The first films were shorts. Most leading filmmakers made shorts, including Chaplin, Keaton, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, and--more recently--Lynne Ramsey and Damian O' Donnell. Though a standard and much-loved part of the cinemagoing experience for decades, short films are now rarely seen, even though more are made than ever. Hundreds of student films are made annually and television stations use shorts as fillers. Dotcom companies fight to secure rights and short film festivals take place all over the world. There is even the beginning of a comeback for the cinema short.
This book traces the history of the short film and its current role. Focusing on short-film producers and directors, it looks at the short film as a training opportunity for new talent. It covers issues of distribution, funding (including the lottery boom), exhibition, festivals, training, and publications.

Why did Edwardian novelists portray journalists as swashbuckling, truth-seeking super-heroes whereas post-WW2 depictions present the journalist as alienated outsider? Why are contemporary fictional journalists often deranged, murderous or intensely vulnerable? As newspaper journalism faces the double crisis of a lack of trust post-Leveson, and a lack of influence in the fragmented internet age, how do cultural producers view journalists and their role in society today? In The Journalist in British Fiction and Film Sarah Lonsdale traces the ways in which journalists and newspapers have been depicted in fiction, theatre and film from the dawn of the mass popular press to the present day. The book asks first how journalists were represented in various distinct periods of the 20th century and then attempts to explain why these representations vary so widely. This is a history of the British press, told not by historians and sociologists, but by writers and directors as well as journalists themselves. In uncovering dozens of forgotten fictions, Sarah Lonsdale explores the bare-knuckled literary combat conducted by writers contesting the disputed boundaries between literature and journalism. Within these texts and films there is perhaps also a clue as to how the best aspects of 'Fourth estate' journalism can survive in the digital age. Authors covered in the volume include: Martin Amis, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Pat Barker, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Wesker and Rudyard Kipling. Television and films covered include House of Cards (US and UK versions), Spotlight, Defence of the Realm, Secret State and State of Play.

The definitive visual history of the thrilling make-up artistry of the legendary Rick Baker, a must-have for collectors and special effects afficionados. From the gory zombies of Michael Jackson's Thriller to the staggeringly lifelike results of Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons to the groundbreaking effects in An American Werewolf in London, Baker's special effects, makeup, and prosthetics are some of Hollywood's most enduring legacies. This deluxe, two-volume set is replete with more than 1000 four-colour images and original sketches. It covers the makeup artist's 40-plus-year journey, from his early days as a young "monster maker", creating body parts in his parents' kitchen, to his more than 70 film and television credits--that earned seven Academy Awards, one Emmy, and three BAFTAs, among numerous other awards.

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.

This book begins with seminal essays, several dating back to the 1950s, that uncover the roots of the genre and explain its wide-ranging, indestructible appeal. These writings include, among many others, 'The Horror of It All' by Hollis Alpert and Charles Beaumont, 'The Subconscious: From Pleasure Castle to Libido Motel' by Raymond Durgnat and 'Satisfaction: A Most Unpleasant Feeling' by Roman Polanski. The second part of the book, New Perspectives, focuses on such specific films as Tod Browning's Freaks and The Devil Doll, The Haunting, in both its 1963 and 1999 incarnations, and The Devil and Daniel Webster; and on such sequel-driven characters as Frankenstein's monster and Freddy Kruegar and the Candyman. The scope of the collection is thus surprisingly broad considering as it does the horror film genre from different times, different perspectives, different angles. But the book's purpose is unvarying: to increase our understanding of how these movies succeed (or do not) in making our flesh creep, our skin turn pale and our hair stand on end. Indeed, the stills alone -- about 100 of them -- may occasionally do that.

Translation of a text supposedly written by Eva Perâon on her deathbed, but not published until 1987. The authenticity of the work has been questioned and it is highly unlikely that she wrote all of it. If it is hers, it displays the sharper aspects of her personality that are missing from the works that she claimed to author. Includes a useful introduction"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

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.

Although films affect and reflect the way Americans look at politics, they have received far less attention than television or newspapers. This is changing, particularly on college campuses, where courses on politics and film are growing in popularity. This book consists of short essays on approximately fifty American political films. It is distinctive in two ways. Firstly, it defines politics broadly enough to include a range of films, not only on obviously political topics such as the presidency, congress, and elections, but also on the media, law and courts, war and peace, and a variety of policy issues. Secondly, it goes beyond plot and dialogue to discuss the language of film, including visual aspects, sound, mise-en-scene, and other ways that films communicate their messages to audiences. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to the films included. The essays also explain the political context of each film and, when films are based on historical events, discuss the accuracy of their depictions. References to additional sources are included at the end of each essay. This book explores the extent to which films take on the political issues of the day and their influence on public perceptions of politics. Do films support the status quo or do they challenge it?

Global in scope and a practical tool for students and teachers of history, Filmography of World History: A Select, Critical Guide To Feature Films That Engage The Past includes description and analysis of over 300 historical films. A companion to Grant Tracey's Filmography of American History, this critical reference book selects movies that represent aspects of world history from the middle ages through the twentieth century. These films adopt as their subject a wide range of historical events, people and societies of Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Canada, and Latin America. Films are arranged alphabetically, with cross referencing by geographic area, time period, and five themes: History as Biography; Crossing Cultures; Civil, International and Sectarian Conflict; Society: Modernization and Tradition; and Redefining Historical Narrative. Each film entry includes production data, current U.S. home video distributors, geographical and time setting, plot description, and references to critical literature. Over half of the entries provide extended analysis of the historical interpretation the film brings to the screen. Filmography of World History argues for the potential of feature films to teach us about the past and its reconstruction in academe and popular culture. The book offers an historian's perspective on films as varied as Ararat, Black Rain, Lin Zexu, Saladin, Winstanley, Judgment at Nuremberg, Distant Thunder, The Official Story, Cabeza de Vaca, Newsfront, Lumumba, Daresalam, and The Great White Man of Lambarene.

This book provides coverage of the diversity of Australian film and television production between 2000 and 2015. In this period, Australian film and television have been transformed by new international engagements, the emergence of major new talents and a movement away with earlier films' preoccupation with what it means to be Australian. With original contributions from leading scholars in the field, the collection contains chapters on particular genres (horror, blockbusters and comedy), Indigenous Australian film and television, women's filmmaking, queer cinema, representations of history, Australian characters in non-Australian films and films about Australians in Asia, as well as chapters on sound in Australian cinema and the distribution of screen content. The book is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. It will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of Anglophone film and television, as well as to anyone with an interest in Australian culture and creativity.

This provocative book reveals how Hollywood films reflect our deepest fears and anxieties as a country, often recording our political beliefs and cultural conditions while underscoring the darker side of the American way of life. Long before the war in Iraq and the economic crises of the early 21st century, Hollywood has depicted a grim view of life in the United States, one that belies the prosperity and abundance of the so-called American Dream. While the country emerged from World War II as a world power, collectively our sense of security had been threatened. The result is a cinematic body of work that has America's decline and ruin as a central theme. The author draws from popular films across all genres and six decades to illustrate how the political climate of the times influenced their creation. Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U.S. Decline combines film history, social history, and political history to reveal important themes in the unfolding American narrative. Discussions focus on a wide variety of films, including Rambo, Planet of the Apes, and Easy Rider.

Tagline: We watch the same movies, but we don't see the same movies. Hollywood Values makes a heroic effort to show that Hollywood bashing doesn't have it right. Good things are coming out of Hollywood. This book proves it.

Cyndy Hendershot argues that 1950s science fiction films open a window on the cultural paranoia that characterized 1950s America, a phenomenon largely triggered by use of nuclear weapons during World War II. This study uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the various monsters that inhabit 1950s sci-fi movies giant insects, prehistoric creatures, mutants, uncanny doubles, to name a few which serve as metaphorical embodiments of a varied and complex cultural paranoia. Postwar paranoia may have stemmed from the bomb, but it came to correlate with a wider range of issues such as anti-communism, internal totalitarianism, scientific progress, domestic problems, gender roles, and sexuality."

As with many aspects of European cultural life, film was galvanized and transformed by the revolutionary fervor of 1968. This groundbreaking study provides a full account of the era's cinematic crises, innovations, and provocations, as well as the social and aesthetic contexts in which they appeared. The author mounts a genuinely fresh analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter, and Fassbinder to the "low" cinematic genres of horror, pornography, and the Western reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt-a cinema for the barricades.

What does the portrayal of gender in film reveal about Spanish society? To what extent and in what ways does cinema contribute to constructions of national and regional identity? How does gender interact with ethnicity, class, politics and history?Gender and Spanish Cinema addresses these questions and more in its examination of twentieth-century film. Defining 'gender' in its broadest sense, the authors discuss topics such as body, performance, desire and fantasy. Gender is not considered in isolation, but is discussed in relation to nationalism, race, memory, psychoanalyisis and historical context. The chapters are wide-ranging, dealing with subjects such as Buuel, cinema under Franco, 1950s melodrama and Pedro Almodvar.Bringing together leading academics from the UK, US and Spain, this volume examines the diversity of gender representation in Spanish cinema through a range of genres. A filmography and illustrations enhance the text.