Film Studies
Beijing Film Academy 2021
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
Outback
Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.
The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.
When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.
World Film Locations: Los Angeles
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.
Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
Architecture, Film, and the In-between
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
Call Me by Your Name
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.
Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
There is now no shortage of media for us to consume from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations though is the maker: in particular the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.
How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging as well as thinking through time editing sound and the stream Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.
The result is a personal journey through media theory history and technology furnished with practical exercises for teachers students professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.
This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world.
The primary readership will be among academics researchers and students in the creative arts as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers cinematographers and social media content producers.
Designed for classroom use this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production and may also be of interest to students at MA level particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.
It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.
Ulrike Ottinger
The first English language scholarly collection of articles on the leading Berlin based German artist and film-maker Ulrike Ottinger. The articles engage with the full range of the works from the early Berlin feature films of the 1970s and .'80s to the ethnographic documentaries also including the art exhibitions photography shows installations and artist books. The book brings together feminist film theorists with art historians and cultural theorists each with a distinctive and detailed perspective on the queer fabulist genres of Ottinger now in her 80s.
Reframing Berlin
Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city an urban memory through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’ which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political religious economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’ which range from demolition to memorialisation.
It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895 with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.
Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty
A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Scenographers, set and costume designers in the Alessandro Blasetti Archive
The Alessandro Blasetti Archive is a unique source of information that traces the profiles and work of many professional figures of the film industry including scenographers and costume designers. An examination of the director’s filmography reveals the names of the numerous maestri of Italian cinema who between the 1930s and the 1970s elevated the art of set and costume design beyond Italy. Among them were pioneers such as Virgilio Marchi Gastone Medin Gino Carlo Sensani and Dario Cecchi. The archive holds rare documents that concern them as well as documents relative to Marina Arcangeli and Maria de Matteis two women who were as important as their male colleagues to the success of Italian talent in this sector.
Fashion, migration and identity in Italian cinema: The case of Billo il grand dakhaar and Bangla
This article analyses the insightful role that fabric fashion and clothing shops have in Laura Muscardin’s Billo il grand dakhaar (Billo the Grand Dakhaar) (2008) and Phaim Bhuiyan’s first feature film Bangla (2019). Billo portrays the story of a young tailor from Senegal who dreams of becoming a fashion designer in Rome; Bangla fictionalizes the life of its director Phaim Bhuiyan a second-generation Italian of Bangladeshi descent. By analysing flashbacks and dream sequences as signifiers of cultural ties and by examining the role of the shops as emblematic spaces where the local and the transnational forge a new intersecting reality the article aims to investigate how both protagonists become active agents of change and how fashion contributes to the reshaping of the landscape of the city of Rome.
A Roman holiday with ‘open heritage’? Exploring copyright law and cultural heritage law’s role for our collective cultural interest in Italian film and Italian fashion
This article explores how the law affects an audience’s collective recognition that a film and fashion in film is of cultural interest. It argues that copyright law today can play an important and crucial role in a film’s continued relevance and in the preservation and valorization of cinema as copyright law regulates the copying and display of a film and its images including the fashion images within it. Likewise it shows how cultural heritage law plays an important and crucial role in the preservation and continued relevance of fashion through film as cultural heritage law applies certain rules and norms to the preservation of film reels and the archives and institutions in which they are stored. The article uses Roman Holiday (Wyler 1953) and La Dolce Vita (Fellini 1960) as case studies and considers Cinecittà’s description of itself as an ‘open heritage’ to explore the relationship between law fashion and film.
L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo, Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009), Italy: Luce Cinecittà
Review of: L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009) Italy: Luce Cinecittà
‘Vetrine della Moda’: Forms and models of femininity on the pages of fascist movie magazines
Italian fascism of the 1930s dominated more than just politics particularly as it spilled over into styles of clothing. This article demonstrates that despite the manipulative ideology of fascism women found other ways to affirm their femininity. American fashion and costumes conveyed through the movie magazines of the same period became evidence of new cultural models that stood out in opposition to the Duce and his familiar and domestic ideals. Magazines such as Stelle and Cinema Illustrazione which were considered ‘cultural intermediaries’ proposed an image of a new woman built through exotic and sensual clothing and looks. Many columns were dedicated to building a direct relationship between the audience and the entertainment industry. As the industry sprung up with more advertisements and fashion articles it promoted new clothing styles make-up use and acting. This cultural orientation represented a historical contradiction which this article will consider.
Malavita chic: Fashion and fandom in the Italian crime series
This article analyses how fashion in the Italian crime series Suburra and Gomorrah is a significant facet of how these programmes’ visual and narrative discourses work upon audiences to communicate a privileged vision of the criminal subcultures they represent. Clothing and style are crucial to the series through the narrative dimension in which costuming reveals character development and symbolizes shifts in plot and theme as well by articulating the characters’ adherence to and deviation from their cultural milieu. Moreover by presenting an ethnography of criminal subcultures as articulated through dress these series have engendered a complex network of fashion fandom raising significant questions about viewer identification and the reification of mob wear within mainstream culture. This in-depth analysis of the role of fashion in Suburra and Gomorrah aims to deepen our understanding of how these series constitute a significant intervention on the interplay of fashion and identity in Italy today.
The costumes of an archaic dream: Pasolini, Danilo Donati and Oedipus the King (1967)
This article examines the collaboration between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Danilo Donati. Pasolini wanted the aesthetic of Oedipus the King to evoke an ‘indistinct barbaric’ feel and asked the great costume designer Danilo Donati for a mélange of Persian Sumerian Aztec and African art. Pasolini sought the shapes the drawings and the sculptures of an archaic civilization but mixed together adhering to the Pasolinian method of contamination so that they would lose their original identity in a new form that at the same time recalled ancient cultures or in the case of the African art even tribal history.
Fashioning: Women and gender in film and fashion
This article introduces the interviews featured in this issue of the journal with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and creative director of the Maison Christian Dior Maria Grazia Chiuri. In 2020 Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Alina Marazzi to make a short film about the work of Lucia Marcucci a feminist visual poet and artist active in the 1960s and 1970s who combined the language of mass media and advertising and addressed themes such as the changing values of family domesticity and the role of women. Focusing on the work of Alina Marazzi and Maria Grazia Chiuri this article provides a framework to explore the long history of fashion and film as well as the collaboration between Chiuri and female artists. In addition to discussing the digital genre of the ‘fashion film’ the essay contextualizes the emergence and development of the field of fashion studies and its relationship with feminism women the media and the history of women and fashion.
Eclectic primitivism: Piero Tosi’s Medea (1969)
Marked by difficult beginnings Piero Tosi’s work on the costumes for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 Medea turned out to be one of the designer’s most innovative contributions. Departing from his own philological method and from the protective alliance with Luchino Visconti Tosi eventually came to absorb from Pasolini a liberating form of contamination which remains at the core of the film’s primitivistic costumes. Seconding Pasolini’s allegorical intentions and anthropological imagination Tosi reconstructed the mythological past of the Euripidean tragedy without incurring the clichés of conventional Hellenism. Supported by dressmaker Umberto Tirelli he created experimental works that drew upon a variety of anachronistic sources from seventeenth-century Tupi feather garments to early twentieth-century fashion from Pre-Columbian gold ornaments to Italian mannerist paintings. This article aims at uncovering several overlooked references in Tosi’s postmodern eclecticism while providing a documented reconstruction of the designer’s collaboration with Pasolini.
Interview with Alina Marazzi: The tactile gaze
Alina Marazzi is a well-known Italian feminist director whose explorations of women’s lives the challenges they have faced (and still face) in society and the family have had a profound impact on film and feminist studies. She has contributed to creating a new cinematic language and mode of storytelling through experimenting with the use of both collage and montage. She has also made incursions into the world of fashion with a film on international fashion icon and intellectual Anna Piaggi and later with her short film that the House of Dior commissioned: To Cut Is to Think (2020). The interview focuses on this latter film where Marazzi shares her experience in working on the film the opportunities it opened up for her creative process her collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri and her encounter with the work of the poet and artist Lucia Marcucci whose work is the subject of the film.
The New Made in Italy for the 21st Century: Fashion, Film, Art and Design, Eugenia Paulicelli, Claudio Napoli and Massimo Mascolo (dirs) (2022), USA: Okozoko
Review of: The New Made in Italy for the 21st Century: Fashion Film Art and Design Eugenia Paulicelli Claudio Napoli and Massimo Mascolo (dirs) (2022) USA: Okozoko
‘Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond’
This editorial positions the study of fashion and costume against the field of film studies and the history of Italian cinema and media. Although scholarly approaches to this field of study first appeared in Anglo American literature at the beginning of the 1990s the pioneering work of Italian historian and film critic Mario Verdone has yet to be acknowledged. The anthology Verdone edited in 1950 a pivotal year of Italy’s post-war reconstruction was the first of its kind: prior to its publication the relationship between costume fashion and film had never been the subject of scholarly enquiry. The title of Verdone’s book La moda e il costume nel film (‘Fashion and costume in film’) calls attention to how these arts techniques and industries work in the actual process of making films. Verdone’s book offers a context for the articles contained in this volume.
Interview with Maria Grazia Chiuri: Women in fashion: Crafting feminisms
Maria Grazia Chiuri creative director at the House of Christian Dior talks about her current role working for the French luxury brand. She reflects on how passionate she is about highlighting and promoting women’s multifaceted manifestations of work image and creativity. Chiuri also discusses her long career in fashion starting with her mother’s atelier her studies at the European Institute of Design and then her work for the Fendi sisters and Valentino both located in Rome where she was born. Chiuri stresses certain books have been crucial for her from Ngozi’s recent bestseller We Should All Be Feminists (2015) to Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life (2019) and classical texts by Simone de Beauvoir as well as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970). In addition she emphasizes how beneficial it has been to be able to immerse herself in Dior’s rich archive. She finds inspiration in the history of women fashion feminism the arts cinema and how all these institutions promote necessary changes to the fashion industry of the twenty-first century.
Fashion and costumes in the work of Italian filmmaker Robert Vignola in silent Hollywood
While the influence of dive fashion on the cross-class audience of Italian silent cinema has been established the relationship between fashion and silent Hollywood stresses the class-composition of the audience. The work of director Robert G. Vignola born in Italy but active in the United States clarifies the passage from a cinema addressed to the popular audience of the nickelodeon to the middle class and specifically women in the narrative and through stars within the suggestions of fashion. There is a general consensus about Italian American culture being an extension of Italianness. In the press Vignola was always identified as an Italian and his artistic sensibility was credited to his Italian origins at a time where Italian silent cinema was incredibly popular on American screens. From a transnational perspective the role of fashion in his work both within a historical perspective and in the theoretical debate on female silent film spectatorship also points to the underestimated relations between American media and Italian culture.
Feminist genealogies, archival constellations and women’s labour in fashion films: Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (2016) and Triangle (2014)
In this article I examine how Alina Marazzi and Costanza Quatriglio deal with the world of haute couture and off-the-rack fashion and with the turn to the archive in their documentaries. They construct feminist genealogies (between maternage and spectral sisterhood) in the fashion world and adopt different modalities of montage (between gleaning and détournement). In Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (‘Anna Piaggi: A fashion visionary’) (2016) Marazzi focuses on Anna Piaggi a renowned fashion editor for Vogue Italia. In contrast Costanza Quatriglio in Triangle (2014) centres her story on the 123 women textile workers victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911 in counterpoint to her interview with Mariella Fasanella the only survivor of a collapsed sweatshop in Barletta Italy in 2011. The two filmmakers produce a short circuit in fashion films among feminist genealogies archival constellations and women’s labour in the fashion industry activating a feminist and ethical stance.
Film, fashion, costume and Rome-based archives
This essay presents a mapping of archival sources public and private connected to the activities of the cine-theatrical tailors and costume designers in order to reconstruct a productive and cultural reality of absolute excellence that starting from the past century developed in Rome. The aim is to offer information in the context of personal archives consisting of documentary assets of various types ranging from collections of press clippings photographs notes working manuscripts and above all else collections of original sketches often accompanied by samples of fabrics produced by costume designers for the creation of cinematic televisual and theatrical costumes. The major film and theatre ateliers operating in Rome are listed and follow a focus on the archival funds of costume designers of the Chiarini Library of the Experimental Center for Cinematography Foundation. Designers include such names as Gino Carlo Sensani Piero Tosi Vera Marzot Adriana Berselli Marisa D’Andrea and Alberto Verso.
How backstory and direct address reformulate the Shakespearean character on television: The case of the missing psychological motivation for House of Cards’ Frank Underwood
This article delves into narrative elements of direct address and backstory in television focusing on House of Cards (2012–19) Shakespeare’s Richard III and Game of Thrones (2011–19). Comparing dramaturgical approaches in stage plays and TV series the study highlights House of Cards’ unique incorporation of a pragmatic use of the direct address to create ‘world-view’ for character exploration. The analysis extends to Game of Thrones emphasizing Tyrion Lannister’s self-descriptive addresses revealing a psychological struggle rooted in rejection and backstory. The article proposes a methodological framework linking first lines or direct addresses to character backstories emphasizing the role of self-descriptive asides in character creation. It introduces the concept of a ‘psychological motivational arc’ within character arcs exploring how direct addresses contribute to nonlinear character development. Concluding with an in-depth examination of House of Cards’ Frank Underwood it scrutinizes Willimon’s ‘show don’t tell’ approach questioning its potential limitations on character depth and challenging traditional screenwriting advice. The analysis unravels the interplay between direct address backstory and character development in television series offering insights into evolving narrative techniques and their implications for contemporary screenwriting.
Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
Review of: Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
Oxon and New York: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 217 pp.
ISBN 978-1-90797-551-6 h/bk $48.95
Scripted resonance or lost in translation?: Storytelling and Chinese reception of Everything Everywhere All at Once
This study delves into the intricate art of screenwriting by critically examining the reception of the 2023 award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once among Chinese audiences. Notwithstanding its international laurels Everything has sparked a divided sentiment in Mainland China. While its audacious blend of genres and the poignant depiction of Chinese–American experiences have been recognized Everything was absent from Chinese theatres owing to its explicit content. However its digital footprint on Chinese streaming platforms has painted a picture of ambivalence. Many Chinese viewers expressed reservations about the screenwriters’ frequent use of pop culture references perceived narrative clichés and the incorporation of elements that seem discordant with conventional Chinese storytelling. Yet interspersed among these critiques is admiration for its visual brilliance and inclusivity. Grounded in resonance theory this study scrutinizes Everything particularly the screenplay’s reliance on the oft-touted ‘universal’ blueprint of the Hero’s Journey. Aligning with critiques suggesting such frameworks might be culturally myopic this study connects these screenwriting choices to the lukewarm reception among Chinese audiences. Through this lens the study offers invaluable insights for screenwriters keen on crafting narratives that resonate deeply with Chinese viewers. Moreover it adds to the larger conversation about the need for diversifying screenwriting templates on the global stage challenging the dominance of western-centric paradigms such as the Hero’s Journey. At its core this study deciphers the intricate tapestry of screenwriting elements that strike a chord within the Chinese sociocultural milieu.
In Custody: From written text to audio-visual discourse through a postcolonial lens
Comparing the novel In Custody written by Anita Desai (1984) and the film adaptation In Custody (1993) directed by Ismail Merchant provides an interesting opportunity to examine how literary texts are transformed into audio-visual works through different discursive techniques. A written text is taken from the page to live on a screen and thus focusing on the main content the literary author created becomes a challenge for screenwriters filmmakers and translators. In the case of In Custody the inclusion of English subtitles in the film allows for its internationalization while respecting the language of the novel. This approach enables audiences to appreciate the sounds of Hindi and Urdu poetry and in doing so they become custodians of these rich literary traditions.
The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self which far from being a stable marker of urban liberal millennial Indian identity has a schizophrenic quality one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion optimism and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book however belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.
The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies popular culture analyses and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star the urban space web series YouTube videos and social media content.
Fallen Women: Filmic Representations of Nuns
Women's Work in Post-war Italy
Italy’s 1948 constitution states that Italy is a ‘republic founded upon work’. This book explores women’s labour following World War Two and Italy’s new republic. It focuses its enquiry on three sectors: agriculture (rice weeders) fashion (seamstresses) and religious work (nuns). It studies original oral history interviews and compares women’s own words with their representation in film.
In Italy both war and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings. This book shifts that frame to investigate the labour that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political social and ideological change. By examining (filmed) oral history interviews and postwar fiction films the book brings a vivid engaging and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work.
Historical studies of Italian women’s work in this period are scarce short and almost never in English; this work addresses that critical gap. Film histories almost invariably study women for their beauty and on-screen sexuality; this work critiques and moves beyond this bias. Oral history studies aim to give voice to the under-represented; this book shares that goal.
The book is interested in how women’s work was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Critical analysis of films produced between 1945 and 1965 reveals tensions around women workers’ financial sexual intellectual and spatial independence. Oral histories reveal little-discussed professions and women’s experiences in the workplace. These interviews expose the profound difference work made to women’s lives and the joys and dilemmas of this difference.
Professed Professionals: Oral Histories of Nuns
Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes, Kenneth W. Harrow (2022)
Review of: Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes Kenneth W. Harrow (2022)
New York and London: Routledge 238 pp.
ISBN 978-1-00328-889-3 e-book $35.09
Architecture, Film, and the In-between
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
Challenging time, age and power relations: The child figure in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata
This article is an interdisciplinary study of the figure of the child in Ingmar Bergman’s Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) (1978) using theoretical perspectives from childhood studies within a cinema studies framing. By analysing the shifting roles of mother and daughter in this seldom-discussed film the article demonstrates the on-screen child figure’s capacity to challenge society’s deep-rooted ideas of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ respectively thereby exposing the inconstant nature of age categories. Drawing on contemporary childhood studies I argue using Autumn Sonata as an example that the child figure in cinema bears a subversive potential for questioning power relations between generations as well as defying a chrononormative notion of time and age. This reading contributes to a deepened awareness of the function of the on-screen child figure not least transferable to Bergman’s cinematic work. It also sheds light on the mutable connections between fictional children and central conceptions of childhood in contemporary society.
Constructions of the Real
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form content and process.
The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.
It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing critiquing and interpreting the world.
Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian Judith Aston Nicholas Andueza Elisabeth Brun Joanna Callaghan Gerda Cammaer Philip Cartelli Lorena Cervera Jill Daniels Kath Dooley Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz Andréa França Catherine Gough-Brady Robert Hardcastle Alex Johnston Elizabeth Miller Ros Mortimer Kim Munro Minou Norouzi Stefano Odorico Rebecca Ora Sheersha Perera Christine Rogers Isabel Seguí Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.
3-D Experimental VR and Art Practices
The book addresses themes such as visual perception perception of 3-D and stereo. With the event of the stereoscope and the theatre dioramas and panoramas before it vision and perception in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is seen to be marketed to a mass audience. As such the spectacle of the stereoscope and other optical devices can be seen as a precursor to mass media dissemination today.
Yet artists use the stereoscope and VR to signify the spectacle clairvoyance vision and the mechanism of vision as well as a symbol for the act of looking being looked at while looking and the gaze within an art new media practice.
Other artists have used 3-D and virtual reality to address themes such as theories of consciousness or embodied consciousness the human – machine relationship and the idea of mapping reality alternative networked realities.
The book includes an introduction and summary of chapters 86 anaglyphic 3-D images and presents a survey of artists working in 3-D and virtual reality VR art. The convergence of other fields such as new media art video art and early virtual reality art is described through many examples within the scope of the book.
Artists discussed include Mert Akbal Zoe Beloff Geoffrey Berliner Lygia Clark Dan Graham Salvador Dali Marcel Duchamp Scott S. Fisher Rebecca Hackemann Perry Hoberman Daniel Iglesia Ken Jacobs William Kentridge Susan MacWilliam Patrick Meagher Rosa Menkman Jim Naughten Tony Ousler Alfons Schilling Joel Schlemowitz Christopher Schneberger Judith Sönniken Ethan Turpin Aga Ousseinov Colleen Woolpert.
3-D glasses included with hardback book.
Anarchitectural Experiments
The book investigates speculative filmic architectural projects and animations that go beyond representing buildings touching upon issues concerning medium act of representation or conducting criticism on history culture society or urban politics along with the mediated character of contemporary spatial experience – interpreting it primarily through protocols of architectural imaging.
The book centres on the influence of simulation and cinematic design on visionary or speculative architecture. It outlines the impact of film and animation in architectural representation through key projects. The opening analysis is useful in contextualizing speculative architectural projects while the later chapters link the theory to the imagery. Stasiowski uses a diverse collection of interesting case studies that are easy to read and well-chosen to support his argument.
This is a well-researched work and comprehensive review of speculative architecture and various media that describe it. Stasiowski makes a thorough argument about the use of cinema and animation as a method of architectural visualization.
Stasiowki’s book sets itself apart from other work in the same area by in discussing speculative projects in relation to cinema. and specifically the effect that modern technologies are having on the subject now and in its potential futures.
The borderline between material environment and spatialized imagery becomes progressively more blurred while demand for visionary works that would make sense of this merging has never been greater.
It will appeal primarily to architects and designers filmmakers and academics. It may also be of interest to artists set designers and film production designers.
Reframing Berlin
Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city an urban memory through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’ which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political religious economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’ which range from demolition to memorialisation.
It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895 with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.
Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty
A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect
Beijing Film Academy 2020
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
Fedor Bondarchuk: 'Stalingrad'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing.
This KinoSputnik about Fedor Bondarchuk's megahit Stalingrad (2013) examines the production context and reception of the film whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes.
Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 blockbuster film Stalingrad shattered box-office records and dazzled viewers with its use of special effects enhanced by its 3D IMAX format. The film transported viewers back to 1942 and the bloody battle that would turn the tide of the Second World War.
This new study situates the film within the context of ongoing debates about the meanings of the Second World War in Russia and previous films about the Battle of Stalingrad.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts but will also be of interest to anyone researching or studying the Battle of Stalingrad and the course of the Second World War.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Aleksei Balabanov: 'Brother'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing.
Ira Österberg's KinoSputnik on Aleksei Balabanov's cult film Brother (1997) examines the production history context and reception of the film and offers a detailed reading of its key themes.
Balabanov’s Brother made a mark on the new Russia’s film history as its hero Danila Bagrov quickly gained cult status and the nostalgic rock soundtrack hit the nerve of the young post-Soviet generation. This study unravels the film’s effective and ingenious mixture of genre elements art narration and almost documentary-style realism which would become trademarks for Balabanov’s oeuvre.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts but will also be of interest to anyone researching or studying film soundtracking.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Andrei Tarkovsky: 'Ivan's Childhood'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing. This KinoSputnik on Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature Ivan's Childhood examines the production context and reception of the film whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes.
Through a close examination of its intricate narrative structure unique stylistic approach and deep philosophical underpinnings this KinoSputnik provides a thorough analysis of a truly remarkable debut film from an artist now considered a towering figure of Russian culture.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Beijing Film Academy 2019
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
Men, War and Film
The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service produced towards the end of the Second World War were one-reel films in which soldiers gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front. These are the first ever films where men speak openly in their regional accents and they have profound meaning for remembrance documentary representation and the ecology of film in wartime.
Of the 400 films (or ‘issues’) made 64 survive. Each of those contained around 25 individual messages. Men – and a very few women - from a particular city town or region were grouped together for the films to make regional screenings back in UK cinemas and town halls possible. Personnel from all three services are featured but the men are predominantly from the army units. Screenings took place at a cinema in the subjects’ local area and were usually organised by the regional Army Welfare Committee. The names and addresses of those to be invited to the screenings were sent to the UK along with the films.
Until now these films have barely been researched and yet are a valuable source of social history as well as representing a different mode from the mainstream of British wartime documentary. This book expands the history of Calling Blighty and places it in a broader context both past and present. New research reveals the origins of the film series and draws comparisons with written and oral contemporary sources.
Steve Hawley is an artist/filmmaker whose work has been screened worldwide and has collaborated closely with the North West Film Archive UK. He is emeritus professor at the Manchester Metropolitan University UK.
Using memoirs and diaries Steve Hawley has researched the roles in the Burma campaign of participants in the surviving films and traced over 160 of the families of the men – and two men still alive – and recreated these wartime screenings.
Hawley’s book is part description of the films part reclamation of a largely unknown genre of wartime filmmaking partly an account of the Burma campaign and partly a discussion of war and memory. Engagingly and warmly written.
It will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of war studies especially those specializing in the social rather than military history of warfare and historians of British wartime cinema and documentary. Also useful for an undergraduate audience in history media/film studies.
Potential for readers with an interest in the Second World War particularly the war in Burma and those with an interest in family history of the period.
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where over a thousand-year history Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history an argument that informs the shape of the whole.
The book is divided into two sections. The first ‘Islamicate Histories’ charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow the traditions of miniature painting poetry song and their performance and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section ‘Cinematic Forms’ discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’ as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’.
Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim especially in contemporary Bollywood.
This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry dance song performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents.
The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use.
It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history cultural studies women's studies visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India.
Remembering Paris in Text and Film
This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris through written texts and movies from the outside and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it.
This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines.
The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Paris at Midnight which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle Australia.
While it is driven by original research notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time it will also provide clarity and importantly make logical links between for example the past and present myth and reality poetry and history and various schools and movements including psychology poetics poststructuralism and critical theory classical reception feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses.
Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond.
Primary readership will be academics educators scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use.
Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses which combine historical cultural literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book therefore will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography.
Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film
This will be the first edited collection in English on urban space and architecture in Spanish popular film since 1898. Building on existing film and urban histories this innovative volume will examine Spanish film through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space the built environment visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age.
Architecture and Urbanism in Spanish Film brings together the innovative scholarship of an international and interdisciplinary group of film architecture and urban studies scholars thinking through the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. Some of the shared concerns that emerge from this volume include the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited since the early twentieth century; the question of the mobile gaze; film's role in the shifting relationship between the private and the public; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; the impact of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.
Primary readership will be those researching teaching and studying Spanish film international film studies urban cultural studies cultural studies and architects who are interested in interdisciplinary endeavours.
The Return of Twin Peaks
In 2017 twenty-five years after its initial release a new season of Twin Peaks shook the world of television.
This new book is a detailed analysis of the third season of the television series and aims to elucidate some of the meanings of Twin Peaks: The Return and explain these in terms of philosophical mythological and spiritual approaches. It focuses on the third season of Twin Peaks but also refers to the first two seasons and to the film Fire Walk with Me.
Divided into three sections the book first examines the third season as expanded storytelling through the lens of Gene Youngblood's theory of synesthetic cinema intertextuality integrationist and segregationist approaches in the realm of fiction and focuses on the role of audio and visual superimpositions in The Return. It goes on to question the nature of the reality depicted in the seasons via scientific approaches such as electromagnetism time theory and multiverses. The third and final section aims to transcend this vision by exploring the role of theosophy the occult and other spiritual sources.
The author’s focus on the role of spirituality and science in Twin Peaks is what distinguishes this book from other works on the famous television series. The work of a scholar who is also a fan the book should appeal to any hard-core Twin Peaks viewer.
Foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com and the television critic for New York magazine.
This will be essential reading for fans of Twin Peaks and academics writing about it.
Also of interest for students with an interest in philosophy religion science or spiritualism in visual and popular culture.
Radioactive Documentary
How have nuclear issues been covered in documentary since the end of the Cold War? This original new book explores how the sometimes elusive sometimes dramatic effects of uranium products on the landscape on architecture and on social organisation continue to show up on-screen maintaining a record of moving images that goes back to the early twentieth century.
It is the first book to analyse independent documentary films about nuclear energy - it suggests an approach to documentary films as agents of change.
Each chapter of this book focuses on one of ten different documentary films made in Europe and North America since 1989. Each of these films works the material and the ideological heritage of the nuclear power industry into visions of the future. Dealing with the legacy of how ignorance and neglect led to accidents and failures the films offer different ways of understanding and moving on from the past. The documentary form itself can be understood as a collective means for the discovery of creative solutions and the communication of new narratives. In the case of these films the concepts of radioactivity and deep time in particular are used to bring together narrative and formal aesthetics in the process of reimagining the relationships between people and their environments.
Focusing on the representation of radioactive spaces in documentary and experimental art films the study shows how moving images do more than communicate the risks and opportunities and the tumultuous history associated with atomic energy. They embody the effects of Cold War technologies as they persist into the present acting as a reminder that the story is not over yet.
Primary readership will be academics and students working in environmental communication and in environmental humanities more broadly. For students of independent film or documentary it will also provide a clear picture of contemporary themes and creative practice.
Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
There is now no shortage of media for us to consume from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations though is the maker: in particular the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.
How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging as well as thinking through time editing sound and the stream Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.
The result is a personal journey through media theory history and technology furnished with practical exercises for teachers students professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.
This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world.
The primary readership will be among academics researchers and students in the creative arts as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers cinematographers and social media content producers.
Designed for classroom use this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production and may also be of interest to students at MA level particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.
It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.
Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television
The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has to date written and directed nine films winning an Oscar a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013. In 2016 he created and directed his first TV series The Young Pope which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films.
This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film.
International contributors from the UK Italy France The Netherlands Australia Israel Canada and the United States Italy Israel France UK Australia Canada offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work. They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory nostalgia ageing love thirst for fulfilment search for the self identity crisis human estrangement marginality irony and power. In so doing they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion challenging established assumptions and interpretations. Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino’s highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture.
While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian none
of these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership. This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker.
The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions.
Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS – The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019. The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field.
Primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies. Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates.
Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses
Given the subject there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership but this is primarily a scholarly text.
The Poetics of Poetry Film
Set to generate and influence discussions in the field for years to come this is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. It will set the benchmark for all subsequent works on the subject being the first book of its kind.
Poetry films are a genre of short film usually combining the three main elements: the poem as verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music which create a soundscape. This book examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film film poetry and video poetry particularly in relation to lyric voice and time.
Provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. Includes interviews analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film from its origins to the present. This is a very important groundbreaking work on film poetry. The ideas discussed here are of great importance and the diversity and breadth of the volume is especially impressive and very useful. This book brings together in one place crucial ideas and information for practitioners students and academics and is clearly and accessibly written.
Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners this will be an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry digital media filmmaking art and creative writing as well as poetry filmmakers. It explores working practices processes of collaboration and the mechanisms which make these possible. It also reveals the network of festivals disseminating and theorizing poetry film and presents a compelling bibliography.
This is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date. It is poised to become a major text in the field.
Essential reading for academics teaching poetry filmmaking moving image film media and media poetry writing and art. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in those fields. Great potential for textbook adoption.
Also relevant to poets filmmakers visual artists graphic artists and theorists filmmakers screenwriters art historians philosophers cultural commentators arts journalists.
MEDIA
The first in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy this volume explores a transdisciplinary notion of media and technology exploring media as technology with special attention to its material historical and ecological ramifications. The authors reconceptualize media from environmental ecological and systems approaches drawing not only on media and communication studies but also philosophy sociology political science biology art computer science information studies and other disciplines.
Featuring a group of internationally known scholars this collection explores evolving definitions of media and how media technologies are transforming theory and practice. As the current media includes a wider and wider range of concepts products services and institutions the definition of media continues to be in a state of flux. What are media today? How is media studies evolving? How have technologies transformed communication and media theory and informed praxis? What are some of the futures of media?
The collection challenges traditional notions of media as well as concepts such as freedom of expression audience empowerment and participatory media and explores emergent media including transmedia virtual reality online games metatechnology remediation and makerspaces.
This is the first volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry 9781789382655 follows and builds upon this 2021 collection.
Beijing Film Academy 2018
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook showcases the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
Narrating the City
Analysing a variety of international films and ultimately placing them in dialogue with video art photographic narratives and emerging digital image-based technologies the contributions explore the expanding range of ‘mediated’ narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. Each chapter presents an interesting critical approach to the diversity of topics with clear explanation of the contextual framework and methodology and a consistent depth of analysis.
In the three sections of the book authors underline the continual role of film and media in creating moving image narratives of the city identifying how it creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture re-presenting familiar cities modes of seeing cultures and social questions in unfamiliar ways. This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media which illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture.
In making this shift from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption the book not only reveals new techniques of representation mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers; its emphasis on ‘narrative’ offers insights into critical societal issues. These include cultural identity diversity memory and spatial politics as they are both informed by and represented in various media.
The focus for the book is on how films can produce mediation of urban life and culture by connecting the notions of identity diversity and memory. Both the subject and the approach are gaining in popularity in recent years. This book's main feature is its dual perspective involving both practical and theoretical stances – and it is this approach that makes it a particularly relevant and original contribution.
Primary readership will be academics scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners interested in architecture and media in general film moving images urban studies in particular. Also of relevance to sociologists and those interested in cultural theory. The inclusion of chapters on urban photography and art installations may also be of interest to students and designers in these areas.
Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen
The book offers an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen examining stage and screen works as texts but also as performances and cultural events. Case studies of distinct periods in British film and theatre history are used to illustrate the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced and to look at issues around theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism.
Written in a refreshingly accessible style it offers an original analysis with emphasis on performance and event. It opens up new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place mise en scène acting styles and star personas. The recent growth of digital theatre is examined to foreground the 'events' of theatre and cinema with phenomena such as NT Live analysed for the different ways that 'liveness' is adapted.
Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between mediums. The book takes as its subject the interaction between film and theatre and argues that rather than emphasising differences between the two mediums the emphasis should be placed on elements that they share in particular the emphasis on performance and the participation in an event. It uses a number of case studies to show how this relationship is affected by changes in technology – the coming of film sound the invention of live-casting – and in the nature of the event being offered to particular audiences. These examples ranging from the well-known to the obscure are all treated with relevant and knowledgeable analysis and a strong and appropriate sense of context.
The book offers a welcome overview of previous work in this area and demonstrates the importance of basing analysis on historical context as well as giving new insights into some familiar examples. Discussion ranges from Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Lepage and Ivo van Hove. There are detailed analyses of Alfie Gone Too Far and Festen as well as authoritative analyses of NT Live performances and British New Wave cinema.
The book will be of primary interest to academics researchers teachers and students working in adaptation studies film studies and theatre studies. Written in an accessible style it will appeal to teachers and students on A-level undergraduate and postgraduate film theatre media and cultural studies courses. The chapter on digital theatres will add to the growing body of literature in this area and appeal to students and academics working on digital cultures and new media.
Live screenings of theatre events are becoming more widely available and increasingly popular including some of the productions discussed. There is potential interest for a general audience interested in British films theatre and actors.
Lesbians on Television
The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. This book offers a unique and layered account of the complex dynamics in the modern moment of social change drawing together critical social and cultural theory as well as empirical research which includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses.
This original new study puts forward a much-needed analysis of twenty-first century television and lesbian visibility. Books addressing the representation of lesbians have tended to focus on film; analysis of queer characters on television has usually focused on representations of gay males. Other recent books have attempted to address lesbian gay and trans representation together with the result that none are examined in sufficient detail – here the exclusive focus on lesbian representation allows a fuller discussion. Until now much of the research on lesbian and gay representation has tended to employ only textual analysis. The combination of audience research with analysis in this book brings a new angle to the debates as does the critical review of the tropes of lesbian representation. The earlier stereotypes of pathological monsters and predators are discussed alongside the more recent trends of ‘lesbian chic’ and ‘lesbianism as a phase’.
Cosmopolitics of the Camera
In Cosmopolitics of the Camera the leading experts in the field present Les Archives de la Planète (The Archives of the Planet) – Albert Kahn’s stunning collection of early colour photography and documentary film – and discuss the extraordinary intellectual context from which it grew. The archives collected between 1909 and 1932 show the cultural richness and diversity of humanity at a time of drastic geographical and historical change. Consisting of 183000 metres of film 72000 autochromes and more than 6000 stereographs it portrays the beauty and creativity of cultures and their fatal disappearance of which Kahn believed to be only a question of time.
The Archives of the Planet was one of a string of institutions for research and international cooperation established in Kahn’s utopian World Gardens near Paris. Some of the best-known minds of the age met there regularly in order to discuss the problem of how to make new media of communication serve the cause of peace and human development. The Cosmopolitics of the Camera presents ten expert voices from seven different countries studying the work of Kahn and his key collaborators the geographer Jean Brunhes and the philosopher Henri Bergson in the spirit of their culturally diverse venture placing it in its proper historical and intellectual context and exploring its ambitious achievements and failures. By pushing Kahn’s work back into active discussion the analysis forces us to reflect on the ways our world is shaped and recorded by the media and reactivates the time capsule that Kahn designed to communicate with the future.
The Cinematic Sublime
This interdisciplinary volume is dedicated to exploring the idea of the cinematic sublime by bringing together the disciplines of film studies and aesthetics to examine cinema and cinematic experience. Explores the idea of ‘the sublime’ in cinema from a variety of perspectives; the essays range in focus from early cinema through classical Hollywood documentary avant-garde and art cinema traditions and on to contemporary digital cinema. The book aims to apply the discussion of the sublime in philosophy to cinema and to interrogate the ways in which cinema engages with this tradition.
Offers new and exciting insights into how cinema engages with traditional historical and aesthetic discourse. Original and wide-ranging this clear and coherent volume is a useful resource for both post-graduate students and established scholars interested in the interrelations between film and philosophy. The range of material covered in the individual essays makes this a wide-ranging and very useful introduction to the topic.
A significant new contribution to the literature on Film-Philosophy. What sets this reader apart from the existing books on the subject is the wider scope. It embraces both philosophers and film scholars to consider films from throughout film history in light of theories of the sublime from throughout the history of Philosophy. In doing so it aims to demonstrate the diverse value of sublime approaches (versus a singular definition and philosophical perspective) to a wider range of films than has previously been considered.
An original and stimulating collection of essays contributing new insights into the crossover between historical and aesthetic approaches to contemporary cinema and cinematic experience.
The main readership will be academic markets including film studies and philosophy and academics with an interest in the legacies of Burke and Kant on aesthetics. Useful for teaching aesthetics through cinematic illustration and application.
Appropriate to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in ideas at the boundaries of contemporary film studies.
The Traumatic Screen
Christopher Nolan occupies a rare realm within the Hollywood mainstream creating complex original films that achieve both critical acclaim and commercial success. In The Traumatic Screen Stuart Joy builds on contemporary applications of psychoanalytic film theory to consider the function and presentation of trauma across Nolan’s work arguing that the complexity thematic consistency and fragmentary nature of his films mimic the structural operation of trauma.
From 1997’s Doodlebug to 2017’s Dunkirk Nolan’s films highlight cinema’s ability to probe the nature of human consciousness while commenting on the relationship between spectator and screen. Joy examines Nolan’s treatment of trauma – both individual and collective – through the formal construction mise en scène and repeated themes of his films. The argument presented is based on close textual analysis and a methodological framework that incorporates the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The first in-depth overtly psychoanalytic understanding of trauma in the context of the director’s filmography this book builds on and challenges existing scholarship in a bold new interpretation of the Nolan canon.
American Presidents and Oliver Stone
Perhaps no current filmmaker has made more provocative films about American history than Oliver Stone. In this book Carl Freedman gives a detailed and nuanced account of the presidencies of John F. Kennedy Richard Nixon and George W. Bush as fictionalized in Stone’s biographical films JFK Nixon and W.
Offering detailed historical perspectives alongside careful aesthetic criticism Freedman explores how Stone uses melodrama tragedy and farce to transform politics into national mythology. Synthesizing film criticism with political and historical analysis the book transcends the limitations of formalism and empiricism reflecting on both Stone’s achievements as a filmmaker and American politics of the past sixty years.
Oliver Stone’s importance among filmmakers as the major chronicler of recent US history is the starting point for the analysis of his three ‘presidential’ films: JFK Nixon and W. While not claiming equal artistic merit for Stone’s films Freedman makes some comparison with Shakespeare’s history plays and draws on T.S. Eliot’s notion of ‘essential history’ to transcend the barren dichotomy of formalism versus empiricism – that is treating historical fiction as either only pure fiction with nothing to say about real history or judging it as non-fiction by the extent to which it adheres to superficial historical detail. Instead the focus is on the capacity of Stone’s films to illuminate the structural workings of history contemporary and general.
Freedman is thoroughly familiar with his subject and his meticulous attention to historical accuracy and critical attention to the films is impeccable. This book has a powerfully original focus and makes a significant contribution to the field through offering these detailed historical perspectives alongside much more careful aesthetic criticism of the films. It has the potential to become not only a great source on its subject but a model of how to approach historical fiction in general.
This is an academic study but is written in such an accessible style that it will have genuine appeal to the general reader – to anyone with an interest in cinema politics and recent history. Wide-ranging accessible and highly original American Presidents combines erudition and complex analysis with jargon-free writing and is sure to engage anyone interested in the intersection of American politics and cinema.
The academic readership will be among humanities scholars and students of film popular culture media politics political history and modern history. It will be highly relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying film or modern American history and culture.
Radical Mainstream
Radical Mainstream examines independent film and video cultures in Britain from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s in the context of struggles against capitalism patriarchy racism colonialism and homophobia examining relations between counterpublics and social change. The book considers this period in order to examine the capacity for radical discourse to affect dominant cultural media forms arguing that independent film- and video-makers helped transform television into a vital site of counterpublic discourse.
The end of the twentieth century saw the development of new social models of film and video production and exhibition alongside the formation of new alliances to campaign for changes to social practice policy and legislature. Radical Mainstream explores the interrelation between public debate institutions and individuals arguing that independent film and video in Britain at this time – including activist documentary currents of counter-cinema avant-garde film and video art – were largely concerned with creating and circulating counterpublic discourses. The book traces the diversity of the influences on independent film and video from socialist and liberation movements to popular radical histories and psychoanalytic and Marxist film theory. The account provides a historic backdrop to contemporary documentary and moving image work and illuminates the heritage of critical thinking within such practices.
Film Studies in China 2
Film Studies in China 2 is a collection of selected articles chosen from issues of the journal Contemporary Cinema published throughout the year and translated for an English-speaking audience. As one of the most prestigious academic film studies journals in China Contemporary Cinema has been active not only in publishing Chinese scholarship for Chinese readers but also in reaching out to academics from across the globe. This anthology hopes to encourage a cross-cultural academic conversation on the fields of Chinese cinema and media studies. Following the successful release of the first volume this is the second collection to be released in the Film Studies in China series.
Women in Iberian Filmic Culture
Though cinema arrived in Spain and Portugal at the end of the nineteenth century national and industrial problems as well as the dictatorships of Salazar and Caetano (in Portugal) and Franco (in Spain) meant Iberian cinemas were isolated from European cultural trends. Strict censorship in both countries limited the themes and artistic practices adopted while a specific cinematographic language in many cases full of metaphors and symbolism sought alternatives to the imposed official discourse and preconceived definitions of supposed national identities. By contrast the arrival of democracy from the 1970s onwards widened not just the panorama of film production and criticism but also opened the film industry to women’s participation in areas historically assigned to men.
Focusing on Portuguese and Spanish cinema this collection brings together research about women and their status in relation to Iberian filmic culture. The volume contributes to ongoing debates about the position of women in the cinemas of Portugal and Spain from interdisciplinary and feminist perspectives as well as new accounts of film history. It also aims to promote comparisons between Iberian cinemas and visual culture a topic that is almost unexplored in academia despite the similar histories of the two countries particularly throughout the twentieth century.
Fellini’s Films and Commercials
Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable if extremely complex.
Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern this new edition includes revised material from the original plus a new preface and new chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched this book is essential reading for Fellini fans and scholars.
Understanding Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
Scholars have been studying the films of Stanley Kubrick for decades. This book however breaks new ground by bringing together recent empirical approaches to Kubrick with earlier formalist approaches to arrive at a broader understanding of the ways in which Kubrick’s methods were developed to create the unique aesthetic creation that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. More than 50 years after its release contributors explore the film’s still striking design vision and philosophical structure offering new insights and analyses that will give even dedicated Kubrick fans new ways of thinking about the director and his masterpiece.
The Architecture of Cinematic Spaces
The Architecture of Cinematic Spaces by Interiors is a graphic exploration of architectural spaces in cinema that provides a new perspective on the relationship between architecture and film. Combining critical essays with original architectural floor plan drawings the book discusses production design in key films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Rope Le mépris Playtime 2001: A Space Odyssey Home Alone Panic Room A Single Man Her and Columbus. Each chapter is accompanied by an original floor plan of a key scene bridging the gap between film criticism and architectural practice. The book written by the editors of the critically acclaimed online journal Interiors will appeal to both film and architecture communities and everyone in between. A must-read for fans and scholars alike this volume prompts us to reconsider the spaces our favourite characters occupy and to listen to the stories those spaces can tell.
Architecture Filmmaking
Unlike other books on architecture and film Architecture Filmmaking investigates how the now-expanded field of architecture utilizes the practice of filmmaking (feature/short film stop motion animation and documentary) or video/moving image in research teaching and practice and what the consequences of this interdisciplinary exchange are. While architecture and filmmaking have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs and filmmaking is a much younger art than architecture the intersection between them is less defined. This book investigates the ways in which architectural researchers teachers of architecture their students and practising architects filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran
This volume explores the lives of women in Iran through the social political and aesthetic contexts of veiling unveiling and re-veiling. Through poetic writings and photographs Azadeh Fatehrad responds to the legacy of the Iranian Revolution via the representation of women in photography literature and film. The images and texts are documentary analytical and personal.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan Shirin Neshat Shadi Ghadirian Abbas Kiarostami Mohsen Makhmalbaf Adolf Loos Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen
Why are educators and their profession the focus of so much film and theatre? Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast bring together scholars and practitioners in education examining dramatic portrayals of teachers and teaching to answer this very question. Films such as Freedom Writers Bad Teacher and School of Rock to name a few intentionally or inadvertently comment on education and influence the opinions and ultimately the experiences of anyone who has taught or been taught. The chapters gathered in this collection critique the Hollywood 'good teacher' repertoire delve into satiric parodies and alternative representations and explore issues through analyses of independent and popular films and plays from around the world. By examining teacher-student relationships institutional cultures societal influences and much more Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen addresses these media’s varied fascinations with the educator like no collection before it.
The Idea of the Avant Garde
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies temporalities and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international intergenerational and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film video architecture visual art art activism literature poetry theatre performance intermedia and music.
Preston Sturges
Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade including films plays TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries sketchbooks correspondence unpublished screenplays and more Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen showing a master still at work – even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage.
Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter
Nineteen years later . . .
Even as a new generation embraces the Harry Potter novels for the first time J.K. Rowling’s world is expanding with Fantastic Beasts Cursed Child and Pottermore. There are new mobile games new toys and of course the theme parks. Meanwhile Quidditch and the Harry Potter Alliance stretch from college to college inspiring each generation. Fans have adapted the series into roleplaying games parodies musicals films dances art and published fiction like Tommy Taylor or Carry On. They are also scrambling Potter with new franchises: Game of Thrones Hunger Games Percy Jackson Hamilton. What else is this new generation discovering about loving Potter? Which are the best conventions the best fanfiction and wizard rock? And how has Potter aged and what does it still have to teach us? Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter offers Potter fans a taste of the best the fandom has to offer.
Exposing Vulnerability
This book explores the diversity of perspectives afforded by the emerging body of Scandinavian films produced by women. The author focuses on women filmmakers' use of their own vulnerability in representing Scandinavian experiences with globally relevant contemporary issues such as race gender mental illness bullying and the trauma of migration and highlights the frictions between the positive and negative manifestations of such vulnerability. Though Scandinavia is reputed for its ambitious and innovative film tradition film scholarship has largely ignored women’s bold contributions to the canon. Exposing Vulnerability is a cultural and socio-political analysis of contemporary film by Scandinavian women as they use their lives and work to reconfigure the cinematic the political and the ethical.
Britpop Cinema
The Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave hitting its stride with Trainspotting and going global with The Full Monty Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Human Traffic Sexy Beast Shaun of the Dead and This Is England Britpop cinema pushed boundaries paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe.
Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg Irvine Welsh Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.
The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking
Based on a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council this book analyses 40 years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. John Sundholm and Lars Gustaf Andersson consider the creativity that lies in the state of exile offering analyses of over 50 rarely seen immigrant films that would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived. They shed light on the complex web of personal economic and cultural circumstances around migrant filmmaking and discuss associations that became important sites of self-organization for exiled filmmakers: The Independent Film Group The Stockholm Film Workshop Cineco Kaleidoscope and Tensta Film Association.
Using an innovative combination of key film theory The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking studies immigrant filmmaking in a transnational context exploring how immigrant filmmakers use film to find a place in a new cultural situation.
The e-book of this work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of the licence visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Open Access PDF of this title is available from OAPEN at this link - The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking.
From Méliès to New Media
From Méliès to New Media contributes to a dynamic stream of film history that is just beginning to understand that new media forms are not only indebted to but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Adopting a media archaeology this book will present a comparative examination of cinema including early film experiments with light and contemporary music videos silent film and their digital restorations German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake Alfred Hitchcock’s films exhibited in the gallery post medium films as abstracted light forms and interactive digital screens revising experiments in precinema. Media archaeology is an approach that uncovers the potential of intermedial research as a fluid form of history. It envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalised contributions to history. It is also an approach that has been championed by influential new historicists like Thomas Elsaesser as providing the most vibrant and productive new histories (2014).
Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium
Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium provides a new approach to the study of contemporary Spanish cinema between 2000 and 2015 by analysing films that represent both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture side by side. The two film cultures are represented by Goya-winning films and the biggest box-office successes. By analysing the chronological trajectory of the country’s most important films over this period Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium examines contemporary Spain’s national identity culture and film industry.
The Anarchist Cinema
The Anarchist Cinema examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse underground and popular film. James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyse filmmakers genres and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.
Beijing Film Academy Yearbook 2017
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook showcases the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.