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.

Examines the social and historical significance of women's contributions to American silent Film comedy. For many people the term ""silent comedy"" conjures up images of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Buster Keaton's Stoneface, or Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the side of a skyscraper. Even people who have never seen a silent film can recognize these comedians at a glance. But what about the female comedians? Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda, Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge-these and numerous others were wildly popular during the silent fi lm era, appearing in countless motion pictures and earning top salaries, and yet their names have been almost entirely forgotten. As a consequence, recovering their history is all the more compelling given that they laid the foundation for generations of funny women, from Lucille Ball to Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. These women constitute an essential and neglected sector of film history, reflecting a turning point in women's social and political history. Their talent and brave spirit continues to be felt today, and Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film seeks to provide a better understanding of women's experiences in the early twentieth century and to better understand and appreciate the unruly and boundary-breaking women who have followed. The diversity and breadth of archival materials explored in Comic Venus illuminate the social and historical period of comediennes and silent film. It is the first book to explore the overlooked contributions made by comediennes in American silent fi lm. Those with an interest in fi lm and representations of femininity in comedy will be fascinated by the analytical connections and thoroughly researched histories of these women and their groundbreaking movements in comedy and stage.

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society. Often, the manly good becomes the ugly bad, while the monstrous bad turns out to be the attractive good. Movie men and monsters, then, offer a critical window into American culture. Specifically, the authors examine movies as complicated markers of and participants within the foundational social discourse of subject formation and hegemonic discipline. Of particular focus are warfare and militarism, neoliberal capitalism-corporatism-imperialism, the infliction of gender, and the agonistic negotiations of power.

Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with "getting on" with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British.

Genre - or 'type' - is a core concept in both film production and the history of film. Genres play a key role in how moviegoers perceive and rate films, and is likely to determine a film's production values and costs.
Written in a clear, engaging, jargon-free style, this volume offers a cutting-edge theoretical overview of the topic of genre as practiced in British, American and French film criticism. Organized by a series of simple but fundamental questions, the book uses numerous examples from classic Hollywood cinema (the western, drama, musical comedy, and film noir) as well as some more contemporary examples from European or Asian cinema that are so often neglected by other studies in the field. How do we characterize genre and what are its various functions? In what ways does genre give a film its identity? How do genres emerge? What is the cultural significance of genre and how does it circulate within and across national boundaries? Informative and user-friendly, Moine's book is accessible to general readers and adapts easily to a wide range of teaching approaches.

"Brief on brilliant cocktail conversation? This reader-friendly collection will help you apply Foucault to Keanu, Derrida to Spielberg, Macbeth to Blair Witch, and pull it off with panache. Stimulating in small doses, its 34 essays deconstruct 1990s cinema, and the decade too, with intellectual vigor and a wry sense of humor."
--"Variety"

"The End of Cinema As We Know It is at once academic and popular in the best sense of both terms-intelligent and erudite critical analysis conveyed through accessible and gracefully written prose. Just like the cinema of the '90s itself, this collection of thirty-four smart and sprightly essays refuses to be bound by traditional categories. Free from the homogenized consensus that too often results from the supposed advantage of historical distance, these broadly ranging essays on a period still fresh in our memory necessarily pose more questions than they answer. But they are good provocative questions and it is precisely this spirit of free-wheeling inquiry and fearless speculation that makes the book so enjoyable to read."
--Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television

""The End of Cinema" provides an enjoyable reading with a good balance of academic and popular qualities."
--American Studies International, June 2002

"The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties, is an encouraging step in a new direction. In it, we find an impressive assembly of established as well as younger scholars grappling both with pop-film and industry concerns."
--"Cineaste"

Almost half a century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, "I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have beenwaiting forand wondering aboutthis prophecy ever since. The way films are made and exhibited has changed significantly. Films, some of which are not exactly "films" anymore, can now be projected in a wide variety of wayson screens in revamped high tech theaters, on big, high-resolution TVs, on little screens in minivans and laptops. But with all this new gear, all these new ways of viewing films, are we necessarily getting different, better movies?

The thirty-four brief essays in The End of Cinema as We Know It attend a variety of topics, from film censorship and preservation to the changing structure and status of independent cinemafrom the continued importance of celebrity and stardom to the sudden importance of alternative video. While many of the contributors explore in detail the pictures that captured the attention of the nineties film audience, such as "Jurassic Park," "Eyes Wide Shut," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "The Wedding Banquet," "The Matrix," "Independence Day," "Gods and Monsters," "The Nutty Professor," and "Kids," several essays consider works that fall outside the category of film as it is conventionally definedthe home "movie" of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon and the amateur video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King.

Examining key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles and audio-visual technologies, the contributors to this volume spell out the end of cinema in terms of irony, cynicism and exhaustion, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the decline of what we once used to call film culture.

Contributors include: Paul Arthur, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Thomas Doherty, Thomas Elsaesser, KrinGabbard, Henry Giroux, Heather Hendershot, Jan-Christopher Hook, Alexandra Juhasz, Charles Keil, Chuck Klienhans, Jon Lewis, Eric S. Mallin, Laura U. Marks, Kathleen McHugh, Pat Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, Hillary Radner, Ralph E. Rodriguez, R.L. Rutsky, James Schamus, Christopher Sharrett, David Shumway, Robert Sklar, Murray Smith, Marita Sturken, Imre Szeman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Maureen Turim, Justin Wyatt, and Elizabeth Young.

It is often suggested that there are 'secrets' to comedy or that it is 'lightning in a bottle', but the craft of comedy writing can be taught. While comedic tastes change, over time and from person to person, the core underpinning still depends on the comedic geniuses that have paved the way. Great comedy is built upon a strong foundation. In Writing the Comedy Movie, Marc Blake lays out - in an entertainingly readable style - the nuts and bolts of comedy screenwriting. His objective is to clarify the 'rules' of comedy: to contextualize comedy staples such as the double act, slapstick, gross-out, rom com, screwball, satire and parody and to introduce new ones such as the bromance or stoner comedy. He explains the underlying principles of comedy and comedy writing for the screen, along with providing analysis of leading examples of each subgenre.

This book discusses British cinema's representation of the Great War during the 1920s. It argues that popular cinematic representations of the war offered surviving audiences a language through which to interpret their recent experience, and traces the ways in which those interpretations changed during the decade.

Once called the ""perfect example of a homeless waif"" by director Cecil B. DeMille, Junior Coghlan has been acting in movies for over 70 years. Perhaps best remembered for his role as Billy Batson in the Republic serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, he has worked with many of the legends of Hollywood, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper, and Shirley Temple. Also included are the stories of Coghlan's 23-year naval service, where he enlisted as an aviator during World War II and eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Included are the stories of his eight years as the naval liaison on such films as The Caine Mutiny and Mr. Roberts. A filmography traces his career.

Examining Brazilian and Argentine cinema of the last fifteen years, this volume charts the emergence of a new concern with the real, bringing together contributions from leading film scholars and critics from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Comparing 'New Argentine Cinema" and the Brazilian 'Retomada, ' the contributors read across the boundaries between documentary and fiction and trace new modes of deploying performance and re-enactment, found footage, and the interplay between film and television and theater. They shed light on similarities between and variations in different Latin American national cinemas' filmic discourses and production contexts and map these findings onto the larger context of current film theory.

This book provides an interdisciplinary and collaborative anthology that seeks to make a compelling and exciting analysis of contemporary Hollywood film texts (and the larger industry and society to which they are dialectically related) in light of Giroux's ideas about public pedagogy. Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg.

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema.

Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing form we encounter them, our collective repertoire of symbolic forms, historical sensibilities, modes of representation, and patterns of imagination determine how we identify, analyze and deal with catastrophes and crises.This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire's eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.

The life and career of Henry Fonda, one of Hollywood's greatest stars, are detailed in this bio-bibliography that places equal emphasis on the actor's professional and private lives. The reference provides a complete and detailed guide to Fonda's films, television, theater, radio, recordings, awards, video releases, and a comprehensive bibliography. A detailed index makes it easy to look up every significant actor and filmmaker with whom Fonda worked. Also included are filmographies of Jane and Peter Fonda.

This collection explores the centrality of The Who's classic album, and Franc Roddam's cult classic film of adolescent life, Quadrophenia to the recent cultural history of Britain, to British subcultural studies, and to a continuing fascination with Mod style and culture. The interdisciplinary chapters collected here set the album and film amongst critical contexts including gender and sexuality studies, class analysis, and the film and album's urban geographies, seeing Quadrophenia as a transatlantic phenomenon and as a perennial adolescent story. Contributors view Quadrophenia through a variety of lenses, including the Who's history and reception, the 1970s English political and social landscape, the adolescent novel of development (the bildungsroman), the perception of the film through the eyes of Mods and Mod revivalists, 1970s socialist politics, punk, glam, sharp suits, scooters and the Brighton train, arguing for the continuing richness of Quadrophenia's depiction of the adolescent dilemma. The volume includes new interviews with Franc Roddam, director of Quadrophenia, and the photographer Ethan Russell, who took the photos for the album's famous photo booklet.

In his signature larger-than-life style, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall is a revealing self-portrait of his illustrious, controversial and truly unique life.

Born in a small Austrian town in 1947, a year of famine, he was the son of an austere police chief. He dreamed of moving to America to become a bodybuilding champion and a movie star. By the age of 21, he was living in Los Angeles and had been crowned Mr Universe. Within five years, he had learned English and become the greatest bodybuilder in the world. Within ten years, he had earned his college degree and was a millionaire from his business enterprises in real estate, landscaping and bodybuilding. He was also the winner of a Golden Globe Award for his debut as a dramatic actor in Stay Hungry. But that was only the beginning.

The Terminator spawned numerous sequels and made him one of Hollywood's biggest stars, as he had a series of hit films including Predator, Total Recall, True Lies and Twins. He married Maria Shriver, becoming part of the Kennedy clan, while going on to become the Republican governor of California, where he led the state through a budget crisis, natural disasters and political turmoil. It is the greatest immigrant success story of our time.

His story is unique, and uniquely entertaining, and he tells it brilliantly in these pages. Until now, he has never told the full story of his life, in his own voice. Here is Arnold, with total recall.