Syria is now one of the most important countries in the world for the documentary film industry. Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history. This book is the first history of documentary filmmaking in Syria. Based on extensive media ethnography and in-depth interviews with Syrian filmmakers in exile, the book offers an archival analysis of the documentary work by masters of Syrian cinema, such as Nabil Maleh, Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Hala Al Abdallah, Hanna Ward, Ali Atassi and Omar Amiralay. Joshka Wessels traces how the works of these filmmakers became iconic for a new generation of filmmakers at the beginning of the 21st century and maps the radical change in the documentary landscape after the revolution of 2011. Special attention is paid to the late Syrian filmmaker and pro-democracy activist, Bassel Shehadeh, and the video-resistance from Aleppo and Raqqa against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State. An essential resource for scholars of Syrian Studies, this book will also be highly relevant to the fields of media & conflict research, anthropology and political science.

OFFICIAL STAR WARS IN-UNIVERSE BOOK FEATURING NOTES ON TACTICS, ARMOR, AND VALOR FROM GALACTIC CONFLICTS IN THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE From the Clone Wars and the Rebellion to the clashes with the First Order, the galaxy is defined by war. Star Wars: On the Front Lines chronicles the tactics, weapons, and armor used in pivotal battles along with acts of valor achieved during the campaign. By focusing on elements of the battles that occurred "off screen," this collection brings the struggles faced by ground soldiers and starfighter pilots to life like never before, placing the reader on the battlelines. With full-spread, classic illustrations that capture the sweeping scale of these historical battles, On the Front Lines brings a fresh look at the forces who fought on the front lines.

Over the last two decades, philosophers have been increasingly inclined to consider science fiction films as philosophical exercises that center on the nature of human consciousness and existence. Albert Camus' philosophy of the absurd, however, has almost never been employed as a constructive perspective that can reveal unexplored aspects of these films. This is surprising, since science fiction films seem to be packed with visions and dialogues that echo the Sisyphean universe. Cosmos and Camus endeavors to set foot in this uncharted terrain. Its first part introduces the main components of Camus' absurdity so that it can be easily applied to the analysis of the films later. Equipped with these Camusean essentials, the book delves into an indepth analysis of two first-encounter films (Contact and Arrival) and two A.I. films (A.I. and Her). These analyses yield more than an insightful reflection of the absurd contents in science fiction film. Indeed, imaginative collisions with nonhumans seem to tell us a lot about the nature of the absurd in the human condition, as well as raising the question of whether absurdity is exclusively a human matter. Ultimately, the interpretation of the films illuminates the films themselves just as much as it illuminates, challenges, and expands Camus' concept of absurdity.

Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it represented both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kent's watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayona's award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Aster's genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Trier's visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, and-sometimes-healing.

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

The book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place. It is focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites.

Travelling along a timeline of memory, Tanja Sakota takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film format, Sakota hosts several workshops in different countries focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place.

Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to make the invisible visible? How does one remember events that one hasn’t necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present?

As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film.

How did Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population go from being the objectified subjects of documentary films to the directors and producers in the digital age? What prompted these changes and how and when did this decolonisation of documentary film production occur? Taking a long historical perspective, this book is based on a study of a selection of Australian documentary films produced by and about Aboriginal peoples since the early twentieth century. The films signpost significant shifts in Anglo-Australian attitudes about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and trace the growth of the Indigenous filmmaking industry in Australia. Used as a form of resistance to the imposition of colonialism, filmmaking gave Aboriginal people greater control over their depiction on documentary film and the medium has become an avenue to contest widely held assumptions about a peaceful colonial settlement. This study considers how developments in camera and film stock technologies along with filmic techniques influenced the depiction of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The films are also examined within their historical context, employing them to gauge how social attitudes, access to funding and political pressures influenced their production values. The book aims to expose the course of race relations in Australia through the decolonisation of documentary film by Aboriginal filmmakers, tracing their struggle to achieve social justice and self-representation.

In the late 19th century, modern psychology emerged as a discipline, shaking off metaphysical notions of the soul in favor of a more scientific, neurophysiological concept of the mind. Laboratories began to introduce instruments and procedures which examined bodily markers of psychological experiences, like muscle contractions and changes in vital signs. Along with these changes in the scientific realm came a newfound interest in physiological psychology within the arts - particularly with the new perception of artwork as stimuli, able to induce specific affective experiences. In Psychomotor Aesthetics, author Ana Hedberg Olenina explores the effects of physiological psychology on art at the turn of the 20th century. The book explores its influence on not only art scholars and theorists, wishing to understand the relationship between artistic experience and the internal processes of the mind, but also cultural producers more widely. Actors incorporated psychology into their film acting techniques, the Russian and American film industries started to evaluate audience members' physical reactions, and literary scholars began investigations into poets' and performers' articulation. Yet also looming over this newly emergent field were commercial advertisers and politicians, eager to use psychology to further their own mass appeal and assert control over audiences. Drawing from archival documents and a variety of cross-disciplinary sources, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the cultural resonance of theories behind emotional and cognitive experience - theories with implications for today's neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.

This book "decodes" 1930s Hollywood movies and explains why they looked and behaved in the way they did. Organized through a series of related case studies, the book exposes Classical Hollywood movies to a detailed analysis of their historical, industrial and cultural contexts. In the process it utilizes industry data, aesthetic analysis and the insights of New Cinema History to explain why and how these movies assumed their familiar forms. The book represents the summation of Richard Maltby's four decades of scholarship in the field of Hollywood cinema. The essays presented here share an assumption that has increasingly informed the author's critical method over the years: that any historical understanding of the films of this period requires a deep contextualization in the social circumstances surrounding both their production and consumption. In this way, the book introduces an innovative, overarching research methodology that synthesizes branches of research that are typically employed in isolation, including production, distribution, reception, film aesthetics, and cultural and historical context. Of the book's nine chapters, three are presented here for the first time, and four have been substantially revised and extended from their original publication.

This first-of-its-kind compendium unites perspectives from artists, scholars, arts educators, policymakers and activists to investigate the complex system of values surrounding artistic-educational endeavors. Addressing a range of artistic domains, ranging from music and dance, to visual arts and storytelling, contributors offer an exploration and criticism of the conventions that govern our interactions with these practices. Artistic Citizenship focuses the responsibilities, and functions of amateur as well as professional artists in society, and introduces a novel set of ethics that are conventionally dismissed in discourses on the topic. The authors address the questions: How does the concept of citizenship relate to the arts? What socio-cultural, political, and ethical "goods" can artistic engagements create for people worldwide? Do particular artistic endeavors have distinctive potentials for nurturing artistic citizenship? What are the most effective strategies in the arts to institute change and/or resist local, national, and world problems? What responsibilities do artists and consumers of art have in order to facilitate the relationship between the arts and citizenship? How can artistic activities contribute to the eradication of various 'ism's? A substantial accompanying website features video clips of arts-in-action, videotaped interviews with scholars and practitioners in a variety of global sites, a blog, and supplementary resources about existing and emerging initiatives. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Artistic Citizenship is an essential text for artists, scholars, policy makers, educators, and students.

This exciting new title investigates the explosion of Shakespeare films during the 1990s and beyond. It reflects upon the contexts determining the production of different cinematic ventures, and it provides an innovative understanding of Shakespeare's constitution as a guardian of enshrined values and a figure associated with play and reinvention. Linking fluctuating "Shakespeares" with the growth of a global marketplace, the dissolution of national borders and technological advances, this book produces a fresh awareness of our contemporary cultural moment.

This book examines major British and American missionary films during the Golden Age of Hollywood to explore the significance of race, gender, and spirituality in relation to the lives of the missionaries portrayed in film during the middle third of the twentieth century. Film both influences and reflects culture, and racial, gender, and religious identities are some of the most debated issues globally today. In the movies explored in this book, missionary interactions with various people groups reflect the historical changes which took place during this time.

This book is an exploration of the changes in Russian cultural identity in the twenty years after the fall of the Soviet state. Through close readings of a select number of contemporary Russian films and television series, Irina Souch investigates how a variety of popular cultural tropes ranging from the patriarchal family to the country idyll survived the demise of Communism and maintained their power to inform the Russian people's self-image. She shows how these tropes continue to define attitudes towards political authority, economic disparity, ethnic and cultural difference, generational relations and gender. The author also introduces theories of identity developed in Russia at the same time, enabling these works to act as sites of productive dialogue with the more familiar discourses of Western scholarship.

Star Trek has transcended science fiction through its integration of elements that also have crucial roles in the classical utopian tradition. New technologies change a civilization, a miniature society unfolds on a spaceship, and an android teaches humanity. Star Trek has been answering many questions about our own world for over five decades, and since the days of Captain Kirk, the franchise has become one of the world's best-known pop cultural phenomena. In six sections, this book documents what the Star Trek franchise has in common with classic utopias. Chapters analyze how technology changes society and how the Federation embodies utopian ideals. Also explored are the political relations among alien species that reflect past and present conflicts in our real world and how the Borg resembles an anti-utopian society.

Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on melodrama, "commedia all'italiana," peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film.