Short Cuts

Thomas M. Puhr identifies and analyzes the ways that cinema has dealt with the tension between fate and free will. He examines films that express deterministic ideas, including circular narratives of stasis or confinement and fatalistic portraits of external forces dictating characters’ lives.

Alberto Mira offers a new account of how pop music revolutionized the Hollywood musical. He shows that while the Hollywood system ceased producing large-scale traditional musicals, different pop strains—disco, rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop, glam, and hip-hop—renewed the genre, giving it a new life.

Since the movie industry’s earliest days, Hollywood has mythologized itself through stories of stardom. In the first book to focus exclusively on these modern fairy tales, Karen McNally traces the history of this genre from silent cinema to contemporary film and television to show its significance to both Hollywood and broader American culture.

Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. He distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts.

Terence McSweeney provides a concise and up-to-date overview of the superhero genre. He lays out its narrative codes and conventions, exploring why it appeals to diverse audiences and what it has to say about the world in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Suburban Fantastic Cinema is a study of American movies in which preteen and teenage suburban boys are called upon to combat a disruptive force. Beginning in the 1980s, the suburban fantastic established itself as a popular commercial model combining coming-of-age melodramas with elements drawn from science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood looks into the contexts of studio film production in the new century. In an era dominated in box-office terms by the franchise and the family film, this book combines close textual readings and industrial analysis, illustrating why these kinds of movies are favored by producers and audiences alike.

Performers make a crucial contribution to the achievement of narrative films. By moving through exemplary sequences, this book closely follows the movement and behaviour of screen performers – Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Widmark – and by emphasising their relationship to other aspects of film style – camera, location and plot – it develops accounts that are specific and involved. This study concentrates on films from the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood and moment-by-moment descriptions enable fresh interpretations to emerge and evolve. These reveal the significance and intensity of a performer’s engagement with the world of a film.

Film Censorship is a concise overview of Hollywood censorship and efforts to regulate American films. Sheri Chinen Biesen unveils the behind-the-scenes history of cinema censorship and explore how Hollywood responded to censorial constraints on screen content in a changing cultural and industrial landscape.

This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to the children's film, examining its recurrent themes and ideologies, and common narrative and stylistic principles.

This volume explores the lower reaches of cinema and its paradoxical appeal. It looks at films from the B-movies of the 1930s to the mockbusters of today, and from the New York underground to the genre variations of Turkey's Yesilçam studios (and their YouTube afterlife). Critically examining the reasons for studying, denigrating, or celebrating the detritus of film history, it also considers the place of a trash aesthetic within and beyond 1960s American avant-garde and looks at the cult of trash in the fanzines of the 1980s. It draws on debates about cult, paracinema, and camp, arguing that trash cinema exists in relation to these but brings with it a particular history that includes the ordinary as well as the strange. Trash Cinema places these debates, and the strand of self-proclaimed low culture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, within a historical and international perspective. It focuses on American cinema history but addresses Eurotrash reception as well as the related field of garbology, examining trash cinema as a distinct but fluid category.

Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars traces the public fascination with incarceration from the silent era to the present.

Environmental themes are present in cinema more than ever before. But the relationship between film and the natural world is a long and complex one, not reducible to issues such as climate change and pollution. This volume demonstrates how an awareness of natural features and dynamics can enhance our understanding of three key film-studies topics – narrative, genre, and national cinema. It does so by drawing on examples from a broad historical and geographical spectrum, including Sunrise, A River Called Titas, and Profound Desires of the Gods. The first introductory text on a topic which has long been overlooked in the discipline, Film and the Natural Environment argues that the nonhuman world can be understood not just as a theme but as a creative resource available to all filmmakers. It invites readers to consider some of the particular strengths and weaknesses of cinema as communicator of environmental phenomena, and collates ideas and passages from a range of critics and theorists who have contributed to our understanding of moving images and the natural world.

Since the spectacular success of The Artist (2011) there has been a resurgence of interest in silent cinema, and particularly in the lush and passionate screen dramas of the 1920s. This book offers an introduction to the cinema of this extraordinary period, outlining the development of the form between the end of the First World War and the introduction of synchronized sound at the end of the 1920s. Lawrence Napper addresses the relationship between film aesthetics and the industrial and political contexts of film production through a series of case studies of "national" cinemas. It also focuses on film-going as the most popular leisure activity of the age. Topics such as the star system, cinema buildings, musical accompaniments, film fashions, and fan cultures are addressed—all the elements that ensured that the experience of the pictures was "big." The international dominance of Hollywood is outlined, as are the different responses to that dominance in Britain, Germany, and the USSR. Case studies seek to move beyond the familiar silent canon, and include The Oyster Princess (1919), It (1927), Shooting Stars (1927), and The Girl with the Hatbox (1927).

As analyzed in this study, from its most familiar origins in Hollywood the road movie has become a global film practice, whether as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between various national contexts and American cinema, as a means of narrating different national and continental histories, or as a form of individual filmmaking expression

Examines postmodern film aesthetics and challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating film analysis

Explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives

Examines the gangster film in its historical context with an emphasis on the ways the image of the gangster has adapted and changed

Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked bio-pics, explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, structure, production, subject representation or misrepresentation, and critical response

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers

International Politics and Film draws attention to how the relationship between the visual and the spatial is constitutive of international politics

After covering the genre's early history and theorizing its general characteristics, this volume then focuses on specific instances of sports films, such as the biopic, the sports history film, the documentary, the fan film, the boxing film, and explores issues such as gender, race, spectacle and silent comedy. Four major films are then closely analysed – Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, the Indian cricket epic Lagaan, and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. While recording American film's importance to the genre, the book resists the conventional over-concentration on American cinema and sports by its attention to other cinemas, for example the British, Indian, Australian, South Korean, Thai, German, New Zealand, Spanish, and so on, with the many different sports they depict.

A concise introduction to the genre about that one last big score, The Heist Film: Stealing With Style traces this crime thriller's development as both a dramatic and comic vehicle growing out of film noir (Criss Cross, The Killers, The Asphalt Jungle), mutating into sleek capers in the 1960s (Ocean's Eleven, Gambit, How to Steal a Million) and splashing across screens in the 2000s in remake after remake (The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, The Good Thief). Built around a series of case studies (Rififi, Bob le Flambeur, The Killing, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Getaway, the Ocean's trilogy), this volume explores why directors of such varied backgrounds, from studio regulars (Siodmak, Crichton, Siegel, Walsh and Wise) to independents (Anderson, Fuller, Kubrick, Ritchie and Soderbergh), are so drawn to this popular genre.