Books in the Film and Culture Series series

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films-including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment-Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society.In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder's films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition.Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across "normal" self and "monstrous" other.

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other.

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures. Exploring how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society, Rosalind Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.

How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World.

Richard Koszarski chronicles the compelling and often surprising origins of New York's postwar film renaissance. He examines the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped New York filmmaking, from city politics to union regulations.

This innovative book focuses on the contested origins of ethnographic film from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, vividly depicting the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures.

Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic history of early Bombay cinema and its consolidation in the 1930s. Bombay Hustle provides vital insight into practices of modernity and political, social, and technological change in late colonial India.

The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred debate over what it means to be a "cinephile." Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images.

Spaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema and its place in today's visual landscape. Considering 3D's distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital culture, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts.

Virginia Wright Wexman offers a groundbreaking history of how movie directors became cinematic auteurs that reveals and pinpoints the influence of the Directors Guild of America. Hollywood's Artists sheds new light on the ways in which the DGA has shaped the role and image of directors both within the Hollywood system and in the culture at large.

Film Studies is a concise and indispensable introduction to the formal study of cinema. The second edition to this best-selling textbook adds two new chapters: "Film and Ideology" and "Film Studies in the Age of Digital Cinema."

Justin Remes demonstrates how omissions of expected elements can spur viewers to interpret and understand the nature of film in new ways. Through a careful analysis of a broad array of avant-garde works, Absence in Cinema reveals that films must be understood not only in terms of what they show but also what they withhold.

Malcolm Turvey examines Jacques Tati's unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director's films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati's work.

Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. She challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment.

Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences. He examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world.

Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe provide a revelatory history of how the use of color in film led the way in creating a chromatically vibrant culture. Focusing on the final decade of silent film, Chromatic Modernity portrays the 1920s as a pivotal and profoundly chromatic period of cosmopolitan exchange, collaboration, and experimentation.

In Rewriting Indie Cinema, J. J. Murphy explores alternative forms of scripting and how they have shaped American film from the 1950s to the present. He traces a strain of indie cinema that used improvisation and psychodrama, a therapeutic form of improvised acting based on a performer's own life experiences.

Patrick Keating offers an innovative history of the aesthetics of the camera that examines how camera movement shaped the classical Hollywood style. In careful readings of dozens of films, he explores how major figures like F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock used camera movement to enrich their stories and deepen their themes.

Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable.

Jeff Menne rewrites the history of the New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood's corporate project. Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the "creative economy."

Thomas Doherty tells the story of the 1947 hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. Show Trial is a character-driven inquiry into how the HUAC hearings ignited the Hollywood blacklist, providing a gripping new history of one of the most influential events of the postwar era.

In Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, Maggie Hennefeld examines little-known silent films that, she argues, provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. Hennefeld shows how slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language and experimentation.

Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. The essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre's origins and follows its transformations.

Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. He provides new readings of films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time for Love (1990), as well as ones by other key directors.

Providing an historical and cultural exploration, this text demonstrates the role Japanese cinema played in the 1930s in the construction of a national identity, and in terms of the larger context of Japan's encounter with the West and with modernity.

Exploring the work of three visionary auteurs deeply invested in the political possibilities of film.

This title considers how Hollywood articulates the eroticism that is intrinsic to identification between men. It also examines how Hollywood has both reflected and helped to shape the concept of masculinity.

Anderegg considers Welles's influence as an interpreter of Shakespeare for twentieth-century American popular audiences, drawing on his knowledge of the abundant, lowbrow popularity of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. Welles's three film adaptations of Shakespeare, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, are examined.