The first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar cinemas from a transnational perspective, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic presents the region as one of great and previously overlooked cinematic diversity. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and indigenous film, gender and ecology, as well as Hollywood and the USSR's uses and abuses of the Arctic, this book provides a groundbreaking account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present. Challenging dominant notions of the region in popular and political culture, it...

This book traces the development of what we know as film noir from the proto-noir elements of Feuillade's silent French crime series and German Expressionism to the genre's mid-twentieth-century popularisation and influence on contemporary global media.
By employing experimental lighting effects, oblique camera angles, distorted compositions and shifting points-of-view, film noir's style both creates and comments upon a morally adumbrated world, where the alienating effects of the uncanny, the fetishistic and the surreal dominate. What drew original audiences to film noir is an immediate...

Stephen Zepke shows how the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement.

Considers transnational, national and regional concepts within contemporary francophone Belgian cinema.

Films such as Occident, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Police, Adjective and If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle have brought Romanian cinema from relative obscurity into the limelight of the international festival circuit and to the attention of professional and lay audiences alike. These films' common aesthetic, thematic, ethical and ideological traits expound a coherent and increasingly important film movement - the new Romanian cinema. Through the prism of a representative selection of twenty extraordinarily well-crafted and highly awarded films made over the last...

A much-needed critical introduction to some of the most important Japanese horror films produced over the last fifty years, Japanese Horror Cinema provides an insightful examination of the tradition's most significant trends and themes. The book examines the genre's dominant aesthetic, cultural, political and technological underpinnings, and individual chapters address key topics such as: the debt Japanese horror films owe to various Japanese theatrical and literary traditions; the popular 'avenging spirit' motif; the impact of atomic warfare, rapid industrialisation and apocalyptic rhetoric...

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere introduces a new concept to Nordic film studies as well as to other small national, transnational and world cinema traditions. Examining overlooked 'elsewheres', the book presents Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic and geographically dispersed, from their beginnings in the early silent period to their present 21st-century dynamics. Exploring both canonical works by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, as well as a wide range of unknown or overlooked narratives of movement, synthesis and resistance, the book...