New European Cinema offers a compelling response to the changing cultural shapes of Europe, charting political, aesthetic, and historical developments through innovative readings of some of the most popular and influential European films of the 1990s. Made around the time of the revolutions of 1989 but set in post-World War II Europe, these films grapple with the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Balkans, and a growing sense of historical loss and disenchantment felt across the continent. They represent a period in which national borders became blurred and the events...

"Art cinema" has for over fifty years defined how audiences and critics imagine film outside Hollywood, but surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. And yet in the last thirty years art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of East Asian and Latin American new waves, the reinvigoration of European film, the success of Iranian directors, and the rise of the film festival have transformed the landscape of world cinema. This book brings into focus art cinema's core internationalism, demonstrating its centrality to understanding film as a...

Film culture often rejects visually rich images, treating simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as the more provocative, political, and truly cinematic choice. Cinema may challenge traditional ideas of art, but its opposition to the decorative represents a long-standing Western aesthetic bias against feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal, colonial perspective--which treats decorative style as foreign or sexually perverse--filmmakers, critics, and theorists have often denigrated colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions in...

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to...