clarify the many Dante Gabriel Rossettis, using thirteen of the thirty easily identifiable roles in this system of representation which the author has identified herself-roles by which Rossetti is described and portrayed. The identified portrayals of Rossetti fall easily into five groupings: first, the Italian-English man who is a brother and a loyal friend; second, the poet who is a painter and co-founder of an art movement which afforded him the chance to be a mentor; third, the lover, seducer, husband, oppressor; fourth, the murderer; and fifth, the tortured artist and addict who was mentally ill. These are the portrayals are used throughout this work. Several have chronological boundaries and are discrete representations while others reoccur across the time period covered. Using these categories, the author examines seven works of prose fiction, a feature-length film, two television series, a stage play, and the songs and lyrics of a contemporary band.

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Ceremonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films."

This book examines a corpus of films and TV series released since the global financial crisis, addressing them as emblematic expressions of our age of precarity. The analysis of the motifs and characters of these case studies is built around notions originating from Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory and, in particular, the concept of chronotope, affirming the material and dynamic connection between form and content in artistic experience. This book observes how precarious lives are enacted in forms of spatio-temporal compositions which carry conceptual and ethical challenges for their viewers. This book falls within the film-philosophy framework and, although primarily directed to an academic audience, it provides an interdisciplinary account of the notion of cinematic precarity. It puts the embodied analysis of viewers' ethical participation in close dialogical relationship with a philosophical and sociological examination of current dynamics of inequality and exclusion.

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad's (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell's (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales' (1990) genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.

This insightful account analyzes and provides context for the films and careers of directors who have made Latin American film an important force in Hollywood and in world cinema. In this insightful account, R. Hernandez-Rodriguez analyzes some of the most important, fascinating, and popular films to come out of Latin America in the last three decades, connecting them to a long tradition of filmmaking that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. Directors Alejandro Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, and Lucretia Martel and director/screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga have given cause for critics and public alike to praise a new golden age of Latin American cinema. Splendors of Latin Cinema probes deeply into their films, but also looks back at the two most important previous moments of this cinema: the experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the stage-setting movies from the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses films, directors, and stars from Spain (as a continuing influence), Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile that have contributed to one of the most interesting aspects of world cinema.

Comprising 91 A-Z entries, this encyclopedia provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the topic of religion within film. Technology has enabled films to reach much wider audiences, enabling today's viewers to access a dizzying number of films that employ diverse symbolism and communicate a vast array of viewpoints. Encyclopedia of Religion and Film will provide such an audience with the tools to begin their own exploration of the deeper meanings of these films and grasp the religious significance within. Organized alphabetically, this encyclopedia provides more than 90 entries on the larger religious traditions, the major film-producing regions of the globe, the films that have stirred controversy, the most significant religious symbols, and the more important filmmakers. The included topics provide substantially more information on the intersection of religion and film than any of the similar volumes currently available. While the emphasis is on the English-speaking world and the films produced therein, there is also substantial representation of non-English, non-Western film and filmmakers, providing significant intercultural coverage to the topic. Presents 91 A-Z entries that illuminate topics of geographic and regional interest, biographic data, categories common in the study of religion, and examinations of specific films or film-related events Contains contributions from a remarkable group of distinguished, well-published authorities and younger scholars, all with relevant backgrounds in religion, film, culture, or multiple areas of expertise Includes images of important film directors as well as film stills Provides selected bibliographic information regarding the intersection of religion and film that supplements the "for further reading" section of each entry Offers an indexed filmography of works noted throughout the encyclopedia, providing significant information about each film, such as year released, director, and major actors

What is 'fun' about the Hollywood version of girlhood? Through re-evaluating notions of pleasure and fun, The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film forms a study of Hollywood girl teen films between 2000-2010. By tracing the aesthetic connections between films such as Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Hairspray (Shankman, 2007), and Easy A (Gluck, 2010), the book articulates the specific types of pleasure these films offer as a means to understand how Hollywood creates gendered ideas of fun. Rather than condemn these films as 'guilty pleasures' this book sets out to understand how they are designed to create experiences that feel as though they express desires, memories, or fantasies that girls supposedly share in common. Providing a practical model for a new approach to cinematic pleasures The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film proposes that these films offer a limited version of girlhood that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters.

Film scholarship has largely failed to address the complex and paradoxical nature of the films of Sam Peckinpah, focusing primarily on the violence of movies such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Straw Dogs" while ignoring the poetry and gentility of lesser-known pictures including "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" and "Junior Bonner." Serving as a necessary corrective, Gabrielle Murray's "This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah" offers a better understanding of the work of this landmark director through close readings of both his famous and less-famous works.

Placing them in their proper context--both aesthetically and mythologically--Murray eschews the usual debates about screen violence to discover the ways in which Peckinpah's films provide intense, kinetic explorations of life and death. Amid the often-discussed bloodshed, this bold new study comes to find the complicated utopian impulse that exists at the heart of even Peckinpah's most violent work.

The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple. This book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students across the humanities and social sciences, as well as being a teachable resource for undergraduate students. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.

Let your creative spirits flow with this handy set of 10 graphite pencils featuring beloved characters from Hayao Miyazaki's award-winning fantasy film Spirited Away. * GREAT FOR STUDIO GHIBLI FANS: This pencil set, part of a continuing official partnership with Japanese animation giant Studio Ghibli, captures the nostalgia and magic of the classic Ghibli film Spirited Away. It's a great gift or self-purchase for animation fans, collectors, artists, and anyone who loves cute Japanese art, stationery, and pop culture. * OWN A PIECE OF THIS CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED FILM: Spirited Away is the highest-grossing film in Japan's history. It won the Academy Award (R) for Best Animated Feature, and has appeared on many critics' lists of the best films of all time. * DISTINCTIVE SCHOOL OR OFFICE SUPPLY: Bring some flair to your school or office supplies with this fun pencil set that features characters from Spirited Away. The Standard HB/No. 2 pencils offer great writing quality, while the full-color characters printed on them will delight adults and children alike. * INCLUDES: 10 sharpened graphite pencils with erasers in box (tray with sleeve). 5 unique designs. (c) 2001 Studio Ghibli - NDDTM

In "Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s" author David Roche takes up the assumption shared by many fans and scholars that original horror movies are more "disturbing," and thus better than the remakes. He assesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, according to criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion. With a methodology that combines a formalist and cultural studies approach, Roche sifts aspects of the American horror movie that have been widely addressed (class, the patriarchal family, gender, and the opposition between terror and horror) and those that have been somewhat neglected (race, the Gothic, style, and verisimilitude). Containing seventy-eight black and white illustrations, the book is grounded in a close comparative analysis of the politics and aesthetics of four of the most significant independent American horror movies of the 1970s--"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, " and "Halloween"--and their twenty-first-century remakes.

To what extent can the politics of these films be described as "disturbing" insomuch as they promote subversive subtexts that undermine essentialist perspectives? Do the politics of the film lie on the surface or are they wedded to the film's aesthetics? Early in the book, Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, and class), and the structuring role played by the motif of the American nuclear family. He then asks to what extent these films disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread, terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and the formal strategies employed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions of the genre and its metafictional nature. Roche ends with a meditation on the extent to which the technical limitations of the horror films of the 1970s actually contribute to this "disturbing" quality. Moving far beyond the genre itself, "Making and Remaking Horror" studies the redux as a form of adaptation and enables a more complete discussion of the evolution of horror in contemporary American cinema.