Entertaining, well written, this is a succinct summary of the field, ideal for those studying film for the first time. A substantial glossary helps readers understand key terms and concepts. Fully updated to incorporate shifts in the discipline and contemporary film examples more familiar to today's students

Film Studies: A Global Introduction reroutes film studies from its Euro-American focus and canon in order to introduce students to a medium that has always been global but has become differently and insistently so in the digital age. Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo's approach encourages readers to think about film holistically by looking beyond the textual analysis of key films. In contrast, it engages with other vital areas, such as financing, labour, marketing, distribution, exhibition, preservation, and politics, reflecting contemporary aspects of cinema production and consumption worldwide. Key features of the book include: clear definitions of the key terms at the foundation of film studies coverage of the work of key thinkers, explained in their social and historical context a broad range of relevant case studies that reflect the book's approach to global cinema, from Italian "white telephone" films to Mexican wrestling films innovative and flexible exercises to help readers enhance their understanding of the histories, theories, and examples introduced in each chapter an extensive Interlude introducing readers to formal analysis through the careful explication and application of key terms a detailed discussion of strategies for writing about cinema Films Studies: A Global Introduction will appeal to students studying film today and aspiring to work in the industry, as well as those eager to understand the world of images and screens in which we all live.

Keyframes introduces the study of popular cinema of Hollywood and beyond and responds to the transformative effect of cultural studies on film studies.
The contributors rethink contemporary film culture using ideas and concerns from feminism, queer theory, 'race' studies, critiques of nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, the cultural economies of fandom, spectator theory, and Marxism. Combining a film studies focus on the film industry, production and technology with a cultural studies analysis of consumption and audiences, Keframes demonstrates the breadth of approaches now available for understanding popular cinema. Subjects addressed include:
* Studying Ripley and the 'Alien' films
* Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts cinema
* Judy Garland fandom on the net
* Stardom and serial fantasies: Thomas Harris's 'Hannibal'
* Tom Hanks and the globalization of stars
* Queer Bollywood
* Jackie Chan and the Black connection
* '12 Monkeys', postmodernism and urban space.

A comprehensive overview of how to study film, this updated third edition provides concise and provocative summaries for approaching the language of film analysis, ways of thinking about film history, and approaches and methods for studying cinema, from national cinemas to genre to stardom and beyond.

The new edition tracks the changes in film production and exhibition by situating the study of film within contemporary digital media cultures and structures, such as social media and streaming platforms. Without forsaking its emphasis on the study of film, the third edition updates its examples and provides fresh insight into today’s image culture.

Film Studies: The Basics provides beginning students in film studies, as well as lifelong film buffs, with the tools to pursue film analysis, film history, and further inquiries into the medium.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction to Film Studies

Chapter 2: The Language of Film

Chapter 3: The History of Film

Chapter 4: The Production and Exhibition of Film

Chapter 5: The Reception of Film

Chapter 6: The Future of Film

Film Studies: A Global Introduction reroutes film studies from its Euro-American focus and canon in order to introduce students to a medium that has always been global but has become differently and insistently so in the digital age. Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo's approach encourages readers to think about film holistically by looking beyond the textual analysis of key films. In contrast, it engages with other vital areas, such as financing, labour, marketing, distribution, exhibition, preservation, and politics, reflecting contemporary aspects of cinema production and consumption worldwide. Key features of the book include: clear definitions of the key terms at the foundation of film studies coverage of the work of key thinkers, explained in their social and historical context a broad range of relevant case studies that reflect the book's approach to global cinema, from Italian "white telephone" films to Mexican wrestling films innovative and flexible exercises to help readers enhance their understanding of the histories, theories, and examples introduced in each chapter an extensive Interlude introducing readers to formal analysis through the careful explication and application of key terms a detailed discussion of strategies for writing about cinema Films Studies: A Global Introduction will appeal to students studying film today and aspiring to work in the industry, as well as those eager to understand the world of images and screens in which we all live.

The term "queer cinema" is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception, and the past twenty-five years have seen the idea of "queer cinema" expand further as a descriptor for a global arts practice. As the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema treats these three currents as art and critical practice, bringing the canon of queer cinema together with a new generation of makers and scholars. The Handbook's contributors include scholars who research the worldwide canon of queer cinema, those who are uniquely positioned to address three decades of its particular importance, and those best positioned to ponder the forms it is taking or may take in our new century, namely digital media that moves in new circuits. In eight sections, they explore the many forms that queer cinema takes across time, discussing narrative, experimental, documentary, and genre filmmaking, including pornography. Likewise, although the study of cinema and media is not restricted to a single method, chapters showcase the unique combination of textual analysis, industrial and production history, interpretation, ethnography, and archival research that this field enables. For example, chapters analyze the ways in which queer cinema both is and is not self-evidently an object for study by examining films that reinforce negative understandings of queerness alongside those that liberate the subject; and by naming the films that are newly queered, while noting that many queerly-made texts await discovery. Finally, chapters necessarily assert that queer cinema is not an Anglophone phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the medium of film.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television's lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television’s lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

With the U.S. economy booming under President Bill Clinton and the cold war finally over, many Americans experienced peace and prosperity in the nineties. Digital technologies gained popularity, with nearly one billion people online by the end of the decade. The film industry wondered what the effect on cinema would be. The essays in American Cinema of the 1990s examine the big-budget blockbusters and critically acclaimed independent films that defined the decade. The 1990s' most popular genre, action, channeled anxieties about global threats such as AIDS and foreign terrorist attacks into escapist entertainment movies. Horror films and thrillers were on the rise, but family-friendly pictures and feel-good romances netted big audiences too. Meanwhile, independent films captured hearts, engaged minds, and invaded Hollywood: by decade's end every studio boasted its own "art film" affiliate. Among the films discussed are Terminator 2, The Matrix, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, Pulp Fiction, Boys Don't Cry, Toy Story, and Clueless. Chris Holmlund is a professor of cinema studies, women's studies, and French at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is also chair of the Cinema Studies Program and the author of several books on film.

With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she analyzes what these representations contain and their limits. She combines Marxist theories of value with poststructuralist insights to argue that lesbian visibility operates simultaneously as an achievement and a ruse, a possibility for building a new visual politics and away of rendering static and contained what lesbian might mean. Integrating cinema studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, Villarejo illuminates the contexts within which the lesbian is rendered visible. Toward that end, she analyzes key portrayals of lesbians in public culture, particularly in documentary film. She considers a range of films-from documentaries about Cuba and lesbian pulp fiction to Exile Shanghai and The Brandon Teena Story-and, in doing so, brings to light a nuanced economy of value and desire.