Comprising 91 A-Z entries, this encyclopedia provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the topic of religion within film. Technology has enabled films to reach much wider audiences, enabling today's viewers to access a dizzying number of films that employ diverse symbolism and communicate a vast array of viewpoints. Encyclopedia of Religion and Film will provide such an audience with the tools to begin their own exploration of the deeper meanings of these films and grasp the religious significance within. Organized alphabetically, this encyclopedia provides more than 90 entries on the larger religious traditions, the major film-producing regions of the globe, the films that have stirred controversy, the most significant religious symbols, and the more important filmmakers. The included topics provide substantially more information on the intersection of religion and film than any of the similar volumes currently available. While the emphasis is on the English-speaking world and the films produced therein, there is also substantial representation of non-English, non-Western film and filmmakers, providing significant intercultural coverage to the topic. Presents 91 A-Z entries that illuminate topics of geographic and regional interest, biographic data, categories common in the study of religion, and examinations of specific films or film-related events Contains contributions from a remarkable group of distinguished, well-published authorities and younger scholars, all with relevant backgrounds in religion, film, culture, or multiple areas of expertise Includes images of important film directors as well as film stills Provides selected bibliographic information regarding the intersection of religion and film that supplements the "for further reading" section of each entry Offers an indexed filmography of works noted throughout the encyclopedia, providing significant information about each film, such as year released, director, and major actors

An officially licensed collectible replica of the unforgettable mandrake root from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry's herbology class. Complete with sound of the plant's cry, this is a perfect gift for fans of the Wizarding World. * SPECIFICATIONS: Mini replica of the mandrake potted plant; Plays audio of mandrake cry when pulled up from the pot; Measures 3 inches * AUTHENTIC AUDIO: Includes mandrake cry as heard in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets * IDENTIFICATION CARD INCLUDED: An illustrated description card provides essential information on the mandrake * PERFECT GIFT: A unique gift for fans of the wizarding world * OFFICIALLY LICENSED: Authentic collectible

The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple. This book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students across the humanities and social sciences, as well as being a teachable resource for undergraduate students. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.

In "Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s" author David Roche takes up the assumption shared by many fans and scholars that original horror movies are more "disturbing," and thus better than the remakes. He assesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, according to criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion. With a methodology that combines a formalist and cultural studies approach, Roche sifts aspects of the American horror movie that have been widely addressed (class, the patriarchal family, gender, and the opposition between terror and horror) and those that have been somewhat neglected (race, the Gothic, style, and verisimilitude). Containing seventy-eight black and white illustrations, the book is grounded in a close comparative analysis of the politics and aesthetics of four of the most significant independent American horror movies of the 1970s--"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, " and "Halloween"--and their twenty-first-century remakes.

To what extent can the politics of these films be described as "disturbing" insomuch as they promote subversive subtexts that undermine essentialist perspectives? Do the politics of the film lie on the surface or are they wedded to the film's aesthetics? Early in the book, Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, and class), and the structuring role played by the motif of the American nuclear family. He then asks to what extent these films disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread, terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and the formal strategies employed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions of the genre and its metafictional nature. Roche ends with a meditation on the extent to which the technical limitations of the horror films of the 1970s actually contribute to this "disturbing" quality. Moving far beyond the genre itself, "Making and Remaking Horror" studies the redux as a form of adaptation and enables a more complete discussion of the evolution of horror in contemporary American cinema.

The political economy and culture of Chinese cinema during the era of China's prolonged economic reform has not until now been examined in detail. Ying Zhu's new and comprehensive study examines the institutional as well as the stylistic transitions of Chinese cinema from pedagogy to art to commerce, focusing on the key film reform measures as well as the metamorphosis of Chinese Fifth Generation films from art film narration-as in Chen Kaige's 1984 Yellow Earth-to post-New-Wave classical film narration-as in the same director's 1993 Farewell, My Concubine. Zhu also considers the films of a younger generation, the so-called "underground generation," which has been making both critical and commercial waves in recent years. Of use to Asian Studies scholars and film scholars alike, her work reconciles the stylistic, cultural, and economic dimensions of the nation's cinematic output, also providing the first systematic institutional analysis of an industry in a state of constant flux.

Why did Edwardian novelists portray journalists as swashbuckling, truth-seeking super-heroes whereas post-WW2 depictions present the journalist as alienated outsider? Why are contemporary fictional journalists often deranged, murderous or intensely vulnerable? As newspaper journalism faces the double crisis of a lack of trust post-Leveson, and a lack of influence in the fragmented internet age, how do cultural producers view journalists and their role in society today? In The Journalist in British Fiction and Film Sarah Lonsdale traces the ways in which journalists and newspapers have been depicted in fiction, theatre and film from the dawn of the mass popular press to the present day. The book asks first how journalists were represented in various distinct periods of the 20th century and then attempts to explain why these representations vary so widely. This is a history of the British press, told not by historians and sociologists, but by writers and directors as well as journalists themselves. In uncovering dozens of forgotten fictions, Sarah Lonsdale explores the bare-knuckled literary combat conducted by writers contesting the disputed boundaries between literature and journalism. Within these texts and films there is perhaps also a clue as to how the best aspects of 'Fourth estate' journalism can survive in the digital age. Authors covered in the volume include: Martin Amis, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Pat Barker, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Wesker and Rudyard Kipling. Television and films covered include House of Cards (US and UK versions), Spotlight, Defence of the Realm, Secret State and State of Play.

"Dietrich's Ghosts "is the first major English-language study to look at the star system under the Third Reich. Erica Carter argues that after the Weimar period, the German star system was reorganized to foster an anti-modernist mode of spectatorship geared to an appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime.
Carter discusses the reconfiguring of film production and exhibition around idealist aesthetic principles and offers case studies of three stars. Emil Jannings figures as an exemplar of what Carter terms the "volkisch "sublime, while Marlene Dietrich emerges as a figure at the crossroads of modernist and idealist conceptions of beauty. A provocative chapter on Zarah Leander in the feature films of the early war years portrays this star as a post-Dietrich emblem of the supposed sublimity of a fascist war.
This unprecedented new study reassesses existing paradigms in German film history debates and throws suggestive new light on the icons and popular culture of the Third Reich.

The first films were shorts. Most leading filmmakers made shorts, including Chaplin, Keaton, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, and--more recently--Lynne Ramsey and Damian O' Donnell. Though a standard and much-loved part of the cinemagoing experience for decades, short films are now rarely seen, even though more are made than ever. Hundreds of student films are made annually and television stations use shorts as fillers. Dotcom companies fight to secure rights and short film festivals take place all over the world. There is even the beginning of a comeback for the cinema short.
This book traces the history of the short film and its current role. Focusing on short-film producers and directors, it looks at the short film as a training opportunity for new talent. It covers issues of distribution, funding (including the lottery boom), exhibition, festivals, training, and publications.

This book provides coverage of the diversity of Australian film and television production between 2000 and 2015. In this period, Australian film and television have been transformed by new international engagements, the emergence of major new talents and a movement away with earlier films' preoccupation with what it means to be Australian. With original contributions from leading scholars in the field, the collection contains chapters on particular genres (horror, blockbusters and comedy), Indigenous Australian film and television, women's filmmaking, queer cinema, representations of history, Australian characters in non-Australian films and films about Australians in Asia, as well as chapters on sound in Australian cinema and the distribution of screen content. The book is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. It will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of Anglophone film and television, as well as to anyone with an interest in Australian culture and creativity.

This provocative book reveals how Hollywood films reflect our deepest fears and anxieties as a country, often recording our political beliefs and cultural conditions while underscoring the darker side of the American way of life. Long before the war in Iraq and the economic crises of the early 21st century, Hollywood has depicted a grim view of life in the United States, one that belies the prosperity and abundance of the so-called American Dream. While the country emerged from World War II as a world power, collectively our sense of security had been threatened. The result is a cinematic body of work that has America's decline and ruin as a central theme. The author draws from popular films across all genres and six decades to illustrate how the political climate of the times influenced their creation. Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U.S. Decline combines film history, social history, and political history to reveal important themes in the unfolding American narrative. Discussions focus on a wide variety of films, including Rambo, Planet of the Apes, and Easy Rider.

Global in scope and a practical tool for students and teachers of history, Filmography of World History: A Select, Critical Guide To Feature Films That Engage The Past includes description and analysis of over 300 historical films. A companion to Grant Tracey's Filmography of American History, this critical reference book selects movies that represent aspects of world history from the middle ages through the twentieth century. These films adopt as their subject a wide range of historical events, people and societies of Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Canada, and Latin America. Films are arranged alphabetically, with cross referencing by geographic area, time period, and five themes: History as Biography; Crossing Cultures; Civil, International and Sectarian Conflict; Society: Modernization and Tradition; and Redefining Historical Narrative. Each film entry includes production data, current U.S. home video distributors, geographical and time setting, plot description, and references to critical literature. Over half of the entries provide extended analysis of the historical interpretation the film brings to the screen. Filmography of World History argues for the potential of feature films to teach us about the past and its reconstruction in academe and popular culture. The book offers an historian's perspective on films as varied as Ararat, Black Rain, Lin Zexu, Saladin, Winstanley, Judgment at Nuremberg, Distant Thunder, The Official Story, Cabeza de Vaca, Newsfront, Lumumba, Daresalam, and The Great White Man of Lambarene.

Queer Psychology is the first comprehensive book to examine the current state of LGBTQ communities and psychology, through the lenses of both queer theory and Intersectionality theory. Thus, the book describes the experiences of LGBTQ people broadly, while also highlighting the voices of LGBTQ people of color, transgender and gender nonconforming people, those of religious minority groups, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other historically marginalized groups. Each chapter will include an intersectional case example, as well as implications for policy and practice. This book is especially important as there has been an increase in psychology and counseling courses focusing on LGBTQ communities; however, students often learn about LGBTQ-related issues through a White cisgender male normative perspective. The edited volume contains the contributions of leading scholars in LGBTQ psychology, and covers a number of concepts - ranging from identity development to discrimination to health.

Tagline: We watch the same movies, but we don't see the same movies. Hollywood Values makes a heroic effort to show that Hollywood bashing doesn't have it right. Good things are coming out of Hollywood. This book proves it.

Cyndy Hendershot argues that 1950s science fiction films open a window on the cultural paranoia that characterized 1950s America, a phenomenon largely triggered by use of nuclear weapons during World War II. This study uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the various monsters that inhabit 1950s sci-fi movies giant insects, prehistoric creatures, mutants, uncanny doubles, to name a few which serve as metaphorical embodiments of a varied and complex cultural paranoia. Postwar paranoia may have stemmed from the bomb, but it came to correlate with a wider range of issues such as anti-communism, internal totalitarianism, scientific progress, domestic problems, gender roles, and sexuality."

Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune will be seen like never before in the breathtaking film adaptation from acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve. Now fans can be part of the creative journey of bringing Herbert's seminal work to life with The Art and Making of Dune, the only official companion to the hugely anticipated movie event. This exploration of the filmmaking process documents the story of capturing Villeneuve's vision for Dune, from its stunning environmental and creature designs to intricate costume concepts and landmark digital effects. The Art and Making of Dune will also feature interviews with key cast and crew, including extensive insight from Villeneuve. The book will be illustrated with a wealth of concept art and other key visuals showcasing the design process behind the creation of this bold new vision. The Art and Making of Dune is an essential companion to Villeneuve's latest masterpiece.