Engineering Hollywood tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, this book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker's reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini's cinema as an individual expression of the nation's "mythical biography," the director's most celebrated themes and images - a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival - become symbols of Italy's traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.

Rohmer is one of the most popular French directors of the second half of the 20th century, one of the members of the famous Nouvelle Vague that reconstituted French cinema based on the theoretical principles articulated in the Cahiers du Cinema - from whose editorship he was fired when the conservative Catholic opposed its turn toward politicization. Like some of his colleagues, Rohmer is extremely interested in both the history and the philosophy of film: Brother of the noted French philosopher Rene Scherer, he begins his career as a film critic In his films, deep moral conflicts as well as the search for one's own identity emerge from the intricacies of seemingly superficial everyday life interactions, particularly between a man and a woman. Hoesle's book puts Rohmer in the context of a long French tradition of reflected eroticism, with Marivaux, Musset, Stendhal, and Jean Renoir as crucial figures, and shows how Rohmer both recognizes the inner logic of eroticism and subjects it to moral demands that he inherits from his Catholic background. For Rohmer, the tension between the two can usually only be solved by some unexpected event that can be interpreted as an equivalent of grace.

Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman begins with a comprehensive and original anthropological analysis of Vertov's film The Man With a Movie Camera. Tomas then explores the film's various aspects and contributions to media history and practice through detailed discussions of selected case studies. The first concerns the way Snow's La Region Centrale and De La extend and/or develop important theoretical and technical aspects of Vertov's original film, in particular those aspects that have made the film so important in the history of cinema. The linkage between Vertov's film and the works discussed in the case studies also serve to illustrate the historical and theoretical significance of a comparative approach of this kind, and illustrate the pertinence of adopting a 'relational approach' to the history of media and its contemporary practice, an approach that is no longer focused exclusively on the technical question of the new in contemporary media practices but, in contrast, situates a work and measures its originality in historical, intermedia, and ultimately political terms.

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a "filmmaker and philosopher"? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

Reframing Vivien Leigh takes a new look at the laboring life one of the twentieth century's most iconic stars. Author Lisa Stead reframes the dominant narratives that have surrounded Leigh's life and career, offering a new perspective on Vivien Leigh as a distinctly archival subject. The book examines the collections and curatorial practices that have built up around her, exploring material documents collated by her own hand and by those who worked with her. The book also examines the collection practices of those who have developed deep, long-standing fandoms of her life and work. To do so, the book draws upon new oral history work with curators, archivists and fan collectives and examines a variety of archived correspondence, items of dress and costume, script annotations, photography, press clippings, props and memorabilia. It argues that such material has the potential to produce a new interpretation of Leigh as a creative laborer. As such, the book casts new light on the labor of archiving itself and the significance of archival processes and practices to contemporary feminist film historiography.

The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.

This book is about the emigration, film careers and socio-cultural influence of British filmmakers moving to Hollywood in the studio era. It deals with some of the unknown and neglected emigres, as well as the leading lights who founded, initiated and ensured that American film became the leading national cinema of the twentieth century.

Indispensable for students of film studies, in this book Reena Dube explores Satyajit Ray's films, and The Chess Players in particular, in the context of discourses of labour in colonial and postcolonial conditions. Starting from Daniel Defoe and moving through history, short story and film to the present, Dube widens her analysis with comparisons in which Indian films are situated alongside Hollywood and other films, and interweaves historical and cultural debates within film theory. Her book treats film as part of the larger cultural production of India and provides a historical sense of the cross genre borrowings, traditions and debates that have deeply influenced Indian cinema and its viewers.

Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Although he is well known for his avant-garde filmmaking, his garden, and his AIDS activism, he is also the author of over a dozen books, many of which are autobiographical. Much of Jarman's exploration of post-war queer identity and imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his books, such as the lyrical AIDS diaries Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion. This book fully explores, for the first time, the remarkable range and depth of Jarman's writing. Spanning his career, Alexandra Parsons argues that Jarman's self-reflexive response to the HIV/AIDS crisis was critical in changing the cultural terms of queer representation from the 1980s onwards. Luminous presence is of great interest to students, scholars and readers of queer histories in literature, art and film. -- .

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock celebrates the remarkable depth and scope of his artistic achievement in film. It explores his works in relationship both to their social context and to the traditions of critical theory they continue to inspire. The collection draws on the best of current Hitchcock scholarship, featuring the work of both new and established scholars. It displays the full diversity of critical methods that have characterized the study of this director's films in recent years. The articles are grouped into four thematic sections: "Authorship and Aesthetics" examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. "French Hitchcock" looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. "Poetics and Politics of Identity" explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work, and the final section, "Death and Transfiguration" addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece "Psycho,"

One of the most versatile Hollywood filmmmakers, Robert Wise had a number of renowned films under his directorial belt, including The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Nonetheless, Wise remains a rarely studied Hollywood figure--while many filmgoers know and love his films, few recognize his name. This book, the first in-depth analysis of Wise's cinematic achievement, uncovers the elements linking the director's diverse cinematic subjects and examines in detail the manifold ways in which Wise explored the tensions between individuals and their societies. His films are seen from a new and more complex perspective, one which will heighten the viewer's appreciation for the range and depth of Wise's overall body of work.

Can blockbuster films be socially relevant or are they just escapist diversions to entertain the masses and enrich the studios? Not every successful film contains thoughtful commentary but some that are marketed as pure entertainment do seriously engage social issues. Popular science fiction films of the late 1970s and early 1980s-such as George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Ridley Scott's Alien and Aliens, and James Cameron's Terminator films-present a critique of our engagement with technology in a way that resonates with 1960s counterculture. As challengers of the status quo's technological underpinnings, Luke Skywalker, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor echo the once-popular social criticism of philosopher Herbert Marcuse and speak directly to the concerns of people living in a technologically complex society. The films of Lucas, Scott and Cameron made money but also made us think about the world we live in.

Hailed as the Brazilian Chaplin, Amacio Mazzaropi is one of the most popular Brazilian filmmakers of all time. Looking beyond Cinema Novo films, Amacio Mazzaropi in the Film and Culture of Brazil analyzes the cultural impact and critical reception of Mazzaropi's work. A former circus and radio artist, Mazzaropi started his cinema career in 1951, with the Companhia Cinematografica Vera Cruz; in 1958 he founded his own company, PAM Filmes. He acted in, produced, and directed more than thirty films in which he presents his beloved character, Jeca Tatu, and discusses race, class, gender, religion, and the meaning of nation. Bueno discusses how the films approach issues facing a changing country that was becoming more urban, how ex-centric Brazilians ("caipiras") resolved their position in this new society, and how they fit in the politics and in the history of the country.

Laura Hubner's book is among the first to analyze key films directed by Ingmar Bergman throughout his lifetime. Various kinds of "illusion" in Bergman's work (the mask, identity, dreams, and visions) are explored at both thematic and formal levels, positioned within wider concerns and perspectives such as cultural and artistic influences on Bergman's creative output, the phenomenon of Bergman as "art film" director, debates about modernism and postmodernism, and emerging feminist discourses on the multiplicity of identity.

In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of ecriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization's formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salo, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.

Hitchcock and Contemporary Art introduces readers to the fascinating and diverse range of artistic practices devoted to Alfred Hitchcock's films. These practices are more than celebrations of his cinematic achievements. The artworks considered here are motivated by a cinephilia often deeply imprinted by epistemophilia, that is, a love of cinema charged by a desire to know more about it and to revel in the pleasures of discovery. As such, these works have the capacity to activate sophisticated engagements with Hitchcock's films and cinema more generally, tackling issues of time and space, memory and history, and sound and image.

Film maker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the 'infinite relation'of word to image. Cinema Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, music and language, life and theory, with Homi Bhabba, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist's ideas and visions. Extensively illustrated in colour and black and white, Cinema Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning 'the third term' or the 'space between'- between viewer, maker and film; image, sound and text; or else, between different sets of fictions, different forms of blindness and lucidity; between love and resistance. While discussing the films' perspectives on the shifting realities of China and Vietnam, the interviews also expand on the roles played by such concepts as residue, resonance, repetition, indirectness and foreignness in the creative proces. The complete scripts of Trinh's films Shoot for the Contents and A Tale of Love are also included. Cinema Interval will be an essential work for readers interested in contemporary film art, cultural politics, feminist thought and postcolonial studies.

Intervening at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and cinema, this book argues that the career of Robert Guediguian is the result of one of the most original and coherent projects in contemporary French cinema: to make a committed, historically-conscious cinema, in a local space, over a long period of time, but most especially with friends. The account starts with in-depth consideration of friendship and its relation to philosophy, politics, time, and space. The book chronologically traces this project as it begins in Guediguian's hometown, the Communist-leaning Marseille. It further unfolds through the political transformations of the 1980s Left and the local activism and utopias of the 1990s, and spreads into Guediguian's varied explorations of genre and register. Close analysis is accompanied with historical and social contextualization, but also with a consistent return to the underlying, radical and philosophically rich project. -- .

WALERIAN BOROWCZYK by JEREMY MARK ROBINSON

Walerian Borowczyk (known as 'Boro') is one of cinema's one-offs. Quite simply, there is no filmmaker quite like Borowczyk. Borowczyk's films have an astonishing, magical quality. They reach a place very rare in contemporary cinema, and are quite unlike the films of any other auteur. Borowczyk's films create their own space, with imagery, sounds and music of a really exceptional power.

Jeremy Robinson discusses each Borowczyk film in detail, sometimes going through scenes shot by shot.

Fully illustrated, with stills from Borowczyk's movies, and from the history of erotica, a bibliography, filmography and notes. 252pp.

The text has been updated for this new (2nd) edition. www.crmoon.com EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Goto: Island of Love was the first Walerian Borowczyk film that made a big impression on audiences and critics, winning a number of prizes. I first saw Goto: Island of Love in 1982, at Bournemouth Film School, when we watched 16mm prints as part of our film history programme. You could see there was an astonishing vision at work here. I remember above all the creation of a visceral, idiosyncratic and original world.

If I had to single out some films, I'd cite Blanche, Immoral Tales, Behind Convent Walls, The Beast and Goto: Island of Love, for their painterly sense, the use of props and costumes, and the incredible attention to detail. Very stylish, mysterious, poetic. Not forgetting the acute awareness of the history of religion and literature. Borowczyk produced some of the most memorable images in European cinema, the equal of Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Paradjanov or Andrei Tarkovsky.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I spent a long time researching and compiling this book. It contains a huge amount of information on the amazing filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, much of which is very, very hard to find. You have to really dig around to discover valuable information on Boro. The book relates Borowczyk to many other filmmakers and movies, from the European art movie tradition, but also the horror genre, and animation; it analyzes each of Borowcyk's movie in depth (from the sublime - Goto and Immoral Tales - to the downright terrible - Emmanuelle 5); it assesses the critical reception of Borowczyk, and the current perception of Borowcyk as a director; it contains many illustrations (some of which are rare); it considers Borowczyk's love of erotica (with illustrations); and it contains a useful bibliography and list of sources.

Lastly, my book on Walerian Borowczyk is clearly written in an entertaining style, which I hope will encourage the reader to seek out some of Borowczyk's strange, lyrical, hallucinatory and erotic movies. And if you've already seen them, I hope my book will offer some fresh insights into Borowcyk.