In Cinematic Political Thought, Michael J. Shapiro investigates aspects of contemporary politics and articulates a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema. Reading such films as "Hoop Dreams, Lone Star, Father of the Bride II "and "To Live and Die in LA "through the lens of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, Shapiro demonstrates what it can mean to think the political both in terms of cinema studies and in wider aesthetic and social contexts.

Cinematic Political Thought is a polemical work, aimed at encouraging critical, ethical and political thinking. Its breadth of theoretical scope and empirical reference, and the innovative style of presentation will make it vital reading for anyone with an interest in the conjunction of culture and politics.

An examination of how screen texts embrace, refute, and reinvent the cultural heritage of antiquity, this volume looks at specific story-patterns and archetypes from Greco-Roman culture. The contributors offer a variety of perspectives, highlighting key cultural relay points at which a myth is received and reformulated for a particular audience.

Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction is a concise and accessible overview of steampunk's indelible impact within film, and acts as a case study for examining the ways with which genres hybridize and coalesce into new forms. Since the beginning of the 21st century, a series of high-profile and big-budget films have adopted steampunk identities to re-imagine periods of industrial development into fantastical histories where future meets past. By calling this growing mass-cultural fetishism for anachronistic machines into question, this book examines how a retro-futuristic romanticism for technology powered by cogs, pistons and steam-engines has taken center stage in blockbuster cinema. As the first monograph to consider cinema's unique relationship with steampunk, it places this burgeoning genre in the context of ongoing debates within film theory: each of which reflecting the movement's remarkable interest in reengineering historical technologies. Rather than acting as a niche subculture, Robbie McAllister argues that steampunk's proliferation in mainstream filmmaking reflects a desire to reassess contemporary relationships with technology and navigate the intense changes that the medium itself is experiencing in the 21st century.

The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

The richness and color of African cinema have been neglected for too long and its many talented film-makers deserve full recognition. This new and unique book gives detailed information on over 300 major African and Arab film-makers from the main film-producing countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania, Tunisia, and Zaire. It also includes important film directors from Southern African states--Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and others--as well as from other African republics.

Each entry gives details of the film-maker's career and a complete list of films made. Two extensive indexes arrange film-makers by country and list some 5,000 film titles, in both the original language and English. An important addition is the chronology of African cinema, giving a bold summary of its growth over the last thirty years.

Moby-Dick looms large - gargantuan in size, themes, symbols, and influence. Its deep dives, comedic interludes, adventurous journey, and surface effects demand a new approach. Instead of a traditional academic analysis, Dive Deeper grapples in novel fashion with this classic work. For each of the originals 135 chapters (along with Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue), Dive Deeper has a corresponding brief chapter relating to themes and issues in the original. This permits Dive Deeper to follow the flow of the original and to bring forth new appreciation for the novel, its characters, and its readers. At once creative and informative, Dive Deeper captures the up and down history of the novel, from its original reception to its resurrection in the 1890s, to its ecoming the central work in the canon of American literature in the 1930s. Great books such as Moby-Dick live outside the confines of libraries. They occupy a central place in popular culture. Thus, Dive Deeper tracks the novel as it appears in various motion pictures (more than five major ones to date), comic routines and jokes, paintings, novels, songs (from rock to classical to rap), and in other cultural forms. In the process, Dive Deeper charts how, and why, this novel about a whale and its pursuer has captivated generations of American readers. And why it continues to do so today. Dive Deeper, then, is a creative and original way of approaching a great novel. Readers will gain information and a deeper understanding of an American classic and its place in popular culture.

Filmic constructions of war heroism have a profound impact on public perceptions of conflicts. Here, contributors examine the ways motifs of gender and heroism in war films are used to justify ideological positions, shape the understanding of the military conflicts, support political agendas and institutions, and influence collective memory.

The essays collected in "Cinema and Technology" map out a new interdisciplinary terrain, combining contemporary analyses of material and visual culture, deploying the methods of film studies, media and cultural studies, media anthropology, and science and technology studies. Rather than describing a technological "crisis," or separating the technological and aesthetic halves of the cinema, they present a manifold, expansive reconsideration of the life of technologies in the cultures, theories and practices of cinematic production and consumption.

Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century. UK cinema attendance grew significantly in the Second World War and peaked in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though `going to the pictures' remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the forties, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens' leisure habits. During the fifties, a range of factors including increased affluence, the growth of television ownership, population shifts and the diversification of leisure activities led to rapid declines in attendance. By 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million and the cinema held a far more marginal existence in the nation's leisure habits. Cinema attendances fell in all regions, but the speed, nature and extent of this decline varied widely across the United Kingdom. By linking broad national developments to detailed case studies of two similarly-sized industrial cities, Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance and detail to our understanding of regional variations in film exhibition, audience habits and cinema-going experiences during a period of profound social and cultural change. The use of a wide range of quantitative and qualitative sources, such as oral testimony, box-office data, newspapers and trade journals, conveys the diverse nature of the cinema industry and the importance of place as a determinant of cinema attendance. Sam Manning is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC European Cinema Audiences project. He has recently published articles in Cultural and Social History and Media History.

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century. UK cinema attendance grew significantly in the Second World War and peaked in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though `going to the pictures' remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the forties, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens' leisure habits. During the fifties, a range of factors including increased affluence, the growth of television ownership, population shifts and the diversification of leisure activities led to rapid declines in attendance. By 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million and the cinema held a far more marginal existence in the nation's leisure habits. Cinema attendances fell in all regions, but the speed, nature and extent of this decline varied widely across the United Kingdom. By linking broad national developments to detailed case studies of two similarly-sized industrial cities, Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance and detail to our understanding of regional variations in film exhibition, audience habits and cinema-going experiences during a period of profound social and cultural change. The use of a wide range of quantitative and qualitative sources, such as oral testimony, box-office data, newspapers and trade journals, conveys the diverse nature of the cinema industry and the importance of place as a determinant of cinema attendance. Sam Manning is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC European Cinema Audiences project. He has recently published articles in Cultural and Social History and Media History.

Teresa de Lauretis makes a bold and orginal argument for the renewed relevance of the Freudian theory of drives, through close readings of texts ranging from cinema and literature to psychoanalysis and cultural theory.

This is the only collection of every book, story, and ephemera published on and about Stephen King in the US and Internationally Including: Books, Novels, Short-Fiction Collections, Non-Fiction, Etc. Including Reprints and multimedia adaptations of book titles. Short Fiction, Screenplays, Anthologies, Audio and Video adaptations, etc. This volumne, coming in at over 650 pages, also features many reproductions of novels from the US and Foreign editions. Over 100 cover and art reproductions. Thousands of listings that took Mr. Collings over fifteen years to collect. This is a one-of-a-kind volumne, and invaluable to any King reader, library, and collector to discover the many volumnes and listings of and about Stephen King.

"Commerce in Culture" is an innovative study of how states have responded to the globalization of the film sector. Concerned with more than film content or substance, the book exposes the ongoing political and economic struggles that shape cultural production and trade in the world. The historical focus is on Hollywood's engagement with rivals and partners in two leading developing countries, Egypt and Mexico, beginning with the birth of their national film industries in the late 1920s. State and market institutions evolved differently in each context, acting like national prisms to mediate international competition and produce distinctive results. As filmmaking has become a dynamic focal point in the new economy, "Commerce in Culture" reveals a vital but neglected part of the global terrain.

Martini Man goes beyond the simple caricature of the boozy lounge singer with a penchant for racy humor to reveal the substantive man behind that mask. Although Martin's movie roles receive in-depth attention in this incisive biography, as does his career-defining partnership with Jerry Lewis, details of Dino's personal life also abound, such as how Shierly MacLaine dropped by his house "to tell Dean she was in love with him-even though his wife was in the other room." William Schoell's chronicle is a sympathetic portrait that recreates the life and times of one of America's favorite entertainers.

RICHARD LINKLATER

A new study of the American filmmaker Richard Linklater (b. 1960) whose movies include Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Before Sunrise and A Scanner Darkly.

This new edition the only full-length appreciation of Linklater s available anywhere includes his latest films Me and Orson Welles and Inning By Inning.

FROM THE FOREWORD

Welcome to the world of Richard Linklater, the extraordinary US movie director from Austin, whose broad range of films - from indie (Slacker) to mainstream (School of Rock) - makes it impossible to pigeonhole him. What is not open to debate is quality of his output - his films are entertaining, intelligent, philosophical, innovative, adventurous, unpredictable, eclectic... to be honest, the adjectives could go on ad infinitum.

Welcome also to the world of Thomas A. Christie, whose pioneering attempt to pin down the elusive nature of the maverick auteur makes for a follow-up to his recent volume on Liv Tyler. This new work bears all the hallmarks of the earlier book - wide-ranging and meticulous research, and intelligent commentaries on each film, backed up by well informed and even-handed opinions. In chapter after chapter Christie demonstrates his knowledge of Linklater, his films and movieland in general - you feel safe in his cinematic hands. His opinions are authoritative - you know that Christie s judgements are the result of viewing and analysis of Linklater s oeuvre, seen through a sharp and perceptive mind. Christie shows once again that he is master of fine detail and formulated opinion, expressed in the clearest narrative prose. We couldn t ask for a better guide to the world of Linklater.

If you don t know Linklater s films, this book will make you want to see them. If you feel you know them all already, think again you ll want to re-view them again and again after reading Christie s thought-provoking volume.

THOMAS CHRISTIE has a life-long fascination with films and the people who make them. Currently reading for a PhD in Scottish Literature, he lives in Scotland with his family.

He is the author of Liv Tyler, Star in Ascendance: Her First Decade in Film (2007) and The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2008) which are also published by Crescent Moon.