This volume provides an overview of the landscape of mediated female agencies and subjectivities in the last decade. In three sections, the book covers the films of women directors, television shows featuring women in lead roles, and the representational struggles of women in cultural context, with a special focus on changes in the transformative power of narratives and images across genres and platforms. This collection derives from the editors' multi-year experiences as scholars and practitioners in the field of film and television. It is an effort that aims to describe and understand female agencies and subjectivities across screen narratives, gather scholars from around the world to generate timely discussions, and inspire fellow researchers and practitioners of film and television.

This book explores adaptation in its various forms in contemporary television drama. It considers the mechanics of adaptation as an ever-more prevalent form of production, most notably in the reworking of literary sources for television. It also explores the broader process through which the television industry as a whole is currently making necessary adaptations in how it tells stories, especially in relation to important concerns of equality, diversity and inclusion. Offering and analysing 16 original interviews with leading British television producers, writers, directors, production designers, casting directors and actors, and with a particular focus on female and/or minority-ethnic industry perspectives, the book examines some of the key professional and creative approaches behind television adaptations today. The book connects these industry insights to the existing conceptual and critical frameworks of television studies and adaptation studies, illuminating the unique characteristics of television adaptation as a material mode of production, and revealing television itself as an inherently adaptive artform.

This book combines content analysis of film and television cases, the examination of policy documents, and first-hand interview material with Danish industry professionals, tracing the pivotal moments in media and welfare state history to unite these two overlapping spheres: welfare state social policy and media imagery. In doing so, it addresses a gap in existing academic and policy documents to demonstrate how motherhood and femininity are presented in contemporary state-supported Danish screen fiction. As an industry premised on state funding and public service values, Danish screen fiction plays a cogent role in shaping and communicating cultural norms and provides a space for the cultivation of belonging and a sense of a shared identity. For this reason, it is vital to identify and examine representational trends and patterns in popular media formats. This book argues that the political narrative of gender equality, democracy and universal social support that permeates Danish state policy is undermined in screen fiction, wherein working mother characters are problematised and the welfare system's integrity is challenged. This book asserts that the framing of femininity, motherhood and citizenship in many contemporary Danish films and television dramas indicates a cultural concern about the welfare state's institutionalisation of caregiving and presents absent mothers as an indirect cause of crime, trauma or social unrest.

Annual anthology of short plays by members of the New Voices Playwrights for the year 2015. Includes plays by John Bolen, Lynne Bolen, Mark Bowen, Michael C. Buss, Frank Farmer, John Franceschini, Anne V. Grob, John Lane, Austin Peay, David Rusiecki, Pattric Walker, and Linda Whitmore.

The essays in this volume seek to expose the scandals of adaptation. Some of them focus on specific adaptations that have been considered scandalous because they portray characters acting in ways that give scandal, because they are thought to betray the values enshrined in the texts they adapt, because their composition or reception raises scandalous possibilities those adapted texts had repressed, or because they challenge their audiences in ways those texts had never thought to do. Others consider more general questions arising from the proposition that all adaptation is a scandalous practice that confronts audiences with provocative questions about bowdlerizing, ethics, censorship, contagion, screenwriting, and history. The collection offers a challenge to the continued marginalization of adaptations and adaptation studies and an invitation to change their position by embracing rather than downplaying their ability to scandalize the institutions they affront.

Applying the theories of Popular Culture, Visual Culture, Performance Studies, (Post)Feminism, and Film Studies, this interdisciplinary and well-crafted book leads you to the fascinating and intriguing world of popular film, (musical) theatre, and TV drama. It explores the classical and contemporary cases of the literature works, both Eastern and Western, adapted, represented and transformed into the interesting artistic medium in films, performances, TV dramas, musicals, and AI robot theatre/films. 'Iris Tuan's book is wide ranging in scope and diversity, examining theatre, music, film and television productions from both Western and Asian countries. Tuan also surveys an extensive range of critical and theoretical perspectives, especially from performance studies and popular cultural studies, to offer context for her descriptions of the many different works. Some of her examples are well-known (Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Disney's The Lion King) while others little known outside their place of origin (such as the Hakka Theatre of Taiwan) -- all are approached by the author with enthusiasm.' -Susan Bennett, Professor of English, University of Calgary, Canada 'Tuan takes us through multiple examples of contemporary popular performance in theatre/film/TV ranging from "high" art sources (Shakespeare or Journey to the West in films, Hirata's robotic theatre experiments) to "low" (Taiwanese TV soap operas Hakka Theatre: Roseki and Story of Yangxi Palace, Korean film Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds). The reader moves at a speed-dating pace through contemporary culture production and interpretive theories, encountering significant works, controversies (i. e., yellow face), and conundrums selected from China, Korea, Japan and the U. S. and filtered through a Taiwanese female gaze.' -Kathy Foley, Professor of Theatre Arts, University of California Santa Cruz, USA

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

This book offers a comparative study of historical television genres in Europe, with a special focus on Germany and Great Britain and their way of narrating twentieth century European history. The book analyses our common European past and memory through central historical television narratives. Each chapter looks at how historical TV genres, fictional and documentary, have dealt with the most salient and defining periods, events and changes in the twentieth century- an age of extremes. Bondebjerg offers unique theoretical and analytical insight into the role of television in mediating and shaping the past. The book explores television's creation of transnational cultural encounters across Europe in relation to our common and national past. The book addresses how television has influenced our understanding of history, collective memory and public debate over the twentieth century. It is fundamentally a book about the importance of the past in present day Europe and the centrality of media for transnational understanding.

This book explores a range of lesser-known documentaries and short films from the transnational Oresund region released in the period 2000-2009, focusing on how this Scandinavian region's urban and maritime spaces, iconic architecture, and peripheral communities across Malmoe and Copenhagen have been imagined and critiqued through film. This is the first book to widen the critical gaze beyond popular representations to examine a significant body of peripheral films produced in and about the metropolitan Oresund region. Emerging at a time of spatial transformation and geopolitical change, these films weave alternative narratives that confront the official rhetoric of transnational regionalism. Offering the concept of regioscape as a way to investigate the intimate relationship between artistic representation, screen policy, space, and the region-building project, this book presents new readings of films by contemporary Swedish and Danish filmmakers such as Fredrik Gertten, Kolbjoern Guwallius, Daniel Dencik, and Max Kestner.

strangest stories that make one question everything they held to be true

This volume brings together research on the forms, genres, media and histories of refugee migration. Chapters come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including literature, film studies, performance studies and postcolonial studies. The goal is to bring together chapters that use the perspectives of the arts and humanities to study representations of refugee migration. The chapters of the anthology are organized around specific forms and genres: life-writing and memoir, the graphic novel, theater and music, film and documentary, coming-of-age stories, street literature, and the literary novel.

This erudite volume examines the moral universe of the hit Netflix show Black Mirror. It brings together scholars in media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, psychology, theatre and game studies to analyse the significance and reverberations of Charlie Brooker's dystopian universe with our present-day technologically mediated life world. Brooker's ground-breaking Black Mirror anthology generates often disturbing and sometimes amusing future imaginaries of the dark side of ubiquitous screen life, as it unleashes the power of the uncanny. This book takes the psychoanalytic idea of the uncanny into a moral framework befitting Black Mirror's dystopian visions. The volume suggests that the Black Mirror anthology doesn't just make the viewer feel, on the surface, a strange recognition of closeness to some of its dystopian scenarios, but also makes us realise how very fragile, wavering, fractured, and uncertain is the human moral compass.

- ONE-OF-A-KIND CARD DECK: Includes 40 full-color printed cards filled with profiles of top-selling Wheezes (from Puking Pastilles to Fainting Fancies, Screaming Yo-yos, Pigmy Puffs, and beyond), and "Words of Weasley" for magical mischief inspiration; all feature eye-catching graphic artwork from the Weasleys' shop - GUIDED JOURNAL: An accompanying book is filled with prompts for jokes, inventions, and creative ideas of all kinds, plus space for brainstorming and journaling; with full-color graphics and movie images throughout - PERFECT GIFT: A unique gift for fans of the Wizarding World and Harry Potter - OFFICIALLY LICENSED: Authentic Wizarding World collectible - SPECIFICATIONS: 40 illustrated cards are 3 x 5 inches, shrink-wrapped in an interior travel case; journal is an 88-page paperback book, 3 x 5 inches; deck and book are packaged in a keepsake magnetic closure box A note on packaging: In order to help honor our planet and reduce waste, we have only shrink wrapped the interior card deck, rather than the keepsake box. Please feel confident that your product is not defective or used. When you open your deck, you will find that the actual cards inside the box are shrink wrapped for protection and to ensure first use by the buyer. Copyright (c) 2022 Warner Bros. Entertainment. WIZARDING WORLD characters, names, and related indicia are (c) & (TM) Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. WB SHIELD: (c) & (TM) WBEI. Publishing Rights (c) JKR. (s22)

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

This book uses corpus and multimodal methods to present a comparative study of three major Canadian TV crime series, Flashpoint (2008-2010), Motive (2013-2015) and 19-2 (2014-2016), paying special attention to cinematic techniques. Following an overview of the methodology and the Canadian cultural milieu of the study, the author approaches the three series as complex cultural and linguistic productions that depend heavily on a national appropriation of a genre whose popularity is growing internationally. The book investigates the verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal strategies employed by each production to create the patterns that make this genre appealing to a variety of audiences, and uncovers some of the psychological processes at work in contemporary Canadian TV crime serials. This book will be of interest to scholars in fields including Corpus Linguistics, Multimodal Studies, Canadian Studies, Media and Communication Studies, and Specialised Discourse.

'Terrific. So funny' Zadie Smith 'Monstrously depressing but so comic and well observed that I didn't really mind .... It is great' Dolly Alderton 'A dark comedy of female rage' Catherine Lacey 'Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation' Pandora Sykes 'Funny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertaining' Roddy Doyle 'A definitive work of milennial literature' Jia Tolentino 'The best thing I've read in years' Emma Jane Unsworth 'Vicious ... hilariously spot on' Guardian In a windowless office, a woman explains something from her real, nonwork life - about the frustration and indignity of returning her online shopping - to her colleagues. One wears a topknot. Another checks her pedometer. Watching them all is Millie. Thirty-years-old and an eternal temp, she says almost nothing, almost all of the time. But then the possibility of a permanent job arises. Will it bring the new life Millie is envisioning - one involving a gym membership, a book club, and a lot less beer and TV - finally within reach? Or will it reveal just how hollow that vision has become? 'Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn' The Paris Review 'A definite work of millennial literature. Wretchedly riveting, with the sick, obsessive pleasure of looking under a bandage at a wound' The New Yorker 'So darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary' Andrew McMillan 'Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere - and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner - will recognize themselves' Nylon

Life is not always sweet. In this gripping and compelling work of fiction experience the vivid emotional roller coaster through the eyes of a father, lawyer, husband, and man of faith thrown into a situation where his family is held hostage. Fight the insecurities with him as he tries to reconcile why he must suffer at the hands of his captors and survive to find the truth.

New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction demonstrates the variety and scope of German science fiction (SF) production in literature, television, and cinema. The volume argues that speculative fictions and explorations of the fantastic provide a critical lens for studying the possibilities and limitations of paradigm shifts in society. Lars Schmeink and Ingo Cornils bring together essays that study the renaissance of German SF in the twenty-first century. The volume makes clear that German SF is both global and local-the genre is in balance between internationally dominant forms and adapting them to Germany's reality as it relates to migration, the environment, and human rights. The essays explore a range of media (literature, cinema, television) and relevant political, philosophical, and cultural discourses.

This book is about television in Latin America. Its national and regional industries create most television programming there within genres developed over time in the region. However, part of the programming has always come from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. With cable, satellite and now streaming TV, that inflow of foreign programming has increased substantially. While many in the audience still prefer national or regional programs for their cultural proximity, an increasing number among the upper-middle and middle classes, particularly the young, are turning to the new foreign services, like Netflix, Amazon and Disney for class distinction, cosmopolitanism or other motives. Among the television industries, global, regional and national actors are creating a variety of programs and channels (broadcast, pay-TV and streaming) to segment and appeal to different parts of the audience.

Subscription video on demand (SVOD) represents the fastest-growing means to consume films and series. Although market leaders Netflix and Amazon Prime have received much scholarly attention for the way that they use algorithms and big data to connect users to content, there is another significant, relatively unexamined model: curation-style services such as BFI Player, IFC Unlimited, the Criterion Channel or MUBI - the latter, which forms the focus of this book, claims to be the world's most subscribed independent video on demand service. These platforms take advantage of common anxieties about algorithms, cultural surplus and filter bubbles to promote discovery, human-generated recommendations and quality over quantity of content. Deploying an original, holistic methodology that includes analysis of technological affordances, marketing rhetoric, business models, interviews with company executives and a qualiquantitative audience study, this book critically analyses MUBI as a way to understand this particular mode of content aggregation, cultural recommendation, choice architecture and community building. Curation services address a real, but decidedly circumscribed gap in the market. Ultimately, MUBI offers film, media and business scholars an instructive example of the fate of art cinema and media diversity in a digital culture increasingly dominated by a few giant tech companies.

The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution. Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment-jokes, bits-to the more complex-caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.

This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book explores tensions, debates, and expressions that unite them. In an investigation of how young filmmakers employ queer strategies of self-making to bring sexual diversity to the screen, Margaret G. Frohlich shows us how cine joven takes part in the socialization of power in Cuba.

This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question-who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman-is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground. "Chapter 6" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book develops a critical and theoretical approach to the semiotics of motion pictures as they are applied to a broader range of constructions than traditional commercial narrative productions. This interdisciplinary approach begins with the problems posed by motion perception to develop a model of cinematic interpretation that includes both narrative and non-narrative types of productions. Contrasting traditional theatrical projection and varieties of new media, this book integrates analyses of title sequences, music videos, and visual effects with discussions on classic and avant-garde films. It further explores the intersection between formative audio-visual cues identified by viewers and how viewers' desires direct engagement with the motion picture to present a framework for understanding cinematic articulation. This new theoretical model incorporates much of what was neglected and gives greater prominence to formerly critical marginal productions by showing the fundamental connections that link all moving imagery and animated text, whether it tells a story or not. This insightful work will appeal to students and academics in film and media studies.

The essays collected in Tattooed Bodies draw on a range of theoretical paradigms and empirical knowledge to investigate tattoos, tattooing, and our complex relations with marks on skin. Engaging with diverse disciplinary perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the sheer diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos throughout history and across cultures. Essays explore conceptualizations of tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while utilizing theoretical perspectives to interpret tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others. Tattooed Bodies prompts readers to explore a few significant questions: Are tattoos unique phenomena or an art medium in need of special theoretical exploration? If so, what conceptual paradigms and theories might best shape our understanding of tattoos and their complex ubiquity in world cultures and histories?