This critical study of Mike Leigh s cinema is a comprehensive assessment of his thirty plus years in film, including his television features, from the first feature-length Bleak Moments to All or Nothing. Through his own species of tragicomedy and favored thematic content concentrating on relationships, Leigh enlarges the emotional boundaries of cinema for performers and audience alike. His deep and fully realized characters often subvert both decorum and irony traditionally associated with British film and television. Leigh s sense of the reciprocity and interpenetration of the...

Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema combines close film analysis with a small-scale qualitative investigation of audience responses to examine images of queerness in contemporary French popular cinema and their reception. Through its blending of the textual and the empirical, this book provides a unique insight into the ways in which sexuality and gender are represented on the cinema screen, as well as the spectator reactions they elicit. Since the mid-1990s, depictions of lesbians, gay men, and queer forms of sexual desire and identity have shifted to the mainstream of French...

Dutch cinema is typically treated only in terms of prewar films or documentaries, leaving postwar fictional film largely understudied. At the same time, a Hollandse School, first named in the 1980s, has developed through deadpan, ironic films like those of director and actor Alex van Warmerdam. Using seminal theories on humor and comedy, this book explores a number of Dutch films using the notion of categories, such as low-class comedies, neurotic romances, deliberate camp, and grotesque satire. With its original approach, this study makes surprising connections between Dutch films from...

This is the first book to survey the entire career of Joris Ivens, a prolific documentary filmmaker who worked on every continent over the course of seven decades. More than a biography of a leftist committed to changing the world through film, The Conscience of Cinema is also a microcosmic history of the documentary and its form, culture, and place within twentieth-century world cinema. Ivens worked in almost every genre, including the essay, compilation, hybrid dramatization, socialist realism, and more. Whether in his native Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United States, Vietnam,...

The German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II left a lasting mark on Dutch memory and culture. This book is the first to explore depictions of that period in films made a generation later, between 1962 and 1986. As Dutch public opinion towards the war altered over the postwar decades, the historical trajectory of Dutch recovery and reconstruction political, economic, and, most complicated of all, psychological came to be revealed, often unconsciously, in the films of the period."

Rich in detail, this is a study of the interrelationships between film historical discourse and archival practices. Exploring the history of several important collections from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, Bregt Lameris shows how archival films and collections always carry the historical traces of selection policies, restoration philosophies, and exhibition strategies. The result is a compelling argument that film archives can never be viewed simply as innocent or neutral sources of film history.

This book offers one of the most comprehensive accounts yet of the place of women in silent film in Europe.

Malgre la nature multisensorielle de ses composantes, le cinema est presque toujours envisage comme un art essentiellement visuel. Quelle est des lors l'importance de la composante verbale? Quelle est la fonction du dialogue, au-dela de la pure et simple transmission d'informations, apparemment redondantes d'ailleurs, s'il est vrai qu'une image vaut mille mots?

A partir des cadres analytiques et methodologiques developpes en analyse interactionnelle, l'auteur essaie de repondre a ces questions en les appliquant a l'etude d'un corpus de films d'Eric Rohmer.

Divisee en trois...

This book explores John Singleton's cinematic voice and helps explicate his propensity for the folk elements in his work (the oral tradition and lore).

This book investigates the roots of Dutch visual cliches in popular visual media, offring new insights into the emergance of national cliches and the study of stereotypical thinking.