In [this book], Eric Trenkamp addresses a question that many American cinema fans may have asked themselves over the past 20 years - "why is everything superheroes now?" Although it might be easy to dismiss Hollywood's last two decades of comic book movies as nothing more than overly simplified morality tales, the reality is much more complex. The pervasiveness of the comic book genre throughout American culture, Trenkamp argues, perpetuates a subtextual myth about what it means to be an "American" in the contemporary world. At the core of this myth is the image of who Hollywood considers to be the ideal American hero - the White male savior. This book explores the evolution of this ever-changing image of White superiority in American cinema, which can be traced from the earliest silent Westerns, through decades of war films, and up to the modern day comic book genre. Through provocative and engaging analysis of a wide variety of Hollywood films, Trenkamp demonstrates the industry's history of popularizing White supremacy and the ways in which these films can act as propaganda to support various dehumanizing U.S. policies, both abroad and at home. Scholars of film studies, comic studies, genre studies, American studies, race studies, pop culture, and history will find this book particularly useful.

With the aim to help teachers design and deliver instruction around world films featuring child protagonists, Cultivating Creativity through World Films guides readers to understand the importance of fostering creativity in the lives of youth. It is expected that by teaching students about world films through the eyes of characters that resemble them, they will gain insight into cultures that might be otherwise unknown to them and learn to analyze what they see. Teachers can use these films to examine and reflect on differences and commonalities rooted in culture, social class, gender, language, religion, etc., through guided questions for class discussion. The framework of this book is conceived to help teachers develop students' ability to evaluate, analyze, synthesize and interpret. The proposed activities seek to incite reflection and creativity in students, and can be used as a model for teachers in designing future lessons on other films.

The romance industry has profited on the fantasies of women for centuries. However, as a new generation of women raised under the guidance of second-wave feminists take up the reins of romance production, romance novels and films have increasingly challenged tired stereotypes labeling romantic stories as formulaic fodder. This book examines how the romance genre serves women in multiple ways, from escapism to sexual education, from fantasy to fun, and most importantly, as a site of production for feminist texts.

The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004 - 2012 examines the cultural, political, and aesthetic significance of narrative films made during the fiftieth-anniversary period of the war, between 2004 and 2012. This period was a fruitful one, in which film became a central medium generating varied representations of the war, and Anne Donadey argues that the fiftieth-anniversary film production contributed to France's move from a period of the return of the repressed to one of difficult anamnesis. Donadey provides a close analysis of twenty narrative films made during this period on both side of the Mediterranean, observing that while some films continue to center on the point of view of only one stake-holding group, a number of films open up new opportunities for multicultural French audiences to envision the war through the eyes of Algerian characters on-screen, and other films bring memories from various groups together in thoughtful synthesis that represent the complexity of the situation. Donadey takes this analysis a step further to analyze what types of gendered representations emerge in these films, given the important participation of Algerian women in the revolutionary war. Scholars of Francophone studies, film, women's studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Whether on the big screen or small, films featuring the American Civil War are among the most classic and controversial in motion picture history. From D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) to Free State of Jones (2016), the war has provided the setting, ideologies, and character archetypes for cinematic narratives of morality, race, gender, and nation, as well as serving as historical education for a century of Americans. In The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color, Douglas Brode, Shea T. Brode, and Cynthia J. Miller bring together nineteen essays by a diverse array of scholars across the disciplines to explore these issues. The essays included here span a wide range of films, from the silent era to the present day, including Buster Keaton's The General (1926), Red Badge of Courage (1951), Glory (1989), Gettysburg (1993), and Cold Mountain (2003), as well as television mini-series The Blue and The Gray (1982) and John Jakes' acclaimed North and South trilogy (1985-86). As an accessible volume to dedicated to a critical conversation about the Civil War on film, The American Civil War on Film and TV will appeal to not only to scholars of film, military history, American history, and cultural history, but to fans of war films and period films, as well.

Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir examines the phenomenon of Argentine film noir. Beginning with definitions of film noir and its international iterations, the book presents a history of the development of film noir and neo-noir in Argentina (from the 1940s to the present), as well as a technical, aesthetic, and socio-historical analysis of such recent Argentine neo-noir films as The Aura, The Secret in Their Eyes, and The German Doctor. It considers the question of inscription of such classic noirs as Double Indemnity and The Third Man and looks forward to future scholarly work on other Latin American noir and neo-noir films, especially those produced in Mexico and Brazil.