History & Criticism

From their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, B movies declined in popularity through the 1970s. As the big Hollywood studios began to make genre films with sky-high budgets, independent producers of low-budget movies could not compete in theaters. The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781399514712Author Daniel Ch�vez HerasFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

Surfing has fascinated filmmakers since Thomas Edison shot footage of Waikiki beachboys in 1906. Before the 1950s surf craze, surfing showed up in travelogues or as exotic background for studio features. The arrival of Gidget (1959) on the big...

Something is rotten in the state of Spain. The uninterred corpse of a patriarchal figure populates the visual landscapes of Iberian cinemas. He is chilled, drugged, perfumed, ventilated, presumed dead, speared in the cranium, and worse.Analyzing a series...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474440653Author Laura MeeFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University PressWeight(grams)...

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls’ school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474457859Author Christer Bakke AndresenFormat PaperbackPage Count 200Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University PressWeight(grams)...

At a moment when American film reflects a deepening preoccupation with the Bush administration's War on Terror, this authoritative and timely book offers the first comprehensive account of Hollywood's propaganda role during the defining ideological...

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls’ school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring...

Connecting interactive cinema to media ethics and global citizenship Interactive Cinema explores various cinematic practices that work to transform what is often seen as a primarily receptive activity into a participatory, multimedia experience...

The veterans' culture in postwar eras from World War I to the present is examined in this book, with specific attention to the historic events of each era as they influence veterans, and the literature and movies produced about veterans and by veterans...

The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their deployment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. The author argues that...

Taking an innovative approach to the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), this biographical dictionary concentrates on her circle of friends, acquaintances and coworkers--1618 in all. Distilled from hundreds of celebrity biographies are...

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at...

Some critics in England and France have long maintained that British director Terence Fisher, whose films dominated world markets in the 1950s and 60s, was one of the greatest directors of fantasy films in history. Since his death in 1980, Fisher's...

Seventy years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is still dealing with the effects of the bombings on the national psyche. From the Occupation Period to the present, Japanese cinema had offered a means of coming to terms with one...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLERAn NPR Best Book of the YearIn this spectacular, newsmaking exposé that has the entertainment industry abuzz and on its heels, Vanity Fair's Maureen Ryan blows the lid off patterns of harassment...

With an output of more than 250,000 minutes annually, and with roughly 5,000 producers and production units, the Chinese are leading the field of animated films. Although it is almost impossible to completely cover 90 years of filmmaking, this book...

In this collection of the author's original interviews, actors, writers, directors and producers offer unique insight about western movies from the early talkies to the present. Interviewed here are Glenn Ford, Warren Oates, Virginia Mayo, Andrew V...

This work offers a critical, colorful and informative examination of different types of monster movies, spanning the silent period to today. Chapter One focuses on dragons, dinosaurs, and other scaly giants from films like 1953's The Beast from 20,000...

Elvis Presley musicals, beach romps, biker flicks, and alienated youth movies were some of the most popular types of drive-in films during the sixties. The actresses interviewed for this book (including Celeste Yarnall, Lana Wood, Linda Harrison, Pamela...

When "talking" pictures first appeared in cinema theaters in the late 1920s, representations of newspaper journalists quickly became a Hollywood mainstay, resulting in a variety of responses from working reporters, editors, and photographers. The...

Examines the evolution of the thriller from the heyday of the Hollywood mogul era in the 1930s when it was primarily bottom-of-the-bill fodder, through its maturity in the World War II years and the noir-breeding 1950s, its commercial and critical...

Censorship has been an ongoing issue from the early days of filmmaking. One hundred years of film censorship, encompassing the entire 20th century, are chronicled in this work. The freewheeling nature of films in the early decades was profoundly...

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our...

Today's animation is much more than kids' stuff. Increasingly complex subject matter has produced a corresponding increase in artistic interest, and forms once specific to certain cultures have crossed borders to enjoy international popularity...

This collection convenes diverse analyses of David Lynch's newly conceived, dreamlike neo-noir representations of the American West, a first in studies of regionalism and indigeneity in his films. Twelve essays and three interviews address Lynch's...

From the earliest accounts of contact with Europeans, Polynesians have been perceived as sensual and sexual beings. By the late 1800s, publications, lectures and stage plays about the Pacific became popular across Europe, and often contained exotic and...

For fifty years, the newsreel was a fixture in American movie theaters. Released twice a week, less than ten minutes long, each had news footage that combined journalism with entertainment. With the advent of television news programs after World War...

Many monsters in Victorian British novels were intimately connected with the protagonists, and representative of both the personal failings of a character and the failings of the society in which he or she lived. By contrast, more recent film...

Between 1917 and 1941, Hollywood studios, gossip columnists and novelists featured an unprecedented number of homosexuals, cross-dressers, and adulterers in their depictions of the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle. Actress Greta Garbo defined herself...

Among their many idiosyncrasies, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, remained serious cartoon aficionados throughout their lives. They adored animation and their influence on German animation after World War II continues...

The 1950s era of science fiction film effectively ended when space flight became a reality with the first manned orbit of Earth in 1962. As the genre's wildly speculative depictions of science and technology gave way to more reality-based...

From their heyday in the 1910s to their lingering demise in the 1950s, American film serials delivered excitement in weekly installments for millions of moviegoers, despite minuscule budgets, nearly impossible shooting schedules and the disdain of...

The darkly handsome man gazes deeply into her eyes. She finds him irresistible, wants to experience the passion of the moment. He grins--the movie audience can see his lengthened lateral incisors--and bends to her neck. The eroticism is horrible, and...

The narrative surrounding the Titanic's voyage, collision, and sinking in April 1912 seems tailor-made for film. With clear categories of gender, class, nationality, and religion, the dominating Titanic myth offers a wealth of motifs ripe for the...

The experience of going to the movies, be it a single screen theater, twin, multiplex or drive-in, is affected by many different factors that have shifted over the years. Just as movies emerged from silent to talking, black and white to color, there...

After Fox released In Old Arizona, the first feature length western with sound, in 1929, Universal president Carl Laemmle decided that Universal's westerns should follow suit. Beginning that same year, with the release of The Wagon Master starring Ken...

Here is a critical and historical overview of unconventional and aesthetically challenging films, all of feature length. The author focuses on the particular forms of contemporary avant-garde films, which often rely on characteristics associated with...

A summary analysis of Charlie Chaplin's films that star his alter-ego, Charlie, which is to say, for the most part, Chaplin's silent films and not his sound films. In the book I stress Chaplin's often underrated skills as a film-director as well as his...