This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race. Probing the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, this volume positions itself at the cutting edge of transnational film studies.

A facinating, ground-breaking blockbuster on shopping in exciting Australia and Papua New Guinea.

This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race. Probing the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, this volume positions itself at the cutting edge of transnational film studies.

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films. Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle. The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world. In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. This volume undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centered on Winterbottom's collaborative working practices, political and cultural contexts, and critical reception. Arguing that his work delineates a 'cinema of borders', this study examines Winterbottom's treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and national and international politics, as well as his quest to adequately narrate inequality, injustice, and violence.

What are the roles of reason and imagination in secret intelligence? How do apparently normal people get involved? What happens to them? While British, American and Soviet empires have produced plentiful supplies of heroes, villains and stirring tales, Australians have typically averted their gaze from this country's involvement in the 'second oldest profession'. And yet espionage has been a part of Australia's history since the earliest European imaginings of a southern land mass. Australian spies have produced their share of heroes and villains and this book shows how they influenced Australia's diplomatic and military policy, and the personal price some of them paid.

A raw, gritty memoir--part true-life cop thriller, part unputdownable history of a storied time and place--that will grip you by the throat until the explosive end

Alphabet City in 1988 burned with heroin, radicalism, and anti-police sentiment. Working as a plainclothes narcotics cop in the most high-voltage neighborhood in Manhattan, Detective Sergeant Mike Codella earned the nickname "Rambo" from the local dealers, as well as a $50,000 bounty on his head. The son of a cop who grew up in a mob neighborhood in Brooklyn, Codella understood the unwritten laws of the shadowy businesses that ruled the streets. He knew that the further east you got from the relative safety of 5th Avenue, Washington Square Park and NYU, the deeper you entered the sea of human misery, greed, addiction, violence and all the things that come with an illegal retail drug trade run wild. With his partner, Gio, Codella made it his personal mission to put away Davie Blue Eyes--a stone cold murderer and the head of Alphabet City's heroin supply chain. Despite the hell they endured--all the beatings and gunshots, the footchases and close calls--Codella and Gio always saw Alphabet City the same way: worth saving.

"Alphaville," Codella's riveting, no-holds-barred memoir, resurrects the vicious streets that Davie Blue Eyes owned, and tells the story of how Codella bagged the so-called Forty Thieves that surrounded Davie, slowly working his way to the head of the snake one scale at a time. With the blistering narrative spirit of "The French Connection," the insights of a seasoned insider, and a relentless voice that reads like the city's own, "Alphaville "is at once the story of a dedicated New York cop, and of New York City itself.

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. This volume undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centered on Winterbottom's collaborative working practices, political and cultural contexts, and critical reception. Arguing that his work delineates a 'cinema of borders', this study examines Winterbottom's treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and national and international politics, as well as his quest to adequately narrate inequality, injustice, and violence.

From a Distant Shore explores the lives and creative work of Australia's many expatriate writers living and working in Britain since the early 19th century. The book contests the notion of Australia as predominantly an 'import' culture and shows Australians exporting literary talent to Britain and further afield, from 1820 until the present. Stories of the lives and works of writers in all genres - from romance and crime to contemporary literary fiction - are interweaved in a collective biography. The book uncovers many unknown writers and document their adventures both on and off the page. It examines the expatriate lives of figures such as Pamela Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Frederic Manning, Randolph Stow, and Madeleine St. John. Additionally, it explores the work of lesser known writers, such as Jill Neville and her vibrant London literary milieu in the 1960s, Christina Stead's expatriate years, the modernist dramas of Patrick White and Barry Humphries, as well as the arguments with England expressed in the lives and work of Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Michael Blakemore, and Geoffrey Robertson. This book is the first historically comprehensive and detailed examination of expatriate Australian writers at work in Britain. It illuminates a century and a half of intense literary activity by Australians living abroad, and it offers insight into the works of the writers and their transnational literary achievements. (Series: Australian Literary Studies) *** "In tune with our globalised world, the approach of Bennett and Pender is quite different. In place of the old polarity of cultural metropolis in England and cultural cringe at home, they are more interested in convergence, and the ways in which even the most apparently assimilated Australian writers gave a distinct inflection to British forms." - Jim Davidson, The Saturday Age, Sydney Morning Herald, March 16, 2013 *** "While attitudes to Britain and reasons for living there may have changed over the past 200 years, it has remained a drawcard for Australian writers, as Bruce Bennett nd Anne Pender demononstrate in this comprehensive study." - The Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 2013