Bücher der Reihe New Studies in European Cinema

This book explores the cinematic representation of the city in British film from 1895 to 1914, featuring depictions of London, Glasgow, Dublin, Delhi and other British colonial cities. The author argues that the films are not only an invaluable record of the economic, social and cultural life of these cities but also that the spatial organization of these urban areas, and the cinematic representations of them, were shaped by the ideology and activity of imperialism. The pioneer camera operators who made these early films often put forward an imperialist ideology by paying particular attention to the cinematic representation of monumental and ceremonial spaces, modern communication and transport within the city and between the city and the empire. Of Empire and the City establishes connections between these cities and their cinematic representation by means of continuous motifs and themes, including modernity, Orientalism, spectatorship and the imperial subject. The book makes a unique contribution to studies of early film, British urban history and the history of the British Empire. This is a highly original and genuinely groundbreaking piece of scholarship on early British cinema. Very little work on this subject to date has sought to contextualise films of the 1890s and 1900s within the broader field of the history of imperialism. Cinquegrani's book systematically corrects this 'blind spot', and in its use of a wide range of ideas and methodologies [...] it offers a compelling new model for future scholarship on British cinema of the silent era. (Dr Jon Burrows, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick)

In the age of the selfie, this book traces self-portraiture in film and video from the Western tradition in painting and literature into present-day digital media. The essays assess the significance of the self-portrait in the moving image and new media by exploring a varied and international body of works.

This book is the first integrated study of Surrealist photography and film, assessing the impact of early experimental practice and theoretical discourse on post-war trends in art house cinema. Drawing on the work of Barthes, Derrida and Deleuze, the author sheds light on Surrealist concepts and traces their influence on post-war filmmakers.

Northern landscapes, soundscapes, characters and narratives are defined and recognised as distinctive image-spaces within film and television. However, the 'North' is portrayed, exploited and interpreted in divergent ways by filmmakers and film audiences worldwide, and this volume sheds new light on these varying perspectives.

Examines the films that the Kaurismaekis produced, individually and in collaboration, between 1981 and 1995 - films which mobilise various methods to reflect, criticise, counteract and contribute to the globalisation of Finnish society in the era of late capitalist development. This title provides an analysis of these films.

Suitable for scholars and devotees of Italian cinema to share their original and non-standard work, incorporating some classic texts and filmmakers, this title contains articles that arises out of the international conference 'Italy on Screen', held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London, in February 2007.

This book is the first ever full-length study of the reception of British cinema in post-war France, challenging François Truffaut¿s infamous dismissal of British cinema as ¿a contradiction in terms¿, a comment which has been, and still is, widely reproduced, yet has until now remained critically unexplored. A historical account, the book gathers together well-known episodes (such as Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s) and critics (André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard), along with original new material, and thus throws new light on a topic which, given the influential nature of French film criticism and cinephilia, continues to be at the core of film culture.

French film design throughout the 1930s was a period of 'ripping open' film sets to make them not just descriptive, but also expressive. This book details the elaborate paraphrasing tendencies of French film design in the period, exploring the crucial role of the set designer in the film's evolutionary process.

This book covers the history of Polish cinema from 1989 up to the present in a broad political and cultural context, looking at both the film industry and film artistry. It considers the main ideas behind the institutional changes in the Polish film industry after the collapse of communism and assesses how these ideas were implemented. In discussing artistry, the focus is on the genres which dominated the Polish cinematic landscape after 1989 and the most important directors.