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'Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.' The prophetic words of Galadriel, addressed to Frodo as he prepared to travel from Lothlorien to Mordor to destroy the One Ring, are just as pertinent to J R R Tolkien's own fiction. For decades, hobbits and the other fantastical creatures of Middle-earth have captured the imaginations of a fiercely loyal tribe of readers, all enhanced by the immense success of Peter Jackson's films: first "The Lord of the Rings", and now his new "T...

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographic...

This collection brings together leading international scholars and filmmakers focusing on Latin American cinema. Themes discussed include subjectivity, history, memory, representations of reality, cinema's relation to the public sphere, and issues of production, distribution and marketing.

Despite the urgent need to develop understandings of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the light of the current situation in the Middle East, the role of violence and reconciliation in Palestinian and Israeli literature and film has received only brief treatment. This book is intended to fill that void; that is to explore how Israelis and Palestinians view and depict themselves and each other in situations that lead to either violence or reconciliation, and the ways in which both parties defin...

Runner-up for the 2014 Publication Prize awarded by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland This book presents an original historiography on fifty years of Uruguayan cinema. It is the first English language academic book in which Uruguay becomes a case study to reflect upon broader interests of both Film and Latin American Studies, such as the conditions of film archives, the many materialities of film, the relationshipbetween film and politics, and the ways in which films...

Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of soci...

In the growing scholarly literature on music in film, one category that remains discreetly neglected is pornography. Yet in 2003 it was reported that in Los Angeles alone there are more than 10,000 porn films made each year, as compared with average of 400 feature films coming out of Hollywood. This is, by any qualitative standard, a major film genre. From as far afield as the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and Finland, this collection explores the role of sound and music across a wide spec...

Writing in the late 1930s, New York journalist Joseph Mitchell observed: "Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America's only original contribution to the theater." In Body and Soul, Peter Stanfield's arguments echo Mitchell's observation. Stanfield begins by exploring how Hollywood used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history, and ends with a look at how American film at the close of the studio era represented urban decay through the fi...

The first comparative study of censorship in both theatre and cinema The first comparative study of censorship in theatre and cinema during the last century, this book examines notable twentieth-century cases involving the Lord Chamberlain's theatre censorship and the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Anthony Aldgate and James C. Robertson have written extensively on the subject of stage and screen censorship, and here they utilise previously unpublished Lord Chamberlain's censorship sources...

The popularity of television in postwar suburban America had a devastating effect on the traditional Hollywood studio system. Yet many aging Hollywood stars used television to revive their fading careers. In Recycled Stars, Mary R. Desjardins examines the recirculation, ownership, and control of female film stars and their images in television, print, and new media. Female stardom, she argues, is central to understanding both the anxieties and the pleasures that these figures evoke in their audi...

Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups. In this revised and expanded edition of Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-sta...

Writer, artist, filmmaker, provocateur, revolutionary, and impresario of the Situationist International, Guy Debord shunned the apparatus of publicity he dissected so brilliantly in his most influential work, The Society of the Spectacle. In this ambitious and innovative biography, Vincent Kaufmann places Debord's very hostility toward the inquisitive, biographical gaze at the center of an investigation into his subject's diverse output-from his earliest films to his landmark works of social the...