A deep dive into classic noir films and how filmmakers today are refreshing and updating the genre for new generations. In American Film Noir, M. Keith Booker introduces readers to the cult-favorite genre of film noir and discusses the ongoing power and popularity of the genre's key elements and themes in modern films, often considered ......
Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and--for some--threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the ......
The Dynamic History of the Heroines of Gotham City
Explores the history of Batgirlfrom her groundbreaking comics debut to her disappointing live-action appearances and beyond. For over sixty years, every woman who took on the mantle of Batgirl has been a powerful, independent heroine, belying the sidekick status the name implies. Betty Kane, the original Bat-Girl, was a hero for young girls at a ......
Recording Broadway: A life in Cast Albums is veteran producer Thomas Z. Shepard's first-person account of the making of fifty plus years' worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal stories of his work with pretty much everyone who was anyone on Broadway, including Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein ("truly awesome but very complicated"), ......
Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho's enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director's entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong's sense of spatial and ......
Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho's enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director's entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong's sense of spatial and ......
Explores how popular religions and philosophies have influenced and are manifested in the world of Star Wars. You have watched Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in A New Hope, seen Yoda merge with the Force in Return of the Jedi, and heard Rey contact the Jedi of the past in The Rise of Skywalker. But did you know that the Star Wars films ......
Motion pictures were introduced to China in 1896, and today China is a major player in the global film industry. However, the story of how Chinese cinema became what it is today is exceptionally turbulent, encompassing incursions by foreign powers, warfare among contending rulers, the collapse of the Chinese empire, and the massive setback of the ......
Zeppo was the Marx Brother who didn't want to go into the family business. A juvenile delinquent in his teen years, before joining his brothers on stage, Zeppo balanced two careers: auto mechanic and petty criminal. Even after getting dragged into the world of entertainment-for sixteen years, he did his familial duty as as a vaudeville, Broadway, ......
Columbia Pictures will reach a major milestone in 2024 by celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Columbia's incorporation. In the same vein of recent Hollywood movie studio titles such as Warner Bros.: Hollywood's Ultimate Backlot, Paramount: City of Dreams, and MGM: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot, this new book documents the studio history of ......
40 Overlooked Costars of Oscar-Winning Performances
Most books about screen acting, including one of the author's (100 GREAT FILM PERFORMANCES YOU SHOULD REMEMBER BUT PROBABLY DON'T), concentrate on major stars and major roles. THERE ARE NO SMALL PARTS focuses on the wonders achieved by performers in brief roles, sometimes mere cameos. To watch an actor's complete delineation of a character in a ......
In The Queer Coming of Age Film Genre, Brad J. Windhauser argues for the existence of this genre and, using a genre and queer theory lens, investigates how the initial, classic cluster of this genre's films represent the unique issues experienced by queer people - including trans, non-binary, and intersex individuals - coming of age in society in ......
This collection considers Lubitsch, the famous author of Weimar and classical Hollywood cinema, as a role model for our times. From this ethical position Lubitsch's cinema is regarded as a conceptual tool to unlock the serious issues of contemporary politics, culture, philosophy, philosophy of art and theatre. It is not only the socio-political or ......
Films like The Eternal Daughter and the diptych The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II have cemented Joanna Hogg's reputation as an original voice in contemporary cinema. Her rigorous and quiet style draws on the histories of film and art to tell stories that weave autobiography with studies in human opacity. Shonni Enelow analyzes Hogg's six ......
Films like The Eternal Daughter and the diptych The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II have cemented Joanna Hogg's reputation as an original voice in contemporary cinema. Her rigorous and quiet style draws on the histories of film and art to tell stories that weave autobiography with studies in human opacity. Shonni Enelow analyzes Hogg's six ......
Global Cinema Studies in Landscape Allegory explores the narrative and stylistic approaches to imbuing natural settings in audiovisual media with a psychological dimension - or, in other words, configuring a 'landscape' to function beyond its typical role as a backdrop - and the cultural contexts for this aesthetic impulse. Contributors argue that ......
Wicked Leadership in Film offers a novel theory of how leaders can contend with so-called "wicked problems," a class of important, entrenched, and far-reaching political and social challenges (such as climate change or mental illness) that resist ordinary policies and problem solving. Bruce Peabody's relational theory is built on two central ......
In the thirty years since its release, The Crow has become the ultimate cult movie, with a dedicated worldwide following, two sequels, and a persistent fascination owing to the tragedy that came to define its legacy, in which star Brandon Lee was killed in a strange on-set accident during the last days of filming.
"Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past" explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker.Many of Hollywood's legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. ......
The Films, the Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon
Joan Crawford: the name has an enduring fascination. Forty-five years after her death, Crawford remains a familiar icon in pop culture and the entertainment world. Certainly the camp bathos of Mommie Dearest has played a part in her continued relevance. But it is ultimately her work and career themselves that account for her remarkable longevity ......
Richard Wright's dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright's long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright's family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright's ......
A History of American Animation from Gertie to Pixar and Beyond
A deep dive into the history of cinematic animation in the United States. Animated films started with simple sequential drawings photographed one at a time--little bits of comedic fluff to make amateur title scenes or surreal escapist sequences. Today, animation is a worldwide industry valued at nearly $300 billion and still growing in scope and ......
James Bond the the 60s Spy Craze will explore James Bond films and the number of movies and television shows of the 1960s inspired by Ian Fleming's character. The book also delves into the production, casting, merchandise, and music that helped to make James Bond a household name and a cultural touchstone. The 1960s spy craze lasted seven years, ......
Over the last eighty years, Marlon Brando has become such an object of fascination, buried under so many accreted layers of mythos and half-truth, that it is all but impossible to see the man behind the icon. As we approach the centennial of this undisputed American legend, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel is a revelatory biography that tells its ......
This book reveals how marginalized communities and women are underrepresented on our screens and, too often, depicted in stereotypical ways. This is doubly true for marginalized speakers--those who speak traditionally "nonstandard" dialects. Lindsey Clouse examines the origins of linguistic prejudice and how our public schools perpetuate the myth ......
Author Donald Brackett-whose grandfather was Charles Brackett's cousin-delves into family lore, correspondence, contemporary media reports, and all other manner of historical records to reconstruct the strange magic of Brackett & Wilder's combustible partnership.
How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss
White feminists performing to maintain privilege Mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it coopts its affect, form, and content from racial oppression and protest while aiming meanness toward people in marginalized groups. Kim Hong Nguyen's feminist media study examines ......
How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss
White feminists performing to maintain privilege Mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it coopts its affect, form, and content from racial oppression and protest while aiming meanness toward people in marginalized groups. Kim Hong Nguyen's feminist media study examines ......
Richard Wright's dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright's long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright's family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright's ......
This book explores fictional representations and narrative functions of animal characters in animated and live-action film and television, examining the ways in which these representations intersect with a variety of social issues. Contributors cover a range of animal characters, from heroes to villains, across a variety of screen genres and ......
This book explicates how many films intersect black suffering and God-talk in ways that instantiate secular limitations to divine efficacy. The book's concept of a modern God introduces a new method of analysis that reimagines theodical discourses as mechanisms of modern identities and filmmakers as skillful exegetes who recalibrate divine ......
