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Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book, through both an intermedial and a transnational focus, replaces auteuristic accounts of the director’s work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentienth century cinema and visual culture.

Perhaps because they are so immediately absorbing, narrative films can also be profoundly confusing and disorienting. This fascinating book neither proposes fool-proof methods for avoiding confusion, nor does it suggest that disorientation is always a virtue. Instead, it argues that the best way to come to terms with our confusion is to look closely at exactly what is confusing us, and why. At the heart of the book are original close readings of four important recent films: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012), Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006) and Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage (2014). Clearly written but critically and theoretically bold, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions explores both how we get (or fail to get) our bearings with respect to a film, and what we might discover by (and while) doing so.

Documentary cinema has always drawn from real life. However, an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers go further still, drawing onscreen images of reality through a range of animated filmmaking techniques and aesthetics. This book is the first of its kind, exploring the field of animated documentary film from a diverse range of scholarly and practice-based perspectives. The book’s chapters explore and propose answers to a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: What are the historical roots of animated documentary? What kinds of reasons inspire practitioners to employ animation within documentary contexts? How do animated documentary images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of multiple forms of reality – public and private, psychological and political? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging many orthodox definitions of both animated and documentary cinema.

Bringing together the latest developments in the study of serial formatting practices – remakes, sequels, series – Film Reboots is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the new millennial phenomenon of rebooting. Through a set of vibrant case studies, this collection investigates rebooting as a practice that seeks to remake an entire film series or franchise, with ambitions that are at once respectful and revisionary. Examining such notable examples as Batman, Ghostbusters, and Star Trek, among others, this collection contends with some of the most important features of contemporary film and media culture today.

The most distinguished actor among Charlie Chaplin’s children, Geraldine Chaplin has created a striking performative presence across international cinema. In shifting cinematic contexts and through collaborations with major film directors, she playfully evokes the memory of her iconic father, while establishing her own distinctive screen art. Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance is a long-overdue appreciation of Chaplin’s remarkable screen achievements, and includes close readings of her performances in films such as Doctor Zhivago, Peppermint Frappé, Cría cuervos, Nashville, Welcome to L.A., Remember My Name, Noroît, Chaplin, Talk to Her, and more.

Moving images have become a common feature in museums, where visitors are now accustomed to finding a broad variety of projections and screens. But when did films start to be displayed in history, science or natural history museums? How did visitors react to the transformation of static displays by means of moving images? And what are the current stakes of showing audio-visuals in exhibition spaces? The Museum as a Cinematic Space is an extensive investigation of the use of moving images in exhibition design outside the art field. It explores how museums have incorporated films and audio-visuals in their display from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present. The Museum as a Cinematic Space investigates the inclusion of cinematic elements (films, screens, projections) within the display. In addition to describing the strategies used by the curators to exhibit films, the book identifies the practical, technical and discursive conditions that made possible the use of moving images in museum galleries during the twentieth and twenty-first century. By opening itself to moving images, the exhibition becomes a place where cinema and museum spectatorships converge, reshaping the relations between the public, the images, and viewing space.

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere proposes a new paradigm for Nordic film studies, as well as for other small national, transnational, and world cinema traditions. This book re-imagines Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic, and planet-connected from their beginnings in the early silent period on forward to their present 21st-century dynamics more than a century later. By identifying and engaging with a wide range of unknown, repressed, and overlooked stories (e.g., narratives of movement, mobility, interaction, synthesis, resistance, loss, reclamation, humanistic questing, etc.) inside and outside of established Nordic film traditions, this book introduces a new model of inquiry into a specific Scandinavian cultural lineage and into small nation and pan-regional cinemas more generally. In this way, the book also speaks to a range of traditions in world cinema. Its overarching goal is to breach entrenched structures and to invite more exploratory, rigorous, and unexpected readings. The volume advocates the intellectual and cultural ethos of cinemas of elsewhere, expanding on previous progressive, interpretive traditions such as cinemas of diasporic, exilic, postcolonial, accented, post-industrial, and existential identities. It is therefore not a study of Nordic cinemas comfortably situated within national brackets or self-enclosed borders. Drawing on the specificities, dynamics, and ambitious reach and scope of Scandinavian cinema production, circulation, and influence for over a century, Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere navigates and narrates a parallel, alternative history.

The acclaimed French auteur behind the mind-bending modern classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Michel Gondry has directed innovative, ground-breaking films and documentaries, episodes of the acclaimed television show Kidding and some of the most influential music videos in the history of the medium. In this book, a range of international scholars offers a comprehensive study of this significant and influential figure, covering his French and English-language films and videos, and framing Gondry as a transnational and transcultural auteur whose work provides insight into both French/European and American cinematic and cultural identity. With detailed case studies of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005), The Science of Sleep (2006), Be Kind Rewind (2008), Mood Indigo (2013) and Microbe & Gasoline (2015), the book examines significant themes throughout Gondry’s filmography including surrealism, adaptation, memory, dreams, play and African-American identity. The book compares Gondry to other filmmakers including Wes Anderson and Jean Vigo, allowing for an understanding of how Gondry’s films might compare with both his global contemporaries and his predecessors in French and international cinema. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how Gondry’s work in narrative film, documentary and music video represents significant innovation in narrative, visual aesthetic, and genre.

Paul Schrader’s unique relationship to the role of the author (as screenwriter, director and critic) has long informed his cinema, and raises complicated questions about the definition of the auteur. This volume of essays – the first collection to assess Schrader’s contributions to directing, screenwriting and criticism – includes the first original appraisals of his much-lauded masterpiece First Reformed (2017), as well as a chapter-length interview with Schrader himself, conducted by the editors, in which Schrader examines the arc of his career for the first time and revises previous statements about filmmaking and film criticism. Providing a comprehensive exploration of his groundbreaking achievements in cinema, the book considers Schrader’s more overlooked films and provides new insights to their connection with his celebrated work in direction and screenwriting such as Taxi Driver (1976), Cat People (1982) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990). In doing so, it provides a valuable update to previous texts on Schrader and contains chapters on Schrader’s work since 2008, the publication date of the last book on his filmmaking. Where this study distinguishes itself fully is in its inclusion of a serious treatment of Schrader’s own film criticism and analytical writing. This collected writing provides unique access into how Schrader approaches the analysis of films and provides insight into his own work and others as “transcendental” filmmakers.

The book takes as its subject a corpus of thirty-three vampire movies made, distributed and exhibited during the peak years of film production in Italy, and certified to be of Italian nationality by state institutions such as the Italian Show Business Bureau and the Italian Film Censorship Office. Positioning itself at the intersection of Italian film history, horror studies and cultural studies, the book asks: why, and how, is the protean, transnational and transmedial figure of the vampire appropriated by Italian cinema practitioners between 1956 and 1975? Or, more concisely, what do the vampires of post-war Italian cinema mean? The aim is to show that – in spite of Italian vampire cinema’s imported and derivative nature, and its great reliance on profits coming from distribution on the international market – Italian cinematic vampires reflect their national zeitgeist from the economic miracle of the late 1950s to the mid-1970s austerity, twenty years of large political and socio-economic change in which gender politics were also in relative flux. The result of an original research into film production data, film censorship files, screenplays, trade papers, film magazines and vampire-themed paraliterature, the book leaves the well-trod track of award-winning art films to shed light on some of the so-called ‘lower forms’ of cinematic culture, looking for the economic backbone and cultural instrumentality of post-war Italian cinema in the run-of-the-mill genre movies rushed through a cheap production and into domestic and international distribution to parasitically (vampirically?) exploit a given commercially successful film.