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In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain's national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain's peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media cultur...

Although the ""coming of age"" story has been a popular film plot for decades, producers have only recently realized the commercial potential of targeting films to adolescent girls. Movies like ""Clueless"", ""Legally Blonde"" and ""Mean Girls"" have been successfully marketed to teenage girls, as have several well-known independent films. Important as both cultural indicators and catalysts, these films simultaneously demonstrate pop culture's influence on girls' films, and the ability of girls'...

Terry Jones was a comedian before he became a filmmaker and this book takes takes his comedy seriously philosophically. Robert Bernasconi claims that Jones' work uses irreverence and parody to dismantle deeply ingrained forms of thought. Bernasconi's Terry Jones is saying something significant through his films: whether it's challenging the nature of intellectual authority and the canon or poking fun at religion, politics and, even, philosophy! An original, well-conceived exploration of a member...

This innovative study provides an exciting, challenging and accessible critical introduction to cultural representations of 1984-5 and analyses the ways in which these representations articulate an essential dialogic exchange of issues central to both the coal dispute and the development of literary and cultural studies over the past twenty five years. Focusing closely on the politics of form, the study interrogates the significance of the mode, means and function of strikers' writings, as well...

There is no denying that Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave (1978) deserves its title as one of the most controversial films ever made. While many condemn it as misogynistic, others praise it for raising uncomfortable issues about sexual violence. While its reputation as a cult film has undoubtedly been cemented by its unique position in the 1970s/80s exploitation era and the "video nasties" scandal, it has also become mythologized by its own official and unofficial franchises. David Maguire ex...

Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers -- these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions.At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe...

Drawing on a range of disciplinary tools and critical analyses, this unique collection explores interdisciplinary connections between academic and professional crime writing, historical studies of crime and 'true crime', and screen portrayals of crime and criminals from the 1850s to the present day.The essays are based on murder and exploitation, outlaws, gunfighters, private eyes, bounty hunters, serial killers, gangsters, and the police procedural, andexplore representations of race, gender, s...

Until 1951, when Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, Japanese cinema was isolated from world distribution and the international discourse on film. After this historic event, however, Japanese cinema could no longer be ignored.In Time Frames, Scott Nygren explores how Japanese film criticism and history has been written both within and beyond Japan, before and after Rashomon. He takes up the central question of which, and whose, Japan do critic...

Since the progressive era, baseball has been promoted as an institution encapsulating the best of American values and capable of bridging the chasms of twentieth century American culture - urban versus rural, industry versus agriculture, individual versus community, immigrant versus native, white versus color. Among the more enthusiastic of the game's proponents have been American filmmakers, and baseball films present perhaps the purest depiction of baseball's vision of an idealized America. Th...

Oscar-winning actor, acclaimed director, and recipient of the Golden Globe Award for lifetime achievement in film, Frank Sinatra carved out one of the biggest careers in the history of Hollywood, yet his screen legacy has been overshadowed by his achievements as a recording artist. Until now. "Sinatra in Hollywood" is an analytical yet deeply personal look at his screen legend. Laced throughout with Sinatra's own observations on his film work, Santopietro deals head-on with the tumultuous marria...

In what the New York Times's A.O. Scott called a "suave, scholarly tour de force," J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one. This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate-as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In "elegant, epigrammatic prose," as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the...