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Focusing on a recent wave of international art cinema, Animal Worlds offers the first sustained analysis of the relations between cinematic time and animal life. Through an aesthetic of extended duration, films such as Bestiaire (Denis Côté, 2012), The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) and A Cow’s Life (Emmanuel Gras, 2011) attend to animal worlds of sentience and perception, while registering the governing of life through biopolitical regimes. Bringing together Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema and his reflections (with Félix Guattari) on animals, while drawing on Jacques Derrida, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Nicole Shukin and others, the book argues that these films question the biopolitical reduction of animal life to forms of capital, opening up realms of virtuality, becoming and alternative political futures.

Blood in the Streets investigates the various ways in which 1970s Italian crime films were embedded in their immediate cultural and political contexts. The book analyses the emergence, proliferation and distribution of a range of popular film cycles (or filoni) - from conspiracy thrillers and vigilante films, to mafia and serial killer narratives - and examines what these reveal about their time and place. The engagement in these films with both the contemporary political turmoil of 1970s Italy and the traumas of the nation's recent past offer fascinating insights into wider anxieties of this decade around the Second World War and its on-going political aftermath. Ultimately, these cycles' industrial conditions of rapid production schedules and concentrated release patterns are seen to be the key to understanding their significance, since these conditions allowed for swift responsiveness to political events, cinematic trends and attendant economic opportunities, while demanding the simplified construction of believable contemporary backdrops. The book thus reveals a repetitive accumulation of assumptions around historically constituted corruption, the impact of rapid socio-economic change and the lingering vestiges of wartime conflict.

The September 11th attacks in 2001 and the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ have had a profound effect on American cinema, and the contemporary Western reflects this situation. This book explores the various ways in which recent Westerns – Open Range (2003), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), True Grit (2010), Django Unchained (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013), The Revenant (2015), and Jane Got a Gun (2016) – reinforce a conservative myth of America exceptionalism. As a whole, the films are seen to endorse the use of extreme force in dealing with enemies and highlight the importance of defending the homeland. Placing their characters within a dark world of confusion and horror, these films reflect the United States’ post-9/11 uncertainties, and the tension between assumed civilised values and the brutality employed to defend those values. Frequently, outside forces of singular magnitude that threaten to overwhelm either the individual, or the community, or both, are defeated by the Western hero who in these films is restored to a position of mythic power from which he is able to deliver some sense of hope for the future.

As Hollywood shifts towards the digital era, the role of the media franchise has become more prominent. Over a series of essays by a range of international scholars, this edited collection argues that the franchise is now an integral element of American media culture. As such, the collection explores the production, distribution, and marketing of franchises as a historical form of media-making. In particular, the essays analyze the complex industrial practice of managing franchises across interconnected online platforms with a global scope, presenting a network of scholarly texts that critically look at the collision of new and old industrial logics against an ever more fragmented and consolidated mediascape. The authors address how traditional incumbents like film studios and television networks have responded to the rise of big data, Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google; the ways in which legacy franchises are adapting to new media platforms and technologies; the significant historical continuities and deviations in franchise-making and how they shape the representation of on-screen texts across digital displays; and, finally, how emerging media formats are expanding the possibility for transmedia experiences. In this regard, The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy offers an in-depth analysis of the tectonic shifts that have disrupted entertainment companies in the twenty-first century, demonstrating that the media franchise stands front and center in this high-stakes environment.

Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.

World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by transnational filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalisation. With case studies of essayistic works by John Akomfrah, Frances Calvert, José Luis Guerín, Jonas Mekas, David Perlov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Zhao Liang, amongst many others, and with a photo-essay by Trinh T. Minh-ha, the book expands current research on the essay film and presents transnational perspectives on what is becoming a global film practice.