Bücher der Reihe Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

Demonstrates the viability of rural cinema as a benchmark of national identity by bringing into critical focus the space the rural occupies, both on cinema screens and in the national imagination. This work attempts to formulate a template for rural cinema, set forth its salient characteristics and provide a guideline for discussion and analysis.

Presents contributions from prominent German film studies scholars to examine the current politically charged and provocative moment in German filmmaking historically, ideologically, and formally as another break with cinematic convention.

Marcia Landy has gathered thirty-seven important essays on film and melodrama that have appeared in books and journals over the last two decades. In her introduction to the book, sheexplores the recent interest in the genre in relation to theoretical work in psychoanalysis and semiotics, setting the stage for the essays that follow.

In examining the construction of girlhood from many angles, this collection of essays attempts to capture the richness of meaning behind ""girl films"", but also explores the recent resurgence of youth-orientated cinema and the relationship of young female viewers to that medium.

Discusses aspects of boyhood and its relation to cinema - in particular, the process whereby masculinities are socially, historically, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically created in male coming-of-age as depicted onscreen.

Austrian director Michael Haneke is recognized for films that explore the most pressing social questions while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of style with innovative visual and sonic practices. This title explores the philosophical, historical, and stylistic complexity of Haneke's films.

Traces the legacy of Krzysztof Kieslowski in films made after his death using his scripts or ideas and in the work of other filmmakers. This title diverges from the typical analysis of Kieslowski's work to focus on his legacy in films made after his death, including those based on his scripts and ideas and those made entirely by other filmmakers.

In eleven essays, Toles combines aesthetic inquiry with a psychology of spectatorship to illuminate the dialogue between sentiment and irony that unfolds in every good movie. Each essay ponders the nature and implications of a film experience and examines the ironies of spectatorship.

Widely known for innovative films like ""Meet Me in St Louis"", ""An American in Paris"", and ""The Band Wagon"", Vincente Minnelli also directed classic film comedies like ""Father of the Bride"" and ""Designing Woman"", and melodramas such as ""The Bad and the Beautiful"" and ""Some Came Running"". This work offers an examination of Minnelli's career.

This anthology examines a number of issues related to violence within the media landscape, using various methodologies to suggest the implications of the increasing obsession with violence for postmodern civilization.

Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analyzed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking from Nanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those "regimes of truth" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume.

Explores the popular cultural phenomenon of "bromance" in film and television and its oppositions between homosexual and homosocial behavior.

Critics rarely associate popular film with German cinema, despite the international success of films including ""Das Boot"" and ""Run Lola Run"". The essays here re-examine German popular film production along with larger cultural, historical and political meanings suggested by the term ""popular"".

Explores the proliferation of humor in recent cinema of the Middle East and its possible ramifications for cinematic representation, art, and politics.

With the end of apartheid, South African cinema is at a turning point. But how can there be a discussion of national cinema when only the elite minority has so far participated in it? This collection looks at a film industry which has excluded its own black majority and how it will overcome this.

Examines how psychological and physical suffering, as portrayed on screen and experienced in personal lives, has affected the images, performances, and fortunes of stars from the 1940s to present.

French filmmaker Christophe Honore challenges audiences with complex cinematic form, intricate narrative structures, and aesthetically dynamic filmmaking. But the limited release of his films outside of Europe has left him largely unknown to U.S. audiences. In Christophe Honore: A Critical Introduction, authors David A. Gerstner and Julien Nahmias invite English-speaking scholars and cineastes to explore Honore's three most recognized films, Dans Paris (2006), Les Chansons d'amour (2007), and La Belle personne (2008)-"e;the trilogy."e; Gerstner and Nahmias analyze Honore's filmmaking as the work of a queer auteur whose cinematic engagement with questions of family, death, and sexual desire represent new ground for queer theory. Considering each of the trilogy films in turn, the authors take a close look at Honors cinematic technique and how it engages with France's contemporary cultural landscape. With careful attention to the complexity of Honors work, they consider critically contested issues such as the filmmaker's cinematic strategies for addressing AIDS, the depth of his LGBTQ politics, his representations of death and sexual desire, and the connections between his films and the New Wave. Anchored by a comprehensive interview with the director, the authors incorporate classical and contemporary film theories to offer a range of cinematic interventions for thinking queerly about the noted film author. Christophe Honor A Critical Introduction reconceptualizes the relationship between film theory and queer theory by moving beyond predominant literary and linguistic models, focusing instead on cinematic technique. Students and teachers of queer film will appreciate this thought-provoking volume.

Blackness Is Burning is one of the first books to examine the ways race and psychological rhetoric collided in the public and popular culture of the civil rights era. In analyzing a range of media forms, including Sidney Poitier's popular films, black mother and daughter family melodramas, Bill Cosby's comedy routine and cartoon Fat Albert, pulpy black pimp narratives, and several aspects of post-civil rights black/American culture, TreaAndrea M. Russworm identifies and problematizes the many ways in which psychoanalytic culture has functioned as a governing racial ideology that is built around a flawed understanding of trying to "e;recognize"e; the racial other as human. The main argument of Blackness Is Burning is that humanizing, or trying to represent in narrative and popular culture that #BlackLivesMatter, has long been barely attainable and impossible to sustain cultural agenda. But Blackness Is Burning makes two additional interdisciplinary interventions: the book makes a historical and temporal intervention because Russworm is committed to showing the relationship between civil rights discourses on theories of recognition and how we continue to represent and talk about race today. The book also makes a formal intervention since the chapter-length case studies take seemingly banal popular forms seriously. She argues that the popular forms and disreputable works are integral parts of our shared cultural knowledge. Blackness Is Burning's interdisciplinary reach is what makes it a vital component to nearly any scholar's library, particularly those with an interest in African American popular culture, film and media studies, or psychoanalytic theory.

A groundbreaking scholarly anthology devoted to examining canonical and lesser-known films of the blaxploitation movement to demonstrate the richness, depth, and complexity of this intriguing period in motion picture history.

The heist has been a persistent and popular mainstay of the crime film. The Best Laid Plans asks the question: why has the heist film proved so appealing to audiences over many years and in diverse cultural contexts? The twelve essays in this volume, explore the significance of the heist film in different national cinemas, as well as its aesthetic principles and ideological issues.

Provides a better understanding of women's experiences in the early twentieth century, and an appreciation of the unruly and boundary-breaking women who have followed. Comic Venus brings readers to understand comediennes and their impact on silent-era cinema, as well as their lasting influence on later generations of funny women.

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.

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 Lazaro-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.

Describes serial television and "binge watching". Dennis Broe looks at this practice of media consumption by suggesting that the history of seriality itself is a continual battleground between a more unified version of truth-telling and a more fractured form of diversion and addiction.