Filmhistorie, filmteori og filmkritik

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai¿i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

"In this official centennial history of the greatest studio in Hollywood, unforgettable stars, untold stories, and rare images from the Warner Bros. vault bring a century of entertainment to vivid life"--

From generation to generation, three outstanding American Jewish directors¿William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg--advance a tradition of Jewish writers, artists, and leaders who propagate the ethical basis of the American Idea and Creed. They strive to renew the American spirit by insisting that America must live up to its values and ideals. These directors accentuate the ethical responsibility for the other as a basis of the American soul and a source for strengthening American liberal democracy. In the manner of the jeremiad, their films challenge America to achieve a liberal democratic culture for all people by becoming more inclusive and by modernizing the American Idea. Following an introduction that relates aspects of modern ethical thought to the search for Americäs soul, the book divides into three sections. The Wyler section focuses on the director¿s social vision of a changing America. The Lumet section views his films as dramatizing Lumet¿s dynamicand aggressive social and ethical conscience. The Spielberg section tracks his films as a movement toward American redemption and renewal that aspires to realize Lincoln¿s vision of America as the hope of the world. The directors, among many others, perpetuate a ¿New Covenant¿ that advocates change and renewal in the American experience.

For centuries, mankind has been chilled by tales of vampires. A fixture of literature, art, and folk tales, the vampire was a natural early choice for a movie monster at the dawn of cinema and has remained popular ever since as the screen's most enduring and sexually charged nightmare figure. Within these bloodstained pages, you'll discover that vampires of the silver screen are far more complex and diverse than variations on Dracula and other staples like Carmilla and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. All the icons are here, from Bela Lugosi and Max Schreck's pioneering fiends to the heyday of Hammer Films, but that's just a sanguinary taste of what's to come as you explore macabre offerings from Hong Kong, India, Italy, France, Germany, and more. Along the way you'll meet vampire-fighting musclemen, rock 'n' roll bloodsuckers, plasma-craving infants, creepy canines, and supernatural strippers. It's all served up on a blood-spattered silver platter by author and film historian Nathaniel Thompson, who also delivers a globetrotting introduction to the history and evolution of vampire cinema from the silent era to the modern age of undead heartthrobs and vampire assassins. Sweetening the bloody deal is a foreword by legendary writer and monster expert Kim Newman, who dragged vampire literature into the daylight of the modern age with his Anno Dracula series. Take our hand, if you dare, and accept our invitation to explore the dizzying array of frightening, hilarious, and often beautiful sights and sounds of the undead on film. Following the success of the previous five editions: The FrightFest Guide to Exploitation Movies, Monster Movies, Ghost Movies, Werewolf Movies and Grindhouse Movies, this is the latest in a series of wide appeal books for both the curious spectator and the cult connoisseur.

A collection of wide-ranging essays written throughout the 1990s, On the Body in General and the Figure in Particular: Figurative Invention in Cinema covers an array of genres and styles to propose an original method of cinematic analysis and interpretation foregrounding film's formal and plastic qualities in all their multifaceted materiality and aesthetics. Brenez reconsiders what a body on film can be and what constitutes a figure in cinema.

"Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period 'in the spirit' of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman's equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution."--

Belfast, Beirut and Berlin are notorious for their internal boundaries and borders. As symbols for political disunion, the three cities have inspired scriptwriters and directors from diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite their different histories, they share a wide range of features central to divided cities. In each city, particular territories take on specific symbolic and psychological meanings. Following a comparative approach, this book concentrates on the cinematographic representations of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin. Filmmakers are in constant search of new ways in order to engage with urban division. Making use of a variety of genres reaching from thriller to comedy, they explore the three cities' internal and external borders, as well as the psychological boundaries existing between citizens belonging to different communities. Among the characters featuring in films set in Belfast, Berlin and Beirut, we may count dangerous gunmen, prisoners' wives, soldiers and snipers, but also comic Stasi-members, punk aficionados and fake nuns. The various characters contribute to the creation of a multifaceted image of city limits in troubled times.

Esfir Shub was the only prominent female director of nonfiction film present at the dawning of the Soviet film industry. She was, in fact, the first woman both to write critical texts on cinema and then practically apply these theorisations in her own films. As such, her syncretism of cinema theory and praxis inspired her to ask questions regarding both the nature of nonfiction film, such as the problem of authenticity and reality, and the function of the artist in society; issues which are still relevant in contemporary discussions about the documentary. Accordingly, this book demonstrates Shub's position not only as a significant filmmaker and recognised member of the early Soviet avant-garde but also as a key figure in global cinema history. Shub deserves recognition both as the founder and ardent promoter of the compilation film genre and as a pioneer of the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking.

How do the islands and archipelagos of the New World figure in Latin American cinema? Comprising 15 essays and a critical introduction, The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema addresses this question by examining a series of intersections between insular spaces and filmmaking in Latin America. The volume brings together international scholars and filmmakers to consider a diverse corpus of films about islands, films that take place on islands, films produced in islands, and films that problematise islands. The book explores a diverse range of films that extend from the Chilean documentaries of Patricio Guzmán to work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, and films by Argentine directors Gustavo Fontán and Lucrecia Martel. Chapters focus on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Mexican Islas Marías, and the Panamanian Caribbean; on ecocritical, environmental and film historical aspects of Brazilian and Argentine river islands; and on Cuban, Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Puerto Rican contexts.The Film Archipelago argues that the islands and archipelagos of Latin American cinema constitute a critically interesting, analytically complex, and historically suggestive angle to explore issues of marginality and peripherality, remoteness and isolation, and fragility and dependency. As a whole, the collection demonstrates to what extent the combined insular and archipelagic lens can re-frame and re-figure both longstanding and recent discussions on the spaces of Latin American cinema.

A fascinating examination of films set in Ancient Rome that assesses their historical accuracy in terms of plot, costumes, sets, and characterizations and leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of Roman history and modern cinema.

For much of the 20th century, the underground pornography industry - made up of amateurs and hobbyists who created hardcore, explicit "stag films" - went about its business hounded by reformers and law enforcement, from local police departments all the way up to the FBI. Rumors of this illicit activity circulated and became the stuff of urban myth, but this period of pornography history remains murky.Let's Go Stag! reveals the secrets of this underground world. Using the archives of civic groups, law enforcement, bygone government studies and similarly neglected evidence, archivist Dan Erdman reconstructs the means by which stag films were produced, distributed and exhibited, as well as demonstrate the way in which these practices changed with the times, eventually paving the way for the pornographic explosion of the 1970s and beyond. Let's Go Stag! is sure to point the way for countless future researchers and remain the standard work of history for this era of adult film for a long time to come.

This often-startlingly original book introduces a new way of thinking about color in film as distinct from existing approaches which tend to emphasize either technical processes and/or histories of film coloration, or the meaning(s) of color as metaphor or symbol, or else part of a broader signifying system. Murray Pomerance's latest meditation on cinema has the author embed himself in various ways of thinking about color; not ways of framing it as a production trick or a symbolic language but ways of wondering how the color effect onscreen can work in the act of viewing. Pomerance examines many issues, including acuity, dreaming, interrelationships, saturations, color contrasts, color and performance (color as a performance aid or even performance substitute), and more. The lavender of the photographer's seamless in Antonioni's Blow-Up taken in itself as an explosion of color worked into form, and then considered both as part of the story and part of our experience. The 14 chapters of this book each discuss a single primary color as regards to our experience of cinema. After opening the idea of such an exploration in terms of the history of our apperception and the variation in our experience that color germinates, Color it True takes form.

The first monograph to examine Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, this book explains the significance of Salles' film with respect to the specific category of 'youth culture' as a historically and culturally situated concept.The Motorcycle Diaries looks at the film's engagement with 'emerging adulthood', the importance of travel as a source of self-discovery, and the film's impact on the iconicity of Che Guevara, the international emblem of a restless, rebellious youth. Combining insights from transnational film studies, tourism studies and affect theory, as well as drawing on extensive historical materials, this book provides not only a necessary addition to existing scholarship on this popular movie, but also an inspiring model for the analysis of film in relation to youth culture - a burgeoning field of interest in Latin American scholarship.It will interest any scholar in film studies, specifically transnational cinemas, global cinema, Latin American cinema, Latin American history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, tourism studies and global politics.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The box office smash Back to the Future was almost a bomb, saved only by the talents of Michael J. Fox, who was brought in to star six weeks after production had started. Ivan Reitman wasn't really interested in directing Ghostbusters. Producer Gloria Katz described Howard the Duck as "a comedy about a person with certain particular characteristics," foremost of which was that he was a duck. These insights and many more are revealed in these interviews with some of the leading creative talents in Hollywood fantasy films during the 1980s. Fox, Reitman, Katz, Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, Jamie Gertz, Ray Bradbury, Michael Ritchie, Timothy Dalton and others discuss Big Trouble in Little China, James Bond, Conan, Dead Zone, Gremlins, Ladyhawke, Lost Boys, and other fantasy films of the decade. Each of the interviews (previously published in a different form in Starlog) is preceded by a brief introduction setting it in context. "All the interviews are informative" Classic Images "Gives a variety of perspectives...enjoyable and informative" Library Journal