Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War explores the expectations, experiences, and reactions of Allied servicemen and women who served in the wartime Pacific. Viewing the South Pacific through the lens of Hollywood's South Seas, Americans and their Allies expected to find glamorous women who resembled the famous 'sarong girl, ' Dorothy Lamour. But Dorothy was nowhere to be seen. Despite those disappointments popular images proved resilient, and at war's end the 'old' South Seas re-emerged almost unscathed. Based on extensive archival research, Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War explores the intersections between military experiences and cultural history.

Widely regarded by historians of the early moving picture as the best work yet published on pre-cinema, "The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema" throws light on a fascinating range of optical media from the twelfth century to the turn of the twentieth. First published in French in 1994 and now translated into English, Laurent Mannoni's account projects a broad picture of the subject area now known as 'pre-cinema'. Starting from the earliest uses of the camera obscura in astronomy and entertainment, Mannoni discusses, among many other devices, the invention and early years of the magic lantern in the seventeenth century, the peepshows and perspective views of the eighteenth century, and the many weird and wonderful nineteenth-century attempts to recreate visions of real life in different ways and forms. This fully-illustrated and accessible account of a strange mixture of science, magic, art and deception introduces to an English-speaking readership many aspects of pre-cinema history from other European countries.

Peter Lorre described himself as merely a 'face maker'. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang's M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre's screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre's career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.

This book opens up a new field at the intersections of transnational, feminist, and media studies. The collection brings feminist theories to bear on the discourses of transnationality embedded in a range of recent films and video art from diverse locations in North Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Paying particular attention to new frontiers of migration, an increasing vigilance vis-a-vis the foreign, and the gendered and racialized representations of mobility, the book charts innovative feminist strategies for the interpretation of contemporary visual cultures. This ambitious volume will be an important guide for scholars and students interested in approaching global media cultures from transnational feminist perspectives

Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, The Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema. Engaging with the subject of time and temporality, the essays examine the politics of adaptation and our contemporary entanglement with the medieval: not only in overtly medieval-themed films but also in such diverse genres as thrillers, horror films, performance animation, and even science fiction. Among the films and TV shows discussed are productions such as HBO's award winning series Game of Thrones, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, and M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.

In "Making Settler Cinemas," Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and overlooked, "Making Settler Cinemas "not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.""

Tallulah Bankhead was an actress whose talents were greatly overshadowed by her antics. Indeed, the Bankhead personality was much better known than her acting roles. While it is impossible to study her career without exploring her highly charged personality, this bio-bibliography honors Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. In a career that spanned five decades, she conquered practically every medium of entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her mark in each one. Biographers have several times attempted to chronicle her life, but Bankhead remains too original, too unconventional, too colorful to be captured fully on paper. What can be noted are her many accomplishments--which have previously been ignored. This book corrects that oversight by documenting her 19 motion pictures, 56 stage plays, 167 radio appearances, and 56 television appearances, and also listing other professional appearances, recordings, awards and tributes. Additional features include a biographical sketch based on research and interviews with associates, a chronology of highlights in her life, an annotated bibliography of books and magazine articles about her or referring to her, and interesting photographs illustrating her career. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this is a complete source for any research about Bankhead and will also provide helpful data and insights into the theater, films, persons, and events of her world.

Reading a Japanese Film, written by a pioneer of Japanese film studies in the United States, provides viewers new to Japanese cinema with the necessary tools to construct a deeper understanding of some of the most critically acclaimed and thoroughly entertaining films ever made. In her introduction, Keiko McDonald presents a historical overview and outlines a unified approach to film analysis. Sixteen "readings" of films currently available on DVD with English subtitles put theory into practice as she considers a wide range of work, from familiar classics by Ozu and Kurosawa to the films of a younger generation of directors.

Traditional critics of film adaptation generally assumed a) that the written text is better than the film adaptation because the plot is more intricate and the language richer when pictorial images do not intrude; b) that films are better when particularly faithful to the original; c) that authors do not make good script writers and should not sully their imagination by writing film scripts; d) and often that American films lack the complexity of authored texts because they are sourced out of Hollywood. The 'faithfulness' view has by and large disappeared, and intertextuality is now a generally received notion, but the field still lacks studies with a postmodern methodology and lens.Exploring Hollywood feature films as well as small studio productions, Adaptation Theory and Criticism explores the intertextuality of a dozen films through a series of case studies introduced through discussions of postmodern methodology and practice. Providing the reader with informative background on theories of film adaptation as well as carefully articulated postmodern methodology and issues, Gordon Slethaug includes several case studies of major Hollywood productions and small studio films, some of which have been discussed before ("Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York," and "Do the Right Thing") and some that have received lesser consideration ("Six Degrees of Separation, Smoke, Smoke""Signals, Broken Flowers," and various Snow White narratives including "Enchanted, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and the Huntsman"). Useful for both film and literary studies students, Adaptation Theory and Criticism cogently combines the existing scholarship and uses previous theories to engage readers to think about the current state of American literature and film.

In Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Fuhrer on Film, a Shakespearean and a sociologist explore the fascination our popular culture has with Adolf Hitler. What made him ... Hitler? Do our explanations tell us more about the perceiver than the actual historical figure? We ask such question by viewing the Hitler character in the movies. How have directors, actors, film critics, and audiences accounted for this monster in a medium that reflects public tastes and opinions? The book first looks at comedic films, such as Chaplain's The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), along with the Mel Brooks's 1983 version. Then, there is the Hitler of fantasy, from trash films like The Saved Hitler's Brain to a serious work like The Boys from Brazil where Hitler is cloned. Psychological portraits include Anthony Hopkins's The Bunker, the surreal The Empty Mirror, and Max, a portrait of Hitler in his days in Vienna as a would-be artist. Documentaries and docudramas range from Leni Reinfenstahl's iconic The Triumph of the Will or The Hidden Fuhrer, to the controversial Hitler: A Film from Germany and Quentin Tarantino's fanciful Inglourious Basterds. Hitler in the Movies also considers the ways Der Fuhrer remains today, as a ghostly presence, if not an actual character. Why is he still with us in everything from political smears to video games to merchandise? In trying to explain this and the man himself, what might we learn about ourselves and our society?

The latest offering from the "Reference Guides to the World's Cinema" series, this critical survey of key films, actors, directors, and screenwriters during the silent era of the American cinema offers a broad-ranging portrait of the motion picture production of silent film. Detailed but concise alphabetical entries include over 100 film titles and 150 personnel. An introductory chapter explores the early growth of the new silent medium while the final chapter of this encyclopedic study examines the sophistication of the silent cinema. These two chapters outline film history from its beginnings until the perfection of synchronized sound, and reflect upon the themes and techniques established with the silent cinema that continued into the sound era through modern times.

The annotated entries, alphabetically arranged by film title or personnel, include brief bibliographies and filmographies. An appendix lists secondary but important movies and their creators. Film and popular culture scholars will appreciate the vast amount of information that has been culled from various sources and that builds upon the increased studies and research of the past ten years.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of narco cinema, a cross-border exploitation cinema that, for over forty years, has been instrumental in shaping narco-culture in Mexico and the US borderlands. Identifying classics in its mammoth catalogue and analyzing select films at length, Rashotte outlines the genre's history and aesthetic criteria. He approaches its history as an alternative to mainstream representation of the drug war and considers how its vernacular aesthetic speaks to the anxieties and desires of Latina/o audiences by celebrating regional cultures while exploring the dynamics of global transition. Despite recent federal prohibitions, narco cinema endures as a popular folk art because it reflects distinctively the experiences of those uprooted by the forces of globalization and critiques those forces in ways mainstream cinema has failed.

The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

This book introduces the diverse practices of three non-canonical practitioners: David MacDougall, Desire Machine Collective and Kumar Shahani. It offers analysis of their documentary methods and aesthetics, exploring how their oeuvres constitute a critical and self-reflexive approach to documentary-making in India.

"Reading 'Bollywood' "explores the connections between representations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in Hindi films, socio-political contexts and the construction of gender, sexual and ethnic identity by young audience members in India and the UK. Extended excerpts from in-depth interviews with young viewers, observations and original photographs provide exciting and unique insights about spectatorship as well as material for comparison with theories about Hindi film and studies of film audiences and popular culture worldwide.

The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even beyond our subjective consciousness of reality, towards the synthesis of objective actuality itself.

This comprehensive annotated bibliography reviews nearly 500 English-language studies published between 1915 and 2001 that examine the depiction of ethnic, racial, and national groups as portrayed in United States feature films from the inception of cinema through the present. Coverage includes books, reference works, book chapters within larger works, and individual essays from collections and anthologies. Concise annotations provide content summaries; unique features; major films and filmmakers discussed; and useful information on related titles, purpose, and intended readership. The studies included range from specialized scholarly treatises to popular illustrated books for general readers, making DEGREESIProjecting Ethnicity and Race DEGREESR an invaluable resource for researchers interested in ethnic and racial film imagery.

Entries are arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, while four separate indexes make the work simple to navigate by author, subject, gender, race, ethnic group, nationality, country, religion, film title, filmmaker, performer, or theme. Although the majority of studies published examine images of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians in film, the volume contains studies of groups including Africans, Arabs, the British, Canadians, South Sea Islanders, Tibetans, Buddhists, and Muslims--making it a unique reference book with a wide range of uses for a wide range of scholars.

"When it comes to censorship in Hollywood, the bottom line is the ticket line. That's the central message in Jon Lewis's provocative and insightful investigation of the movie industry's history of self-regulation.a]Lewis shows that Hollywood films are a triumph of commerce over art, and that the film industry has consistently used internal censorship and government-industrial collusion to guarantee that its cash flow is never seriously threatened."
"-- The New York Times Book Review"

"a]an accomplished, comprehensive, and provocative new history of censorship and the American film industrya]And what of the perennial tussles between politicos and the film industry? All show business, suggests Lewis, make-believe veiling the real power structure that has nothing to do with morals, let alone art (it would be interesting to get his take on the recent marketing brouhaha and its relationship to the recent threatened actors and writers strikes). A staggering saga worthy itself of a Hollywood movie, Hollywood v. Hardcore is film history at its most illuminating and intense."
" --The Boston Phoenix"

"As provocative as his sometimes X-rated subject matter, film scholar Lewis detects an intimate relationship between the seemingly strange bedfellows of mainstream Hollywood cinema and hardcore pornography. From postal inspector Anthony Comstock to virtue maven William Bennett, from the Hays Office that monitored the golden age of Hollywood to the alphabet ratings system that labels the motion pictures in today's multiplex malls, Lewis's wry, informative, and always insightful study of American film censorship demonstrates that the most effective media surveillance happens before yousee the movie. Hollywood v. Hard Core is highly recommended for audiences of all ages."
"--Thomas Doherty, author of Pre-Code Hollywood"

"Jon Lewis weaves a compelling narrative of how box office needs-rather than moral strictures-have dictated the history of film regulation. Telling the complex and fascinating story of how Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and developed the ratings system and then telling the even more compelling story of how the X rating became a desirable marketing device when hard core pornography became popular, Hollywood v. Hard Core reveals a great deal about the true business of censorship."
"--Linda Williams, author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible""

"This is a fascinating account, both entertaining and scholarly."
--"Journal of the West"

In 1972, "The Godfather" and "Deep Throat" were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance."

Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together.

Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films werefaltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films--from foreign art house film "Last Tango in Paris" to hard-core pornography like "Behind the Green Door"--that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.