In Binghamton Babylon, Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of films and videos but went on to invigorate the American media scene for the next half-century. Drawing on interviews with faculty, students, and visiting artists, MacDonald weaves together an engaging conversation that...

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard,...

Biopics--films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history--have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and...

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Nonfiction category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey's and Gilles Deleuze's paradigms and offering close readings grounded in psychoanalysis and queer theory, David Greven examines several key films and genre trends from the late 1990s forward. Movies considered range from the slasher film Scream to bromances...

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Nonfiction category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey's and Gilles Deleuze's paradigms and offering close readings grounded in psychoanalysis and queer theory, David Greven examines several key films and genre trends from the late 1990s forward. Movies considered range from the slasher film Scream to bromances...

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard,...

Biopics--films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history--have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and...

Ripping England investigates a fertile moment for British satire--the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the...

Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of "misdirection films," a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Inception (2010), were both commercial and critical successes. Seth Friedman examines this genre in its sociocultural, industrial, and technological contexts to explain why it has become more...