Browse

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women AmateurFilmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.

The use of hard-core sex and brutal violence in films such as Antichrist, Romance and Irreversible has been branded by many as an unsophisticated attempt to attract audiences. These accusations of gimmickry have been directed towards a range of extreme art films, however they have rarely been explored in detail. This book therefore seeks to investigate the validity of these claims by considering the extent to which these often infamous sequences of extremity inform the commercial identity of the film. Through close textual analysis of various paratexts, the book examines how sleeve designs, blurbs, and special features manage these extreme reputations, and the extent to which they exploit the supposed value of extremity. The book positions the tangible home video product as a bearer of meaning, capable of defining the public persona of the film. The book explores the ways home video artefacts communicate to both highbrow and lowbrow audiences by drawing from contradicting marketing traditions, as well as examining the means through which they breach long-standing taste distinctions. Including case studies from both art cinema and exploitation cinema – such as Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom, Weekend and Antichrist – the book explores the complicated dichotomies between these cinematic traditions, offering a fluid history of extreme art cinema while challenging existing accounts of the field. Ultimately, the book argues that extremity – far from being a simple marketing tool – is a complex and multifaceted commercial symbol.

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?

Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust provides a new topographical methodology for the study of cinema and the Holocaust and addresses crucial issues of memory and history in relation to the Holocaust as it unfolded in the territories of the Second Polish Republic. Aiming to understand the ways past events inform present-day landscapes, and the way in which we engage with memory, witnessing and representation, the book creates a coherent cinematic map of this landscape through the study of previously neglected film and TV documentaries that focus on survivors and bystanders, as well as on members of the post-war generation. Applying a spatial and geographical approach to a debate previously organised around other frameworks of analysis, Journey to Poland uncovers vital new perspectives on the Holocaust. As it focuses on ideas of postmemory, sites of memory and multidirectional memory, Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust thus investigates understudied archival footage and recent Polish and international documentaries made for TV and applies a spatial and geographical approach to a debate previously organised around other frameworks of analysis.

This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).

The Two cines con niño  is the first genre study of Spanish-language child-starred cinemas. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of cinema from Spain and how the child-starred genres use the concept of childhood to define the nation’s past, present, and future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Latin American cinema, this monograph examines dialogism in aesthetics, narratives, and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina. In-depth inquiry within its pages examines films by Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio del Amo, Montxo Armendáriz, Benjamín Ávila, Juan Antonio Bayona, José Luis Cuerda, Guillermo del Toro, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Arantxa Lazkano, Luis Lucía, Paula Markovtich, Javier Ruiz Caldera, Carlos Saura, Imanol Uribe, Ladislao Vajda, Agustí Villaronga, and Andrés Wood.