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Edgar Allan Poe exerted a profound influence on many aspects of 20th-century culture, and continues to inspire composers, filmmakers, writers and artists. Popularly thought of as a ""horror"" writer, Poe was also a philosophical aesthete, a satirist, a hoaxer, a psychologist and a prophet of the anxieties and preoccupations of the modern world. Alphabetically arranged, this book explores Poe's major works both in their own right and in terms of their impact on others, including Baudelaire, who t...

Born into a family of vaudevillians, Buster Keaton made his first film appearance in 1917 at the age of 21. By the early 1920s, he had established himself as one of the geniuses of silent cinema with such films as Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator and his 1925 work, The General, placed at number 18 in the American Film Institute's poll of the 100 greatest features, the highest ranked silent film on the survey. But with the advent of sound in the late 1920s, silent stars like Keaton began to fall o...

Hockey has been featured in North American cinema from the medium's inception, yet little research on the topic exists to date. The first comprehensive work of its kind, this volume examines more than fifty hockey-themed Hollywood, English-Canadian, and Quebec theatrical releases and TV movies across several decades. Here the reader will discover the national myths that ground the hockey player's depiction in motion pictures, as well as the social concerns and sport and film industry development...

This is the first major study in English of cine quinqui, a cycle of popular Spanish films from the late 1970s and early 1980s that starred real-life juvenile delinquents. The book provides a close analysis of key quinqui films by directors such as Eloy de la Iglesia, Jose Antonio de la Loma and Carlos, as well as the moral panics, public fears and media debates that surrounded their controversial production and reception. In paying particular attention to the soundtrack of the films, the book s...

The horror film analysed from a Deleuzian perspective. This book argues that dominant psychoanalytic approaches to horror films neglect the aesthetics of horror. Yet cinematic devices such as mise en scene, editing and sound, are central to the viewer's visceral fear and arousal. Using Deleuze's work on art and film, Anna Powell argues that film viewing is a form of 'altered consciousness' and the experience of viewing horror film an 'embodied event'. The book begins with a critical introduction...

In Sex in the Head, Linda Ruth Williams uses psychoanalysis and recent feminist film theory to analyze a network of ideas which link looking with sexuality and difference, in the work of a writer who disavowed, yet covertly enjoyed, the pleasures and power of vision. The book is a departure from the long history of feminist readings of Lawrence, in that it discusses his engagement with theories of the gaze and its cultural forms - cinema, photography, painting and the visual dynamics and metapho...

Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. It discusses various films, including "The Alien Quartet", Christopher Nolan's "Memento", Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange", Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and Derek Jarman's "The Garden". It draws on a wide ra...

Recounts the stories of top movie stars before and during the productions of their first films, depicting their pre-fame careers, the obstacles they faced en route to stardom, and the factors that contributed to their successes.

The birth of cinema coincided with the heyday of the short story. This book studies the relationship between popular magazine short stories and the very early British films. It pairs eight intriguing short stories on cinema with eight new essays unveiling the rich documentary value of the original fiction and using the stories as touchstones for a discussion of the popular culture of the period during which cinema first developed. The short stories are by authors ranging from the notable (Rudy...

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. Sangjoon Lee adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US...