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Through contextual and textual analyses, Adjusting the contrast: British television and constructs of race explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of television’s relationship with ‘race’. The collection brings together media scholars from the UK and US, who focus on a range of issues, from television scheduling to historical questions of representation. The collection also seeks to examine how television represents Britishness through whiteness, and continued constructs of racialised normativity. Included are analyses of programmes such as Doctor Who, Shoot the Messenger, Desi DNA andTop Boy, which explore the broadcast policies and cultural production in the 'new age' of television. Other chapters examine the reframing of the 1950s on contemporary television though the example of Call the Midwife; the continuing myth of a multicultural England on Luther, and how sitcoms such as Till Death Us Do Part and Mind Your Language framed racial tensions through comedy. Through a critical analysis of literature and new empirical research, cultures of production are deconstructed, and public service remits examined.

This book is a study linking filmmaking in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) with that in francophone West Africa and examining the factors (including Islam and the involvement of African and French governments) which have shaped post-independence production. The main focus is the development over forty years of two main traditions of African filmmaking: a social realist strand examining the nature of postcolonial society; and a more experimental approach where emphasis is placed on new stylistic patterns able to embrace history, myth, and magic. The work of younger filmmakers born since independence is examined in the light of these two traditions.

Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.

In the early days of cinema, a forgotten master played a major part in the development of feature film and literary adaptation. In France, Albert Capellani directed for Pathé the first versions of Les Misérables (1912) and Germinal (1913), which were greeted as masterpieces worldwide. Capellani moved to the United States in 1915, where he directed some of the greatest stars of the screen, including Clara Kimball Young, Alla Nazimova, and Marion Davies. He even created his own production company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, then the hub of the film industry. Considered one of the greatest filmmakers of the age, Capellani sank into oblivion after his premature death in 1931. Yet cinema made a giant leap forward thanks to the extraordinary visual sense of this artist, who considered filmmaking on a par with drama, literature, and music. In 2010, the Bologna Film Festival organized a retrospective that restored him to the place he deserves in film history. His amazing career is recounted for the first time after in-depth research in archives. This is the first-ever detailed biography of this pioneer, affectionately nicknamed “Cap” by the Americans. This book follows the adventures of a filmmaker who, together with many fellow French directors, technicians, and cameramen, brought to the American film industry the “French touch.”

This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron> (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.

American Documentary Film focuses on the extensive range and history of nonfiction filmmaking in the USA, investigating how documentary films have reflected varied and often competing visions of US culture, history, and national identity. Documentary has long been a negotiated and changing concept: a site of social, intellectual, and aesthetic investment keenly fought over and debated. In this sense documentary films also create a kind of public space: they act as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation; they contribute to the public sphere. This book distills key aspects of the documentary idea while tracing the form's development over time, focusing on the ways documentaries have given shape to the experience and comprehension of a national imaginary. Combining comprehensive overviews with in-depth case studies, Geiger examines the impact of pre- and early cinema, travelogues, the avant-garde, 1930s social documentary, Second World War propaganda, direct cinema, postmodernism and the crisis of ‘truth’, and the new media age.

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self—or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone’s much-maligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration. Others look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the U.S. film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres—from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film—as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic, and the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation. Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change). The subject of this book is how certain American independent films appropriate ritual as a kind of power of the false in order to throw into crisis images – such as the cliché – that pertain to truth via collective comprehension. In his study of genre, Steve Neale (2000) has outlined how certain images and sound tracks can function ritualistically and ideologically; cinema, according to Neale, both creates a horizon of expectations for an audience and also draws upon existing stratifications and categories in order to shore up established identities and modes of thought.

This introduction to American independent cinema offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century to the present and a study of key individual films and film-makers. Readers will develop an understanding of the complex dynamic relations between independent and mainstream American cinema.The main argument revolves around the idea that American independent cinema has developed alongside mainstream Hollywood cinema with institutional, industrial and economic changes in the latter shaping and informing the former. Consequently, the term ‘independent’ has acquired different meanings at different points in the history of American cinema, evolving according to the impact of changing conditions in the American film industry. These various meanings are examined in the course of the book.The book is ordered chronologically, beginning with independent filmmaking in the studio era (examining both top-rank and low-end independent film production), moving to the 1950s and 1960s (discussing both the adoption of independent filmmaking as the main method of production for the Hollywood majors as well as exploitation filmmaking) and finishing with contemporary American independent cinema (exploring areas such as the New Hollywood, the major independent production and distribution companies and the institutionalisation of independent cinema in the 1990s). Each chapter includes a number of case studies which focus on specific films and/or filmmakers, while a number of independent production and distribution companies are also discussed in detail.

In light of their tremendous gains in the political and professional sphere, and their ever-expanding options, why is it that most contemporary American films aimed at women still focus almost exclusively on their pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship? American Postfeminist Cinema explores this question and is the first book to examine the symbiotic relationship between heterosexual romance and postfeminist culture. The book argues that since 1980, postfeminism’s most salient tensions and anxieties have been reflected and negotiated in the American romance film. Case studies of a broad range of Hollywood and independent films reveal how the postfeminist romance cycle is intertwined with contemporary women’s ambivalence and broader cultural anxieties about women’s changing social and political status.

This book is devoted to the multifaceted career of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), who is regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the history of film and radio. It examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theatre, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. It details how Roxy built an influential and prolific career as a film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theatre manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. It relates key aspects of his career: how he helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and movie going become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The book highlights how showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the movie-going experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theatre into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. It explains how Roxy's interest in media convergence also reflected a larger movement in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises and exploit them through content release “events”.

David Holloway's interdisciplinary study of how 9/11 and the war on terror were represented during the Bush era, shows how culture functioned as a vital resource for citizens attempting to make sense of momentous events that frequently seemed beyond their influence or control. Illustrated throughout, the book discusses representation of 9/11 and the war on terror in: Hollywood film; the 9/11 Novel; news media; visual art and photography; contemporary political and historical debates, particularly those about American “empire” and the limits of “republican” governance As well as prompting an international security crisis, and a crisis in international governance and law, Holloway suggests the culture of the time also points to a ‘crisis’ unfolding in the institutions and processes of republican democracy in the U.S. between the September 11 attacks and the Congressional midterm elections in 2006; a crisis he suggests was contained and defused by the cathartic symbolism of the American political process. Holloway presents 9/11 and the war on terror not as a break, rupture or transformation in American history, but as events with deep historical and political roots, whose representation in the Bush-era was generally framed within well-worn cultural and intellectual traditions. The book offers a cultural and ideological history of the period, showing how culture was used by contemporaries to participate in, and to side-step, debate as to the causes, consequences, and implications, of 9/11 and the war on terror.

This is a full-length monograph about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his award-winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. It locates André Téchiné within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian War, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French New Wave. The originality of his sixteen feature films lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national identity as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture and the centre–periphery relationship between Paris, especially his native southwest and the rest of France. The book also looks at the collaborative nature of Téchiné's filmmaking, including his work with Catherine Deneuve, who has made more films with him than with any other director, and the role of Philippe Sarde's musical scores.

Infernal Affairs has received journalistic, popular and corporate notice but little vigorous critical attention. This book explores the way this example of Hong Kong's cinematic eclecticism has crossed borders as a story, a commercial product and a work of art; and has had an undeniable impact on current Hong Kong cinema. Moreover the author uses this film to highlight the way Hong Kong cinema continues to be inextricably intertwined with global film culture and the transnational movie market.

Animators work within a strictly defined, limited space that requires difficult artistic decisions. The blank frame presents a dilemma for all animators, and the decision as to what to include and leave out raises important questions about artistry, authorship, and cultural influence. This book explores how animation has confronted the blank template, and how responses to that confrontation have changed. Focusing on American animation, the book tracks the development of animation in line with changing cultural attitudes toward space and examines innovations that elevated the medium from a novelty to a fully realized art form. From Winsor McCay and the Fleischer brothers to the Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., and Pixar Studios, this book explores the contributions of those who invented animation, those who refined it, and those who, in the current digital age, are using it to redefine the very possibilities of cinema.

Ann Dvorak may not have been the best-known actress of Hollywood’s golden age, but she certainly made her mark. She blazed onto screens in 1932 as Paul Muni’s doomed sister in Scarface, and seemed poised for stardom as a darling of the daring pre-Code era. However, poor business decisions, studio battles with Warner Bros., extended absences, and overbearing husbands torpedoed Ann’s chances of rising to the heights within the structure of the Hollywood studio system like contemporaries Bette Davis and Jean Harlow. Dvorak sued Warner Bros. to get out of her long-term contract, inspiring Davis and James Cagney to follow in her footsteps with their similar, and more well-known cases. Just as her freelance career began gaining steam, she instead choose to literally fly into a war zone, becoming a correspondent and London ambulance driver during World War II. After the war, Dvorak’s career limped along into the early 1950s, as she gave bright performances in generally dim films, then abruptly opted for retirement, and obscurity, in Hawaii. Now, for the first time, the fascinating life and career of Ann Dvorak is explored by Christina Rice, who presents an in-depth look at this complicated woman who briefly took Hollywood by storm but seemed determined to throw away success with both hands and instead became Hollywood’s forgotten rebel.

The pioneering independent filmmaker Ann On-wah Hui has drawn much acclaim for her sensitive portrayals of numerous Hong Kong tragedies and marginalized populations. In a career spanning three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer, and actress for more than thirty films. This work analyzes a 1990 film considered by many to be one of Hui's most haunting and poignant works, Song of the Exile. The semi-autobiographical film depicts a daughter's coming to terms with her mother's Japanese identity. Themes of cross-cultural alienation, divided loyalties, and generational reconciliation resonated strongly amid the migration and displacement pressures surrounding Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Even now, more than a decade after the 1997 Handover, the film is a perennial favorite among returning Hong Kong emigrants and international cinema students alike.

This is a comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. The author sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, and examines the artistic and cultural influences within which his films can be understood. Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan respectively, together with his significant contributions to wartime British cinema, re-established him as one of Britain's leading film makers. Asquith's post-war career includes several pictures in collaboration with Rattigan, and the definitive adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), but his versatility is demonstrated effectively in a number of modest genre films including The Woman in Question (1950), The Young Lovers (1954) and Orders to Kill (1958).