Bücher der Reihe Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

Explores the diverse world of collecting film- and media-related materials. The book interrogates and illustrates the meaning and practical nature of film and media collections while also considering the vast array of personal and professional motivations behind their assemblage.

Highlights the industries, markets, identities, and histories that distinguish cinema beyond the traditional hubs of mainstream Western cinema. This title not only includes geographic case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins, like New Zealand and Scotland, but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures.

Filmmaker John Sayles has tackled issues ranging from race and sexuality to the abuses of capitalism and American culture. This collection offers coverage of Sayles's craft and content, with a variety of critical methods to explore the scope of his work. The essays give an understanding of his individual films and of his place in American cinema.

For critics, fans, and scholars of drama and film, the laugh has traditionally been tied to comedy, indicating and expressing mirth, witty relief, joyous celebration, or arch and sarcastic parody. But strange, dark laughter that illuminates non-comedic, unfunny situations gets much less attention. In The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema, editor Murray Pomerance has assembled contributions from thirteen estimable scholars that address the strange laughter of cinema from varying intellectual perspectives and a wide range of sources.Contributors consider unusual humors in a variety of filmic settings, from the chilling unheard laughter of silent cinema to the ribald and mortal laughter in the work of Orson Welles; the vagaries and nuances of laughter in film noir to the eccentric laughter of science fiction. Essays also look at laughter in many different applications, from the subtle, underlying wit of the thriller Don't Look Now to the deeply provocative humor of experimental film and the unpredictable, shadowy, insightful, and stunning laughter in such films as Black Swan, Henry Fool, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Kiss of Death, The Dark Knight, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The accessibly written, unique essays in The Last Laugh bring a new understanding to the delicate balance, unsettled tensions, and fragility of human affairs depicted by strange humor in film. For scholars of film and readers who love cinema, these essays will be rich and playful inspiration.

Five of Hitchcock's most significant films were unavailable to the public for as long as two decades before their release in 1983-84. This highly readable volume collects the most important essays written about Hitchcock and the rereleased films since that time. Covering the entire range of contemporary film criticism and theory, these studies demonstrate Hitchcock's centrality to an understanding of how culture shapes film and how film shapes, and even creates culture.

Contains twenty in-depth studies of prominent New Zealand directors, producers, actors, and cinematographers. This book displays the diversity of filmmaking in New Zealand and highlights the specific industrial, aesthetic, and cultural concerns that have created a film culture of international significance.

A study of the cinematic traditions and film practices in the black Diaspora. It includes essays by film scholars, film critics and film-makers, whose critical readings challenge assumptions of colonialist and ethnocentric discourses about the Third World, Hollywood and European cinemas.

In its intimate joining of self and machine, video gaming works to extend the body into a fluid, dynamic, unstable, and discontinuous entity. While digital gaming and culture has become a popular field of academic study, there has been a lack of sustained philosophical analysis of this direct gaming experience. In Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience, author Jonathan Boulter addresses this gap by analyzing video games and the player experience philosophically. Finding points of departure in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Boulter argues that we need to think seriously about what it means to enter into a relationship with the game machine and to assume (or to have conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity. Parables of the Posthuman approaches the experience of gaming by asking: What does it mean for the player to enter the machinic "e;world"e; of the game? What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What happens to consciousness itself when one plays? To this end, Boulter analyzes the experience of particular role-playing video games, including Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Crysis 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. These games both thematize the idea of the posthuman-the games are "e;about"e; subjects whose physical and intellectual capacities are extended through machine or other prosthetic means-and also enact an experience of the posthuman for the player, who becomes more than what he was as he plays the game. Boulter concludes by exploring how the game acts as a parable of what the human, or posthuman, may look like in times to come. Academics with an interest in the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture forms and video gamers with an interest in thinking about the implications of gaming will enjoy this volume.

The Apu Trilogy is the fifth book written by influential film critic Robin Wood and republished for a contemporary audience. Focusing on the famed trilogy from Indian director Satyajit Ray, Wood persuasively demonstrates his ability at detailed textual analysis, providing an impressively sustained reading that elucidates the complex view of life in the trilogy. Wood was one of our most insightful and committed film critics, championing films that explore the human condition. His analysis of The Apu Trilogy reveals and illuminates the films' profoundly humanistic qualities with clarity and rigor, plumbing the psychological and emotional resonances that arise from Ray's delicate balance of performance, camerawork, and visual design. Wood was the first English-language critic to write substantively about Ray's films, which made the original publication of his monograph on The Apu Trilogy unprecedented as well as impressive. Of late there has been a renewed interest in North America in the work of Satyajit Ray, yet no other critic has come close to equaling the scope and depth of his analysis. In his introduction, originally published in 1971, Wood says reactions to Ray's work were met with indifference. In response, he offers possible reasons why this occurred, including social and cultural differences and the films' slow pacing, which contemporary critics tended to associate with classical cinema. Wood notes Ray's admiration for Western film culture, including the Hollywood cinema and European directors, particularly Jean Renoir and his realist films. Assigning a chapter to each Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito, (1957), and The World of Apu, (1959), Wood goes on to explore each film more thoroughly. One of the aspects of this book that is particularly rewarding is Wood's analytical approach to the trilogy as a whole, as well as detailed attention given to each of the three films. The book, with a new preface by Richard Lippe and foreword by Barry Keith Grant, functions as a master class on what constitutes an in-depth reading of a work and the use of critical tools that are relevant to such a task. Robin Wood's The Apu Trilogy offers an excellent account of evaluative criticism that will appeal to film scholars and students alike.

Stella Adler (1901-92) trained many well-known American actors yet throughout much of her career, her influence was overshadowed by Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio. In Beyond Method, Scott Balcerzak focuses on Adler's teachings and how she challenged Strasberg's psychological focus on the actor's "self" by promoting an empathetic and socially engaged approach to performance.

This volume (second of two), maps the historical and cultural contexts of film practices in Latin America. It explores the formation of the New Latin American cinema movement as a comparative national project. Essays are grouped by nation into two regions.

Looks at the work of Jesus "Jess" Franco (1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive filmmakers in the history of cinema. Editors Antonio Lsszaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled a team of scholars to examine Franco's offbeat films, which command an international cult following and have developed a more mainstream audience in recent years.

Investigates the dynamic relationship between the Surrealist modernist artist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) and the cinema. Magritte once said that he used cinema as "a trampoline for the imagination," but here author Lucy Fischer reverses that process by using Magritte's work as a stimulus for an imaginative examination of film.

Explores how Shoah fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians understand the history of the Holocaust. Contributors reexamine the impact of Shoah through a trove of previously unavailable and unexplored footage.

Investigates the work of global filmmaker Raul Ruiz. Raul Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry posits the unity of Ruiz's body of work and investigates the similarities between his very diverse artistic productions. Ruiz's own concept of "cinema of inquiry" provides the lens through which his films and poetics are examined.

A study of one of Stanley Cavell's greatest yet most neglected books. The authors address the philosopher's readers who have neither understood why he has given film so much attention, nor grasped the place of ""The World Viewed"" within the totality of his writings about film.

Offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.

Explores how Shoah fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians understand the history of the Holocaust. Contributors reexamine the impact of Shoah through a trove of previously unavailable and unexplored footage.

Offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.

Defiantly claims that ""all films are adaptations"". The wide-ranging chapters included in this book highlight the growing and evolving relevance of the field of adaptation studies and its many branding subfields.

Defiantly claims that ""all films are adaptations"". The wide-ranging chapters included in this book highlight the growing and evolving relevance of the field of adaptation studies and its many branding subfields.

Victor Perkins was a foundational figure for the study of film both as a writer and as an educationalist and teacher who played a key role in establishing film within British higher education. This book makes it possible to see his writing as a coherent body of work, and to appreciate its great historical and cultural significance.

Victor Perkins was a foundational figure for the study of film both as a writer and as an educationalist and teacher who played a key role in establishing film within British higher education. This book makes it possible to see his writing as a coherent body of work, and to appreciate its great historical and cultural significance.