How far have we progressed from the days when showing a film such as Jack Smith 's Flaming Creatures landed the cinema 's programmer, projectionist, and ticket taker in jail? What are some of the hidden clues modern audiences are overlooking in older films that suggest a character 's bisexuality? Which famous actors, actresses, directors, and screenwriters were attracted to people of both sexes? In Bisexual Characters in Film, the first book to focus on the role of bisexual characters in film, you ll find answers to these questions and many more as you explore, analyze, and celebrate 80 years of bisexual movie characters (and the people who have created them) from around the world. A lively, entertaining, and informative commentary, this book examines the treatment of bisexual film characters and shows you how that treatment has been affected by societal forces such as censorship, politics, religious prejudices, homophobia, and sexual stereotypes. Bisexual Characters in Film looks at the contribution of bisexual people (and others who have had lovers of varying sexes) to the body of work available on film today. These include the directors, writers, actors, composers, and designers whose sexual orientation has informed their work. An analysis of the Motion Picture Production Code and its devastating effect on bisexual and homosexual screen images forms an important part of the book. You learn how, specifically, it eradicated gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters from Hollywood films as well as the role of bisexual, lesbian, and gay filmmakers in finally defeating it. Other questions you ll find answers to include: Who, or what, is a bisexual?How were bisexual characters represented in silent film, before the forces of censorship banned them from the screen?What bisexual myths and stereotypes are portrayed on film?What is the role of "camp" in bisexual film?Bisexual Characters in Film is a unique resource for researchers; librarians; film festival planners; the queer media; professors and students of lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies; bisexual activists; and general bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered readers. It provides a much-needed view of bisexual representations in a major segment of our popular culture.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is an account of the prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain. In this new paperback edition, which has been revised to take into account recent scholarship of early cinema, the author provides an account of the rich history of the origins of film. The book demonstrates that the theory of "the persistence of vision", which led to the invention of moving pictures, has been superceded by modern scientific findings. In its place, it puts forward a theory of invention as a type of "bricolage", and shows that cinematography was a product of the forces of 19th century capitalism. It discusses the wealth of influences, both popular and bourgeois, on the culture of early cinema, including diorama, the magic lantern, itinerant entertainers and music hall. The book looks at the relationship between film and photography, and considers the nascent film business, the ways in which early cinema was received by its audiences and the developing aesthetics of cinema in its first 15 years.

The definitive guide to a Hollywood legend. Few stars are as loved as Audrey Hepburn, today as much as ever. Beautiful, delicate, graceful - but always warm and natural - she stole our hearts. She was also brave, working tirelessly for UNICEF in the face of her own failing health. in this moving and heartwarming biography Alexander Walker traces the extraordinary combination of luck and talent that allowed a fragile little girl,who nearly died in Hitler's occupied Europe, to conquer, in just one year, the New York stage and the Hollywood screen. Walker analyses her ascent to power and world fame and reveals the sadness of her life: two failed marriages, a broken engagement, and the crushing disappointment that occupied her triumph in My Fair Lady. Most importantly of all, this biography reveals what no one has known until now: the truly terrifying family secret that tore Audrey's childhood apart and kept her forever silent about her parents.

This book studies American science fiction films depicting invasions of the USA and Earth by extra- terrestrials within the context of imperialism from 1950-2020. It shows how such films imagine America and its allies as objects of colonial control. This trope enables filmmakers to explore the ethics of American interventionism abroad either by defending the status quo or by questioning interventionism. The study shows how these films comment on American domestic hegemonic practices regarding racial or gender hierarchies, as well as hegemonic practices abroad. Beginning with the Cold War consensus in the 1950s, the study shows how hegemony at home and abroad promotes division in the culture.

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies represent themselves. Hedges discusses the role of cinema in creating cultural memory within a global perspective that spans five continents. The book's innovative approach and approachable style should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects.

With a historical sweep that recent events have made definitive, the authors examine the influence of Soviet ideology on the presentation of social reality in films produced in the Soviet Union between the October Revolution and the final days of glasnost. Within the framework of an introduction that lays out the conceptual terminology used to describe that shifting ideological landscape, the authors analyze both the social groups appearing in the films and the relations of film directors and other film makers to state censorship and ideological control.

'Women's films' are more popular now than at any time following the classical era. Postmodern Chick Flicks considers the reasons for the renewed popularity of female-orientated genres and examines the new film cycles this has produced. Focusing on melodrama, romantic comedy, costume drama and female-led noirs, the book looks at the revival of these forms and the way in which they blend classical and contemporary themes and formal devices.

Australian Western in the Fifties: Kangaroo, Hopalong Cassidy on Tour, and Whiplash looks at Australian Westerns from three points of view-film, personal appearance, and television at the beginning, middle, and end of the 1950s, the American Western's golden age. It looks at three significant but "forgotten" cases: (1) Kangaroo: The Australian Story, the first Technicolor film made in Australia, produced by the Hollywood movie studio 20th Century Fox, directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lewis Milestone, starring Maureen O'Hara, Peter Lawford, and Richard Boone. (2) The successful goodwill tour of Australia by the Hollywood actor William Boyd who played the film, radio, and television cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. (3) The British-American produced black-and-white TV series Whiplash, made in Australia and starring the Hollywood actor Peter Graves. The American filmmakers' ignorance of Australia meant they learned the hard way there was more to Australian Westerns than simply replacing the prairie with the bush, bison with kangaroos, and Native Americans with Aboriginals. Indeed, the depiction of place and the presentation of Aboriginal culture are two of the most intriguing aspects of Australian Westerns. In retelling the filmmakers' stories, a unique picture of the Australian film and television industry and everyday life during the 1950s is revealed.

Jason Statham has risen from street seller through championship diving and modelling to become arguably the biggest British male film star of the twenty-first century. This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of his work across a variety of media, including film, television, video games and music videos. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of Statham's career, from his distinctive screen presence to his style, branding and celebrity. Accessibly written, and featuring a contribution from Hollywood director Paul Feig, who worked with Statham on the 2015 action-comedy Spy, the collection will appeal to a wide audience of scholars, students and fans. -- .

This work examines the reasons why anthropologists have not used the camera as a research instrument or film as a means of communicating ethnographic knowledge. It suggests that images and words in this discipline operate on different logical levels; that they are hierarchically related; that whereas writings may encompass the images produced by film, the inverse of this cannot be true. The author argues for this position further by suggesting that the visual is to the written mode as "thin description" (giving a record of the form of behaviour) is to "thick description" (giving an account of meaning). -- .

This updated third edition of Studio Television Production and Directing introduces readers to the basic fundamentals of studio and control room production. Accessible and focused, readers of this updated third edition will gain fluency in essential studio terms and technology and acquire the necessary skills to make it in the industry. This book is your back-to-the-basics guide to common technology-including principles of directing, assistant directing, technical directing, audio ops, the basics of studio lighting, an introduction to set design, camera ops, floor directing, story types (VO, VO/SOT, PKG), basic engineering, and more. Whether an established professional or a student, this book provides readers with the technical expertise to successfully coordinate live or taped studio television today. In this new edition, author Andrew Hicks Utterback offers an expanded glossary and new material on visualization walls, alternative camera mounts, basic engineering, and news narrative diagramming.

With themes ranging from passion and romance to murder and psychological disturbance, popular British film in the 1940s found little favour with the critics, but provided thrills and entertainment for millions of people during a time of austerity and danger. "Realism and Tinsel" looks beyond the established histories of Ealing Comedies and realist classics to excavate a rich but neglected tradition of melodrama, gangster films, morbid thrillers and costume pictures. Discussing cinema in the context of the major social, economic, and political changes that were taking place, Robert Murphy examines the period's most popular films, including "Madonna of the Seven Moons", "The Way Ahead" and "The Wicked Lady". The picture that emerges challenges the reassuring, cosy view of Britain presented in realist cinema, and throws new light on the British film industry of the time and on our idea of the war era itself. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of film, media and cultural studies.

The book examines how medical knowledge is produced around bodies that do not fit in the heteronormative framework of the state's rationale and processes. The marginal bodies studied in this research are termed MSM, men who have sex with men, categorized as a high-risk group in the backdrop of HIV/AIDS. These Queer bodies entered the registers of epidemiology and governmentality. This classification is the point of departure for the book. The book interrogates and asks how does a sexual subject become a political question? To answer this political trajectory, the book analyses the category of risk in biomedicine. It investigates how the category of risk becomes critical to the Indian state's rationale and policies wherein, through the ambit of health and population, sexuality is managed. Unearthing the sexual politics in South Asia, the book, based on rich empirical evidence derived from the lived experiences of MSM, narrates the construction of sexual subjectivity and masculinity. The process of construction occurs in negotiation with the Indian state, bringing forth the dimension of the Indian state as a medico-legal governmentality regime and how MSM takes on the identity of a medicalized subject.

Despite the powerful anti-political impulses that have pervaded Italian society in recent years, Italian cinema has sustained and renewed its longstanding engagement with questions of politics, both in the narrow definition of the term, and in a wider understanding that takes in reflections on public life, imaginary, and national identity. This book explores these political dimensions of contemporary Italian cinema by looking at three complementary strands: the thematics of contemporary political film from a variety of perspectives; the most prominent directors currently engaged in this filone; and case studies of the films that best represent this engagement. Conceived and edited by two Italian film scholars working in radically different academic settings, Italian Political Cinema brings together a wide array of critical positions and research from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The tripartite structure and international perspective create a volume that is an accessible entry-point into a subject that continues to attract critical and cultural attention, both inside and outside of academia.

Is the world around us truly as it appears or are we inert bodies in tanks, our brains subjected to electronic stimulation creating a make-believe world of hallucination? The Keanu Reeves cult sci-fi movie, The Matrix, vividly conveyed the excitement and the horror of a fake world made of nothing but perceptions, substituting for a real world of grim despair. Since The Matrix is probably the most overtly philosophical movie ever to have come out of Hollywood it has popularised issues on which philosophers have a lot to say. The Matrix and Philosophy is from the same team of cool, capable, young philosophers who created The Simpsons and Philosophy, which redefined the market for a work by serious philosophers. It has 20 new, thoughtful essays on philosophical problems raised by The Matrix, many of which focus on the issues "Can we be sure the world is really there, and if not, what should we do about it?" The book also explores other philosophical puzzles including ethical ones like Cypher's decision to choose a pleasurable fake world over a wretched real one.