Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television

This book offers a critical account of film performances by nonprofessional actors. Nonprofessional actors ¿ actors without previous acting training or experience ¿ have performed in films since the days of the Lumière brothers. Generally associated with currents such as Early Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism and New Argentine Cinema, nonprofessional actors also feature prominently in the works of celebrated directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson and Joanna Hogg. Since the turn of the century and the rise of digital filmmaking, the performances of nonprofessional actors have remained a staple of independent cinemas from all over the world, including films associated with the loose trend often referred to as Slow Cinema. Despite their enduring presence in acclaimed and widely discussed films, nonprofessional actors have received scant scholarly attention. This book proposes to analyse exemplary nonprofessional performances from across the history of cinema as a means of illuminating their significance and celebrating the performers¿ contributions to the films.

This book is about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary artists' moving image installations, and the ways that they use temporal and spatial relationships in the gallery to connect with geopolitical issues.

Ray offers close readings that call attention to what we have missed in such classic films as La Regle du Jeu, It Happened One Night, It's a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, Breathless, and Tickets.

Built around close readings of 11 noir films, this book seeks to refresh our understanding of "film noir" by returning to the films themselves.

This book examines the concept of coherence in film studies. The author then proceeds to a close analysis of stylistically perplexing narrative films, in order to demonstrate how we can broaden, expand and readjust the classical criteria of coherence.

This book puts forward a more considered perspective on 3D, which is often seen as a distracting gimmick at odds with artful cinematic storytelling. It demonstrates that the expressive placement of characters and objects within 3D film worlds can construct meaning in ways that are unavailable to `flat' cinema.

An ambitious interpretation of the critically celebrated and widely popular crime drama Breaking Bad , this book argues that not only should the series be understood as a show that revolves around the dramatic stakes of dignity, but that to do so reveals - in new ways - central aspects of serial television drama as an art form.

Irony in Film is the first book about ironic expression in this medium. Combining in-depth theorising with detailed close analysis, this pioneering study asks what ironic capacities films might possess, how film style may be used ironically, and what role intention should play in film interpretation.

Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from classical Hollywood through to our digital era. So, too, have the ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style. This book explores two central style concepts, mise en scene and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples.

This pioneering book provides detailed analysis of scenes from nine British television dramas produced between 1954 and 2001. Taking dinner table scenes as a recurring motif, the study analyses changes in televisual style with reference to production practices, technology, aesthetic preferences, and social and institutional change.

We are so used to images of words that it is easy to ignore the different ways in which they work in films. This book explores both the letters that come in the post and the many other kinds that are offered to us on screen.

This is the first book in English exclusively devoted to the long take, one of the key elements of film style. Increasingly visible in contemporary international media, the long take currently attracts a good deal of attention in criticism and commentary. There are also significant strands of film theory in which duration has become a recurrent concern. In keeping with the approach of Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, this collection is devoted to the detailed critical analysis of specific long takes, explored in terms of how they function within their contexts, how they shape the visual field, the meanings they generate and the effects they create. The Long Take: Critical Approaches brings together essays by established and emerging scholars (all but one essay commissioned for this volume) in an exciting collection that analyses works from a range of filmmaking traditions, from the 1930s to the present day, selected to represent varied long take practices and to explore associated debates.