The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, M.A.S.H., Harold and Maude--these are only a few of the iconic films made in the United States during the 1970s. Originally considered a "lost generation," the 1970s are increasingly recognized as a crucial turning point in American filmmaking, and many films from the era have resurfaced from oblivion to become a reference for new directorial talents. The Last Great American Picture Show explores this pivotal era in American film history with a collection of essays by scholars and writers that firmly situates the decade as the time...

This book, the first full critical overview of the film avant-garde, ushers in a new approach—and in the process creates its own subject. While many books have studied particular aspects of the European film avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Moving Forward, Looking Back provides a much-needed summary of the theory and practice of the movement, while also emphasizing aspects of the period that have been overlooked. Arguing that a European perspective is the only way to understand the transnational movement, the book also pioneers a new approach to the alternative cinema network that...

The first comprehensive study of film festivals that marks key historical moments and offers surprising insights into the workings of a highly influentiual cultural network

Transfigurations: Violance, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema brings the problem of film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory

Has European cinema, in the age of globalization, lost contact not only with the world at large, but with its own audiences? Between the thriving festival circuit and the obligatory late-night television slot, is there still a public or a public sphere for European films? Can the cinema be the appropriate medium for a multicultural Europe and its migrating multitudes? Is there a division of representational labor, with Hollywood providing stars and spectacle, the Asian countries exotic color and choreographedaction, and Europe a sense of history, place and memory?
This collection of...

A key figure in early avant-garde cinema, Walter Ruttmann was a pioneer of experimental animation and the creative force behind one of the silent era s most celebrated montage films, "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City." Yet even as he was making experimental films, Ruttmann had a day job. He worked regularly in advertising and he would go on to make industrial films, medical films, and even Nazi propaganda films.
Michael Cowan offers here the first study of Ruttmann in English, not only shedding light on his commercial, industrial, and propaganda work, but also rethinking his significance...

"Warped Minds" explores the transformation of psychopathologies into cultural phenomena in the wake of the transition from an epistemological to an ontological approach to psychopathology. Trifonova considers several major points in this intellectual history: the development of a dynamic model of the self at the fin de siecle, the role of photography and film in the construction of psychopathology, the influence of psychoanalysis on the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms to dynamic styles of psychiatry foregrounding the socially constructed nature of madness, and the...

The Cannes Film Festival is the most prominent and important film festival in the worldand its relationship with Hollywood has always been fraught. Hollywood in Cannes offers the first full history of the festival from an American perspective, showing how Hollywood has both supported the festivalespecially in its early yearsand been troubled by it, in particular by the ways in which Cannes indicates the limits of the reach of American filmmaking s money and power. Drawing heavily on unpublished archival material, this book also makes use of interviews with contemporary studio...

Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, "Napoleon," was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts--with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle across ensuing decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film has formed a backdrop to an array of formal, contextual, and ideological battles. In this book, Paul Cuff takes account of those battles and challenges received opinion on Gance's view of both his film and its subject.