Until now, there hasn't been one single-volume authoritative reference work on the history of women in film, highlighting nearly every woman filmmaker from the dawn of cinema including Alice Guy (France, 1896), Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Penny Marshall (U.S.), and Sally Potter (U.K.). Every effort has been made to include every kind of woman filmmaker: commercial and mainstream, avant-garde, and minority, and to give a complete cross-section of the work of these remarkable women. Scholars and students of film, popular culture, Women's Studies, and International Studies, as well as film buffs will learn much from this work. The Dictionary covers the careers of nearly 200 women filmmakers, giving vital statistics where available, listings of films directed by these women, and selected bibliographies for further reading. This is a one-volume, "one-stop" resource, a comprehensive, up-to-date guide that is absolutely essential for any course offering an overview or survey of women's cinema. It offers not only all available statistics, but critical evaluations of the filmmakers' work as well. In order to keep the length manageable, this volume focuses on women who direct fictional narrative films, with occasional forays into the area of the documentary and is limited to film production rather than video production.

A perfect gift for Downton Abbey fans, the official film companion provides a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the art and making of the sequel to the globally successful Downton Abbey film. The worldwide phenomenon and multi-award winning Downton Abbey returns to the big screen with a movie sequel starring the Crawley family and their household staff-and the Downton Abbey 2: The Official Film Companion is the Downton fan's front-row ticket to all the behind-the-scenes action. In addition to the original principal cast-including Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess, Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary, and Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern as Lord and Lady Grantham-fans will gain an unprecedented look at the new Downton characters, including those played by new cast members Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Nathalie Baye, and Dominic West. Featuring spectacular photographs from the production, interviews with the cast and crew, and insight from Downton Abbey writer and creator Julian Fellowes, Downton Abbey 2: The Official Film Companion gives fans an in-depth experience of the magic and elegance of Downton Abbey.

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.

Pop music stars in many of the most exciting and successful British films--from "Performance" to "Trainspotting," from "A Hard Day's Night" to H"uman Traffic." Other films using pop music might be more obscure but include many demonstrating a boldness and imagination rarely matched in other areas of British cinema.
Pop artists (David Bowie, Cliff Richard, Spice Girls, Patsy Kensit, Sex Pistols) could be said to be captured at their most iconic on celluloid. And of course there are the rare but prized cameos from a huge variety of other musicians and their songs in the most unexpected of places. This book tells the story and records the facts of the pop-film relationship decade by decade. It is the most systematic guide to where and how pop appears in British cinema.
"Pop in British Cinema" includes:
* Decade by decade commentary and systematic listings of films with pop music
* Comprehensive referencing of all British feature films using music from the 50s to the end of the century
* Illustrations and descriptions of the changing ways of using pop in British film
* Listings of "band" movies and indexes to musicians, directors, and film titles
For researchers and the curious alike this is an easy and fascinating reference source. It represents both a first history of pop music in British cinema and a mine of trivia questions for music and film buffs of all descriptions.

A collection of ten original essays forging new interdisciplinary connections between crime fiction and film, encompassing British, Swedish, American and Canadian contexts. The authors explore representations of race, gender, sexuality and memory, and challenge traditional categorisations of academic and professional crime writing.

Rock Hudson rose to stardom as the virile hero of adventure films, and he then gained a flurry of female fans by starring in melodramas, like Magnificent Obsession. He earned an Oscar nomination for his role in Giant, starred in successful romantic comedies, and had a productive television and stage career. This book provides full information about his many performances and charts his life and career up to his death from AIDS. Rock Hudson was a movie giant, one of the biggest stars Hollywood ever produced. He gained early fame as the romantic hero of adventure films and melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession (1954). He then tackled serious drama in Giant (1956), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. With the success of Pillow Talk (1959), he entered a new genre for which he would become best known-the sex comedy. He also had a successful stage and television career. This book charts Rock Hudson's rise as a celebrity until his death from AIDS. A biography opens the volume, followed by chapters which chronicle his work in film, television, radio, and the stage. Each chapter contains descriptions of Hudson's individual performances, with entries providing cast and credit information, plot summaries, excerpts from reviews, and critical commentary. The volume also includes a listing of Hudson's awards and an annotated bibliography of additional sources of information.

Timely and ground-breaking, Love in Western Film and Television discloses surprising, and often disturbing, information about the complicated (and often conflicted) emotional frontiers found in Western films released after the Second World War. Fourteen essays by authors from around the world offer new insights to those interested in the American character and the areas of culture, gender, film, and American studies.

How has America censored British films? In this original, fascinating book, Anthony Slide answers this question, making full use for the first time of the recently opened US Production Code Administration files. Film by film from the 1930s through to the 1960s, he tells the inside story of the ongoing dialogue between the British film making industry and the American censors. The book shows graphically how the Production Code system operated, revealing how the censors viewed moral issues, violence, bad language and matters of decorum as well as revealing acute national differences, such as American concern over the British preoccupation with toilets. It also dispels myths, depicting chief censor Joseph Breen and his staff as knowledgeable people who sympathized with and admired the British film industry.

Scotland's greatest export. The world's first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet. Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century. Behind the son of a factory worker, growing up in near-poverty on the harsh streets of pre-war Edinburgh, lay a timeless array of motion pictures that spanned multiple decades and saw Connery work across the globe with directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. And amongst them his greatest role, whether he liked it or not - Bond, James Bond. Author A. J. Black delves into Connery's life for more than mere biography, exploring not just the enormously varied pictures he made including crowd pleasing blockbusters such as The Untouchables or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, serious-minded fare in The Hill or The Offence, and his strange sojourns into eclectic fantasy with Zardoz or Time Bandits, but also the sweep of a career that crossed movie eras as well as decades. From skirmishes with the angry young men of the British New Wave, via becoming the cinematic icon of the 1960s as 007, through to a challenging reinvention as a unique older actor of stature in the 1980s, this exploration of the Cinematic Connery shows just how much his work reflected the changing movie-going tastes, political realities and cultural trends of the 20th century, and beyond . . .

The Frankenstein narrative is one of cinema's most durable, and it is often utilized by the studio system and the most renegade independents alike to reveal our deepest aspirations and greatest anxieties. The films have concerned themselves with demarcations of gender, race, and technology, and this new study aims to critique the more traditional interpretations of both the narrative and its sustained popularity. From James Whale's "Frankenstein" (1931) through Kenneth Branagh's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994), the story remains a nuanced and ultimately ambivalent one and is discussed here in all of its myriad terms: aesthetic, cultural, psychological, and mythic.

Beginning with an examination of the narrative's origins in the myth of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus, "The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein" goes on to consider each of the filM's many incarnations, from the Universal horror films of the thirties through the British Hammer series and beyond. Moving easily between the scholarly and the popular, the book employs both primary texts-including scripts, posters, and documentation of production histories-and a rigorous, scholarly examination of the many implications of this often-misunderstood subgenre of horror cinema.

Fifteen years in the making, "860 glittering pages" ("The New York Times"), the first volume of the astonishing life of Barbara Sanwyck--one of our greatest screen actresses--explores her extraordinary range of eighty-eight motion pictures, her work, her world, and her Hollywood through an American century.
Frank Capra called her "the greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known." Yet Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) was also one of its most underrated stars. Now, Victoria Wilson gives us the most complete portrait of this magnificent actress, seen as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock...her years in New York as dancer and Broadway star...her fraught marriage to Broadway genius, Frank Fay...the adoption of a son; her partnership with Zeppo Marx, with whom she created a horse breeding farm; her fairytale romance and marriage to Robert Taylor, America's most sought-after male star... Here is the shaping of her career working with Hollywood's most important directors, all set against the times--the Depression, the rise of the unions, the coming of World War II, and a fast-evolving motion picture industry. At the heart of the book is Stanwyck herself--how she transformed herself from shunned outsider into one of America's most revered screen actresses.
Volume One is the result of more than 100 exhaustive interviews with those who knew Stanwyck, many who never before had agreed to be interviewed: her family, friends, and co-workers from Lauren Bacall, Jane Fonda, and Jackie Cooper to Patricia Neal, Milton Berle, and Kirk Douglas; from Billy Wilder, Bruce Dern, and Anthony Quinn to Jane Powell, Charlton Heston, Arthur Laurents, and Sydney Lumet. "An epic Hollywood narrative," "A Life of Barbara Stanwyck "includes never-before-seen letters, journals, and photographs.

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.

Over the last decade, migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe have become an issue in political debates about human rights, social integration, multiculturalism and citizenship in Great Britain. The increasing number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain has provoked ambivalent and diverse responses, including representations in film and literature that range from travel writing, humorous fiction, mockumentaries, musicals, drama and children's literature to the thriller. The present volume discusses a wide range of representations of Eastern and Central Europe and its people as reflected in British literature, film and culture. The book offers new readings of authors who have influenced the cultural imagination since the nineteenth century, such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Arthur Koestler. It also discusses the work of more contemporary writers and film directors including Sacha Baron Cohen, David Cronenberg, Vesna Goldsworthy, Kapka Kassabova, Marina Lewycka, Ken Loach, Mike Phillips, Joanne K. Rowling and Rose Tremain. With its focus on post-Wall Europe, "Facing the East in the West "goes beyond discussions of migration to Britain from an established postcolonial perspective and contributes to the current exploration of 'new' European identities.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This is a critical collection of key films, directors, and performers in American film, 1965-1995, a period that spans the demise of the studio system to the rise of the independents. The guide includes such notable contributions as the early work of Mike Nichols, the litany of 1970s masterpieces from Francis Ford Coppola, the overlooked works of genre directors Monte Hellman and Larry Cohen, and the exciting new independent generation of Lili Taylor, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Todd Haynes, and Spike Lee. Of interest to scholars, students, and film buffs.

Each film entry contains key cast and technical credits, a brief synopsis and analysis, and notable awards. Each entry for director and performer contains biographical data, a career overview, a complete filmography and noted television and stage appearances, a selected bibliography, and honors received.

The first book-length study to critically examine the recent wave of Hitler biopics in German cinema and television. A group of international experts discuss films like "Downfall" in the context of earlier portrayals of Hitler and draw out their implications for the changing place of the Third Reich in the national historical imagination.

In Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled a collection of essays that explore the many tropes and themes through which undead Westerns make the genre's inner plagues and demons visible, and lay siege to a frontier tied to myths of strength, ingenuity, freedom, and independence. The volume is divided into three sections: "Reanimating Classic Western Tropes" examines traditional Western characters, symbolism, and plot devices and how they are given new life in undead Westerns; "The Moral Order Under Siege" explores the ways in which the undead confront classic values and morality tales embodied in Western films; and "And Hell Followed with Him" looks at justice, retribution, and retaliation at the hands of undead angels and avenger. The subjects explored here run the gamut from such B films as Curse of the Undead and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to A-list features like From Dusk 'til Dawn and Jonah Hex, as well as animated films (Rango) and television programs (The Walking Dead and Supernatural). Other films discussed include Sam Raimi's Bubba Ho-Tep, John Carpenter's Vampires, George Romero's Land of the Dead, and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Featuring several illustrations and a filmography, Undead in the West will appeal to film scholars, especially those interested in hybrid genres, as well as fans of the Western and the supernatural in cinema.

Nonfiction films about sports have been around for decades, but few scholarly articles have been published on sports documentaries. In Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries, editors Zachary Ingle and David Sutera have assembled a collection of essays that look at the ways in which identity-national, religious, ethnic, racial, etc.-and myth are constructed, perpetuated, or questioned in documentaries produced in the United States, France, Australia, Germany, and Japan. This volume is divided into three sections: American Identity and Myth contains essays on consumerism, religion in sports, and post-9/11 America. The second section, Race and Ethnicity, examines the ways in which African-American, Mexican-American, and Jewish identity are portrayed in the documentaries under discussion. Global Perspectives includes essays about films and TV series produced outside of the United States or that provide perspectives on the international sport scene. Spanning several decades, the landmark sports documentaries discussed in this volume include Hoop Dreams, The Endless Summer, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Olympia, and Tokyo Olympiad.Sports covered in these films include baseball, football, basketball, boxing, soccer, surfing, and the Olympics. Essays in this volume pose such questions as: How are notions of the American dream involved in athletes' aspirations? How do media texts from Australia or France construct Australian and French identity, respectively? How did filmmakers such as Leni Riefenstahl, Kon Ichikawa, and Bud Greenspan infuse their Olympic documentaries with their own national ideology, despite the films also being intended for international audience consumption? By tackling those subjects, the essays in this collection make Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries an intriguing read for scholars, students, and the general public.