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From Stranger than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008), America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation vary widely, and they range from raw, no-budget productions to the more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences...
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The first of its kind in English, this collection covers twenty one well established and lesser known female filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Sixteen scholars illuminate these filmmakers' negotiations of local and global politics, cinematic representation, and issues of gender and sexuality, covering works from the 1920s to the present. Writing from the disciplines of film, Asian, women's, and auteur studies,...
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The German filmmaker Alexander Kluge has long promoted cinema's relationship with the goals of human emancipation. Jean-Luc Godard and Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik also believe in cinema's ability to bring about what Theodor W. Adorno once called a 'redeemed world,' even in the face of new cultural and technological challenges. In three groundbreaking essays, Christopher Pavsek showcases these utopian visions, drawing attention to their strengths,...
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In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted...
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From the architectural spectacle of the medieval cathedral and the romantic sublime of the nineteenth-century panorama to the techno-fetishism of today's London Science Museum, humans have gained a deeper understanding of the natural world through highly illusionistic representations that engender new modes of seeing, listening, and thinking. What unites and defines many of these wondrous spaces is an immersive view-an invitation to step inside the...
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Tunisian cinema is often described as the most daring of all Arab cinemas, a model of equipoise between "East" and "West" and the defender of a fierce, sovereign style. Even during the repressive regime that ruled Tunisia from 1987 to 2011, a generation of filmmakers produced allegories of resistance that defied their society's increasingly illiberal trends. In New Tunisian Cinema, Robert Lang reads eight contemporary Tunisian films, many by some...
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Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements...
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Closely reading the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Hunter Vaughan establishes a connection between phenomenology and image-philosophy to analyze the moving image and its challenge to conventional modes of thought. Striving to establish a clear foundation for the recent field of inquiry called "film-philosophy," he devises a systematic theory of film's philosophical function and its deconstruction of classic oppositional concepts, such...
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Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century's most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which...
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Since the early days of film, critics and theorists have debated the value of formula, cliché, conventional imagery, and recurring narrative patterns of reduced complexity. The high noon showdown or last-minute rescue, the lonely woman standing in the window or two lovers saying goodbye in the rain-many films rely on these scenes, and audiences have come to expect them. Outlining a comprehensive theory of film stereotype, a device as functionally...
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New European Cinema offers a compelling response to the changing cultural shapes of Europe, charting political, aesthetic, and historical developments through innovative readings of some of the most popular and influential European films of the 1990's. Made around the time of the revolutions of 1989 but set in post-World War II Europe, these films grapple with the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Balkans, and a growing sense of...
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What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization? Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige,...
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Focusing on the work of four contemporary filmmakers: Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang, the authors explore how these filmmakers broke from tradition, creating a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history. Featuring stills, anecdotes, and close readings of films, the authors consider the influence of Hong Kong and martial arts films, directors' experiments with autobiography, the shifting...
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In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the...
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It is nearly impossible to separate contemporary Iranian cinema from the Islamic revolution that transformed film production in the country in the late 1970s. As the aims of the revolution shifted and hardened once Khomeini took power and as an eight-year war with Iraq dragged on, Iranian filmmakers confronted new restrictions. In the 1990s, however, the Reformist Movement, led by Mohammad Khatami and the film industry, developed an unlikely partnership...
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A groundbreaking contribution to the study of non-theatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U. S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, the book explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison...
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Representational technologies including photography, phonography, and the cinema have helped define modernity itself. Since the nineteenth century, these technologies have challenged our trust of sensory perception, given the ephemeral unprecedented parity with the eternal, and created profound temporal and spatial displacements. But current approaches to representational and cultural history often neglect to examine these technologies. James Lastra...
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Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890's through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadentstatic cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces...
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Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence...
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