Examining 40 cycles or themes and more than 1,000 silent films, the author attempts to discern how the screen reflected contemporary social, political, and national trends during the silent years. The period has been divided into the early silent years (1900-1919), with films of one or two reels dominating for the first 15 years, and the later silent period (1920-1929), known as the Golden Age of the Silents, in which feature-length films dominated. One of the author's goals is to establish the success, and sometimes the failure, of these films to capture the social and political times of their release. Other film books approach the dramas and comedies by genre, not by specific cycles, which makes this work unique.

The book focuses on both short works and feature-length films that are generally arranged chronologically under specific chapters. Each entry lists the title, year of release, director, and original source, if provided by the film. The major players are often included within the plot summary and analysis. Remakes and films with alternate titles are noted.

Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education is the first international and multidisciplinary effort to coalesce knowledge on education and popular culture studied as broad phenomena and not as a collection of case studies. In this volume, popular culture has been thematically treated as it appears in a variety of media, including movies, digital games, advertising, television, popular songs, and the internet. The book considers education in both formal and informal settings, and looks critically at the accepted dichotomy between education and popular culture. It argues that popular culture is capable of educating and that education shares many characteristics with popular culture, and tries to overcome these dichotomous relationships while also trying to clarify the reciprocal effects between the two. The book calls disciplinary and media boundaries into question in an effort to widen the possibility of enlarging the vocabulary and the verbs of all that stays unnamed by what is considered knowledge.

This book is the first in-depth cultural history of cinema's polyvalent and often contradictory appropriations of Shakespearean drama and performance traditions. The author argues that these adapatations have helped shape multiple aspects of film, from cinematic style to genre and narrative construction.

This is the first comprehensive study of Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett's innovative work for the screen. "Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television "provides meticulous analysis of every play Beckett wrote, directed, or adapted for the screen. Herren studies Beckett's use of "memory machines"--technological media for channeling personal, cultural, philosophical, and artistic ghosts from the past. Having conjured these ghosts, Beckett "decomposes" them in order to recompose them for distinctly innovative use. Herren traces this countraditional approach to tradition as Beckett's signature style for film and television. The book concludes with a consideration of the "Beckett on Film" project, where Herren defends the vital need for creative freedom in future productions of Beckett's plays. With this publication, the film and television plays can now assume their rightful place alongside Beckett's remarkable fiction and stage plays, collectively constituting one of the most innovative artistic achievements of the twentieth century.

Crash Politics and Antiracism argues that race and racism continue to script the social fabric in Euro-North America. While dominant discourses claim that we have made significant progress away from racial bigotry, there is no shortage of evidence that inequitable ideologies of race prevail. Similarly, mainstream cinematic productions have mass appeal, yet tend to demonstrate and cement the racial ideologies that circulate in society. As such, they can be used either for the propagation of dominant ideologies or in the development of critical consciousness. Crash Politics and Antiracism does the latter, understanding the award-winning film Crash as an especially interesting pedagogical site, for while to many it offers a fresh analysis of race and racism, the antiracist analyses in this book suggest that it recycles oppressive understandings of race. The essays in this collection, written from a variety of racial locations, provide readings of Crash that seek to disrupt the movie's subtle messages and, more importantly, some of the intractable liberal notions of race that perpetuate racial inequity. The considerations raised in this volume will enrich critical conversations about how race and racism work in contemporary Euro-North American societies - whether these conversations occur in classrooms, boardrooms, or living rooms.

Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies - a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as "memory", "fragmentation", "desire", "genre", "authorship", and "censorship".

Policies in the EU are largely made by national civil servants who prepare and implement decisions in Brussels as well as at home. Despite their important role, these national civil servants form a relatively hidden world that has received little attention from both the media and academics. This volume considers a wide variety of sources and research methods to answer such questions as: how many civil servants are actually involved in EU-related activities? What do these civil servants do when they engage with the EU? And how do they negotiate their dual roles? "The New Eurocrats" offers unique and invaluable insight into these civil servants and their working practices--and uncovers some secrets in the world of EU governance along the way.

Most histories of Soviet cinema portray the 1970s as a period of stagnation with the gradual decline of the film industry. This book, however, examines Soviet film and television of the era as mature industries articulating diverse cultural values via new genre models. During the 1970s, Soviet cinema and television developed a parallel system of genres where television texts celebrated conservative consensus while films manifested symptoms of ideological and social crises. The book examines the genres of state-sponsored epic films, police procedural, comedy and melodrama, and outlines how television gradually emerged as the major form of Russo-Soviet popular culture. Through close analysis of well-known film classics of the period as well as less familiar films and television series, this groundbreaking work helps to deconstruct the myth of this era as a time of cultural and economic stagnation and also helps us to understand the persistence of this myth in the collective memory of Putin-era Russia. This monograph is the first book-length English-language study of film and television genres of the late Soviet era.

The beginning of the twenty-first century has already seen its fair share of modern myths with heroes such as Spider-Man, Superman, and Harry Potter. The authors in this volume deconstruct, discuss, engage, and interrogate the mythologies of the new millennium in science fiction fantasy texts. Using literary and rhetorical criticism - paired with philosophy, cultural studies, media arts, psychology, and communication studies - they illustrate the function, value, and role of new mythologies, and show that the universal appeal of these texts is their mythic power, drawing upon archetypes of the past which resonate with individuals and throughout culture. In this way they demonstrate how mythology is timeless and eternal.

Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis is a sequel to Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film (AUP, 2016), but the two studies can be read separately. Because of the sheer variety of Fons Rademakers' oeuvre, which spans 'art' cinema and cult, genre film and historical epics, each chapter will start with one of his titles to introduce a key concept from psychoanalysis. It is an oft-voiced claim that Dutch cinema strongly adheres to realism, but this idea is put into perspective by using psychoanalytic theories on desire and fantasy. In the vein of cinephilia, this study brings together canonical titles (Als twee druppels water; Soldaat van Oranje) and little gems (Monsieur Hawarden; Kracht). It juxtaposes among others Gluckauf and De vliegende Hollander (on father figures); Flanagan and Spoorloos (on rabbles and heroes); De aanslag and Leedvermaak (on historical traumas); and Antonia and Bluebird (on aphanisis).

Roger Lewis, in his no-holds-barred biography, exposes a Peter Sellers the world little knows. Recognized as the greatest British comic since Charlie Chaplin, Sellers was the grand master of fifty-five films - from Dr. Strangelove, to Being There and the Pink Panther hits. But shadowing his phenomenal career was a history of increasingly bizarre behavior involving psychotic violence, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse and humiliating self-destructive obsessions with people including Princess Margaret, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and each of his four wives (Ann Hayes, Britt Ekland, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick). He alternately showered his wives and children with gifts and then threatened to kill them. Sellers' fluidity as an actor made for a terrifying madness that grew like a slow metastasizing cancer throughout his adult life. The story of Peter Sellers concludes with his premature death at the age of 54, "sick at heart and alone in those sunless hotel rooms", so recoiled from intimacy that no one really knew him anymore.

It is no coincidence that many of the most celebrated female performers throughout both the 19th and 20th centuries - women widely considered to represent the spirit of their times - were Jewish. Mock traces a lineage that stretches from the first international stage stars, Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise and Sarah Bernhardt, to stars of film and television such as Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler and Roseanne. In a unique enquiry, this book embraces issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality through the figure of the Jewish woman to show how a very specific marginal identity has transformed mainstream cultures.

This new book catalogues some 215 prominent film directors from both countries, giving accurate bio-filmographies and providing an in-depth reference source. Full attention is given to the propaganda cinema under dictators Franco and Salazar, to film-makers who left to work abroad--especially in Latin America--and to those filming in the regional languages (mainly Basque and Catalan). There is coverage not only of internationally well-known figures Almodovar, Bunuel, Oliveira, and Saura, but also across the complete range of feature, documentary, and animation film-making: early pioneers Segundo de Chomon, Catalans Jose Maria Codina, Fructuoso Gelabert, and Magi Muria, and Portuguese Aurelio da Paz dos Reis; experimentalists and avant-garde figures such as Lorenzo Llobet-Gracia, Jose Val del Omar, and Nemesio Sobrevila and documentarist Antonio Campos; animators Cruz Delgado, Francisco Macian, and Arturo Moreno (who worked on the first full-length animated film in Europe, Garbancito de la Mancha, in 1945).

Each entry gives information on the film-maker's career (date and place of birth, educational qualifications, work experience, positions held), together with a list of films made, with dates of production. There are three indexes: Country Index, Film Title Index, and General Index. The index of film titles lists over 3,000 entries, including the original languages and their English language and aka equivalents.

Focusing on international social justice drama in its current local, national, and international manifestation, this interdisciplinary approach explores the relationship of contemporary dramatic forms to human rights issues. Over examines the artistic styles, goals, and thematic interests of dramatists and film directors of works of social commitment. He also considers the conditions and economics of wide audience appeal that prevent Hollywood and many independent filmmakers from effectively addressing these politically explosive issues. In contrast, differing cultures and economic concerns result in third world filmmakers and playwrights producing more comprehensive expositions of social issues. Considering a selected group of film and stage movements the author concludes with an optimistic prediction for political drama in the new century. This informed discussion will appeal to film, theatre, and cultural studies scholars.

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

In Shanghai Filmmaking, Huang Xuelei invites readers to go on an intimate, detailed, behind-the-scenes tour of the world of early Chinese cinema. She paints a nuanced picture of the Mingxing Motion Picture Company, the leading Chinese film studio in the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that Shanghai filmmaking involved a series of border-crossing practices. Shanghai filmmaking developed in a matrix of global cultural production and distribution, and interacted closely with print culture and theatre. People from allegedly antagonistic political groupings worked closely with each other to bring a new form of visual culture and a new body of knowledge to an audience in and outside China. By exploring various border crossings, this book sheds new light on the power of popular cultural production during China's modern transformation.

This is the first publication to bring together comparative research on the international expansion of Third Reich cinema. This volume investigates various attempts to infiltrate - economically, politically and culturally - the film industries of 20 countries and regions either occupied by, friendly with or neutral towards Nazi Germany.

Travel narratives abound in French cinema since the 1980s. This study delineates recurrent travel tropes in films such as departures and returns, the chase, the escape, nomadic wandering, interior voyages, the unlikely travel, rituals, pilgrimages, migrants' narratives and emergencies, women's travel, and healing narratives.

The digital broadcasting of performances to cinemas, or 'livecasting', burst onto the world scene in 2006. This book explores the reasons for its rise by examining the aesthetics of filming theatre and opera performances, as well as exploring who the audiences are and what they want.

After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the public's response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes thirteen contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere.

Latino American cinema is a provocative, complex, and definitively American topic of study. This book examines key mainstream commercial films while also spotlighting often-underappreciated documentaries, avant-garde and experimental projects, independent productions, features and shorts, and more. Latino American Cinema: An Encyclopedia of Movies, Stars, Concepts, and Trends serves as an essential primary reference for students of the topic as well as an accessible resource for general readers. The alphabetized entries in the volume cover the key topics of this provocative and complex genre-films, filmmakers, star performers, concepts, and historical and burgeoning trends-alongside frequently overlooked and crucially ignored items of interest in Latino cinema. This comprehensive treatment bridges gaps between traditional approaches to U.S.-Latino and Latin American cinemas, placing subjects of Chicana and Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban and diasporic Cuban, and Mexican origin in perspective with related Central and South American and Caribbean elements. Many of the entries offer compact definitions, critical discussions, overviews, and analyses of star artists, media productions, and historical moments, while several foundational entries explicate concepts, making this single volume encyclopedia a critical guide as well. Nearly 300 entries on movies, actors and actresses, concepts, and trends A resource guide and bibliography provides listings of online references and databases, research centers, and media distributors Sidebar discussions that elaborate on key points within the entry, spotlight historical and social contexts, and offer examples