History & Criticism

Since the advent of cinema, Jesus has frequently been found in our movie houses and on our television screens. Biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz provides the first comprehensive study of the relationship of Jesus movies to the Gospels. Reinhartz focuses...

Transnational films that represent intimacy and inequality produce new experiences that result in the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today's global audiences. The Proximity of Other Skins examines...

Real Deceptions develops a new theory of realism through close consideration of myriad contemporary art, media, and cultural practices. Rather than focusing on transgressing deceptions which distort reality, the book argues that reality lies within the...

In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever...

Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor...

Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage's career. As the...

Fans and the billion-dollar franchises in which they participate have together become powerful agents within popular culture. These franchises have launched avenues for fans to expand and influence the stories that they tell. This book examines those...

The ""cartoon""in the output of the all conquering Disney studio, the anarchic antics of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes, and the satiric vision of the Simpsons on television is synonymous with the United States, but the...

The Great War played an instrumental role in the development of cinema, so necessary was it to the mobilization efforts of the combatant nations. In turn, after the war, as memory began to fade, cinema continued to shape the war's legacy and eventually...

The most complete and compelling analysis available of Altman's filmsWith his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have...

Lights! Camera! Arkansas! traces the roles played by Arkansans in the first century of Hollywood’s film industry, from Hollywood’s first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, to Mary Steenburgen, Billy Bob Thornton, and many others. The Arkansas landscape...

The maverick filmmaker's personal and political relationships with film Best known in the United States for his visionary short film La Jetee, Chris Marker spearheaded the bourgeoning Nouvelle Vague scene in the late 1950s. His distinctive style and use...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474493796Author Alice MauriceFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

It's official: the zombie apocalypse is here! The living dead have been lurking in media and popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been more popular or ubiquitous on screen than they are today. Zombies have colonized the movies,...

Throughout his lengthy career as both an actor and a director, Clint Eastwood has appeared in virtually every major film genre and, at this point in his career, has emerged as one of America's most popular, recognizable, and respected filmmakers. He also...

What does it mean to describe cinematic effects as "movie magic," to compare filmmakers to magicians, or to say that the cinema is all a "trick"? The heyday of stage illusionism was over a century ago, so why do such performances still serve as a key...

As Christopher Nolan's Batman films and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the comic book movie is a distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of...

In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood's elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and...

Documentaries such as Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born into Brothels, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound, along with March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth have achieved critical as well as popular success. Although...

Hollywood has always been fascinated by America's past, but never more so than in the past fifteen years. Bringing exciting new perspectives to how and why Hollywood has sought to repicture American history, this book offers analysis of more than twenty...

What is history? How do we represent it? How do our notions of history change over time? The essays inThe Historical Film: History and Memory in Mediaprobe the roles that cinema and television play in altering and complicating our understanding of...

Sinister, swaggering, yet often sympathetic, the figure of the gangster has stolen and murdered its way into the hearts of American cinema audiences. Despite the enduring popularity of the gangster film, however, traditional criticism has focused...

Films provide valuable spaces for aesthetic experimentation and analysis, for cinema's openness to other media has always allowed it to expand its own. In Aesthetic Spaces, Brigitte Peucker shows that when painterly or theatrical conventions are...

Screening Auschwitz examines the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), directed by the Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998). Released in 1948, The Last Stage was a pioneering work and the first narrative film to portray...

In "Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series" Mary Jane Miller traces the evolution of perceptions of 'Indians' in series television over 50 years. The series examined are "Radisson"...

In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, Yaron Shemer articulates the modalities through which Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films employ narratives, characters, and space to glean ethnic identities and,...

Mex-Cine offers an accessibly written, multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary Mexican cinema that combines industrial, technical, and sociopolitical analysis with analyses of modes of reception through cognitive theory. Mex-Cine aims to make...

From a hotel in Marrakech in The Man Who Knew Too Much, to small-town Alabama in To Kill a Mockingbird, to Mission Control in Space Cowboys, creating a fictional, yet wholly believable world in which to film a movie has been the passion and life's work...

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts,...

Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and space aliens like the Transformers share a surprising connection along with James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Rocky Balboa. These beloved icons played active roles in movie and television projects set in the state of...

No fewer than seven hundred Civil War films have been made by Hollywood from early silent days to the present, from the epoch-making "Birth of a Nation", through "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Gone With the Wind" to the recent "Glory", "Ride with the...

Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini's prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavalli's book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and...

In Describing Cinema, award-winning film scholar Timothy Corrigan explores the art and poetics of writing about film. Part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy, the text examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in...

With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile - part grimace, part snarl - Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiselled face of Mount Rushmore,...

This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career...

In just over a decade, François Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Fémis, Ozon made a number of critically acclaimed shorts in the 1990s and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780874809008Author Leonard EngelFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint University of Utah Press,U.S.Publisher University of Utah Press,U.S.

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate...

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well...

During the 1920s and '30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals - including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky - who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an...