History & Criticism

Charles Spencer Chaplin was a stage performer before he was a filmmaker, and it was in English music hall that he learned the rudiments of his art. The last film he made in the United States, Limelight, was a tribute to the music hall days of his...

The work of Karl Marx is revered in social philosophy, political science and literary criticism, but there is an area where Marxism seems not to have penetrated. That area is the study of popular culture, especially the cinema, where Marxism provides...

Offering a current and comprehensive analysis of Canadian cinema in its political and cultural contexts, this new edition of Film in Canada introduces students to a cinema that is as diverse as the country itself. Major developments in Canadian...

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, American mainstream cinematic architecture underwent a seismic shift. From the massive movie palace to the intimate streamlined theater, movie theaters became neutralized spaces for calibrated, immersive watching. Leading...

Heyyyyy Aaaaaabbott! Who's on first? It's Abbott & Costello, of course! Although it has been nearly 60 years since Bud Abbot and Lou Costello began filling American movie houses, their work has proven timeless.The Abbott & Costello Story is a fond,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781599540054Author Vito ZagarrioFormat PaperbackPage Count 236Imprint Bordighera PressPublisher Bordighera PressWeight(grams) 322gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781599540207Author Dean Anthony Julian TamburriFormat PaperbackImprint Bordighera PressPublisher Bordighera PressWeight(grams) 268g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789622095892Author Jeremy TamblingFormat PaperbackPage Count 140Imprint Hong Kong University PressPublisher Hong Kong University PressWeight(grams) 210g

A history of film distribution in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s, concentrating on booking, circuiting, and packaging marketing practices. Told not as a “golden age” narrative of films, stars, or individual studios but as an economic...

Richard Wright’s dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright’s long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with...

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Best known for Aelita (1924), the classic science-fiction film of the Soviet silent era, Yakov Protazanov directed over a hundred films in a career spanning three decades. Called "the Russian D.W. Griffith" in the 1910s for his formative role in the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781978803152Author Monica HannaFormat PaperbackPage Count 260Imprint Rutgers University PressPublisher Rutgers University Press

The cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences and in his latest book the acclaimed philosopher Jacques Ranciere relates cinema to literature and theatre. With literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions,...

How an overlooked film industry became a cinematic forceThe first book in English dedicated to the study of Central American film, this volume explores the main trends, genres, and themes that define this emerging industry. The seven nations of the...

The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation's earlier...

Before Johnny Depp and "Public Enemies", there was "The Public Enemy". James Cagney's 1931 portrayal of the Irish American gangster Tommy Powers set the standard for the Hollywood gangster and helped to launch a golden age of Irish American cinema. In...

"Teenagers and Teenpics" tells the story of two signature developments in the 1950s: the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the emergence of that strange new creature, the American teenager. Hollywood's discovery of the teenage...

In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic. The fantasy of an inscrutable East, she argues, is not...

In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past...

From Rocky to Field of Dreams, sports movies are among the most beloved of American films. Revolving around familiar narratives like the underdog story, these movies have generated modern-day legends, reinforcing and disseminating our national myths...

Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection's esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of...

Music videos today sample and rework a century's worth of movies and other pop culture artifacts to offer a plethora of visions and sounds that we have never encountered before. As these videos have proliferated online, they have become more widely...

Over the past century, Disney has grown from a small American animation studio into a multipronged global media giant. Today, the company’s annual revenue exceeds the GDP of over 100 countries, and its portfolio has grown to include Pixar, Marvel,...

Movie buffs and film scholars alike often overlook the importance of makeup artists, hair stylists, and costumers. With precious few but notable exceptions, creative workers in these fields have received little public recognition, even when their...

 Bathing beauty Esther Williams, bombshell Jane Russell, exotic Carmen Miranda, chanteuse Lena Horne, and talk-show fixture Zsa Zsa Gabor are rarely hailed as great actors or as naturalistic performers. Those terms of praise are given to male stars like...

Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the "rulers of film." Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at...

"One of the sharpest and most productive analyses of our contemporaneity and the place of cinema within it and of our new historical relations as spectators to the imaginary universe on the movie screen. This is a study that will be of intense interest...

Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as Judith Butler, Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book proposes the notion of "precarious intimacies" to navigate a dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and...

Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) ranks among the greatest film directors and has had a worldwide impact on filmmaking as a screenwriter, producer, film critic, and founding member of the French New Wave. His most celebrated films include The 400 Blows,...

What do digital platforms mean for cinema studies in Canada? In an era when digital media are proliferating and thousands upon thousands of clips are available online, it seems counter-intuitive to say that audio-visual history is quickly disappearing...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780472088881Author Leonie NaughtonFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint The University of Michigan PressPublisher The University of Michigan Press

William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was one of the most prominent and productive authors of the twentieth century—and his works have been among the most cinematically transformed in history. For more than five decades, adaptations of his plays, stories,...

Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Pop Modernism shows that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of...

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public...

Drawn into the circuit of men cruising for sex in and around a train station, restless adolescent Henri begins a frenzied pursuit of a dangerously charismatic older man, with sometimes violent and ultimately tragic consequences. Premiering at Cannes in...

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don't Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after...

The recent uproar over NSA surveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been an indelible part of contemporary life for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power - and potential for abuse. In Closed Circuits, Garrett Stewart...

A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to the soundtrack, how a soundtrack is effectively organized, how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature of the object, the tools available for its analysis, and the interpretive...

This book asks "How can legal doctrine be turned into filmic art?" By "legal doctrine" Stanley Fish does not mean the sonorous abstractions that usually accompany the self-presentation of law--Justice, Equity, Equality, Liberty, Autonomy, and the like...