Books in the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series 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.

The first book-length study of comic film director and media celebrity Taika Waititi. Author Matthew Bannister analyses Waititi's feature films and places his other works and performances-short films, TV series, advertisements, music videos, and media appearances-in the fabric of popular culture.

More than a century after its emergence, classical Hollywood cinema remains popular today with cinephiles and scholars alike. Resetting the Scene showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers of Hollywood filmmaking of the studio era and proposes new directions for classical Hollywood studies in the twenty-first century.

More than a century after its emergence, classical Hollywood cinema remains popular today with cinephiles and scholars alike. Resetting the Scene showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers of Hollywood filmmaking of the studio era and proposes new directions for classical Hollywood studies in the twenty-first century.

Provides the first full-length exploration of Carrie Fisher's career as actress, writer, and advocate. Fisher's entangled relationship with the iconic Princess Leia is a focal point of this volume. The collection engages with the multiple interfaces between Fisher's most famous character and her other life-giving work.

In defiance of the alleged 'death of romantic comedy', After ""Happily Ever After"": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com's continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways.

Traces the history of the cameo as it emerged in twentieth-century cinema. Although the cameo has existed in film culture for over a century, Joceline Andersen explains that this role cannot be strictly defined because it exists as a constellation of interactions between duration and recognition, dependent on who is watching and when.

Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema.

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.

Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author's direct observation and experience of the city's social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can't Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the "e;real place"e; in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto's monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States' most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.

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.

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.

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.

Offers a theoretical rumination on the question asked in countless blogs and opinion pieces of the last decade: Why are we so obsessed with true crime? Tanya Horeck examines a range of audiovisual true crime texts, and considers the extent to which the genre has come to epitomize participatory media culture.

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.

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.

Joseph H. Lewis enjoyed a monumental career in many genres, including film noir and B-movies, as well as an extensive and often overlooked TV career. Rhodes gathers notable scholars from around the globe to examine the full range of Lewis's career. While some studies analyse Lewis's work in different areas, others focus on particular films, ranging from poverty row fare to westerns and TV films.

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.

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.

In this anthology, filmmakers, psychoanalysts, film scholars and cultural historians use a psychoanalytic approach to examine Bernardo Bertolucci's film ""The Last Emperor"" (1988). The book is divided into four parts entitled ""Filmcraft"", ""Psychoanalysis"", ""Film Scholarship"" and ""Cultural History"".

Looks at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation. John Alberti and P. Andrew Miller have gathered scholars to explore and examine the cultural, political, aesthetic, and pedagogical dimensions of this pop culture phenomenon and how it has changed the reception of both the films and books.

Illustrates how Hollywood films negotiate shifting historical contexts of internationalisation through complex narratives about transnational exchange-a topic that has thus far been neglected in scholarship on classical Hollywood.

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 spite of the difficulty of most American avant-garde films, one can read volumes and find almost no mention of how to view these films. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order addresses precisely this question: how-and to what extent-can viewers make sense of American avant-garde films? It is a controversial book that examines the implicit assumptions of traditional scholarship, advocates on alternative to dominant approaches to the avant-garde cinema, and questions some long-standing clichés about the history of the avant-garde.