Independent Women: From Film to Television explores the significance for feminism of the increasing representation of women on and behind the screen in television contexts around the world. "Independent" has functioned throughout film and television history as an important euphemism for "feminist". This volume investigates how this connection plays out in a contemporary environment that popular feminist discourse is constructing as a golden age of television for women. The original essays in the volume offer insights into how post-network television is being valued as a new site of independent production for women. They also examine how these connotations of creative control influence perceptions of both female creators and their content as feminist. Together, they provide a compelling perspective on the feminist consequences of how independence and "indie" have intensified as cultural sensibilities that coincide and engage with the digital transformation of television during the first decades of the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience's reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of 'Quality TV' impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience's reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of 'Quality TV' impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Independent Women: From Film to Television explores the significance for feminism of the increasing representation of women on and behind the screen in television contexts around the world. "Independent" has functioned throughout film and television history as an important euphemism for "feminist". This volume investigates how this connection plays out in a contemporary environment that popular feminist discourse is constructing as a golden age of television for women. The original essays in the volume offer insights into how post-network television is being valued as a new site of independent production for women. They also examine how these connotations of creative control influence perceptions of both female creators and their content as feminist. Together, they provide a compelling perspective on the feminist consequences of how independence and "indie" have intensified as cultural sensibilities that coincide and engage with the digital transformation of television during the first decades of the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

With the consolidation of 'indie' culture in the 21st century, female filmmakers face an increasingly indifferent climate. Within this sector, women work across all aspects of writing, direction, production, editing and design, yet the dominant narrative continues to construe 'maverick' white male auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson as the face of indie discourse. Defying the formulaic myths of the mainstream 'chick flick' and the ideological and experimental radicalism of feminist counter-cinema alike, women's indie filmmaking is neither ironic, popular nor political enough to be readily absorbed into pre-existing categories. This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the 'difference' of female indie filmmaking. Through a variety of case studies of directors, writers and producers such as Ava DuVernay, Lena Dunham and Christine Vachon, contributors explore the innovation of a range of female practitioners by attending to the sensibilities, ideologies and industrial practices that distinguish their work - while embracing the 'in-between' space in which the narratives they represent and embody can be revealed.

With the consolidation of 'indie' culture in the 21st century, female filmmakers face an increasingly indifferent climate. Within this sector, women work across all aspects of writing, direction, production, editing and design, yet the dominant narrative continues to construe 'maverick' white male auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson as the face of indie discourse. Defying the formulaic myths of the mainstream 'chick flick' and the ideological and experimental radicalism of feminist counter-cinema alike, women's indie filmmaking is neither ironic, popular nor political enough to be readily absorbed into pre-existing categories. This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the 'difference' of female indie filmmaking. Through a variety of case studies of directors, writers and producers such as Ava DuVernay, Lena Dunham and Christine Vachon, contributors explore the innovation of a range of female practitioners by attending to the sensibilities, ideologies and industrial practices that distinguish their work - while embracing the 'in-between' space in which the narratives they represent and embody can be revealed.

This is a study of US independent films marginalised in and by the rise of 'indie' culture. In contemporary film and popular culture the terms 'independent' and 'indie' hold instant recognition and considerable cultural cachet. As both a brand of American filmmaking and a keynote of critical film discourse, indie denotes specific textual, industrial and reception practices that have been enthusiastically cultivated across the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st. Underpinning this cultural category is a canon of highly visible films and filmmakers whose 'maverick' personas and self aware stylisation have successfully sold 'indie' as a quality, alternative worldview - figures like Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Kevin Smith and Wes Anderson, and films like Slacker, Memento, Happiness and Juno. US Independent Filmmaking After 1989: Possible Films reframes this dominant 'indie' canon by attending to a group of films that have not been so fully subsumed by its critical and promotional rhetoric. In 20 close analyses, a diverse range of leading film scholars and commentators allow the contours of the indie sensibility to emerge in and through their individual experiences of a single film that has not received the sustained critical acclaim of more popular titles. With particular representation from female directors - who are almost wholly excluded from the dominant 'indie' canon - these idiosyncratic films are shown to demonstrate central tenets of 'indie' scholarship and simultaneously emphasise the classifying processes that obscure them. It provides 20 textual studies of under evaluated US 'indie' films. It develops an expanded understanding of US 'indie' film culture. It also identifies the contribution of a community of US 'indie' filmmakers and actors, with a particular emphasis on women practitioners.

This title describes a new critical tradition in American filmmaking. American Smart Cinema examines a contemporary type of US filmmaking that exists at the intersection of mainstream, art and independent cinema and often gives rise to absurd, darkly comic and nihilistic effects. Connecting the 'smart' sensibility to issues of expressive irony, generational divide and therapeutic culture, this bold new book describes a recent critical tradition in commercial-independent American filmmaking by exploring the unstable tone and dysfunctional themes of such films as The Royal Tenenbaums, Adaptation, The Squid and the Whale, Palindromes, The Last Days of Disco, Flirt, Ghost World, Your Friends and Neighbors, Donnie Darko and The Savages. Acknowledging the loaded forms of expression employed by these films, American Smart Cinema provides new directions for their study by discussing the self-conscious approach taken to film historical discourses of authorship, narrative and genre. Examining the smart film's taste for 'blank' style and issues of middle-class identity, the book provides a comprehensive account of smart cinema as an aesthetic category while also considering the cultural and political factors that have guaranteed it critical and popular success.

Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking and the Moving Image is the first dedicated anthology that explores vision and perception as it materializes as viewers watch screen content. While nearly all moving image research either 'imagines' how its audience responds to the screen, or focuses upon external responses, this collection utilizes the data produced from eye tracking technology to assess seeing and knowing, gazing and perceiving. The editors divide their collection into the following four sections: eye tracking performance, which addresses the ways viewers respond to screen genre, actor and star, auteur, and cinematography; eye tracking aesthetics which explores the way viewers gaze upon colour, light, movement, and space; eye tracking inscription, which examines the way the viewer responds to subtitles, translation, and written information found in the screen world; and eye tracking augmentation which examines the role of simulation, mediation, and technological intervention in the way viewers engage with screen content. At a time when the nature of viewing the screen is extending and diversifying across different platforms and exhibitions, Seeing into Screens is a timely exploration of how viewers watch the screen.

Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking and the Moving Image is the first dedicated anthology that explores vision and perception as it materializes as viewers watch screen content. While nearly all moving image research either 'imagines' how its audience responds to the screen, or focuses upon external responses, this collection utilizes the data produced from eye tracking technology to assess seeing and knowing, gazing and perceiving. The editors divide their collection into the following four sections: eye tracking performance, which addresses the ways viewers respond to screen genre, actor and star, auteur, and cinematography; eye tracking aesthetics which explores the way viewers gaze upon colour, light, movement, and space; eye tracking inscription, which examines the way the viewer responds to subtitles, translation, and written information found in the screen world; and eye tracking augmentation which examines the role of simulation, mediation, and technological intervention in the way viewers engage with screen content. At a time when the nature of viewing the screen is extending and diversifying across different platforms and exhibitions, Seeing into Screens is a timely exploration of how viewers watch the screen.