Coming to terms with the past has been a preoccupation within German culture and German Studies since the Second World War. In addition, there has been a surge of interest in adaptation of literary works in recent years. Numerousvolumes have theorized, chronicled, or analyzed adaptations from novel to film, asking how and why adaptations are undertaken and what happens when a text is adapted in a particular historical context. With its focus on adaptationof twentieth-century German texts not onl...
Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures – Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular...
Race in American Film
This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history. Hollywood has always reflected current American cultural norms and ideas. As such, film provides a window into attitudes about race and ethnicity over the last century. This comprehensive set provides information on hundreds of films chosen based on scholarly consensus of their...
Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Camelot--love them or love to hate them, movie musicals have been a major part of all our lives. They're so glitzy and catchy that it seems impossible that they could have ever gone any other way. But the ease in which they unfold on the screen is deceptive. Dorothy's dream of finding a land "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut, and even a film as great as The Band Wagon was, at the time, a major flop. In Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter...
Killing Machines (Persistence of Vision X-Series, #1)
by Jack Hunter
This book presents the complete works of Ingmar Bergman: an homage to one of the most esteemed film and theater artists of all time, began in cooperation with Bergman himself and made with full access to his archives.Since 1957, when he released "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries", Ingmar Bergman has been one of the leading figures in international cinema, along with others such as Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. In a career that spanned 60 years, he wrote, produced, and directed 50...
Gender Results - Hollywood Vs the Supreme Court: Ten Decades of Gender and Film
by Eileen C Moore
A timeless Hollywood staple, the war movie has become an American art form. Whether rousing audiences with patriotic excitement or casting a cold light on the horrors of armed combat, films such as "Patton", "Saving Private Ryan", "The Bridge on the River Kwai", "M.A.S.H.", "Platoon", "Pearl Harbor" and hundreds of others offer viewers glimpses of history, war and battles. The depiction of wars in film has impressed upon audiences both the glory and the tragedy of the unimaginable. "The Encyclop...
La Haine (Cine-File French Film Guides) (French Film Guides)
by Ginette Vincendeau
"La Haine" is a cult classic with cinema audiences, recently re-released and available on dvd. Ginette Vincendeau is top authority internationally on French cinema, who writes (eg "Sight and Sound") and broadcasts (eg "Front Row Radio 4") on it regularly. It is hugely enjoyable, exciting book written with great panache and accessibility. Released in 1995, "La Haine" is the black and white chronicle of 24 hours in the life of a mixed-race young male trio from a run-down Parisian suburb. The work...
The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film
by Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Steven Sanders
Dreadful Pleasures offers a lively look at those stories that make our hair stand on end--their persistence in our culture, their manifestations in art, and our need for the frissons they provide. James Twitchell traces our fascination with horror from the cave paintings at Lascaux to the "slasher" movies today. Twitchell finds that three particular stories have had a special resonance in our culture: the bloodsucker (Dracula), the deformed creature (Frankenstein), and the transformation monste...
While some film scores crash through theater speakers to claim their place in memory, others are more unassuming. Either way, a film's score is integral to successful world building. This book lifts the curtain on the elusive yet thrilling art form, examining the birth of the Hollywood film score, its turbulent evolution throughout the decades and the multidimensional challenges to musicians that lie ahead. The history of the film score is illuminated by extraordinary talents (like John William...
Voyages dans le temps (Taxinomie Du Cinema Fantastique, #9)
by Alain Pelosato
The "cartoon"in the output of the all conquering Disney studio, the anarchic antics of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes, and the satiric vision of the Simpsons on television is synonymous with the United States, but the genre rarely is taken seriously. Nevertheless, cartoons are important artistic and cultural achievements, and are an essential ingredient in how America is viewed, both by itself and by others. In Animation and America, Paul Wells looks afresh at this unique art, discus...
Breaking Down Joker (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
Breaking Down Joker offers a compelling, multi-disciplinary examination of a landmark film and media event that was simultaneously both celebrated and derided, and which arrived at a time of unprecedented social malaise. The collection breaks down Joker to explore its aesthetic and ideological representations within the social and cultural context in which it was released. An international team of authors explore Joker’s sightlines and subtexts, the affective relationships, corrosive ideologies...
In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with such films as The Mortal Storm (...
Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-g...
Film Censorship is a concise overview of Hollywood censorship and efforts to regulate American films. It provides a lean introductory survey of U.S. cinema censorship from the pre-Code years and classic studio system Golden Age—in which film censorship thrived—to contemporary Hollywood. From the earliest days of cinema, movies faced controversy over screen images and threats of censorship. This volume draws extensively on primary research from motion picture archives to unveil the fascinating be...
There has been an increasing recognition of the fluidity and ambiguity of ethnic identities within the context of global mobility. With that in mind, how have films constructed the identity of ethnic Chinese in the United States? This book addresses this issue through three sub-questions. First, why is the family narrative so characteristic of films about Chinese Americans in transnational Chinese cinema? In other words, how and why are images of Chinese or Chinese Americans in transnational Chi...