Browse

This book is a study linking filmmaking in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) with that in francophone West Africa and examining the factors (including Islam and the involvement of African and French governments) which have shaped post-independence production. The main focus is the development over forty years of two main traditions of African filmmaking: a social realist strand examining the nature of postcolonial society; and a more experimental approach where emphasis is placed on new stylistic patterns able to embrace history, myth, and magic. The work of younger filmmakers born since independence is examined in the light of these two traditions.

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron> (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.

American Documentary Film focuses on the extensive range and history of nonfiction filmmaking in the USA, investigating how documentary films have reflected varied and often competing visions of US culture, history, and national identity. Documentary has long been a negotiated and changing concept: a site of social, intellectual, and aesthetic investment keenly fought over and debated. In this sense documentary films also create a kind of public space: they act as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation; they contribute to the public sphere. This book distills key aspects of the documentary idea while tracing the form's development over time, focusing on the ways documentaries have given shape to the experience and comprehension of a national imaginary. Combining comprehensive overviews with in-depth case studies, Geiger examines the impact of pre- and early cinema, travelogues, the avant-garde, 1930s social documentary, Second World War propaganda, direct cinema, postmodernism and the crisis of ‘truth’, and the new media age.

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation. Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change). The subject of this book is how certain American independent films appropriate ritual as a kind of power of the false in order to throw into crisis images – such as the cliché – that pertain to truth via collective comprehension. In his study of genre, Steve Neale (2000) has outlined how certain images and sound tracks can function ritualistically and ideologically; cinema, according to Neale, both creates a horizon of expectations for an audience and also draws upon existing stratifications and categories in order to shore up established identities and modes of thought.

This introduction to American independent cinema offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century to the present and a study of key individual films and film-makers. Readers will develop an understanding of the complex dynamic relations between independent and mainstream American cinema.The main argument revolves around the idea that American independent cinema has developed alongside mainstream Hollywood cinema with institutional, industrial and economic changes in the latter shaping and informing the former. Consequently, the term ‘independent’ has acquired different meanings at different points in the history of American cinema, evolving according to the impact of changing conditions in the American film industry. These various meanings are examined in the course of the book.The book is ordered chronologically, beginning with independent filmmaking in the studio era (examining both top-rank and low-end independent film production), moving to the 1950s and 1960s (discussing both the adoption of independent filmmaking as the main method of production for the Hollywood majors as well as exploitation filmmaking) and finishing with contemporary American independent cinema (exploring areas such as the New Hollywood, the major independent production and distribution companies and the institutionalisation of independent cinema in the 1990s). Each chapter includes a number of case studies which focus on specific films and/or filmmakers, while a number of independent production and distribution companies are also discussed in detail.

In light of their tremendous gains in the political and professional sphere, and their ever-expanding options, why is it that most contemporary American films aimed at women still focus almost exclusively on their pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship? American Postfeminist Cinema explores this question and is the first book to examine the symbiotic relationship between heterosexual romance and postfeminist culture. The book argues that since 1980, postfeminism’s most salient tensions and anxieties have been reflected and negotiated in the American romance film. Case studies of a broad range of Hollywood and independent films reveal how the postfeminist romance cycle is intertwined with contemporary women’s ambivalence and broader cultural anxieties about women’s changing social and political status.

David Holloway's interdisciplinary study of how 9/11 and the war on terror were represented during the Bush era, shows how culture functioned as a vital resource for citizens attempting to make sense of momentous events that frequently seemed beyond their influence or control. Illustrated throughout, the book discusses representation of 9/11 and the war on terror in: Hollywood film; the 9/11 Novel; news media; visual art and photography; contemporary political and historical debates, particularly those about American “empire” and the limits of “republican” governance As well as prompting an international security crisis, and a crisis in international governance and law, Holloway suggests the culture of the time also points to a ‘crisis’ unfolding in the institutions and processes of republican democracy in the U.S. between the September 11 attacks and the Congressional midterm elections in 2006; a crisis he suggests was contained and defused by the cathartic symbolism of the American political process. Holloway presents 9/11 and the war on terror not as a break, rupture or transformation in American history, but as events with deep historical and political roots, whose representation in the Bush-era was generally framed within well-worn cultural and intellectual traditions. The book offers a cultural and ideological history of the period, showing how culture was used by contemporaries to participate in, and to side-step, debate as to the causes, consequences, and implications, of 9/11 and the war on terror.

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.

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.

This book examines the origins, development and reception of the major dramatic screen representations of ‘The Few’ in the Battle of Britain produced over the past seventy years. It explores both continuity and change of presentation in relation to a wartime event that acquired near-mythical dimensions in popular consciousness even before it happened, and which has been represented multiple times over the course of the past seven decades. Alongside technical developments, considerable social, cultural and political fluctuation (as well as an expansion of factual knowledge concerning the battle itself) occurred in this period, all of which helped to shape how the battle came to be framed at particular junctures. The ways in which the Battle of Britain was being represented in other fictional forms, as well as in histories and commemorations, form part of the context in which screen representations are explored. Films discussed in detail include The Lion Has Wings, First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky and Battle of Britain, along with the television productions Piece of Cake and A Perfect Hero. Foreign productions, such as A Yank in the RAF and Dark Blue World, as well as abandoned projects and dramas in which ‘The Few’ feature in a more tangential fashion, are also mentioned in context. The emphasis throughout is on production issues and the extent to which these screen dramas reflected or influenced popular understanding of 1940.

The Besieged Ego: Doppelgangers and Split Identity Onscreen critically appraises the representation, or mediation, of identity in film and television through a thorough analysis of doppelgangers and split or fragmentary characters. The prevalence of non-autonomous characters in a wide variety of onscreen examples calls into question the very concept of a unified, knowable identity. The form of the double, and cinematic modes and rhetorics used to denote fragmentary identity, is addressed in the book through a detailed analysis of texts drawn from a range of industrial, historical and cultural contexts. The doppelganger or double carries significant cultural meanings about what it means to be human and the experience of identity as a gendered individual. The double also expresses in fictional form our problematic experience of the world as a social, and supposedly whole and autonomous, subject. The Besieged Ego therefore raises important questions about the representation of identity onscreen and concomitant issues regarding autonomy and the nature of lack and desire in identity formation and experience. This book argues that split characters are a dramatic device that provides narrative structure as well as visual spectacle across a range of genres and industrial contexts. The range and variety of texts that deal with unstable identities through splitting is testimony to the fact that meanings are not fixed in terms of identity representation in media, particularly across genres.

This book addresses representations of Russia and neighbouring Eastern Europe in post-1989 Nordic cinemas, investigating their hitherto-overlooked transnational dimension. Departing from the dark stereotypes that characterise the hegemonic narrative defined as ‘Eastern noir’, the author presents Norden’s eastern neighbours as depicted with a rich, though previously neglected in scholarship, cinematic diversity. The book does not deny the existence of Eastern noir or its accuracy. Instead, in a number of in-depth case studies of both popular and niche feature films, documentaries and television dramas, it interrogates and attempts to add nuance to the Nordic audiovisual imagination of Russia and Eastern Europe. Tracing approaches of and beyond the Eastern noir paradigm across cinematic genres, and in relation to changing historical contexts, the author considers how increasingly transnational affinities have led to a reimagining of Norden’s eastern neighbours in contemporary Nordic films. Making the notions of border/boundary and neighbourliness central to the argument, the author explores how the shared geopolitical border is (re)imagined in Nordic films and how these (re)imaginations reflect back on the Nordic subjects.

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.

‘New Bollywood’ has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry? Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this book reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the twenty-first century. Equipping readers with an alternative method of reading contemporary Indian cinema, the book takes Indian film studies beyond the standard theme of diaspora, and exposes a new decade of aesthetic experimentation and textual appropriation in mainstream Bombay cinema. A bold celebration of contemporary Bollywood texts, this book radically redefines Indian film and persuasively argues for its seriousness as a field of cinematic studies.

This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early 1990s as a signature ‘Bollywood style’ evolved in the wake of liberalisation and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, ‘window-shopping’ ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. One example is the film Haqeeqat, which featured poor, working-class protagonists, but in which romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. The book theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic. The book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalising process in India. It argues that ‘Bollywood’ is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own than it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernisation which comes without a political modernity. It therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, the book presents a complex account of an India of the present.

Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the “border crossing” from one temporal or spatial territory into another, Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film examines the way classic Russian texts have been altered to suit new cinematic environments. In these essays, international scholars examine how political and economic circumstances, from a shifting Soviet political landscape to the perceived demands of American and European markets, have played a crucial role in dictating how filmmakers transpose their cinematic hypertext into a new environment. Rather than focus on the degree of accuracy or fidelity with which these film adaptations address their originating texts, this collection explores the role of ideological, political, and other cultural pressures that can affect the transformation of literary narratives into cinematic offerings.

British national cinema has produced an exceptional track record of innovative, creative and internationally recognised filmmakers, amongst them Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and David Lean. This tradition continues today with the work of directors as diverse as Neil Jordan, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. This concise, authoritative volume analyses critically the work of 100 British directors, from the innovators of the silent period to contemporary auteurs. An introduction places the individual entries in context and examines the role and status of the director within British film production. Each entry includes a complete filmography of the director's British work, as well as suggested further reading. The individual career overviews include biographical information and an assessment of the director's current critical standing. Balancing academic rigour with accessibility, British Film Directors provides a reference source for film students at all levels.

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.

Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart of American mythology, film spectatorship, and genre. Brokeback Mountain offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés of the Western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of homophobia and the closet. This book examines the film in relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing and homosexuality. In doing so it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a contemporary independent and queer film. The book provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors, and proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into account how editing and cruising relate to one another.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. Through different theoretical approaches and thematic focuses, the book attempts to contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole by mapping meaningful areas of in-betweenness including the intermedial and interart relations in-between cinema, music, theatre, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, language and the new, digital technologies of the moving image.