Fifty years after his death the Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Rou remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ‘King of the Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Main Storyteller of the Country’ he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972.



From the heights of Stalinist propaganda cinema through Khrushchev’s Thaw and into the Brezhnev Stagnation era Rou’s films celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of young audiences.



In English-speaking countries Rou’s work remains relatively little known having received only limited theatrical distribution in the West. With home entertainment now offering wider opportunities to discover his unique and exhilarating oeuvre this book provides a timely introduction to the work of one of the world’s great masters of fairy-tale cinema.

The book traces the developments of Rou’s work on fairy-tale film providing cultural and technical contexts of production and analysing in a competent manner the features that mark Rou’s personal style whilst highlighting variations on narratives actors and special effects. It is a joyful read and an impeccably organised text which is well structured and brings out much more clearly the various phases in the development of Rou’s films. The chapters provide excellent introductions that serve to contextualise and connect the narrative.

World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.

When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux. 

The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.



This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.



Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.



A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.

 

The long-established dialogue between architecture and film offers an interdisciplinary platform for a critical examination of spaces of in-between.

Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops to the moving image films have actively participated in shaping the public opinion about architecture and its allied disciplines. While architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film their spatial contextualization of the narrative informs cinematic productions. Screen Space and the In-Between looks at both the filmic imagination/representation of architectural in-betweenness as well as the in-between spaces within the inherent architectural structure of filmic expression.

On the one hand cinematic production serves as a site to project utopian fantasies of the built environment and on the other hand the processes tools and methods involved in both architecture and film function as mediators between abstract ideation and its materialized manifestation.

The book interrogates the filmic creation of spatial imaginaries through the anthropological lens especially as the disciplines in the built environment react to the liminal spaces of the cinematic. It adopts cinematic experiences of the built environment as a vantage point to reframe ongoing theoretical debates about liminal spaces.

Foreword by Mark Foster Gage

Contributors: Giuliana Bruno Beatriz Colomina James F. Kerestes Graham Harman Ferda Kolatan Juhani Pallasmaa Eva Perez De Vega Mehmet Sahinler Patrik Schumacher Maria Sieira Alican Taylan Vahid Vahdat Jason Vigneri-Beane Jon Yoder Michael Young

This article analyses two South Korean feature films representing the traumatic memories of the ‘comfort women’ – Spirits’ Homecoming (2016) and Tuning Fork (2014). While both of these films share some thematic and stylistic similarities as depictions of the sexually enslaved women by Imperial Japan during the Second World War there is a crucial contrast in their narrative structure. This article analyses Spirits’ Homecoming as a fiction whose narrative structure conforms to Amsterdam/Bruner’s conservative account while Tuning Fork illustrates Strejilevich’s account of victims’ stories that defies traditional narrative conventions. Although both films find creative ways to disseminate the once-silenced stories of the victims and hold different sociocultural meanings this analysis suggests Tuning Fork highlights a distinctive intergenerational remembrance of the ‘comfort women’ which eschews dominant nationalistic discourse.

A wide-ranging career interview with Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To. The interview canvasses To’s early career and filmic influences the founding of his production company Milkyway Image his flirtation with Hollywood his taste in acting and his adjustment to new film technologies. In addition To recounts the making of key films in his oeuvre reveals his views on the current state of Hong Kong cinema and ruminates on the prospects of a second Election sequel.