Providing a unique collection of perspectives on the persistence of documentary as a vital and dynamic media form within a digital world, New Documentary Ecologies traces this form through new opportunities of creating media, new platforms of distribution and new ways for audiences to engage with the real.

The twenty-first-century's turn away from fidelity-based adaptations toward more innovative approaches has allowed adapters from Spain, Argentina, and the United States to draw upon Spain's rich body of nineteenth-century classics to address contemporary concerns about gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, celebrity, immigration, identity, social justice, and domestic violence. This book provides a snapshot of visual adaptations in the first two decades of the new millennium, examining how novelistic material from the past has been remediated for today's viewers through film, television, theater, opera, and the graphic novel. Its theoretical approach refines the binary view of adapters as either honoring or opposing their source texts by positing three types of adaptation strategies: salvaging (which preserves old stories by giving them renewed life for modern audiences), utilizing (which draws upon a pre-existing text for an alternative purpose, building upon the story and creating a shift in emphasis without devaluing the source material), and appropriation (which involves a critique of the source text, often with an attempt to dismantle its authority). Special attention is given to how adapters address audiences that are familiar with the source novels, and those that are not. This examination of the vibrant afterlife of classic literature will be of interest to scholars and educators in the fields of adaptation, media, Spanish literature, cultural studies, performance, and the graphic arts.

The western is one of the most popular genres in American film history, and some estimate more than 20,000 of them have been produced. Its popular portrayal of the American West, as a place where good and evil are clearly defined, created heroes that are still among the most respected and remembered in film history. Writers Lane Roth and Tom W. Hoffer, William E. Tydeman III, R. Philip Loy, Gary Kramer, Raymond E. White, Michael K. Schoenecke, Sandra Schackel, Jacqueline K. Greb, Jim Collins, Richard Robertson, and Gary Yoggy each contributed an essay, focusing on the performances of some of the most famous of Hollywoods leading cowboys and cowgirls. Analyses of the works of G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Steve McQueen, and James Arness are included. James Drury of The Virginian relates his firsthand experiences of movie making by way of introducing this collection.

Every baby boomer in America knows who that masked man was. He was mysterious and mythic at the same time, the epitome of the American hero: compassionate, honest, patriotic, inventive, an unswerving champion of justice and fair play.

The Fascination of Film Violence is a study of why fictional violence is such an integral part of fiction film. How can something dreadful be a source of art and entertainment? Explanations are sought from the way social and cultural norms and practices have shaped biologically conditioned violence related traits in human behavior.

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’50s America as the “tough guy.” The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender “otherness,” this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

They sold sin and sensation with the magic words "Uncut! Uncensored! Adults Only!" and the most happily shameless of them all was David F Friedman, the emperor of "exploitation" films. Friedman perfected the fine art of sleaze and delightfully admits that he has hurled more garbage at the public than anyone else before or since. This book is as much his story as it is the history of an idea that in recent times has enjoyed a remarkable rebirth. Friedman writes with gusto of the glory days when there were taboos to be broken and untold amounts of money to be made. He fondly remembers his cinematic forebears, who sold titillation under the guise of moral instruction.Friedman brought the genre to new highs (and lows), producing such films as "She Freak", "Blood Feast", "The Defilers", "Scum of the Earth", "Space Thing", "Color Me Blood Red", and the classic "Two Thousand Maniacs". Whether sexy, gory, or merely shocking, these films played for years to packed theatres and drive-ins. This book captures the core of basic integrity, the wicked sense of humour, and the unerring sense of showmanship of this American original. "A Youth in Babylon" is the definitive book on the history of American "exploitation" films and a unique contribution to motion picture history.

You've got an idea for the next great screenplay. Maybe you're just getting started or perhaps you've spent time with other screenwriting books, and you have your hero's journey, plot twists, reversals, and cat-saving scenes all worked out. Either way, what stands between you and an outstanding finished screenplay are the blank pages that you must fill with cinematic life, energy, conflict, and emotion. So how on Earth do you do that? The secret is scenewriting. This thorough and effective guide will help the beginner and the professional master the most critical and overlooked part of the screenwriting process: the art and craft of writing scenes. With step-by-step instruction, and numerous exercises, you will learn how to transform an outline into a fully-developed script. Learn how to prepare scenes for writing, construct sparkling, naturalistic dialogue, utilize scene description and the unique structure of the screenplay format to maximum advantage, and polish your scenes so that your idea becomes the script you always imagined it could be. Through scenewriting, great ideas become brilliant scripts.

Theda Bara became an overnight superstar with her film debut in the scandalous 1915 hit A Fool There Was, and for the rest of that decade stayed at the top of the heap, along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Despite her fame and notoriety as the movies' first "sex symbol", no biography of the original Vamp has ever been written, even though Bara threatened to pen her own "because nobody ever wrote a true word about me". Finally, someone has. Bara had one of the most bizarre and colorful careers of the silent era, starring in Cleopatra, Salome, and scores of other hit films before vanishing mysteriously from the screen. Now, read for the first time how a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest became "Satan's Handmaiden", scandalized a nation, and abruptly fell from the heights.

A comprehensive study of cannibalism in literature and film, spanning colonial fiction, Gothic texts and contemporary American horror. Amidst the sharp teeth and horrific appetite of the cannibal, this book examines real fears of over-consumerism and consumption that trouble an ever-growing modern world.

This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and shows Sterne's deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant's underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer's more complete account and identifies humor's place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz's work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but also to its style. The book concludes with an explication of French philosopher Henri Bergson's claim that laughter is a response to mechanical inelasticity.

Available for the first time in paperback is Aissa Wayne's poignant memoir. The daughter of John Wayne and his third wife, Pilar, Aissa delves into her father's childhood, his film career, and his life off the screen. "John Wayne: My Father" reports Wayne's life faithfully and compassionately, resulting in an affecting portrait that offers a new perspective on one of America's most enduring heroes. photo insert.

"This book explores the role of emotion and affect in recent Latin American cinemas (1990s-2000s) in the context of larger public debates about past traumas and current anxieties. To address this topic, it examines some of the most significant trends in contemporary Latin American filmmaking, including the emergence of the thriller as a preferred genre to address the legacies of the 1960s and 1970s; the rise of "youth" films about globally-connected and disaffected young adults; and the proliferation of transnational productions by "traveling" filmmakers that encourage audiences to feel for "others." The book features close textual analysis of individual films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico; as well as commentary on the changing structure of Latin American film industries. It frames those analyses within a discussion of recent critical and theoretical debates about affect, sentimentalism and compassion, particularly as they relate to film"--

Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture sheds new light on the ways in which Saturday Night Live's confrontational, boundary-pushing approach spilled over into film production, contributing to some of the biggest hits in Hollywood history, such as National Lampoon's Animal House, Ghostbusters, and Beverly Hills Cop. Jim Whalley also considers how SNL has adapted to meet the needs of subsequent generations, launching the film careers of Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and others in the process. Supported by extensive archival research, some of Hollywood's most popular comedians are placed into the contexts of film and television comic traditions and social and cultural trends in American life.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.