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This edited volume focuses on slow media, an approach that fosters intentional and thoughtful engagement with media of all forms. Contributors explore our individual and community relations with analog and digital media by critiquing current power structures underpinning contemporary media sensibilities, processes, and technologies. Through these critiques, the authors pose crucial questions surrounding how to slow down and be intentional within the landscape of accelerated media technology innovation and ubiquity. Building on existing media studies theory, the essays in this volume explore case studies of the intersections between analog and digital media, share insights from personal slow media projects, and propose useful methods for ethical and thoughtful media practices for both producers and audiences. Ultimately, this volume prompts readers to contemplate and reconsider the role of media technologies in contemporary life.
Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory critically examines the emergent field of podcasting in academia, revealing its significant impact on scholarly communication and approaches to research and knowledge creation. This collection presents in-depth analyses from scholars who have integrated podcasting into their academic pursuits. The book systematically explores the medium's implications for teaching, its effectiveness in reaching broader audiences, and its role in reshaping the dissemination of academic work. Covering a spectrum of disciplines, the contributors detail their engagement with podcasting, providing insight into its use as both a research tool and an object of analysis, thereby illuminating the multifaceted ways in which podcasting intersects with and influences academic life.
Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" - the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences. The toxic effects on social life, young people's mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn't?
Lillian Ross was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, starting there in 1945. During this time she frequently wrote on cinema, and many of these extraordinary pieces are collected here together for the first time.
In Social Media Cultures, Dhiraj Murthy provides a theoretically-grounded, historical exploration of the social media landscape. Uniquely tracing the evolution of social media - from traditional media like letters, postcards, and the telephone to new media and platforms - Murthy argues that these contemporary phenomena are not divorced from their analog antecedents. The historical and theoretical frameworks employed in this book allow readers to better understand the intricacies of nuanced modern dynamics like cancel culture, self-expression, and celebrity influence. Focusing on mobility, political discourse, and the power of witnessing from global perspectives, Murthy uses empirical case studies from both the Global South and North to demonstrate the profound impact of social media on culture, politics, and everyday life.
Erving Goffman's much-loved works are widely cited in media and communication studies. His books have stimulated research on news framing, mass media and social media, inviting new insights about how communication, self, audiences and public life are mediated by, but also transcend, particular technological forms. What explains the continuing relevance of this highly original theorist? In this book, Peter Lunt critically examines how and why the concepts developed by Goffman - face-work and the mediated self, frontstage and backstage, impression management, media frames and logics, footing and interaction rituals - still resonate across the field. Ultimately, Goffman's sociology emerges not only as an enduring influence, but as a source of new inspiration in our ever more interactive world.
Media and Society: An Introduction, offers an interdisciplinary approach to media as means of social connection in everyday life and beyond. Integrating theory and concrete analysis in case studies, exercises, and illustrative examples from around the world, Media and Society: An Introduction delivers a go-to reference work for learning about one of the essential social infrastructures of the twenty-first century. Standing on the shoulders of classic communication models, and covering legacies of research about media institutions, media texts, and media users, the chapters include both how-to sections on methods addressing current digital media forms and reflective segments that place TikTok, ChatGPT, and the emerging Internet of Things in the longer history of human communication.
David T. Z. Mindich's The Mediated World charts the story of media as it has shaped human life and as it infuses every aspect of our modern existence. Mindich's engaging narrative style focuses on concepts and real-world contexts to promote the media literacy students need to understand their personal relationships with media. Empowered as media consumers, creators, and curators, students realize their responsibility to work within the vast world of media to create more positive and productive futures. With a strong emphasis on media literacy that treats students as media stakeholders who have a vested interest in understanding its workings and effects, Mindich's text is the perfect book for a generation of students looking to take charge of their futures in this mediated world.
This book is about the role that social media plays in the lives of individuals, societies, economies and polities. It therefore takes in a wide view of the emergent and changing impacts of social media platforms, and social media practices. As a consequence, it examines social media use through various intellectual and scholarly traditions --psychology, sociology, cultural studies, economics, and (national and global) politics - but it is primarily situated in the field of media and communications studies. As such, it frames its analysis of social media impacts using media studies concepts and terminology, and places media texts, forms, industries and agents (producers, audiences and other users) at the centre of each thematic chapter.
This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk. Video games offer a particularly rich field for thinking about the relationship between narrative and infrastructure. The infrastructures that exist in the fictional worlds of these games define the experience of play in a very direct way: how players are instantiated in the game, how they move around the play space, the resources that are available, and so on.
How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam.
This book is a study of the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of creativity, originality, and inspiration viewed from the lens of a seasoned game developer. It introduces the concept of creative sobriety—a practice that advocates better understanding our own sources of inspiration so that we can intellectually drive our creative voice closer to originality. The creative process is an improvised dance between the conscious and the subconscious mind, where knowledge, experience, intuition, observation, imagination, and projection meet in ways that are completely unique to each person. Presenting practical and theoretical approaches to originality and game concept generation, this book explores the notion of creative sobriety before moving to chapters that blend theory and practice, covering topics such as innovation, the creative process, auteurship, collaboration, and creative vision.
This book addresses how opinion change and political persuasion unfold in three main domains of media effects: private media (i.e., news organizations), public service media (state-own media services), and social media platforms. The volume discusses and further advances the most recent theoretical assumptions and empirical findings that underpin our current understanding on how media influence public opinion and shape liberal democracies. The book also explores how media literacy and critical thinking can mitigate the effects of misinformation and propaganda, emphasizing the importance of educating the public to discern credible information from deceptive content. Furthermore, it discusses the ethical implications of media practices and the responsibilities of media producers in maintaining the integrity of democratic discourse.
This book offers a timely and engaging account of how technologies of communication media impact nationalist challenges to global order, shedding new light on how they matter, how they have changed, and how their evolution transforms the conditions of possibility for nationalist order challengers. In the 21st century, we have become accustomed to close entanglements between resurgent nationalism and digital media. In Mediatizing the Nation, Ordering the World, Andrew Dougall shows that the relationship between media and nationalist order contestation is far older. Comparing Trump's breakthrough in the 21st century United States with a similar - but unsuccessful - movement in 19th century Britain, the book argues that communication media shaped these episodes by differently patterning the constitution and distribution of meaning on which they relied.
Through interviews, news analysis, and personal observation, Meredith D. Clark presents the first book about how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press. Since 1827, when Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper to be published by free Black men in the United States, Black folks have been making use of the media technologies available to them to tell their own stories in their own ways. In We Tried to Tell Y'all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, Meredith D. Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in 'mainstream' media.
The image of the child is often a site of conflict, one that has been captured, preserved, and recollected on screen; but what do these representations tell us about the animated child and how do they compare to their real counterparts? Is childhood simply a metaphor for innocence, or something far more complex that encompasses agency, performance, and othering? Childhood in Animation focuses on key screen characters, such as DJ, Norman, Lilo, the Lost Boys, Marji, Parvana, Bluey, Kirikou, Robyn, Mebh, Cartman and Bart, amongst others, to see how they are represented within worlds of fantasy, separation, horror, politics, and satire, as well as viewing childhood itself through a philosophical, sociological, and global lens.
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable? To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
The images of men, women, and individuals across the gender spectrum on African social media platforms are socially, culturally, and politically embedded with ideologies that continue to shape our understandings of gender. Social Media and Gender in Africa: Discourses on Power and Politics of Everyday Life explores gender debates expressed through social media and the political, social, and cultural discourses surrounding them. The book addresses issues of gender-based violence, gender in political and economic spaces, gender activism, challenges faced in the LGBTQIA+ community, and gender harassment. It is through these platforms that sexual and gender identities are being freely expressed, political expressions are made without fear or favor, and political participation is achieved.
Mother Trouble traces white maternal angst in popular culture across a span of more than fifty years, from the iconic Rosemary’s Baby to anti-vaxx mom memes and HGTV shows. The book narrows in on popular media to think about white maternal angst as a manifestation of feminism’s unrealized possibilities and continued omissions since the second wave. It interrogates intersecting systems of power which make mothers and their children the most impoverished people in the world and urges a greater appreciation in academic and popular thinking of the work that mothers do. The book calls for an analytical expansion beyond gender to better address the erasure of reproductive labour, and especially that performed by migrants and people of colour. It illustrates the continued marginalization of racialized mothers and the disproportionate amount of labour performed by all mothers in a society where their work is devalued.
Against the backdrop of a hyper-competitive AAA industry and the perception that it is a world reserved for top programmers and hard-core 'gamers', Story Mode offers an accessible entry-point for all into writing and designing complex and emotionally affecting narrative video games. The first textbook to combine game design with creative writing techniques, this much-needed resource makes the skills necessary to consume and create digital and multi-modal stories attainable and fun. Appealing to the growing calls for greater inclusivity and access to this important contemporary apparatus of expression, this book offers low-cost, accessible tools and instruction that bridge the knowledge gap for creative writers, showing them how they can merge their skill-set with the fundamentals of game creation and empowering them to produce their own games which push stories beyond the page and the written word.
The serious study of entertainment seems paradoxical, as we presume entertainment to be the "lighter side" of our daily lives. Yet as revealed in this volume, entertainment media serve as cultural artifacts that shape our understandings of various peoples and publics in ways that invite deeper, immersive, and increasingly interactive engagement. On this backdrop, Entertainment Media and Communication serves as a reference guide for canonical and foundational research into media entertainment and a collection of emerging and updated theories and models core to the study of media entertainment in the 21st century. The contributors explore its foundations, define and extend key concepts and theories through myriad lenses, discuss unique considerations of digital media, and divine future paths for scholarly inquiry.
A visual exploration of cyberpunk and its global impact and lasting influence on cinema culture Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of the decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis and urban decay. Central to these narratives are antihero characters who fight against corrupt political systems, technology gone haywire and global mega-corporations. Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures through Cinema examines the global impact and lasting influence of cyberpunk on cinema culture.
This edited collection investigates topics related to environmental humanities through their inclusion, exploration, or critique in contemporary video games. It focuses on how video games are a site for creating and interacting within environments, with analysis that showcases how environments are shaped within video games as well as serve as a reflection of our real world. This crossroad between the virtual and the real allows us to consider the ways in which the concepts, theories, and issues facing our real-world environment can be understood and studied through video games, particularly via the power of interactive play to teach. This book looks into how video games might empower their players to make real-world change through their immersive environments. Finally, the volume offers a consideration of ecological crises through an exploration of post-apocalyptic narratives in a wide variety of video games.
An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of 'old' and 'new' normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration.
Exploring the phenomenon of Femslash fanfiction, this book analyses fan-authored works as forms of literature worthy of studying at length. It examines the anti-racist, feminist, sapphic fan works produced in response to white supremacist, heteronormative, queerbaiting mainstream fantasy and argues that they represent a significant site of queer healing for marginalised audience members. Focusing on the 'Swan Queen' fandom, where fans pair the 'white trash' heroine, Emma Swan and the villainous Latina Evil Queen (Regina Mills) from ABC's hit show Once Upon a Time, Alice Kelly redresses the widespread academic neglect of queer female fandoms and responds to urgent calls to diversify fan and fantasy scholarship.
Fighting Stars provides a rich and diverse account of the emergence and legacies of Hong Kong martial arts cinema stars. Tracing the meanings and influence of stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi , and Donnie Yen against the shifting backdrops of the Hong Kong film industry, the contributors to this important volume highlight martial arts stars' cultural reach, both on a local and global scale. Each of the chapters, written by a host of renowned international scholars, focuses on an individual film star, considering issues such as martial arts practices and philosophies, gender and age, national identities and conflicts, cinematic genres and aesthetic choices in order to understand their local and transnational cultural influence.
Contemporary Directors' Cinema refreshes the argument about the role of the director through the practice of evaluative criticism. The book identifies what makes nine recent films successful achievements by their directors and collaborators. Each chapter gives some context for the director's work, but the central argument focuses on the style, form and themes of each film, while explicating aspects of point of view and tone. Contemporary Directors' Cinema argues that in each of its nine case studies the director's work is central to the achievement of economy, unity, eloquence, subtlety, depth, vigour, vividness and intensity. By offering critical readings of nine films from mainstream film culture, Contemporary Directors' Cinema demonstrates that cinema remains vital as a directors' medium.
The African Gaze is a comprehensive exploration of postcolonial and contemporary photography and cinema from Africa. Drawing from archival imagery and documents, interviews with the photographers and filmmakers (in some cases family members/close associates if the artist is deceased), and contributions from writers, scholars, and curators, it maps a comprehensive introduction to African moving and still imagery. This is a hugely important and timely publication--engagement with Black and African histories is stronger than ever before (and long overdue). The major names of African photography, such as Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, and Seydou Keïta, have become highly collectible in the art market, while African cinema, pioneered by filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène in 1960s Senegal, is now recognized for its creative innovation and storytelling. For anyone drawn to African photography and film, this book will provide an exciting and accessible overview. Featuring interviews with Samuel Fosso and Souleymane Cissé.
Comprehending Cinema is a collection of in-depth interviews and panoramic essays that models a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape. The 18 interviewees featured in this publication include Oscar-winning documentarians Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin; Dean Fleischer Camp, whose Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was an internet smash, then an Oscar nominee; canonical filmmakers Guy Maddin and Su Friedrich, still building on remarkable careers; renowned poet (and cineaste) John Ashbery; Irish independent Tadhg O'Sullivan who is entranced by the moon; indefatigable cine-historian, Paul Cronin; LA artist Jennifer West, who collaborated with 11,500 visitors on New York City's High Line to produce a new kind of City Symphony; Penny Lane, whose documentary films continually surprise; a collaborative filmmaking team who provide an immersive motion study of a crowd taking selfies with the Mona Lisa; cine-explorers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; master of the cine-archive Bill Morrison; cine-scientist Erin Espelie; video-essayist Chloé Galibert-Laîné; and the Alloy Orchestra, who entertained silent-film audiences for three decades.
The cinema of Iran is celebrated both locally and internationally, yet elements of this diverse field remain comparatively understudied. This book brings together a diverse range of scholars to explore contemporary Iranian cinema in its local and international contexts from a range of perspectives including aesthetic, socio-political comparative approaches. Its chapters analyse the work of well-known filmmakers on the international film circuit such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohammad Reza Aslani and Jaffar Panahi, as well as internationally lesser-known domestic films such as those of Kamal Tabrizi and the 'Sacred Defence' films of the Iran-Iraq war. The book further widens its scope with chapters which also examine the material practices of the Iranian film industry itself, including chapters on the process by which Iranian films become 'accessible' to international audience. Finally, it considers, too, representations of Iranians in foreign cinemas, and how these have in turn affected Iranian films.
This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.
Invisible Digital helps us makes sense of something we cannot see by presenting an innovative approach to digital images and digital culture. At its heart is a novel method for exploring software used in the creation of moving images as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. The three main case studies of Invisible Digital are the animated feature Moana (2016) and the computer games No Man's Sky (2016) and Everything (2017). The approach of Invisible Digital is informed by relational theories and the concept of entanglement based on materialist perspectives, combined with insights from work that more explicitly interrogates algorithms and algorithmic culture. These analyses of software provide a widely applicable method through which moving image studies can contribute more fully to the wider and growing debates about algorithmic culture.
Podcasting's stratospheric rise has inspired a new breed of audio reporting. Offering immersive storytelling for a binge-listening audience as well as reaching previously underserved communities, podcasts have become journalism's most rapidly growing digital genre, buoying a beleaguered news industry. Yet many concerns have been raised about this new medium, such as the potential for disinformation, the influence of sponsors on content, the dominance of a few publishers and platforms, and at-times questionable adherence to journalistic principles. David O. Dowling critically examines how podcasting and its evolving conventions are transforming reporting-and even reshaping journalism's core functions and identity. He considers podcast reporting's most influential achievements as well as its most consequential ethical and journalistic shortcomings, emphasizing the reciprocal influences between podcasting and traditional and digital journalism.
Video games are both physically and cognitively demanding--so what does that mean for those with a disability or mental illness? Though they may seem at odds, Ability Machines illuminates just how vital video games are to understanding our bodies and abilities. In Ability Machines, Sky LaRell Anderson shows us how video games can help us imagine what our abilities mean and how they engage us physically, behaviorally, and cognitively to envision our agency beyond limitations.
Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers. Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial factors that move documentary film away from objective documentation and toward the thought-provoking realm of arguments, perceptions, and perspectives that draw from a filmmaker's unique sensibility to help us see the world as we have not seen it before. Exploring ethics, history, different modes of documentary, key social issues addressed, and both the origins and evolution of this form, this updated volume also offers guidance on how to write about documentaries and how to begin the process of making one.
This book offers a historical, cultural, political and socio-economic analysis of the British media. It examines how facts and events are reported and interpreted, but also how ideas and opinions circulate and are recycled, with attention being paid to British traits and tropes in these domains. This in-depth study of "issues" and "singularity" aims at understanding how the British media have helped shape the country's culture and representations, thereby providing its people with a sense of togetherness. Volume 1 focuses on the press, the internet and cinema as mass media, from the prolific and innovative Victorian era - the matrix of the modern world - to the turn of the 21st century with the challenge of digitalisation.
Scripting Empire recovers the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of shrinking British sovereignty, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors, and freelancers at the corporation, including Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Amos Tutuola, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C.L.R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of the aesthetic, formal, and political fallout of decolonization between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence.
Situated at the intersection of film and media studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema provides a trenchant account of the role of cinema in the oeuvre of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The book is animated by Derrida's self-confessed passion for the movies, his reluctance to write about film despite the range of his corpus, and the generative encounters arising between his legacy and the field of film and media studies as a result. Given the expanse of its references, interdisciplinarity, and consideration of Derrida's approach to the experience of both spectatorship and the act of being filmed, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema contributes to the ongoing close analyses of the philosopher's work while also providing a rigorous introduction to deconstruction.
Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations.
* One of the most influential directors ever * Chantal Akerman's film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named best film of all time by magazine Sight and Sound * With her unique and hyper-personal style, the Belgian director transformed both the film and art world * This book is a posthumous collective portrait of Akerman as one of thé filmmakers of our time, with contributions from people who admired her and worked closely with her Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman was one of the most fearless filmmakers of her generation. Her work blurs the boundaries of time and space, of film and art. It can be seen in cinemas and museums worldwide. She may be largely unknown to the general public, but she is revered by cinephiles, visual artists and filmmakers. The impact of her oeuvre on world cinema became abundantly clear when Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named best film of all time by British magazine Sight and Sound.
In The Movies of Racial Childhoods Celine Parreñas Shimizu examines early twenty-first-century cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American children. Drawing on psychoanalysis and her own perspective as a mother grieving for a deceased child, Shimizu considers how cinema renders Asian American children through sexualized racial difference, infantilization, and premature adultification. She looks at how Asian American childhood is characterized in film through experiences of alienation and trauma and contends that childhood development requires finding freedom and self-sovereignty through agentic attunement. In analyzing films that focus on queer Asian American youth such as Spa Night (2016) and Driveways (2019) and those that explore the trauma of being an immigrant like Yellow Rose (2019) and The Half of It (2020), Shimizu demonstrates that films can prompt viewers to evaluate their own childhood development.
In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.
Across more than 30 chapters spanning migration, queerness, and climate change, this handbook captures how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavor of Age(ing) studies has shaped contemporary literary and film studies. In the early 21st century, the literary study of age and ageing in its cultural context has 'come of age': it has come to supplement and challenge a public discourse on ageing seen mainly as a political and demographic 'problem' in many countries of the world. Following a tripartite structure, it looks first at literary and film genres and how they have been shaped by knowledge about age and ageing, incorporating both narrative genres as well as poetry, drama and imagery. The second section includes chapters on key themes and concepts in Age(ing) Studies with examples from film and literature. The third section brings together case studies focussing on individual artists, national traditions and global ageing.
Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded - by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and "immersion". The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford's westerns to Chantal Akerman's claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller's Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao's award-winning NOMADLAND.
In recent years, the enduring appeal of Alfred Hitchcock to film studies has been evidenced by the proliferation of innovative approaches to the director's work. Adding to this pattern of innovation, the edited collection One Shot Hitchcock: A Contemporary Approach to the Screen utilizes formal analysis to interrogate key single shots from across Alfred Hitchcock's long career. This collection reveals the value of analyzing the single shot - within this small, cinematic unit is a code that unlocks a series of revelations about cinema as an artistic practice and a theoretical study. Each chapter examines one shot from a single film, beginning with The Lodger (1927) and ending with Frenzy (1972). If Hitchcock is known as a director of suspense films and films about murder, the shots discussed in One Shot Hitchcock are his crime scenes.
Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century. It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others.
Christopher Falzon argues in this book for a new way of understanding film as philosophy. Inspired and informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Falzon shows how a motion picture can operate not simply as a thought experiment but as a form of experience-centred, experimental reflection. It is film's ability to show viewers things that challenge their way of thinking, giving them experiences that can make them think differently, that gives the film its status as philosophy. Through these cinematic experiences, not only cultural norms and presuppositions but also cinematic conventions, and even established philosophical positions, can be interrogated and questioned. Experiments in Film and Philosophy explores three films in the light of this new way of thinking about philosophy and film: Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Rubin Ötlund's Force Majeure, and Jonathon Glazer's Under the Skin.
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. Rather he has in mind the specific rules and procedures invoked and analyzed by courts on the way to declaring a decision--lawyer/client confidentiality, the distinction between interdicted violence and the violence performed by the legal system, the interplay of positive law and laws rooted in morality, the difference between civilian law and military law, the death penalty, the admissibility of different forms of evidence. In the movies he discusses, these and other points of doctrine and procedure do not serve as a background, occasionally visited, to the substantive issues that drive the plot and provide the characters with choices; they declare the plot, and character is formed and tested in relationship to their demands.
Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through the decades of authoritarian rule that followed Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim examines how their work foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy where the ruled represent themselves and access resources free from state suppression. The first book to offer a history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish.
Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters's Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema epitomizes Hollywood's shift in focus from the mass audience fostered by the classic studios to the multitude of niche audiences sought today.
This Handbook offers new and previously unexplored comparative approaches to the field of New Cinema History. The volume brings together contributions focussing on historical and contemporary comparative case studies of cinema-going practices, cinema distribution, exhibition and reception from a global perspective. Engaging with a wealth of empirical and archive-based sources the volume explores a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches. This Handbook is a key addition to debates on the relationship between film industry and cinema-going practices across different political and cultural geographical dimensions.
An exploration of the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The neoliberal self, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, is replete with contradictions and oppositions. This study of the unstable neoliberal identity lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects. This analysis draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examines a variety of peripheral subjects and texts, including the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.
The Film Studies books are located in the UCL Main Library and cover the philosophy of film, film in society, the industry and its economics, technical aspects, film genres, and film history.
Books on Media Studies can be found in the IOE Library and the Anthropology collection in the Science Library. Subject include media analysis, gaming, fan culture, film- and documentary-making, and researching media.
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