Books in the Film Cultures series

This volume examines representations of travel ideals in contemporary international cinema. It explores the link between filmed spaces and real locations, as well as the fantasy and exoticism that arise through an idealisation of the locations and their transformational impact on the protagonists who travel there.

More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame tracks screen performance's trajectory from dominant discourses of realism and authenticity towards increasingly acute degrees of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between changing forms of onscreen representation and our shifting status as social subjects, the book provides an original perspective through international examples from cinema, experimental production, documentary, television, and the burgeoning landscape of online screen performance. In an emerging culture of participatory media, the creation of a screen-based presence for our own performances of identity has become a currency through which we validate ourselves as subjects of the contemporary, hyper-mediatized world. In this post-dramatic, post-Warhol climate, the author's contention is that we are becoming increasingly wedded to screen media - not just as consumers but as producers and performers.

This book presents an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics of cultural representation and interpretation in film criticism. It examines how French critical reception of Australian cinema since the revival period of the 1970s has evolved as a narrative of perpetual discovery, and how a clear parallel can be drawn between French critics' reading of Australian film and their interpretation of an exotic Australian national identity. In French critical writing on Australian cinema, Australian identity is frequently defined in terms of extremes of cultural specificity and cultural anonymity. On the one hand, French critics construct a Euro-centric orientalist fantasy of Australia as not only a European Antipodes, but the antithesis of Europe. At the same time, French critics have tended to subordinate Australian cultural identity within the framework of a resented Anglo-American filmic and cultural hegemony. The book further explores this marginalisation by examining the influence of the French auteur paradigm, particularly in reference to the work of Jane Campion, as well as by discussing the increasingly problematic notion of national identity, and indeed national cinemas, within the universal framework of international film culture.

This book offers a close study of how film produces sensory-affective experience for the spectator. It argues that we must explore this affective dimension if we want to understand how cinema takes up cultural or thematic issues. Examining cinematic affect through close readings of how affective immersion in cinema works to engage viewers with history, memory and cultural specificity, it deals with both fiction film and documentary. Taking an international perspective, it includes case studies of Korean detective film, classical Japanese cinema, modern Greek cinema, independent American cinema, Indian documentary, Australian television documentary, Indonesian political docudrama, avantgarde French documentary and Australian Indigenous film. Rutherford draws on the analysis of embodied affect to revise many of the foundational concepts of film studies. Drawing on Miriam Hansen's readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the book explores the capacity of film to produce experiences in which the boundaries between the spectator and the film become porous and the viewer is transported in a heightened way into the film.

In the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, all five of the Chief Ministers since 1967 have been former actors. This provocative book debunks the notion of Bollywood as the synecdoche of Indian cinema to explore the hitherto less studied, yet highly influential cinema in South Asia. Developing the concept of the politics of sentiment, the author examines the ways in which actor-politicians constructed their cinematic charisma, projecting themselves as messiahs saving the people from injustices, to create a political appeal to voters. The resilience of cinematic charisma, as Indian society undergoes massive socio-economic changes, provides a compelling study of modern politics, cinema, celebrity and the culture of the subcontinent.

Cet ouvrage parait en complement de Litterature et cinema : la culture visuelle en partage (co-edite par les memes auteurs). Les deux volumes s'inscrivent dans la nouvelle serie " Studies in Film & Literature Cultures " consacree a l'etude des rapports entre le cinema et la litterature au sein de la collection Film Cultures de Peter Lang.