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.

Taiwan film directors

Focusing on the work of four contemporary filmmakers—Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang—the authors explore how these filmmakers broke from tradition, creating a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history. Featuring stills, anecdotes, ...

Filming history from below

In recent decades, a type of historical documentary has emerged that focuses on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of h...

The shining

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is both a successful mainstream horror film and an esoteric object for cult audiences who are convinced that the film means something totally different. This book investigates what has made The Shining a key cult film while also addressing the range of mea...

Werner schroeter

Thinking shakespeare (revised edition)

A newly revised edition of the much-loved guidebook to better knowing the Bard.

Japanese cinema

An informal yet informed journey through the classic works of Japanese cinema and their directors.This is a passionate, personal journey through one of the world’s greatest national cinemas, beginning with the classic directors who came to the fore in the postwar period and became legendary names...

It came from the closet

Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic...

Organic cinema

Presents conceptual parallels between modern cinema and modern architecture. Approaches director Béla Tarr through the particularities of Hungarian culture. Develops the theoretical discourse on Slow Cinema or “Contemplative Cinema” emergent in contemporary philosophy of film.

Marxism and film activism

This collection examines how filmmakers have tried to change the world by engaging in emancipatory politics in their work, and how audiences have received them. It presents a wide spectrum of case studies, covering both film and digital technology. Discussions range from the classic ...

The men with the movie camera

The second scholarly study in English to consider the creative role of the camera operator in the film-making process Represents the first scholarly study to offer a detailed analysis of the films of the Soviet avant-garde in their totality Crosses disciplinary boundaries and examine...

Revolution in 35mm

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 examines how political violence and resistance was represented in arthouse and cult films from 1960 to 1990. This historical period spans the Algerian war of independence and the early w...

Angry brigade

“You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.” — Angry Brigade, communiqué. Between 1970 and 1972 the Angry Brigade used guns and bombs in a series of symbolic attacks against property. A series of communiqués accompanied the actions, explaining the choice of ta...

Preparing for the global blackout

Disaster movies and sci-fi series have long shown what would happen if modern society were to lose its lifeblood. Denis Newiak looks into filmic fictions for answers to pressing questions: How can we prepare ourselves for the dramatic consequences of such a crisis?

Dr. no

Dr. No introduced the James Bond formula that has been a box-office fixture ever since. An explosive cocktail of action, spectacle, and sex, the film transformed popular cinema. James Chapman provides a lively and comprehensive study of Dr. No, marshaling a wealth of archival research to place th...

Radio for the millions

Radio for the Millions examines Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners. Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for st...

Twenty-first-century hollywood

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood looks into the contexts of studio film production in the new century. In an era dominated in box-office terms by the franchise and the family film, this book combines close textual readings and industrial analysis, illustrating why these kinds of movies are favored ...

Storytelling in world cinemas

Storytelling in World Cinemas, Vol. 2: Contexts addresses the questions of what and why particular stories are told in films around the world, both in terms of the forms of storytelling used, and of the political, religious, historical, and social contexts informing cinematic storytelling. Drawin...

Hitchcock annual

Includes Hitchcockian narrative; Hitchcock and India dossier; essays on Alma Reville, Downhill, The Trouble with Harry, and Marnie, and reviews.

International politics and film

International Politics and Film draws attention to how the relationship between the visual and the spatial is constitutive of international politics

Film censorship

Film Censorship is a concise overview of Hollywood censorship and efforts to regulate American films. Sheri Chinen Biesen unveils the behind-the-scenes history of cinema censorship and explore how Hollywood responded to censorial constraints on screen content in a changing cultural and industrial...

Making worlds

Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge the twenty-first century's political trends. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Making Worldsexamines how films produce unexpected and destabilizing affec...

Maya deren

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream...

Horror film and otherness

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.

Bombay hustle

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.

Crooked, but never common

In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Preston Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies.

Programming the future

Programming the Future examines how recent speculative television takes on the contradictions of the neoliberal order. Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander consider a range of popular SF narratives of the last two decades, including Battlestar Galactica, Watchmen, Colony, The Man in the High Castl...

Suzuki seijun and postwar japanese cinema

William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki Seijun’s career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki’s work and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and i...

Film programming

Explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives

Unspeakable histories

William Guynn reads seven films depicting atrocities, exploring the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic events and the dimensions of experience that historiography leaves untouched. Unspeakable Histories argues that the film medium triggers moments of heightened awareness in which...

The cinema of louis malle

A pioneer of the French New Wave, Louis Malle went on to an acclaimed transatlantic career. This collection of essays reassesses his eclectic and subversive oeuvre to redress the critical neglect it has suffered. The volume features contributions from playwright John Guare and filmmakers Volker S...

The cinema of steven spielberg

Cinema's most successful director is a commercial and cultural force demanding serious consideration. Not just triumphant marketing, this international popularity is partly a function of the movies themselves. Polarised critical attitudes largely overlook this, and evidence either unquestioning a...

Trash cinema

This volume explores the lower reaches of cinema and its paradoxical appeal. It looks at films from the B-movies of the 1930s to the mockbusters of today, and from the New York underground to the genre variations of Turkey's Yesilçam studios (and their YouTube afterlife). Critically examining the...

Electric sounds

Electric Sounds brings to vivid life an era when innovations in the production, recording, and transmission of sound revolutionized a number of different media, especially the radio, the phonograph, and the cinema. The 1920s and 1930s marked some of the most important developments in the history ...

A piece of the action

Eithne Quinn reveals how Hollywood catalyzed racial politics in the decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, through representation on screen as well as in battles over jobs and resources behind the scenes. Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films, this book...

Filmosophy

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a...

The cinema of agnès varda

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films l...

War cinema

An introduction to and overview of the Hollywood war movie, a linchpin in American cultural imagination. The book considers the history of this genre, one of continuing significance, from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to We Were Soldiers (2002). Guy Westwell focuses in particular on repre...

Pretty

Film culture often rejects visually rich images, treating simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as the more provocative, political, and truly cinematic choice. Cinema may challenge traditional ideas of art, but its opposition to the decorative represents a long-standing Western aesthetic bias a...

Cultures of representation

Cultures of Representation is the first book to explore the cinematic portrayal of disability in films from across the globe.

Ansichten und absichten [german-language edition]

This volume collects some of Drehli Robnik's most significant scholarly essays, contributions to pop music magazines and film journals, and samples from his work as a philosophical "edutainer."

The cinema of richard linklater

In this second edition of The Cinema of Richard Linklater, Rob Stone shows how Linklater’s latest films have redefined our understanding of his work, offering critical analysis of films including Before Midnight (2013) and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), as well as new interviews with Linklater an...