This book analyses the Korean film industry emergence and development in a global business and economic perspective. This is one of the first books to compare the film policies and industries of the world's six largest film industries - featuring Korea as the central character - with the aim of defining the contours of what constitutes an effective film policy. It presents many cases showing that, contrary to what is often believed, an economically sound policy is a good instrument for achieving desired cultural goals. It uses a set of analytical tools - borrowed from the economic analysis of international trade policies - to provide a rich harvest of new, rigorous, and often unexpected results on the effectiveness of the existing film policies. The implications found in this book are relevant not only for Korea, but for all other countries that wish to foster or enhance the competitiveness of their film industries. This book will be of interest to a wide spectrum of scholars interested in cultural studies - media and cultural specialists, political scientists, sociologists, historians - in addition to business analysts and economists specialized in cultural economics. As this book focuses on film policies and how to improve them, it will also appeal to policymakers, business figures, public relations officials, and staff from international organizations working on the film industry.

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing.

This unique study explores the vampire as host and guest, captor and hostage: a perfect lover and force of seductive predation. From Dracula and Carmilla, to True Blood and The Originals, the figure of the vampire embodies taboos and desires about hospitality, rape and consent. The first section welcomes the reader into ominous spaces of home, examining the vampire through concepts of hospitality and power, the metaphor of threshold, and the blurred boundaries between visitation, invasion and confinement. Section two reflects upon the historical development of vampire narratives and the monster as oppressed, alienated Other. Section three discusses cultural anxieties of youth, (im)maturity, childhood agency, abuse and the age of consent. The final section addresses vampire as intimate partner, mapping boundaries between invitation, passion and coercion. With its fresh insight into vampire genre, this book will appeal to academics, students and general public alike.

This book examines how Shakespeare's plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring together The Tempest and the science fiction-Western Westworld, King Lear and the satirical dynastic drama of Succession, Hamlet and the legal thriller Black Earth Rising, as well as Coriolanus and the political thriller Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare's texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.

This book explores the use of Blockchain and smart contract technologies to develop new ways to finance independent films and digital media worldwide. Using case studies of Alibaba and in-depth, on-set observation of a Sino-US coproduction, as well as research collected from urban China, Hong Kong, Europe, and the USA, Online Film Production in China Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts explores new digital platforms and what this means for the international production of creative works. This research assesses the change in media consciousness from young urban audiences, their emergence as a potential participative and creative community within dis-intermediated, decentralised and distributed crowdfunding and crowdsourcing models. This research proposes solutions on how these young emerging local creative talents can be identified and nurtured early on, particularly those who now produce creative and artistic audiovisual content whether these works are related to film, Virtual Reality (VR), video game, graphic novels, or music. Ultimately, a new media content finance and production platform implementing blockchain is proposed to bring transparency in the film sector and open doors to emerging artists in digital media. Appropriate for both professionals and academics in the film industry as well as computer science.

Reprojecting the City takes a radical new look at the cinematic city through a queer perspective from the global south. Placing centre-stage the intersection of dissident sexuality with capitalism, globalisation and urban development, it shows how recent Latin American films rework our understandings of urban space and disrupt 'Western' imaginations of city life and sexuality in the majority world. Fusing a queer perspective with a range of other critical approaches, Hoff takes current debates beyond the now well-trodden narratives of dependency and subalternity to a new space in which the so-called 'periphery' is relocated back to the centre of things. Latin American cinematic cities, emerge not merely as marginal spaces of prejudice, discrimination, exclusion and violence also ones of hope, empowerment and productive possibility firmly implicated in the global (re)production of sexualities and sexual discourses.

This volume explains how Star Trek allows viewers to comprehend significant aspects of Georg Hegel's concept the absolute, the driving force behind history. Gonzalez, with wit and wisdom, explains how Star Trek exhibits central elements of the absolute. He describes how themes and ethos central to the show display the concept beautifully. For instance, the show posits that people must possess the correct attitudes in order to bring about an ideal society: a commitment to social justice; an unyielding commitment to the truth; and a similar commitment to scientific, intellectual discovery. These characteristics serve as perfect embodiments of Hegel's conceptualization, and Gonzalez's analysis is sharp and exacting.

This book illustrates the many ways that actors contribute to American independent cinema. Analyzing industrial developments, it examines the impact of actors as writers, directors, and producers, and as stars able to attract investment and bring visibility to small-scale productions. Exploring cultural-aesthetic factors, the book identifies the various traditions that shape narrative designs, casting choices, and performance styles. The book offers a genealogy of industrial and aesthetic practices that connects independent filmmaking in the studio era and the 1960s and 1970s to American independent cinema in its independent, indie, indiewood, and late-indiewood forms. Chapters on actors' involvement in the evolution of American independent cinema as a sector alternate with chapters that show how traditions such as naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and Third Cinema influence films and performances.

"Soundies" were the granddaddies of music videos: single-song musical movies that played in special jukeboxes during the 1940s. Some of the biggest musical stars (and stars of the future) appeared in these films: Louis Armstrong, Spike Jones, Liberace, Fats Waller, Stan Kenton, Cab Calloway, and many others. Thanks to Soundies, hundreds of unique musical performances were photographed for posterity. These mini-musicals were originally nothing more than a ten-cent novelty. Today, to film and music fans, they're a priceless part of history. Scott MacGillivray and Ted Okuda, authors of the landmark resource book "The Soundies Distributing Corporation of America," now offer this revised and expanded guide to the Soundies musicals. This all-new book picks up where the original left off: more than 1800 titles are classified by performer, title, and date-many with new, individual annotations and all with new cross-references for easy reading and consultation. There is also a historical account of the prolific Soundies production companies, a look at Soundies' many competitors and descendants (including telescriptions and Scopitones), a checklist of the dozens of Soundies home-movie editions, and a listing of alternate titles to help collectors identify the films more easily. All in one handy volume: "The Soundies Book."

Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema explores the different mechanisms and strategies through which horror films attempt to reinforce or contest gender relations and issues of sexual identity in the continent. The book explores issues of machismo, marianismo, homosociality, bromance, among others through the lens of horror narratives and, especially, it offers an analysis of monstrosity and the figure of the monster as an outlet to play out socio-sexual anxieties in different societies or gender groups. The author looks at a wide rage of films from countries such as Cuba, Peru, Mexico and Argentina and draws points of commonality, as well as comparing essential differences, between the way that horror fictions - considered by many as low-brow cinema - can be effective to delve into the way that sexuality and gender operates and circulates in the popular imaginary in these regions.

Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema looks at the power of cinema in creating ideas that inspire our culture. Sylvie Magerstadt discusses the relationship between art, illusion and reality, a theme that has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. She argues that with the increase in use of digital technologies in modern cinema, this debate has entered a new phase. She discusses the notion of illusions as a system of stories and values that inspire a culture similar to other grand narratives, such as mythology or religion. Cinema thus becomes the postmodern "mythmaking machine" par excellence in a world that finds it increasingly difficult to create unifying concepts and positive illusions that can inspire and give hope. The author draws on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Siegfried Kracauer, and Gilles Deleuze to demonstrate the relevance of continental philosophy to a reading of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The book argues that our longing for illusion is particularly strong in times of crisis, illustrated through an exploration of the recent revival of historic and epic myths in Hollywood cinema, including films such as Troy, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and Clash of the Titans.

Responding to a lack of studies on the film festival's role in the production of cultural memory, this book explores different parameters through which film festivals shape our reception and memories of films. By focusing on two Asian American film festivals, this book analyzes the frames of memory that festivals create for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media. It further establishes that festival locations-both cities and screening venues-play a significant role in shaping our experience of films. Finally, it shows that festivals produce performances which help guide audiences towards certain readings and direct the film's role as a memory object. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, 'Asian American Film Festivals' offers a mixed-methods approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of frames, locations, and performances shaping the festival's memory practices. It also draws attention to the understudied genre of Asian American film festivals, showing how these festivals actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group's collective identity and memory.

Beginning in the 1930s, men and a handful of women came from India's many communities-Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others--to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, "the original fusion music." They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name "Bollywood," but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, "behind the curtain"--the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres.
Now, Gregory D. Booth offers a compelling account of the Bollywood film music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In a rare insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, Booth explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film music industry. On the basis of a fascinating set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creator and performers. Booth also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s-90s as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.
Featuring an extensive companion website with video interviews with the musicians themselves, Behind the Curtain is apowerful, ground-level view of this globally important music industry.

For movie-loving visitors as well as New Yorkers, this is a very special guide to the Big City: thirteen walking tours that lead you to the most timeless and popular of Manhatan's film locations.

With films such as "Muriel's Wedding" and "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" finding recent success in American theaters, Australian cinema has never been as popular in North America as it is today. This new study argues that post-1970 Australian film is best described not as exhibiting phenomenal variety but as focused on a conception of heroism characterized by the love of freedom, the resentment of authority, and attachment to the land, along with anti-intellectualism, fatalism, and occasional sexism. Tracing these themes through one hundred films, Scheckels explores the ways in which they are reflected through depictions of men, women, aboriginals, and youth, with each demographic group posing its own unique generic and cultural questions.

Including films both elite and popular, excellent and flawed, "Celluloid Heroes Down Under" offers film-by-film discussions in seven chapters, making the volume both a highly readable study of a particular cinema and superb reference guide for its readers. Unlike previous studies of the nation's film output, Sheckels's work presents its subject not as a miscellaneous collection but as a focused endeavor, a cohesive and undervalued component of world cinema.

One of the most popular thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock's middle years, Rear Window is now also recognised as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the director's cinematic wizardry. Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, with Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr in memorable supporting roles, the film centres on a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment who, using binoculars, spies on his courtyard neighbours and witnesses a possible murder. Stefan Sharff, professor emeritus of Columbia University's film department, shows us how Hitchcock achieved the mounting excitement and fear that mark this film. The author first provides a detailed overview of the director's skill in developing the story from intriguing start to shattering climax. In the second part of the book, he goes on to a shot-by-shot analysis; using the film's continuity as his text, he describes how Hitchcock's technique accomplished its magic. Illustrated throughout with stills from the film, The Art of Looking is a unique appreciation of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, made even more valuable by the first publication in any form of the full dialogue of a screen masterpiece.