American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protege Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book will consider the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader's Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader's guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain's discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid's life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West - and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

"The Moving Picture World" magazine was the industry standard during the silent cinema era. This is the first index compiled for all the films reviewed in the early volumes of this journal. In 1916, the magazine itself began providing an index to film reviews. Until now, researchers and scholars had to scour page-by-page through each weekly issue from 1907-1915 to find a desired review. This new index, focusing on this period, lists films alphabetically by title, identifies manufacturers/distributors with their films, and provides full dates and page locations for reviews. The index provides easy access to reviews of theatrical films, news pictorials, series and serials, and early travelogues.

Many of the films included in this index are no longer extant; thus, contemporary reviews may be the only means for analysis of these pioneering cinematic efforts. The reviews contain valuable information about the standards and tastes of film in its infancy, and shed light on story content in those early days. Some of the titles in this index will shock the user; many will cause laughter; all are worthy of remembrance for their historical value. Over 27,000 films are listed; the preface chronicles the history of the journal and explains clearly how to use the book. No reviews are included--the index is designed to encourage and guide the user towards an increased familiarity with the "Moving Picture World," which is currently available on microfilm through the Library of Congress

This book opens up the history of twentieth-century French cinema from the silent era to the present day by exploring the key role of gender and sexual politics. A much-needed sequel to Berg's bestselling Gender and German Cinema, the volume tackles such questions as:
- What role did the female voice play when sound cinema was first developed?
- How have film genres and movements been shaped by gender and sexual politics?
- How does gender intersect with factors of race, class, ethnic and national identity?
The contributors also throw into relief broad issues such as the evolution of film in the context of 20C French social, political and cultural history.
Bringing together original essays by French, British and American scholars, the collection fully covers the development of French cinema. It addresses the work of individual auteurs, the French star system, and film genres and movements such as Dada and Surrealism, the New Wave and the New New Wave. It also focuses on film narratives in which issues of gender are particularly pertinent. The volume, which features illustrations, a filmography and bibliography, will be one of the standard handbooks in French cultural/film studies for some time to come.

Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception. In the middle of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, ghost movies became major box office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular "J-Horror" genre inspired similar ghost movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. They reflect upon the identity crises and traumas of the living as well as of the dead, and they unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.

Investigating cinema under the magnifying glass From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.

The laws of movie-making explains the basic legal and business principles behind producing and distributing an independent feature film. This title discusses way of conceptualising an economically viable idea for a film and procure financial investment, warns of the pitfalls of production and simplifies the intricacies of international distribution, while showing you how to limit your legal liabilities. It is intended not only for film students and future film producers, but also for lawyers and entrepreneurs who are eager to understand the mechanisms of the film industry.

Best known for "The Piano," Jane Campion is a author/director whose films explore the relationship between literature and cinema. This book mixes cultural and textual analysis of Campion's films alongside consideration of concepts such as context, pastiche and genre. All those interested in Campion or adaptation studies must read this text.

Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities seeks to reconfigure the ways in which adaptation is conceptualised by considering adaptation within an extended range of generic, critical and theoretical contexts. This collection explores literary, film, television and other visual texts both as origins and adaptations and offers new insights into the construction of genres, canons and classics. Chapters investigate both classic and contemporary texts by British and American authors, from Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens to Bret Easton Ellis, P.D James and Sarah Waters. A diverse range of literary, film and television genres is examined, from romance to science fiction, the Western to the;women's picture and the heritage film to postmodern pastiche. With a thematic focus on key critical paradigms for adaptation studies - fidelity, intertextuality, historicity and authorship - this collection expands the field of adaptation studies beyond its conventional focus on page to screen adaptations to include film remakes, video games, biopics, fan fiction and celebrity culture.

Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns. -- .

This is a comprehensive guide to the black experience both on film and behind the camera. More than 6,000 entries documenting global film activity from 1919 to 1990 offer historical perspective on the black image in film, bibliographical material on filmmakers and individual artists, and exciting information on newly emerging talent throughout the world. Drawing on a wide variety of resource materials, the study furnishes extensive coverage of developments in filmmaking in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean, followed by a thorough examination of the African-American film experience. Two appendixes provide supplementary data on reference works, and names and addresses of notable film resource centers. Four indexes keyed by artist, title, subject, and author complete the work, which proves to be a valuable reference work for scholars and historians in the field of blacks in film.

The triple crown of Oscars awarded to Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002 seemed to mark a turning point for African Americans in cinema. Certainly it was hyped as such by the media, eager to overlook the nuances of this sudden embrace. In this new study, author David Leonard uses this event as a jumping-off point from which to discuss the current state of African-American cinema and the various genres that currently compose it. Looking at such recent films as Love and Basketball, Antwone Fisher, Training Day, and the two Barbershop films--all of which were directed by black artists, and most of which starred and were written by blacks as well--Leonard examines the issues of representation and opportunity in contemporary cinema. In many cases, these films-which walk a line between confronting racial stereotypes and trafficking in them-made a great deal of money while hardly playing to white audiences at all. By examining the ways in which they address the American Dream, racial progress, racial difference, blackness, whiteness, class, capitalism and a host of other issues, Leonard shows that while certainly there are differences between the grotesque images of years past and those that define today's era, the consistency of images across genre and time reflects the lasting power of racism, as well as the black community's response to it.