Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles--from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan...
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In o...
Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms--evil, monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, and darkness. Bad examines the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative. From Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the contributors consider a wide range of...
Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to ...
From beloved bad-boy to cool and captivating maverick, Johnny Depp has inspired media intrigue and has been the source of international acclaim since the early 1990s. He has attracted attention for his eccentric image, his accidental acting career, his beguiling good looks, and his quirky charm. In Johnny Depp Starts Here, film scholar Murray Pomerance explores our fascination with Depp, his riddling complexity, and his meaning for our culture. Moving beyond the actor's engaging and inscrutable private life, Pomerance focuses on his enigmatic screen performances from A Nightmare on Elm Street...
From beloved bad-boy to cool and captivating maverick, Johnny Depp has inspired media intrigue and has been the source of international acclaim since ...
From cold war hysteria and rampant anticommunist witch hunts to the lure of suburbia, television, and the new consumerism, the 1950s was a decade of sensational commercial possibility coupled with dark nuclear fears and conformist politics. Amid this amalgamation of social, political, and cultural conditions, Hollywood was under siege: from the Justice Department, which pressed for big film companies to divest themselves of their theater holdings; from the middleclass, whose retreat to family entertainment inside the home drastically decreased the filmgoing audience; and from the House...
From cold war hysteria and rampant anticommunist witch hunts to the lure of suburbia, television, and the new consumerism, the 1950s was a decade o...
The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a fragmentation of experience. Motion pictures--the quintessence of modernism--entered into this cultural, technical, and philosophical richness with a vast public appeal and a jarring new vision of what life could be.In Cinema and Modernity, Murray Pomerance brings together new essays by seventeen leading scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. Among the many films considered are...
The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a frag...
New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness. The glittering skyscrapers of such films as On the Town have shadowed the characteristic seedy streets in which desperate, passionate stories have played out-as in Scandal Sheet and The Pawnbroker. In other films, the city is a cauldron of bright lights, technology, empire, egotism, fear, hunger,...
New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the...
The development of young masculine sexuality is still a cultural taboo of sorts, and until now there has been little scholarship available that discusses aspects of boyhood and its relation to cinema - in particular, the process whereby masculinities are socially, historically, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically created in male coming-of-age as depicted onscreen. Where the Boys Are, Cinemas of Masculinity and youth scrutinizes a broad corpus of films about boyhood within a cross-genre, trans-historical, cross-cultural framework. Unlike the filmic investigations before it, this...
The development of young masculine sexuality is still a cultural taboo of sorts, and until now there has been little scholarship available that discus...
The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing.
Enfant Terrible Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A veteran of virtually every form of show business, Lewis's performances onscreen and the...
The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. Th...
The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing.
Enfant Terrible Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A veteran of virtually every form of show business, Lewis's performances...
The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. Th...
Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) is the grandest achievement of 21st century cinema so far. But it is also linked to topical and social concerns including war, terrorism, and cultural imperialism. Its style, symbols, narrative, and structure seem always already linked to politics, cultural definition, problems of cinematic style, and the elemenal mythologies that most profoundly capture our imaginations. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings treats Jackson's trilogy as having two conditions of existence: an aesthetic and a...
Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) is the grandest achievement of 21st century cinema so far. But it is also linked to ...
