A panorama of american film noir (1941-1953)

This first book published on film noir established the genre--a classic, at last in translation.

At the end of the street in the shadow

Explores Welles’s vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban transformation, race relations and fascism, the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism, and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture.

Beyond bruce lee

In order to understand Bruce Lee, we must look beyond Bruce Lee to the artist's intricate cultural and historical contexts. This work begins by contextualising Lee, examining his films and martial arts work, and his changing cultural status within different times and places. The text examines Bru...

Bio-pics

Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked bio-pics, explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, structure, production, subject representation or misrepresentation, and critical response

Bollywood

While we have become familiar with the idea of "Bollywood" here in the West, we know little about the industry's films beyond a certain celebration of kitsch. Bollywood, the latest in Wallflower Press's Short Cuts introductory series, surveys this style of filmmaking from its origins in colonial ...

British social realism

Contemporary romanian cinema

This book is the first to provide in-depth analyses of essential works in Romanian cinema ranging from the silent period to contemporary productions.

Crime films

Crime Films: Investigating the Scene analyzes the wide body of films that fall under the rubric of crime, from the gangster film to the film noir to classic whodunit television series like Law and Order and CSI. Ever since Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903, audiences have been fas...

Danger: diabolik

Danger: Diabolik (1968) was adapted from a comic that has been a social phenomenon in Italy for over fifty years. This study examines its status as a comic-book movie, traces its production and initial reception in Italy, France, the U.S., and the UK, and its cult afterlife as both a pop-art clas...

Documents of utopia

This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significant artists working in the world today: Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Anri...

Early cinema

This book introduces the reader to the study of cinema as a series of aesthetic, technological, cultural, ideological and economic debates while exploring new and challenging approaches to the subject.

Eastwood's iwo jima

With Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Clint Eastwood made a unique contribution to film history, being the first director to make two films about the same event. Eastwood's films examine the battle over Iwo Jima from two nations' perspectives, in two languages, and em...

Fantasy cinema

Often dismissed as escapist tales of sword and sorcery or childish fairytales, fantasy is one of the fundamental impulses in filmmaking, a source of some of the most vivid and memorable films ever made. This volume covers the major genres, stylistic approaches, and exponents of cinematic fantasy,...

Faster, pussycat! kill! kill!

Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is an enigma. A box-office failure when initially released on the grindhouse circuit, it has since been embraced by art-house audiences, and referenced in countless films, television series, and songs. A riot of styles and story clichés lifted fro...

Film studies, second edition

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.”

Film theory

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers

Finding ourselves at the movies

Academic philosophy may have lost its audience, but the traditional subjects of philosophy—love, death, justice, knowledge, and faith—remain as compelling as ever. To reach a new generation, Paul W. Kahn argues that philosophy must take up these fundamental concerns as we find them in contemporar...

Flaming creatures

Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. This study of Smith’s magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrica...

Flickering empire

Tells the fascinating but too little known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of film production in America in the years prior to the rise of Hollywood (1907-1913)

Frankenstein

Along with an in-depth critical reading of the original 1931 film, this book tracks Frankenstein the monster’s heavy cultural tread

Global cinematic cities

Engaging with a rapidly transforming urban world, the contributions to this collection rethink the cinematic city at a global scale. By presenting a global constellation of screen cities, the book encourages juxtapositions and comparisons across the North and South to capture the global city and ...

Hollywood lighting from the silent era to film noir

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the ro...

Hollywood science

Whether depicting humans battling aliens or a brave geologist saving lives as a volcano erupts, science-fiction films are an exciting visual and sensuous introduction to the workings of science and technology. These films explore a range of complex topics in vivid and accessible ways, from space ...

Holocaust cinema in the twenty-first century

Analyses of twenty-first-century Holocaust films that venture across national and linguistic boundaries and make visible various formal and intertextual relationships within the substantial body of Holocaust cinema.

I spit on your grave

Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave (1978) is of the most controversial films ever made—both condemned as misogynistic and praised for raising uncomfortable issues about sexual violence. David Maguire investigates the historical, social, and political landscape of the film's release and how it has...

I-docs

Taking a broad view of interactive documentary as any work which engages with ‘the real’ by employing digital interactive technology, this volume addresses a range of platforms and environments, from web-docs and virtual reality to mobile media and live performance.

Last words

Last Words features extensive interviews with contemporary directors and overviews of the directors' work

Liquid metal

Liquid Metal brings together 'seminal' essays that have opened up the study of science fiction to serious critical interrogation. Eight distinct sections cover such topics as the cyborg in science fiction; the science fiction city; time travel and the primal scene; science fiction fandom; and the...

Motion(less) pictures

Challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation.

Must we kill the thing we love?

A new view of the master’s oeuvre, focusing on his ambivalence toward the Emersonian way of thinking he longed to embrace but resisted for the sake of his art.

My affair with art house cinema

My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Phillip Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes.

New chinese cinema

Plastic reality

Julie A. Turnock tracks the use and evolution of special effects in 1970s filmmaking, a development as revolutionary to film as the form’s transition to sound in the 1920s.

Postmodernism and film

Examines postmodern film aesthetics and challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating film analysis

Prison movies

Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars traces the public fascination with incarceration from the silent era to the present.

Quadrophenia

1964: Mods clash with Rockers in Brighton, creating a moral panic. 1973: ex-Mod band The Who release Quadrophenia, a concept album following young Mod Jimmy Cooper to the Brighton riots and beyond. 1979: Franc Roddam directs Quadrophenia, a film based on Pete Townshend's album narrative; its cult...

Reading hollywood

This book examines the treatment of space and narrative in a selection of classic films including My Darling Clementine, It's a Wonderful Life, and Vertigo. Deborah Thomas employs a variety of arguments in exploring the reading of space and its meaning in Hollywood cinema and film generally. Topi...

Reconstructing strangelove

With rare access to unpublished materials, this volume assesses Dr. Strangelove's narrative accuracy, consulting recently declassified Cold War nuclear-policy documents alongside interviews with Kubrick’s collaborators

Reform cinema in iran

An inside look at parole board decision making and its consequences.

Rising sun, divided land

Rising Sun and Divided Land provides a comprehensive, scholarly examination of the historical background, films, and careers of selected Korean and Japanese film directors. It examines eight directors: Fukasaku Kinji, Im Kwon-teak, Kawase Naomi, Miike Takashi, Lee Chang-dong, Kitano Takeshi, Park...

Silent cinema

Since the spectacular success of The Artist (2011) there has been a resurgence of interest in silent cinema, and particularly in the lush and passionate screen dramas of the 1920s. This book offers an introduction to the cinema of this extraordinary period, outlining the development of the form b...