Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - History & Criticism

Unlike the bulk of soft-core pornography, direct-to-video erotic thriller films are made specifically to appeal to women. Nina K. Martin argues that this makes them a valuable resource for investigating female sexuality, subjectivity, and gender construction, and her Sexy Thrills is the first study to use them to examine the construction of female desire.

The heroines of these productions have overtly sexual adventures, often dabbling in a variety of sex work positions--including call girl,...

At a time when gimmicky, action-driven blockbusters ruled Hollywood, Jim Jarmusch spearheaded a boom in independent cinema by making low-budget films focused on intimacy, character, and new takes on classical narratives. His minimal form, peculiar pacing, wry humor, and blank affect have since been adopted by directors including Sophia Coppola, Hal Harley, Richard Linklater, and Wong Kar-Wai. Juan A. Suarez's Jim Jarmusch analyzes the director's work from three mutually implicated perspectives: in relation to independent...

James Morrison's Roman Polanski offers one of the most comprehensive and critically engaged treatments ever written on Polanski's work. Tracing the filmmaker's remarkably diverse career from its beginnings to the present, the book provides commentary on all the major films in their historical, cultural, social, and artistic contexts. By locating Polanski's work within the genres of comedy and melodrama, Morrison argues that the director is not merely obsessed with the theme of repression, but that his true interest is in the...

This lively study unpacks the intersecting racial, sexual, and gender politics underlying the representations of racialized bodies, masculinities, and femininities in early 1970s black action films, with particular focus on the representation of black femininity. Stephane Dunn explores the typical, sexualized, subordinate positioning of women in low-budget blaxploitation action narratives as well as more seriously radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in which black women are typically portrayed as trifling "bitches" compared...

"There is hardly a page in this collection of hard-thought and brilliantly written essays that does not yield some new insight." --Hayden White

..". de Lauretis's writing is brisk and refreshingly lucid." --International Film Guide

..". less about film than about the psychology of the viewing experience." American Film

Employing Freudian psychoanalysis, Christian Metz explores the nature of cinematic spectatorship and looks at the operations of meaning in the film text.

The decade of the 1960s encompassed a "New Wave" of films whose makers were rebels, challenging cinematic traditions and the culture at large. The films of the New Wave in Japan have, until now, been largely overlooked. Eros plus Massacre (taking its title from a 1969 Yoshida Yoshishige film) is the first major study devoted to the examination and explanation of Japanese New Wave film.

Desser organizes his volume around the defining motifs of the New Wave. Chapters examine in depth such themes as youth, identity, sexuality, and women, as they are revealed in the Japanese film of the...

..". a model of genre criticism and probably the best overall analysis of the film musical to date."
Journal of Popular Films and Television

"The American Film Musical is a truly admirable book which is well worth making a song and dance about. It will immediately assume biblical authority for all who are seriously interested in the dream-factory's most lavish fantasies, and it may even come to stand as a landmark in our understanding of Hollywood as a whole.... Altman's book is thorough, well informed and warmly good-humored. It has brought the study of musical films out of the...

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory. She creates a dialogue among theory and popular culture and politics through inventive readings of the films of Owen...

Explorations in Film Theory is a selection of some of the most influential articles which originally appeared in Cine-Tracts one of the journals which helped define contemporary film theory. The articles represent crucial ideas and theories in the areas of film and communications studies, feminist studies, and film history. They challenge the way theoreticians and filmmakers have not come to grips with sexual difference, and they raise questions about image and how images produce meaning. Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Dziga-Vertov, pornography, educational television, and the New German...

Before turning to filmmaking, Francois Truffaut was a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950s. The Early film Criticism of Francois Truffaut makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals such as Cahiers du Cinema and Arts. Truffaut discusses films by such acknowledged masters as Hitchcock, Huston, Dymytryk, and Lang, but also examines the work of such lesser-known directors as Robert Wise, Don Weis, and Roger Vadim.

Amateur film has been seen as the junkheap of private culture. Yet music videos recycle home movies as authenticity; commercials copy its style to sell intimacy; documentaries use it to recount history "from below."

Reel Families is the first historical study of amateur film, the most pervasive of media. Patricia Zimmerman charts the history of this medium from 1897 to the present, examining how ideological, technical, and social constraints have stunted amateur film's potential for extending media production beyond corporate monopolies and into the hands of everyday people. She...

"The Geopolitical Aesthetic is a dazzling... distillation and application of the theoretical system he first presented in The Political Unconscious (1981)." The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary...

"This anthology of essays on Steven Spielberg's 1993 film is a solid achievement. It is a repository of considerable critical insight and frequently passionate argument." Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"An excellent collection; highly recommended for general readers and students at all levels." Choice

"This collection of essays opens further the debate on how to represent the Holocaust as Holocaust representation and memory move into ever-greater areas of daily American and Jewish American culture." Tikkun

Schindler s List not only afforded director Steven Spielberg a...