Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory. Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is. Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.

Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader provides an overview of the key concepts and debates within the developing field of transnational cinema.

Bringing together seminal essays from a wide range of sources, this volume engages with films that fashion their narrative and aesthetic dynamics in relation to more than one national or cultural community. The reader is divided into four sections:

• From National to Transnational Cinema
• Global Cinema in the Digital Age
• Motion Pictures: Film, Migration and Diaspora
• Tourists and Terrorists.

From the kinetoscope, used by one viewer at a time, to the lavish movie palaces of Hollywood's golden era, the experience of watching films has varied enormously across film. Exhibition, The Film Reader traces the emergence of a culture of moviegoing, exploring the range of venues in which films have been shown and following the fluctuating status of film and the continuing struggle over audiences.
Contributors explore the meanings conveyed to spectators through exhibition sites and practices, and raise key issues of distribution, access and consumption.
Essays by: Dudley Andrew, Anthony Downs, Gary Edgerton, Anne Friedberg, Kathryn Helgesen Fuller, Douglas Gomery, Thomas Guback, Ben M. Hall, Ina Rae Hark, Charlotte Herzog, Russell Meritt, William Paul, Suzanne I. Schiller, Gregory Waller, Barbara Wilinsky.

The Road Movie Book is the first comprehensive study of an enduring but ever-changing Hollywood genre, its place in American culture, and its legacy to world cinema. The road and the cinema both flourished in the twentieth century, as technological advances brought motion pictures to a mass audience and the mass produced automobile opened up the road to the ordinary American. When Jean Baudrillard equated modern American culture with 'space, speed, cinema, technology' he could just as easily have added that the road movie is it's supreme emblem.
The contributors explore how the road movie has confronted and represented issues of nationhood, sexuality, gender, class and race. They map the generic terrain of the road movie, trace its evolution on American television as well as on the big screen from the 1930s through the 1980s and, finally, consider road movies that go off the road, departing from the US landscape or travelling on the margins of contemporary American culture.
Movies discussed include:
* Road classics such as It Happened One Night, The Grapes of Wrath, The Wizard of Oz and the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road to films
* 1960s reworkings of the road movie in Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde
* Russ Meyer's road movies: from Motorpsycho! to Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! * Contemporary hits such as Paris Texas, Rain Man, Natural Born Killers and Thelma and Louise
* The road movie, Australian style, from Mad Max to the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The road is an enduring theme in American culture; from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Thelma and Louise," and from "Bonnie and Clyde" to "Natural Born Killers," cinematic portrayals of road journeys continually captivate the American imagination. But what is so American about the genre and why does it translate well to some countries but not others?
In "The Road Movie Book," Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark collect essays that attempt to answer these, as well as other questions, about one of the key genres of modern cinema. Organized into three sections, the first, "Mapping Boundaries," contains essays that sketch broad themes and ideological tropes of the genre. The following section, "American Roads," further historicizes the issues raised in section one and traces the continual reinvention of the genre in Hollywood film from the early 1940s to the end of the 1980s. "Alternate Routes," the final section of essays, concentrates on road films that depart from the American landscape or that travel on its cultural margins to explore why the road movie is so pertinent to those who are alienated or marginalized by society. The essays discuss a broad range of films, including "Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, The Grapes of Wrath, It Happened One Night, Faster Pussycay! Kill! Kill!, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," and "My Own Private Idaho." With 44 stills from the movies discussed, this fascinating collection is the most comprehensive volume devoted solely to the genre of the road movie.

Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.
Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is.
Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203142217

From successful, published editors, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader provides an overview of the key concepts and debates within the developing field of transnational cinema. Bringing together seminal essays from a wide range of sources, this volume engages with films that fashion their narrative and aesthetic dynamics in relation to more than one national or cultural community, demonstrating that, in an era no longer marked by the sharp divisions between communist and capitalist nation states, or even 'first' and 'third' worlds, Europe and the U.S. must be factored into the increasingly hybrid notion of 'world cinema'. The reader is divided into four sections: From National to Transnational Cinema; Global Cinema in the Digital Age; Motion Pictures: Film, Migration and Diaspora; and Tourists and Terrorists. Examining how the significance of crossing borders varies according to the ethnic and/or gendered identity of the traveller the editors suggest that the crossing of certain lines generates fundamental shifts in both the aesthetics and the ethics of cinema as a representational art. studies students have a one-stop reference for all their transnational cinema needs.

From the kinetoscope, used by one viewer at a time, to the lavish movie palaces of Hollywood's golden era, the experience of watching films has varied enormously across film. Exhibition, The Film Reader traces the emergence of a culture of moviegoing, exploring the range of venues in which films have been shown and following the fluctuating status of film and the continuning struggle over audiences.
Contributors explore the meanings conveyed to spectators through exhibition sites and practices, and raise key issues of distribution, access and consumption.
Essays by: Dudley Andrew, Anthony Downs, Gary Edgerton, Anne Friedberg, Kathryn Helgesen Fuller, Douglas Gomery, Thomas Guback, Ben M. Hall, Ina Rae Hark, Charlotte Herzog, Russell Meritt, William Paul, Suzanne I. Schiller, Gregory Waller, Barbara Wilinsky.

A definitive study of David Milch's HBO series Deadwood in the context of the television western as a genre and the intersection of capital and violence in American history.

Probably no decade saw as many changes in the Hollywood film industry and its product as the 1930s did. At the beginning of the decade, the industry was still struggling with the transition to talking pictures. Gangster films and naughty comedies starring Mae West were popular in urban areas, but aroused threats of censorship in the heartland. Whether the film business could survive the economic effects of the Crash was up in the air. By 1939, popularly called "Hollywood's Greatest Year," films like "Gone With the Wind "and "The Wizard of Oz" used both color and sound to spectacular effect, and remain American icons today. The "mature oligopoly" that was the studio system had not only weathered the Depression and become part of mainstream culture through the establishment and enforcement of the Production Code, it was a well-oiled, vertically integrated industrial powerhouse.
The ten original essays in "American Cinema of the 1930s" focus on sixty diverse films of the decade, including "Dracula," "The Public Enemy," "Trouble in Paradise," "42nd Street," "King Kong," "Imitation of Life," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Swing Time," "Angels with Dirty Faces," "Nothing Sacred," " Jezebel," "Mr. Smith Goes to""Washington," and "Stagecoach" .

Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Gary Cooper-"Glamour in a Golden Age" presents original essays from eminent film scholars that analyze movie stars of the 1930s against the background of contemporary American cultural history.
Stardom is approached as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled these actors and actresses to be discovered, featured in films, publicized, and to become recognized and admired-sometimes even notorious-parts of the cultural landscape. Using archival and popular material, including fan and mass market magazines, other promotional and publicity material, and of course films themselves, contributors also discuss other artists who were incredibly popular at the time, among them Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, and Constance Bennett.