Books in the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series series

Victor Perkins was a foundational figure for the study of film both as a writer and as an educationalist and teacher who played a key role in establishing film within British higher education. This book makes it possible to see his writing as a coherent body of work, and to appreciate its great historical and cultural significance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This selection of writings offers an overview of thinking on Alfred Hitchcock and his work. The articles span his career and cover a wide range of topics from archaeological investigation to incisive analyses on the films themselves.

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.

The pantheon of big-budget, commercially successful films encompasses a range of genres, including biblical films, war films, romances, comic-book adaptations, animated features, and historical epics. This title considers the history of the American blockbuster - the large-scale, high-cost film - as it evolved from the 1890s.

This book aims to give the global perspectives and cross-cultural dynamics of world horror cinema their due. The collection of eighteen essays examines a many films, showing how each draws from Hollywood horror conventions and also local cinematic traditions, local folklore, and national historical and cultural concerns.

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"".

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.

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.

A collection of essays on Jane Campion, filmmaker. It analyzes Campion's close relationship with literature and argues that the singular vision in her literary adaptations stems from her New Zealand background and her personal mythology.

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.

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.

Offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.

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.

Offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Filmmaker John Sayles has tackled issues ranging from race and sexuality to the abuses of capitalism and American culture. This collection offers coverage of Sayles's craft and content, with a variety of critical methods to explore the scope of his work. The essays give an understanding of his individual films and of his place in American cinema.