Alluring monsters

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.

Animation

After the silents

Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in Hollywood’s initial development

The politics and poetics of cinematic realism

Casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.

Weimar cinema

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intri...

The horror genre

A comprehensive introduction to the history and key themes of the genre. The main issues and debates raised by horror, and the approaches and theories that have been applied to horror texts are all featured. In addressing the evolution of the horror film in social and historical context, Paul Wel...

Billy wilder

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.

New korean cinema

New Korean Cinema charts the dramatic transformation of South Korea's film industry from the democratization movement of the late 1980s to the 2000s new generation of directors. The author considers such issues as government censorship, the market's embrace of Hollywood films, and the social chan...

Film authorship

Few topics in the study of film produce as much controversy as authorship. Critics, historians, and theoreticians heatedly debate film authors, arguing vociferously about the nature of film authorship and questioning whether films even have authors at all. Film Authorship evaluates these debates ...

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...

The gangster film

Examines the gangster film in its historical context with an emphasis on the ways the image of the gangster has adapted and changed

Lars von trier beyond depression

Linda Badley offers an in-depth examination of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013–14), and The House That Jack Built (2018) and the contexts that produced them. She draws on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside acces...

Through a noir lens

Sheri Chinen Biesen explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services.

The cinema of george a. romero

Explores the relevance of Romero's films within American cultural traditions and explains the potency of such work beyond 'splatter movie' models.

Narrative and narration

Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. He distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts.

Pier paolo pasolini

Annovi revisits Pasolini’s oeuvre to examine the author’s performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression.

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...

Latin hitchcock

This study explores how five major Spanish and Latino directors modeled their early careers on Hitchcock and his film aesthetics.

Sweet and lowdown

Tracing the recurrent theme of regret from his stand-up comedy through classics like Annie Hall as well as less esteemed accomplishments, this volume argues that it is ultimately the shallowness of his protagonists' regret—their lack of deeply felt, sustained remorse—that defines Woody Allen’s vi...

Black & white & noir

Black & White & Noir explores America's pulp modernism through penetrating readings of the noir sensibility lurking in an eclectic array of media: Office of War Information photography, women's experimental films, and African-American novels, among others. It traces the dark edges of cult...

The cinema of steven soderbergh

The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital expe...

Voyages of discovery

Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Frederick Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this updated edition, Barry Keith Grant adds new material exploring the documentarian’s works since the 1990s.

The sounds of commerce

The Sounds of Commerce is the first book to present a detailed historical analysis of popular music in American film, from the era of sheet music sales, to that of orchestrated pop records by Henry Mancini and Ennio Morricone in the 1960• to the MTV-ready pop songs that occupy soundtrack CDs of t...

Motion(less) pictures

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

More-than-human choreography

Moritz Frischkorn takes a fresh look at recent performing arts practices that deal with everyday objects on and beyond the stage.

Topographies of "borderland schengen"

Analysing recent documentary films dealing with undocumented migration at the Schengen Area's fringes and against the backdrop of what has been termed the `European refugee crisis', Jan Kühnemund investigates the interface between migration discourses and image discourses. As an analytical framew...

Melodrama

Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility is designed as an accessible overview of one of the most popular genres at undergraduate Film Studies. The book identifies three distinct but connected concepts through which it is possible to make sense of melodrama; either as a genre, originating in Europ...

East-west encounters

East-West Encounters: Franco-Asian Cinema and Literature is the first book of its kind to examine Franco-Asian film and literary productions in the context of France's postcolonial history. It covers French film-makers' approaches to the Asian 'Other', as well as focusing on the works of Vietname...

Bring me the head of alfredo garcia

In 1974, The Wall Street Journal called this movie "grotesque, sadistic, irrational, obscene, incompetent," while New York Magazine declared it "a catastrophe." Upon its initial release, Sam Peckinpah´s notorious work took a critical and commercial nosedive, but in later years, the work was heral...

Performative arts and social transformation

This book highlights current developments in the field of performing arts, asking for scientific references to the mode of crisis. They bring knowledge from different theatre traditions and cultural contexts into a dialogue.

Installation and the moving image

Traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video

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 ...