Books in the Cinema and Society series

Looking at popular British film in the 1940s, Realism and Tinsel goes beyond the established histories of the Ealing Comedies to excavate a rich tradition of melodrama, morbid thrillers and costume pictures.

Exploring debates about children and how they use and respond to the media, the author researches attempts to control children's viewing, the ideas that supported these approaches and the extent to which they were successful. She develops a proposition that children are agents in the regulation of their own viewing and not passive consumers.

Travelling from Warsaw to Blackpool, Marseilles to Madrid, this study investigates the postmodern nature of contemporary Europe's urban life and cinema, showing how European films represent these cities across old and new Europe. It tackles changes wrought under the effects of political change.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a range of films, from "The Spy in Black" and "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" to "A Canterbury Tale" and "The Red Shoes". This book looks at these classic films to explore their complex relationship to national identity, and their interest in exile, borderlands, utopias, escapism, art and fantasy.

This book questions how films create and interpret what Christmas means to societies across the Anglo-Saxon and European world, examining topics such as Santa Claus in cinema, Dickens and Christmas and Spanish and German seasonal creations. In the CINEMA AND SOCIETY series.

The films "Brigadoon" and "Braveheart" have an enormous resonance and provide general impressions of "Scottishness". This provocative study discusses the films' representations of Scotland and the Scots, looking at how Scotland is (mis)recognized and yet often comes to be "known".

An account of how popular films in America, just after the close of the Second World War, played out America's mood at that crucial time. This book is also a revisionist challenge to the scholarly understanding of this mood, has tended to be seen as characterized by an abiding pessimism most clearly manifested in the films noir of the period.

A detailed study of the workings of the American film industry during the 1930s. Schindler illustrates how the studios helped to foster ideas of social unity and patriotism.

Focusing on the 1950s when Hollywood's interest in the past was at its peak, this book reconstructs how filmmakers understood their treatment of the past, suggesting why many of them saw their work as superior to that of professional historians. It explains how and why Hollywood blurs the boundaries between fiction and historical reality.

At the outbreak of the WWII, all cinemas in Britain were closed. Ten days later, they were opened again as a way of boosting morale. Over the next six years, some 300 feature films and thousands of short films were produced in what is seen as British cinema's 'finest hour'. This work charts this period through the eyes of thirteen key films.