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Angesichts aktueller gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche hat auch das Landleben wieder Konjunktur. In Medien und politischen Reden, ökonomischen Kalkulationen, demografischen Untersuchungen und infrastrukturellen Planungen werden Bilder ruraler Lebenswelten aufgerufen. Sie greifen auf romantische Vorstellungen zurück, entwerfen aber auch düstere Untergangsszenarien. Nicht zuletzt haben zeitgenössische Literaturen, Filme und alltagsbezogene Forschungen - abseits gängiger Polarisierungen - das Landleben wieder für sich entdeckt. Die Beiträge des Bandes zeigen: Leben auf dem Land wird so zur Projektionsfläche, aber auch zu einem Erkundungsraum und Verhandlungsort gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen und darauf bezogener Diskurse.

Das Dorf boomt - die Dörfer sterben. Während die Welt des Dorfes durch globale und regionale Strukturveränderungen zu verschwinden droht, lebt sie gegenwärtig in Literatur, Film und Populärkultur wieder auf. Den verschiedenen Gestaltungsweisen »imaginärer Dörfer« - von der Idylle bis zum Lager - wird in diesem Band ebenso nachgegangen wie den damit verbundenen Funktionen zwischen Kompensation und Projektion, Erinnerung und Orientierung. Die Beiträge fragen: Ist das Dorf eine Lebens- und Sozialform, die Zukunft hat? Wenn ja: Wie sieht diese aus und auf welche Weise lässt sie sich auf aktuelle und historische Vorstellungen eines guten Lebens beziehen?

In The Girl from God's Country, Kay Armatage reintroduces film studies scholars to Nell Shipman, a pioneer in both Canadian and American film, and one of proportionately numerous women from Hollywood's silent era who wrote, directed, produced, and acted in motion pictures. Born and raised in British Columbia, Shipman became a contract actress for Vitagraph Studios, starring in God's Country and the Woman (1915) and Back to God's Country (1919), among other films. These action-packed adventure melodramas, in which the heroine is called upon to rescue her husband and defeat the villain, were immensely successful. Later, Shipman started up her own production company to make films centred on her screen persona,'the girl from God's country.'By the mid 1920s, however, the formation of the large Hollywood studios and vertical integration closed down the independents, Shipman among them. Nevertheless, she continued writing until her death in 1970.Through the use of social history, feminist film theory, and biography, Armatage creates a portrait of a woman film pioneer. Using Shipman's working life as a window to the profession, Armatage explores the position of women in modernism, the developing film industry, and cinematic practice of the 1920s. The Girl from God's Country also contextualizes Shipman's work within the development of Hollywood as a locus of artistic production and in relation to women filmmakers from Europe, Australia, Russia and the United States. Armatage brings Shipman back to life in this important book.

Since the first films played in nickelodeons, controversial movies have been cut or banned across the United States. Far from Hollywood, regional productions such as Oscar Micheaux's provocative race films and Nell Shipman's wildlife adventures were censored by men like Major M.L.C. Funkhouser, the terror of Chicago's cinemas, and Myrtelle Snell, the Alabama administrator who made the slogan'Banned in Birmingham'famous. Censorship continues today, with Utah's case against Deadpool (2016) pending in federal court and Robert Rodriguez's Machete Kills (2013) versus the Texas Film Commission. This authoritative state-by-state account covers the history of film censorship and the battle for free speech in America.

Since Nell Shipman wrote and starred in Back to God's Country (1919), Canadian women have been making films. The accolades given to film-makers such as Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Alanis Obomsawin (Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance), and Micheline Lanctôt (Deux actrices) at festivals throughout the world in recent years attest to the growing international recognition for films made by Canadian women. With Gendering the Nation the editors have produced a definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. In dialogue with new paradigms for understanding the relationship of cinema with nation and gender, Gendering the Nation seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture. This collection of critical essays employs a variety of frameworks to analyse cinematic practices that range from narrative to documentary to the avant-garde.

Along with thousands of other girls who hoped to escape tedious employment and domesticity, June Mathis (1887–1927) started acting as a young teen. After more than a decade of stepping onto stages across the US, she moved into the burgeoning film business and behind the camera to begin a prolific career as a screenwriter and producer for profound movies like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922). With her expert use of melodrama and masterful technique, Mathis would eventually become the first female head writer at Metro Pictures.In June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary, Thomas J. Slater illuminates Mathis's important and complicated life and work, not only detailing her discovery of the silent movie superstar Rudolph Valentino and her involvement on the original screenplay for Ben-Hur (1925) but also her prowess in all aspects of production. Slater pulls from historical records as well as letters, never-before-studied scripts, and Mathis's handwritten will to build a robust narrative for someone who always had to struggle for success, even though Photoplay acknowledged her as'the most powerful woman in the motion picture industry'in 1923. Slater discusses Mathis's artistic and moral failings, as well as how her efforts—such as overlooked collaborations with writer Katharine Kavanaugh and actress Alla Nazimova—consistently challenged male dominance, militarism, and greed.Despite her talent and achievements, Mathis was pushed to the margins when the industry began removing women from spheres of influence. Following a few months of freelancing, she suffered a heart attack during a Broadway show and died at the age of forty. Very quickly, this woman whose ideas shaped American film for more than a decade was forgotten. June Mathis portrays the cinematic legacy of this'million-dollar girl'whose complex story ended too soon but remains relevant today.

A master of subverting tropes with surgical precision, Elaine May forged a career in 1970s Hollywood with films like The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky. Elizabeth Alsop explores the director's non-conformist and uncompromising vision while looking at May's films against trends in classic and post-classical Hollywood. Shaped by her background and success in the theater, May brought the biting humor of her improv comedy to her filmmaking. But unfriendly media and a system hostile to both her methods and sensibility consigned her to “director's jail” after the failure of Ishtar. As Alsop moves through the filmmaker's four movies, she tracks May's inventive treatment of favorite themes like hapless male characters and the inanities of American culture. She also considers May's work in relation to her multifaceted career as a writer and performer. A compelling reconsideration of an iconoclast and original, Elaine May reveals how a surprisingly radical auteur created her trademark cinema of discomfort.

The definitive biography of Hollywood horror legend Tod Browning—now revised and expanded with new material One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Tod Browning (1880–1962) began his career buried alive in a carnival sideshow and saw his Hollywood reputation crash with the box office disaster–turned–cult classic Freaks. Penetrating the secret world of “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,” Dark Carnival excavates the story of this complicated, fiercely private man. In this newly revised and expanded edition of their biography first published in 1995, David J. Skal and Elias Savada researched Browning's recently unearthed scrapbooks and photography archives to add further nuance and depth to their previous portrait of this enigmatic artist. Skal and Savada chronicle Browning's turn-of-the-century flight from an eccentric Louisville family into the realm of carnivals and vaudeville, his disastrous first marriage, his rapid climb to riches in the burgeoning silent film industry, and the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life. They offer a close look at Browning's legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi as well as the studio politics that brought his remarkable run to an inglorious conclusion. With a revised prologue, epilogue, filmography, and new text and illustrations throughout, Dark Carnival is an unparalleled account of a singular filmmaker and an illuminating depiction of the evolution of horror and the early film industry.

Las incertidumbres, las inconsistencias, los miedos y las obsesiones de cada época condicionan su arte, y el cine es uno de los dispositivos que los recoge, estiliza y arroja de nuevo al espectador. Desde la década de 1990 el cine nos invita a desconfiar de sus relatos. Los denominados'mind-game films'convocan narradores amnésicos, durmientes o mentirosos; por ellos transitan figuras detectivescas que terminan descubriéndose como culpables del misterio que investigan; escritores atormentados son devorados por sus propias ficciones; los protagonistas proyectan, sin saberlo, siniestros'doppelgängers'que circulan como personajes reales. Las más de las veces, ni el espectador ni los protagonistas son conscientes del delirante punto de vista desde el que se enuncia la historia hasta bien avanzada esta. Sin embargo, la alteración temporal de estos filmes (su no linealidad) y las imposibles contradicciones que van salpicando sus argumentos mueven a sospechar de la fiabilidad de la narración. Así, este tipo de cine pone en evidencia, por ejemplo, las promesas vacuas de la sobreabundancia de imágenes y de las nuevas tecnologías como sustentos de la memoria y la identidad del sujeto contemporáneo, de manera que se demanda un inusual esfuerzo de interpretación al espectador, que se enfrenta a ciertos fantasmas de su propio tiempo. Para facilitar esta decodificación se analizan sus mecanismos narrativos, así como sus argumentos y motivos visuales más recurrentes.

Largely created by immigrants, the film industry evolved over its first few decades thanks to the work of people outside the traditional ruling class— immigrants, people of color, women—partly as a result of elites denigrating the fledgling field. As the moving picture industry transitioned from neophyte to powerhouse, young and ambitious rebels energized its output. Mostly written out of history, women provided an important component for popularizing silent film and making it a financial success. Women were integral in producing entertaining films to keep up with exploding demand. Men often resented their power and success, and as the studio system took hold, women found themselves out of favor and replaced. First Women of Hollywood explores the invaluable contributions of these mostly forgotten and unacknowledged pioneers.

How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch's American Dreamscape broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch's work engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. As much as Lynch stands as a singular artistic voice, his work arises from and taps into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that illuminates not only his approach to creativity but also the way works interact with each other in an age of mass media. From children's literature to teen tragedy ballads, Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy to folk music and mixtapes, David Lynch's American Dreamscape investigates the cultural frequencies Lynch's films tune into and positions Lynch's work as a conduit for American popular culture, a medium or channel through which the subconscious of American life finds its way into full view.The book expands upon this approach by discussing how artists such as David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey graft Lynch's affiliative, cinematic sensibility onto their own projects. Reading their work as intertextual engagements with Lynch's films further illustrates the versatile interactions among creators and audiences to generate more works, readers, and readings.

“Grammy Award–winning producer Shepard throws open the door to the recording booth in his exuberant and fine-grained debut memoir.... Broadway aficionados will find plenty to enjoy.” - Publishers WeeklyRECORDING BROADWAY: A LIFE IN CAST ALBUMS of the making of fifty-plus years'worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal stories of his work with pretty much everyone who was anyone on Broadway, including Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein (“truly awesome but very complicated”), Sheldon Harnick (“as warm and decent as he was talented”), Barbara Cook (“one of my favorites”), Placido Domingo, Gregory Hines, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury (“so gifted and so easy to be with and to work with”), Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Stephen Sondheim (“a genius, and very easily bruised”), Barbra Streisand (“as professional at 24 as any veteran I've ever worked with”), Andrew Lloyd Webber, and many more.Alongside this unforgettable saga is the tale of Shepard's childhood as a small-in-stature piano prodigy from East Orange, New Jersey, and his emergence into the world as a recording producer of, first, classical music and then Broadway cast recordings. Told with verve in Shepard's inimitable voice— a striking combination of Broadway glitz and classical-music elegance—his journey makes for a uniquely compelling story, whether or not you're among the millions of musical lovers around the world for whom his recordings are a vital link to Broadway at its best.

Offers a fresh perspective on Buster Keaton's early career, examining his formative years in entertainment through rare archival photos and industry publications.Since nearly every aspect of Keaton's story and work has been written about in some form, it is the goal of this book to present a new perspective on Keaton's early life in the entertainment business, beginning before vaudeville and moving through the Comique films, Keaton's first foray into the industry. A microscopic approach to this early period has the goal of illuminating in great detail the formative years of Keaton's career, in order to better understand the brilliance of his ‘independence'and the tragedy of his years at MGM, bringing him to a place in entertainment history that celebrates the little gems and sparks of brilliance in his later creative life and career. This study will utilize the minute detail provided by industry rags, such as The New York Clipper and The Moving Picture World and the publication of rare archival photos to differentiate itself from other works by delving deeper into each moment during the specified twenty-four early years of Keaton's life and career, up to and including the transition to his ‘independent'productions with Joseph Schenk, beginning with The High Sign (1920), The Saphead (1920) and One Week (1920), his first efforts in the new era.

This collection investigates how Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and other Studio Ghibli storytellers have approached the process of reimagining literary sources for animation.Studio Ghibli is renowned for its original storytelling in films like My Neighbor Totoro, but many of its most famous films, including Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo, have their origins in pre-existing novels, manga, or fairy tales. Studio Ghibli's adaptations seldom directly translate source material to animation, but instead transform the works to incorporate themes or imagery central to the studio's sensibilities. Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations explores how these adaptations often blur genre boundaries and raise questions about what constitutes fidelity to source material. The collection also shows how the studio reinterprets and recontextualizes stories across cultures for Japanese audiences and across mediums like manga.

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen's Power Plait to JoJo Siwa's outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times? Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, this book shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls'hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction. It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.

Adopting a multi-method critical approach to the global revival of folklore-themed horror media, Transnational Horror contests Anglophone film scholarship's widespread adherence to its own film-historical canons. Navigating alternative meanings of'folk horror'and locating these meanings within a transnational framework, the volume proposes a curatorial paradigm of critical transnationalism in the study of global film cultures and genre formations. The book proposes an alternative genealogy of horror media: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincialising, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre, and contributes to the formation of a transnational field of horror criticism that troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film and genre studies. Through diverse accounts of scale and regionality as categorical markers of screen media, the contributors to the volume develop critical tools to address the mobility of'folk horror'as mode and as genre, which operates within and beyond the normative registers of national belonging.

Financing the British Film Industry provides a comprehensive history of the financing of British film production from the origin of the industry until the end of the Second World War. It documents the growth of the film business from a cottage industry to a mature business enterprise. It considers the capitalisation of the industry and analyses the relationships between producers, banks and insurance companies. It charts the fluctuating fortunes of British film-making and the various government-backed initiatives support the production sector. James Chapman argues that the difficulties of the British film industry arose not from the extravagances of individual producers or the collapse of particular companies but from underlying economic and structural weaknesses: that the industry was too reliant on short-term finance and that the domestic market was insufficient to guarantee a profitable return for anything other than a modestly-budgeted film

Richard Wright's dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright's long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright's family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright's oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to his unproduced pageant honoring Vladimir Lenin. Wright maintained rewarding associations with playwrights, writers, and actors such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Hellman, and took particular inspiration from French literary figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. Dick's analysis also illuminates Wright's direct involvement with theater and film, including the performative aspects of his travel writings; the Orson Welles-directed Native Son on Broadway; his acting debut in Native Son's first film version; and his play “Daddy Goodness,” a satire of religious charlatans like Father Divine, in the 1930s. Bold and original, Thunder on the Stage offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a major American writer.

Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns'film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history, exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social, political and cultural contexts of their production, including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population. The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian, for the online journal Inside Story. Between the two, he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia's changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can, without didacticism, provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns. When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia, and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre, and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel's 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang.

Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made—a major mass medium of the twentieth century dealing with history. The re-enactments of historical events in film straddle reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction, representation and performance, entertainment and education. This interdisciplinary book examines the relationship between film and history and the links between historical research and filmic (re-)presentations of history with special reference to South Korean cinema.As with all national film industries, Korean cinema functions as a medium of inventing national history and identity, and also establishing their legitimacy—in both forgetting the past and remembering history. Korean films also play a part in forging cultural collective memory. Korea as a colonised and divided nation clearly adopted different approaches to the filmic depiction of history compared to colonial powers such as Western or Japanese cinema. The Colonial Period (1910–1945) and Korean War (1950–1953) draw particular attention as they have been major topics shaping the narrative of nation in North and South Korean films.Exploring the changing modes, impacts and functions of screen images dealing with history in Korean cinema, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Korean history, film, media and cultural studies.

Ist Pornografie dokumentarisch? Darf ein Dokumentarfilm erregen? Das Objektivitätsversprechen des Konstrukts »Dokumentation« erfährt durch den Wirklichkeitseffekt pornografischer Bewegtbilder eine ernstzunehmende Herausforderung. Ausgehend von Feministischen Filmtheorien und Theorien des Dokumentarischen befragt Leonie Zilch Hardcore-Filme, pornografische Plattformen und anleitende Dokumente weiblicher Sexual- und Lustaufklärung nach den ihnen eingeschriebenen Wissenskulturen. Die materialnahen begriffs- und technikgeschichtlichen Überlegungen erschließen dabei neue Wege eines kritischen Umgangs mit dem Erregungspotenzial dokumentarischer Artefakte.

“Oggi, con poca spesa, qualsiasi medio appassionato o studioso di cinema può facilmente vedere e rivedere gran parte dei film che gli interessano. Prescindendo un attimo dai film introvabili o distrutti, perduti o occultati o censurati, la conservazione e diffusione dei testi filmici (cioè dei film, sia pure nella transustanziazione elettronica, tutt'altro che ‘indifferente'...) è ormai democratizzata, massiccia, massiva. Forse non dovrebbe più essere possibile dimenticare come va a finire un film, o una scena. Ma altri, e non meno importanti, sono i fatti implicati dalla nuova situazione di consumo, distribuzione e circolazione dei film. Altre le cose da non dimenticare.” Enrico Ghezzi “Ci sono in questo libro articoli meravigliosi su film e autori/autrici ed è anche percorso da idee e flussi di pensiero che spingono il cinema e la critica cinematografica oltre, che possono essere ancora oggi veri e propri interventi, nel dibattito sul cinema e non solo.” Dalla prefazione di Aura Ghezzi

Screens and Illusionism explores the effects of illusionism as foundational to contemporary acts of perception and aesthetics. Our point of departure is the acknowledgement that our sensory perception is fundamentally subject to mediation, through a class of objects, techniques, and technologies. We emphasize mediation to consider the loss of optical certainty, and explore illusionism within the register of the uncanny. The volume is divided into three sections: Screens as Perceptual Vehicles (Part I), Mediation and its Avatars (Part II), and Alternative Teleologies of Media (Part III). Overall, the collection resonates with contemporary discussions of screen culture, media materiality and intermediality. It explores an array of pre- and post-cinematic devices and spectacular entertainments, forging links between “old” and “new” media, and across media formats.

The definitive biography of the great Shemp Howard, an original member of the Three Stooges, and one of Hollywood's most influential actors that Library Journal calls'a complete portrait of a talented character actor,'Booklist praises as'fascinating,'Kirkus Reviews describes as an'illuminating… reworking of the Stooges mythology'and Patton Oswalt praises as'the only book you will ever need to read about anything. Burn all the other books - there is ONLY SHEMP!'Shemp Howard not only had one of the most distinctive faces of the twentieth century, but was also one of its most accomplished, influential comic actors and showbiz personalities. Along with his brother Moe and comedy violinist Larry Fine, Shemp was an original member of the comedy team that became known as the Three Stooges before he quit and set off on his own in 1932.SHEMP! shows how he made an even greater mark in a successful and until now largely unexplored career in more than a hundred movie shorts and features. He appeared in comedies, dramas, mysteries, Westerns, and musicals alongside the biggest stars of the Golden Age, including W.C. Fields, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, William Powell, Lon Chaney, Jr., Myrna Loy, and the team of Abbott & Costello. Author Burt Kearns challenges the “official” version of Three Stooges history that's been repeated for decades, shattering myths while uncovering the surprising and often troubling facts behind the man's unlikely story: how the child of Jewish immigrants, supposedly racked by debilitating phobias, could conquer show business; the behind-the-scenes machinations that pushed him to return to the team; and the circumstances surrounding his untimely death.Through interviews with fans, family members, experts, filmmakers, and celebrities, SHEMP! unearths treasures in Shemp's solo work, examines the “cult of Shemp” that thrives today, and confirms Shemp Howard's deserved place in cinematic history.

A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks's Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born. Written by film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor). Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.

The man who created the boldest hard boiled fiction, Dashiell Hammett, wrote The Thin Man in 1933 and launched the fun-loving, booze-swilling, mystery-solving couple Nick and Nora Charles into American culture. MGM sold millions of movie tickets by casting William Powell and Myrna Loy as this classiest of romantic couples. Over 14 years and six films, these stars navigated grave periods of history: the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The novel and films live on as gems of a unique gritty sophistication. This complete history of The Thin Man series covers the brightest stars, tastiest scandals, headlines and conflicts behind these classic films. With a cast of hundreds, we see Hammett, his lover Lillian Hellman, and their friend Dorothy Parker fight alcoholism, sexual convention and Senator Joe McCarthy in culture wars of eerie contemporaneity.

This multinational, multidisciplinary collection of essays focuses on Hallmark Channel movies and Hallmark's position in the changing North American media landscape.This book covers the ‘Countdown to Christmas'offerings, year-round productions, made-for-TV mysteries and romances, Hallmark's use of specific filming locations, and its relationship to viewer desires. Chapters examine Hallmark's position in a changing sociopolitical context and the tensions the company must navigate in creating more “progressive” content; they discuss issues of gender, race, sexuality, and place, as well as analyzing the extensive ranges and reactions of social media participants and interrogating the nature of Hallmark's popularity.Suitable for scholars and students of film and tv and popular culture studies, this is a multifaceted look at both Hallmark and its viewers at a particular moment of Hallmark's market dominance.

This autobiography by an influential silent film star gives an insider's view of the motion picture industry in the early twentieth century. It's one of the most enduring images in film history: a young man in circular glasses, dangling from the hands of a clock high above Los Angeles. The actor performing this daring stunt was Harold Lloyd, a highly successful comedian from the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly two hundred comedies, both silent and “talkies,” between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his “Glass” character, a bespectacled everyman who captured the mood of the 1920s. In this fascinating autobiography, which was written just around the time sound was revolutionizing cinema, Lloyd chronicles his experiences as a performer and producer of silent films, preserving firsthand details of Hollywood's bygone period. This extraordinary memoir, originally published in 1928, discusses actors both comedic and dramatic, stage to film adaptations, producers, directors, and primarily, how early silent movies were made. It is a must-read for film historians and movie buffs alike.

Eleanor Roosevelt recognized the power of film and television, especially as educational tools to reach young people. She hosted three political talk shows in the 1950s and early 1960s, often appearing in guest spots to promote the United Nations, Democratic candidates, and progressive issues with Ed Sullivan, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mike Wallace, and Edward R. Murrow. In the 1930s and'40s, fan magazines such as Photoplay and Modern Screen published her opinions on the movies, and she boldly appeared in an interventionist prologue to the 1940 anti-Nazi film Pastor Hall. During World War II, she contributed to civil defense films and became a staple joke in Hollywood comedies. She also negotiated postwar representations of FDR on the big screen, culminating in 1960's Sunrise at Campobello, which portrayed her as the perfect wife. This book is the first to address Eleanor Roosevelt's moving image record and her relationship to film and television in the three decades from the 1932 presidential campaign to her death in 1962.

Film theory: an introduction offers a highly readable account of film theory and is an indispensable resource for students. The discussion ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands, notably politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis were woven together in an ambitious synthesis.In this book, the authors chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation, and clearly explain the various intellectual currents which have contributed to it. Divided into two parts, the first covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, whilst in the second the authors concentrate on particular topics such as authorship, narrative, realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism.For this new edition, the authors have added a new foreword, a fully updated and expanded bibliography, and a 60-page Retrospect outlining developments within film theory since the book's original publication in 1988. This Retrospect identifies a number of broad readings of Theory, each with a different perspective on the main content of the book. As such, it provides a new and original mapping of the ‘post-theory'moment in this complex and often fractured terrain.Accessible and authoritative, this book is essential reading for students of film theory, or indeed anyone seeking a deeper understanding of modern cinema.

Resistant Reproductions asks why narratives of pregnancy and abortion emerged in the early twentieth century and what kinds of stories these narratives conveyed. Is it only once pregnancy becomes plannable that it becomes a story worth telling? Abortion is often considered resistant and feminist, while pregnancy is considered domestic and conventional. How can readings of literary narratives challenge this reductive binary?Resistant Reproductions, the first book-length study of both pregnancy and abortion in British culture, addresses these questions by examining pregnancy narratives, including abortion narratives, in British fiction and film from 1907 to 1967. Fiction became a way for writers to explore what new possibilities of reproductive control would mean for the individual, yet there was also much anxiety about who would have control: individuals or the state. While exploring intimate personal experiences of pregnancy and abortion, Resistant Reproductions also asks how literary narratives used reproductive plots to address political issues of gender, class, and eugenics.

In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.

Silent cinema was never silent. But from the mid-1920s onwards, the'sound'part of the cinema experience was transformed by the arrival of films, long and short, with clearly audible talk, music, and sound effects built in. It marked the most fundamental shift in cinema technology since cinema's birth. The first book devoted to Britain's conversion to talkies, and the result of eight years'research, Silent to Sound: British Cinema in Transition takes a lively and comprehensive look at the production side of the British sound revolution, stretching from experimental efforts in the late 19th century, through the sound shorts of the 1920s, to the key year of 1929, the year of Hitchcock's Blackmail (Britain's first home-grown talkie feature), and the industry turmoil that followed. The narrative concludes in 1934, when John Grierson's GPO Film Unit finally acquired sound equipment, prompting a late burst of experimentation just when commercial feature soundtracks had settled down. Films familiar, neglected, and unknown are examined: overripe melodramas (the lost Black Waters), local versions of Hollywood musicals (Harmony Heaven), visually elaborate science-fiction (High Treason), plus newsreels, documentaries, amateur films, and the last phase of British silent production. The impact of sound on studio technique is examined, along with the industry's complex relations with Britain's strong theatre traditions, with Europe, and above all, cinema's superpower, America. It's also never forgotten that the sound transition was shaped not just by technology but by the talents, foibles, and follies of individual people. Film history with a human face.

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery's continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences. Each of the book's fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral's reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers's Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes. Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

A series of fascinating and groundbreaking meditations on six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock.Film scholar Murray Pomerance presents a series of fascinating and groundbreaking meditations on six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, a master of the cinema. Two of the films, North by Northwest and Vertigo, are extraordinarily famous and have been seen––and misunderstood––countless times. Two others, Marnie and Torn Curtain, have been mostly disregarded by viewers and critics or considered to be colossal mistakes, while the remaining two, Spellbound and I Confess, have received almost no critical attention at all. Here in a twentieth-anniversary edition, with a new preface, An Eye for Hitchcock-the first volume of the Hitchcock Quartet (which includes A Dream of Hitchcock, A Voyage with Hitchcock, and A Silence from Hitchcock)-examines these movies under a bold new light. Pomerance takes us deep into the structure of Hitchcock's vision and his screen architecture, revealing key elements that have never been written about before. Pomerance also clearly reveals the link between Hitchcock's work and a wide range of thinkers and artists in other fields, thereby offering viewers of Hitchcock's films the rare opportunity to see them afresh and with new excitement.

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology. From the early days of television broadcasts to today's live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media. Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently “technological” opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

“A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it,” contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca's duende, Nabokov's poshlost, Bashō's underglimmer, Huizinga's ludic, Tarkovsky's Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes—first always sharing his own personal life stories—on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.

The actor tells the story of his career comeback and surprising second act in a warm, funny memoir “packed with amazing anecdotes” (Entertainment Weekly).When he was in his late fifties, Michael Caine believed his glamorous, rags-to-riches Hollywood career had come to an end. The scripts being sent his way were worse and worse. When one script really disappointed, he called the producer to complain about the part. The producer said, “No, no, we don't want you for the lover, we want you for the father.”Salvation came in the unlikely form of his old friend Jack Nicholson, who convinced him to give acting one more shot. What followed was not only an incredible personal transformation but also one of the most radical comebacks in film history. Learning to accept his new role both on camera and in his own life, Caine went on to win his second Oscar, be knighted by the queen, and deliver some of his best performances to date. Now he shares the spectacular story of his life: his humble upbringing in London's poverty-stricken Elephant and Castle; his military service, marriage, and family life; lively adventures with friends; legendary meetings with fellow stars; forays as a restaurateur; and hilarious offscreen encounters from his glittering five-decade career.“Caine has three things you want in a memoirist—an eye for detail, a knack for storytelling and a sense of humor about himself—and they all come out to play in The Elephant to Hollywood.” —New York Times Book Review

Queer theory, queer literary criticism and queer cultural criticism often focus on western, white, cis men. This book provides the first in-depth analysis of contemporary queer and Gothic texts that focus on the subjectivity, characterisation and representation of queer girls and women. The New Queer Gothic applies interdisciplinary theory to offer a new mode and method of reading literary and film fiction. From monstrous femininity in tales of girlhood, to paranoid negativity and transformation in young womanhood, through to postcolonial doubles, hybrid assimilation, corporeal possession, and final girls at the end of everything – this book takes as its canon works from the past fifteen years concerning queer and questioning girls and women in Gothic settings and narratives, to elucidate upon questions of queer feminist ethics, biopower and global identity politics.

Film studios have been making historical movies now for over a century. In that time, thousands of films have been made covering not just centuries but millennia. Did Neanderthal woman really look like Raquel Welch in her bearskin bikini? Did 6,000 rebellious slaves claim that they were Spartacus? Did Berengaria complain to her husband, Richard the Lionheart, ‘War, war; that's all you think about, Dick Plantagenet'? Was El Cid strapped to his horse's saddle to lead his army after he was dead? These aren't questions of history; they are questions of Hollywood.Charlton Heston was a foot too tall for General Charles Gordon. John Wayne was a tad too American for Genghis Khan. Eric von Stroheim's bald head was an odd choice for the perfectly hirsute Erwin Rommel. And Warren Beatty and Fay Dunaway were far too gorgeous for bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde.Hollywood never gets it right. History and its characters are endlessly complicated, and producers, directors and screenwriters have a simple story to tell. They have a maximum of two hours to explain what happened over weeks or months or years and many of it give it their best shot.Yet for all Hollywood's shortcomings in recreating the past, it has managed to evoke eras and people long dead in a magical way that has kept millions of us enthralled for generations.

Gathered for the first time: one of America's great humorists revisits the books and movies from his youth—often with some embarrassment—in this complete, 22-piece collectionFrom October 1948 to October 1953, The New Yorker published humorist S. J. Perelman's “Cloudland Revisited” series: 22 reviews of once-popular books and silent films whose expiration dates had passed. All but forgotten even at the time, they were nonetheless part of Perelman's youth and made an indelible mark on him.In the comic genius's biting satire they live once again:Gertrude Atherton's sensationalist fantasy Black OxenSax Rohmer's supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchuthe “underwater” silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the SeaEdgar Rice Burrough's 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apesand George Barr McCutcheon's 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark—the Game of Thrones of its era—which launched numerous sequels and film adaptations The complete series is collected here for the first time. With self-deprecating humor and frequent embarrassment, Perelman reflects on how rereading and rewatching brings us in contact with how we, like an old book or film, have both changed and remained the same. This paperback includes a tribute to Perelman's art by another beloved New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.

Hollywood Unions is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and makeup artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annual awards celebrations, but the unions'actual importance is in bargaining with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on behalf of 331,000 workers in the motion picture and television industry. The Hollywood unions are not neutral institutions but rather have long histories of jurisdictional battles, competitions with rival unions, and industry-altering strikes. They have supported the industry's workers through the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, runaway production, fights for gender parity, the digital revolution, and a global pandemic. The history of these unions has contributed to making media work sustainable in the long term and helped shape the conditions and production cultures of Hollywood.

How filmmaker-philosophers brought the dream of making documentaries and strengthening democracy to award-winning reality—with help from nuns, gang members, skateboarders, artists, disability activists, and more. The evolution of Kartemquin Films—Peabody, Emmy, and Sundance-awarded and Oscar-nominated makers of such hits as Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap—is also the story of U.S. independent documentary film over the last seventy years. Patricia Aufderheide reveals the untold story of how Kartemquin developed as an institution that confronts the brutal realities of the industry and society while empowering people to claim their right to democracy. Kartemquin filmmakers, inspired by pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, made their studio a Chicago-area institution. Activists for a more public media, they boldly confronted in their own productions the realities of gender, race, and class. They negotiated the harsh terms and demands of commercial media, from 16mm through the streaming era, while holding fast to their democratic vision. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and personal experience, Aufderheide tells an inspiring story of how to make media that matters in a cynical world.

A screenwriter, novelist, labor leader, Hollywood insider, and feminist, Mary C. McCall Jr. was one of the film industry's most powerful figures in the 1940s and early 1950s. She was elected the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild after leading the fight to unionize the industry's writers and secured the first contract guaranteeing a minimum wage, credit protection, and pay raises. Her advocacy was not welcomed by all: To screenwriters McCall was an “avenging goddess,” but to studio heads she was, in the words of one Hollywood executive, “the meanest bitch in town.” And after a clash with the mogul Howard Hughes in the blacklist-era 1950s, she disappeared from the pages of Hollywood history.J. E. Smyth tells McCall's remarkable story for the first time, putting the spotlight on her trailblazing career and crucial influence. She explores McCall's life and work, from her friendships with stars such as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney to her authorship of the hit Maisie series about a working-class showgirl's adventures. Analyzing McCall's deft political maneuvering, Smyth offers new insight on screenwriters'struggle for equality and recognition. She also examines why McCall's legacy is unrecognized, showing how the Hollywood blacklist and entrenched sexism obscured her accomplishments. Colorful and compelling, this biography provides a powerful account of how one extraordinary woman shaped golden age Hollywood.

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past.Contemporary film and television – and popular screen cultures more generally – are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies. The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic. They are concerned with the historical work of horror's spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as the ruptures and impositions of colonization and nationhood.Trauma is a key theme in this book, examined through themes of war and genocide, ghostly invasions, institutionalized abuse, apocalyptic threat and environmental destruction. These persistent, fearful reimaginings of the past can take many lurid – sometimes tritely generic – forms. Together, these chapters explore and reflect upon horror's ability to speak through them to the unspoken of history, to push the boundaries and probe the fault-lines and ideological impositions of received historical narratives – while reminding us that history and the historical imagination persist as sites of contention.

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past.Contemporary film and television – and popular screen cultures more generally – are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies. The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic. They are concerned with the historical work of horror's spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as the ruptures and impositions of colonization and nationhood.Trauma is a key theme in this book, examined through themes of war and genocide, ghostly invasions, institutionalized abuse, apocalyptic threat and environmental destruction. These persistent, fearful reimaginings of the past can take many lurid – sometimes tritely generic – forms. Together, these chapters explore and reflect upon horror's ability to speak through them to the unspoken of history, to push the boundaries and probe the fault-lines and ideological impositions of received historical narratives – while reminding us that history and the historical imagination persist as sites of contention.

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I:'I'm making this up as I go': Lawrence Kasdan and Raiders of the Lost Ark Chapter 1. Smith and Jones: Discourse Analysis of the Raiders of the Lost Ark Story Conference Chapter 2. Visual Language in the Raiders of the Lost Ark Screenplay Part II: Kasdan the Director: Developing Style(s) Chapter 3. Body Heat: Heightened Style in the Neo-Noir Chapter 4. Classical Structure in the'Perfect Ensemble'of The Big Chill Part III: Voice of the Largest Generation Chapter 5. Altruism and Otherness in The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon Chapter 6. Cowboys, Aliens, and Sixtysomethings: Age and Nostalgia in Kasdan's Later Films Part IV: Influences, Without and Within Chapter 7. From Noir to Kurosawa: Allusion and Homage in Lawrence Kasdan's Films Chapter 8. Kasdan's Collaborations: Creation and Performance Part V: A Long Time in a Galaxy Far, Far Away Chapter 9. From Star Wars to Saga: Lawrence Kasdan and The Empire Strikes Back Chapter 10. Revenge of the Monomyth: Reclaiming the Hero's Journey in Return of the Jedi Chapter 11. A New Hope in The Force Awakens Chapter 12. A Changed Man: Solo and Beyond Chapter 13. An Interview with Lawrence Kasdan Lawrence Kasdan: Writing and Directing Credits Filmography Bibliography

Writing with his customary wit and style, Richard Dyer argues that while pastiche can be used to describe works which contain montage or collage, it can also be used to describe works which are a kind of imitation of previous works. Investigating a wide range of cultural texts drawn from films, videos, novels, poetry, rap tracks, music and painting, Richard Dyer explores issues of text, genre, and the use of pastiche as a resource within a work. The final chapter draws together the underlying concern of the book with affect and poetics and discusses the politics of pastiche.

Identifies key – and in some cases previously overlooked – cult horror films from around the world and reappraises them by approaching and interrogating them in new ways.New productions in the horror genre occupy a prominent space within the cinematic landscape of the 21st century, but the genre's back catalogue of older films refuses to be consigned to the motion picture graveyard just yet. Interest in older horror films remains high, and an ever-increasing number of these films have enjoyed an afterlife as cult movies thanks to regular film festival screenings, television broadcasts and home video releases. Similarly, academic interest in the horror genre has remained high. The frameworks applied by contributors to the collection include genre studies, narrative theory, socio-political readings, aspects of cultural studies, gendered readings, archival research, fan culture work, interviews with filmmakers, aspects of film historiography, spatial theory and cult film theory. Covering a corpus of films that ranges from recognised cult horror classics such as The Wicker Man, The Shining and Candyman to more obscure films like Daughters of Darkness, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Shivers, Howling III: The Marsupials and Inside, Broughton has curated an international selection of case studies that show the diverse nature of the cult horror subgenre. Be they star-laden, stylish, violent, bizarre or simply little heard-of obscurities, this book offers a multitude of new critical insights into a truly eclectic selection of cult horror films.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS'CHOICE • A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens'Academy Award winning epic film of the same name, Giant.The stupendous publication of Edna Ferber's Giant in 1952 set off a storm of protest over the novel's portrayal of Texas manners, money and mores with oil-rich Texans threatening to shoot, lynch or ban Ferber from ever entering the state again.In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes of the internationally best-selling Ferber, one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th Century – her evolution from mid-west maverick girl-reporter to Pulitzer Prize winning, beloved American novelist, from her want-to-be actress days to becoming Broadway's acclaimed prize-winning playwright whose collaborators – George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart, among them, were, along with Ferber, herself, the most successful playwrights of their time.Here is the making of an American classic novel and the film that followed in its wake. We see how George Stevens, Academy-Award winning director, wooed the prickly, stubborn Ferber, ultimately getting her to agree to everything including writing, for the first time ever, a draft of a screenplay, to her okaying James Dean for the part of the ranch hand, Jett Rink, something she was dead set against.Here is the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and their backstory triangle of sex and seduction – each becoming a huge star because of the film; the frustrated Stevens trying to direct the instinctive but undisciplined Dean, and the months long landmark filming in the sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, suddenly invaded by a battalion of a film crew and some of the biggest stars in the rising celebrity culture.