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The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films-including antiwar films-have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in...

Many popular French films of the 1930s captured the world and brought it into neighborhood cinemas for filmgoers who craved adventure. These films often served as visual postcards from the French empire, which enjoyed an unprecedented visibility in domestic popular culture between the world wars. But the public appetite for the exotic also transcended imperial borders. Exoticist films displayed landscapes and different that lay beyond the metropole, many of which were not subject to European rul...

This is the first full-length survey in any language of the fiction and film generated in France by the Algerian war (1954-1962). Although part of a much wider process of decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic that it brought France to the verge of civil war and its memory continues to haunt French society today. Like America's experience in Vietnam, it has been understood as a paradigm of the collapse of Western certainties in the post-war period. Philip Dine's ground-breaking study e...

Into The Woods is a revelation of the fundamental structure and meaning of all stories, from the man responsible for more hours of drama on British television than anyone else, John Yorke. We all love stories. Many of us love to tell them, and even dream of making a living from it too. But what is a story? Hundreds of books about screenwriting and storytelling have been written, but none of them ask 'Why?' Why do we tell stories? And why do all stories function in an eerily similar way? John...

Hitchcock was a masterful director, popular with audiences of all ages and critically acclaimed both during and after his unusually long career. What may have been sensed by many viewers but not fully articulated until now is the extent to which his works subtly engage philosophical themes: What is evil, and how does it shield and reveal itself? Can we know what is inside the mind of another person? What is at stake when one knows the truth but cannot speak of it or cannot persuade others? How i...

This account of Columbia starts in 1924 when the studio first opened; since then it has made over 3000 movies. Every feature-length film (running 50 minutes or longer) released by Columbia or a subsidiary company in the USA and the UK is reviewed. The text also highlights the movies which became famous for their technological advances or social commentary, films such as "From Here to Eternity", "On the Waterfront", "Kramer vs. Kramer", and the blockbusters such as "Gandhi", "Close Encounters of...

Remembered as the Savior of the Union, Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most revered presidents. There have been tens of thousands of books published about him since his death, but he has proved to be a surprisingly daunting subject for filmmakers. Despite a wealth of biographical material, relatively few full-length motion pictures have taken the man and his life as a primary subject. In this detailed study, Brian J. Snee provides a sweeping overview of the cinematic representations of the s...

Hitler and the Nazis saturated their country with many types of propaganda to convince the German citizenry that the Nazi ideology was the only ideology. As Joseph Goebbels, who was in charge of propaganda for Nazi Germany, said, ""The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it."" One type of propaganda that the Nazis relied on heavily was cinematic.This work focuses primarily...

The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much analysis nonetheless centers on highlighting anachronisms. This book aims to help scholars and aficionados of medieval film think about how the re-creation of an often mythical past performs important cultural work for modern directors and viewers. The essays in this collection demonstrate that directors intentionally insert modern preoccupations into a setting that would normally be co...

Poverty row horror films were usually inexpensively (some would say cheaply) produced with writing that ranged from bad to atrocious. Yet these movies with their all-star horror casts (Carradine, Lugosi, Karloff, et al.) and their ape men, mad monsters, devil bats and white zombies still have a loyal audience 50 years after their release. Essays contain full filmographic data on the 31 horror chillers made by the three studios from 1940 through 1946 and are arranged by year of release. Each ent...

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Tracing this preoccupation thro...

Carlos Rojas focuses on the trope of "homesickness" in China-discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by excessive proximity to it. This inverse homesickness marks a process of movement away from the home, conceived of as spaces associated with the nation, family, and individual body, and gives rise to the possibility of long-term health.

The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays expanding the concepts of "ghost" and "haunting" beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, including fiction and film, this collection explores the phenomenon of social ghosts. What does it mean, for example, to be invisible, to be a ghost, par...

Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives.  Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlight...