Though loved by moviegoers worldwide, Spanish cinema has thus far suffered from a relative lack of critical attention. Focusing on the vast corpus of films that have left their marks on generations of spectators, "Directory of World Cinema: Spain "returns the national cinema of Spain rightfully to the forefront with numerous full-color stills and essays establishing the key players and genres in their sociopolitical context, including civil war films, romances, comedies, and the cinema of the transition. From the award-winning big-budget productions of Pedro Almodovar in Madrid to Pere Portabella's experimental documentaries and the influential Barcelona School, reviews cover individual titles in considerable depth. Essential reading for aficionados of Spanish cinema at all levels, this volume provides an accessible overview of the main trends and issues in Spanish film.

AT THAT MOMENT, MY LIFE TOOK ON A DIFFERENT GENRE. As a struggling office worker, Dokja Kim’s sole joy in life is an online novel so obscure that he’s its only reader. Then one day the story comes to an end…and so does the world. People all around the globe suddenly find themselves being massacred by horrific monsters or pitted against each other in sadistic scenarios straight out of the novel. However, only Dokja is aware that this is merely the first chapter of what is to come. Knowing that devastating plot twists are on the horizon, he can no longer afford to sit back as a reader―it’s time for Dokja to step up and write his own destiny!

Barcelona is one of the world's most beautiful cities. A permanent showcase of the work of acclaimed architect Antoni Gaudi, it also has a long and rich cinematic legacy. Great directors from all over the world--among them Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, and Michelangelo Antonioni--have set their films there. "World Film Locations: Barcelona "is the first book of its kind to explore the rich cinematic history of this seductive Catalonian city.
The illuminating essays collected here cover essential themes of the city's cinematic history, including the origins of cinema in Barcelona; the role of Ciutat Vella (old quarter) as a film set; the influential Barcelona School of the 1960s; the film presence of Gaudi and his work; changing attitudes and urban renewal before and after the 1992 Olympics; and the emergence of a new generation of female filmmakers that have made Barcelona the center of their cinematic explorations. This book will be a welcome addition to the libraries of anyone enchanted by the beauty of Barcelona, whether in person on the big screen.

Through provocative essays by specialists in different aspects of Japanese culture, this book provides an historical and analytical survey of the presence of Goddesses in Japanese audiovisual culture from its origins to the present day. It shows how these feminine myths are represented in Japan; not only as beneficial or creative deities, but also the archetypal strong or dominant woman that sometimes overshadows masculine figures and heroes, or as influential figures. Therefore, it analyzes this rich dialectic of the feminine and how the audiovisual culture has represented it thus far in film, TV series, and video games made in Japan. While many theories have been proposed to explain the presence of Goddesses in Japan, this book's focus on audiovisual culture explores how this corpus challenges the traditional conceptions of the feminine as related to Goddesses.

World Film Locations: Madrid is a trip through the urban space conceived as film location. The premise is that these locations must have been protagonist of films shot in Madrid since the silent era to the present. Madrid is the film capital of the Hispanic World from the standpoint of production. Being also one of the most visited cities in the world, this book tries to discover its most imaginative side for the visitor who dares to take this journey. But it is a tour that is not covered in the guidebooks. The different suggestions are explained in a series of essays written by experts, which analyses the role that the city plays in the stories filmed in Madrid. This is a city of contrasts where lives high culture (the best universities, the Museo del Prado, etc.), with the most popular and sparkling nightlife that began with La Movida and Almodovar. These essays account for this life contrast, addressing from the corralas (popular architecture) in Egdar Neville's films, to the underground cinema of Ivan Zulueta. Madrid's spaces and their films are visually discussed as well through 44 microanalysis of sequences, whose selection criteria has been its importance in the plot and its ability to represent the true spirit of the city, rather than its tourist attractive. Casual visitors or permanent inhabitants, and general lovers of Spanish culture in a broad sense, will find in these pages reasons to wander through Madrid's films and streets.

The book aims to provide an unifying view of a variety (a 'zoo') of mathematical models with some kind of singular nonlinearity, in the sense that it becomes infinite when the state variable approaches a certain point. Up to 11 different concrete models are analyzed in separate chapters. Each chapter starts with a discussion of the basic model and its physical significance. Then the main results and typical proofs are outlined, followed by open problems. Each chapter is closed by a suitable list of references. The book may serve as a guide for researchers interested in the modelling of real world processes.

The Brobots are back in another mecha action meets Mother Goose mash-up! This time they're up against the Semisweet ChocoWitch of Crime Brulee Mountain and her crumby criminal cohorts. Take a half cup of Power Rangers with a tablespoon of Powerpuff Girls and add a dash of Voltron for a recipe we're calling "Brobots and the Mecha Malarkey"!

This paper conducts an analysis of the 1st Air Commando Group (ACG) and its operations in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater from August 1943 to May 1944. History lends credence to the fact that this small unorthodox group of airmen, envisioned from the simple idea of "what if" and fashioned in a mere few months time into a cohesive and viable fighting force, breathed life into the stagnant Allied effort of removing the Japanese from the China-Burma-India theater. The question is, how? How could such a small unit, which was forced upon the traditional military structure in the CBI theater, accomplish the seemingly impossible where others before had failed?The author maintains that the success of the 1st Air Commando Group was the result of key factors which when combined formed a "magic elixir" boosting the ailing Allied effort in this theater. Those key factors were strong leadership, efficient organization including the hiring of the "right" people, unit training, joint training to promote teamwork, and, tactics and innovation.This analysis gathered supporting information from primary source documents stored at the USAF Historical Research Agency (USAFHRA) as well as utilizing secondary sources for background information.

The haunting specter of hanging trees holds a powerful sway on the American imagination, conjuring images of rough-and-tumble frontier towns struggling to impose law and order in a land where violence was endemic. In this thoughtful study, former New Mexico State Historian Robert T??rrez examines several fascinating criminal cases that reveal the harsh and often gruesome realities of the role hangings, legal or otherwise, played in the administration of frontier justice.

At first glance, the topic may seem downright morbid, and in a sense it is, but these violent attempts at justice are embedded in our perception of America's western experience. In tracing territorial New Mexico's efforts to enforce law, T??rrez challenges the myths and popular perceptions about hangings and lynching in this corner of the Wild West.

Orientaciones trasnpacificas is a wide-ranging study that presents a cross-temporal examination of the discernible orientation toward East and South Asia that pervades the work of well-known intellectual and artistic Mexican figures. It goes from the later years of the regime of Porfirio Diaz in the 1900s to the cultural imaginaries of nationalism in the 1920s, and from the Cold War to the global spread of neoliberalism at the turn of the new century. Understanding Orientalism as a form of situated and historical orientation grounded in Mexico's own (post)colonial formation, the book argues that, although after its independence Mexico's important commercial connection with the Asian continent became attenuated, East and South Asia continued to be a crucial point of reference for Mexico to assert global centrality and to anchor discourses of cultural singularity or political exception. By tracing the intellectual turn to Asia in Jose Juan Tablada's travel narratives and art essays, Manuel Alvarez Bravo's photography landscapes, Jose Vasconcelos's writing about mestizaje and in his literacy campaigns, Roger Bartra's Marxist political economy writings, Rafael Bernal's hard boiled novel, Marcela Rodriguez and Mario Bellatin's musical composition in Ciudad Juarez, and Shinpei Takeda's art installations in Tijuana, the book recasts the colonial emphasis on a transatlantic relationship with Europe and displays a transpacific and planetary imagination-eschewing the Atlantic dialectic between ex colony and metropole-that defined Mexican conceptualizations of literary and cultural modernity. Thus, Orientaciones trasnpacificas shows that Mexican orientalism played an instrumental (though often unremarked) role in the cultural definitions that became fundamental to the field of Mexican and Latin American Studies, such as the notion of hybrid modernity (in racial, aesthetic, economic, or temporal terms).