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.

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.

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.

Paul Newland's illuminating study explores the ways in which London's East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts - films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour. "The Cultural Construction of London's East End" offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television's "EastEnders," Monica Ali's "Brick Lane," Walter Besant's "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," Thomas Burke's "Limehouse Nights," Peter Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor," films such as "Piccadilly, Sparrows Can't Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider," and in the work of Iain Sinclair.

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.

Newly revised and updated, "Film Lighting "is an indispensible sourcebook for the aspiring and practicing cinematographer, based on extensive interviews with leading cinematographers and gaffers in the film industry.
Film lighting is a living, dynamic art influenced by new technologies and the changing styles of leading cinematographers. A combination of state-of-the-art technology and in-depth interviews with industry experts, "Film Lighting "provides an inside look at how cinematographers and film directors establish the visual concept of the film and use the lighting to create a certain atmosphere.
Kris Malkiewicz uses firsthand material from the experts he interviewed while researching this book. Among these are leading cinematographers Dion Beebe, Russell Carpenter, Caleb Deschanel, Robert Elswit, Mauro Fiore, Adam Holender, Janusz Kaminski, Matthew Libatique, Rodrigo Prieto, Harris Savides, Dante Spinotti, and Vilmos Zsigmond. This updated version of "Film Lighting" fills a growing need in the industry and will be a perennial, invaluable resource.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the past decade, Japan has become a key player on the contemporary horror scene, producing some of the most influential and critically respected genre movies of recent years and helping to spark off the worldwide interest in Asian horror. Whether it's the subtle chills of Ring, the graphic brutality of Audition or the zombie-fuelled mayhem of Versus, Japanese horror has had a major impact throughout the world, leading to high profile remakes and sending its most talented directors to Hollywood. Flowers from Hell is the most in-depth look at the vibrant and challenging world of modern Japanese horror so far, covering the best directors, the most important films and the most popular themes of the past 25 years. From its origins in the mid-80s to the multi-million dollar franchises of today, Flowers from Hell traces the evolution of this consistently inventive and influential horror phenomenon. * Films featured include: - * The Ring series *Audition *Battle Royale *Juon/The Gru

Since its original publication in 1987, "Channels of Discourse" has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies.
The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added--one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays--and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text.
Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from "Rescue 911" and "Twin Peaks" to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals.
"Channels of Discourse, Reassembled" suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity.
The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.

Twilight for the Gods: The Art and History of Film Editing is a passionate exploration of the important role played by editing in the process of film-making and a functional guide to using editing most effectively. The book explains how an editor is, in many ways, responsible for the final rewriting of a script - and that editing is in reality a pictorial form of writing. Filled with examples from well-known films, the book explores all aspects of film editing from the first flash of inspiration to the latest technological advances. Readers will learn about the early history of editing, the impact of television, the influence of the French New Wave, and liquid editing. The book also discusses working with directors, making the first cut, and cutting room etiquette. Written by a film editor with 50 years of experience in the field, Twilight for the Gods is well suited to courses on media editing. The book is also an excellent reading selection for classes dealing with film history.

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.

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.

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.