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...