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Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

Tilman Baumgartel (ed.)

The rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, following the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers there, is among the most significant recent developments in global cinema. The advent of ... More

The rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, following the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers there, is among the most significant recent developments in global cinema. The advent of affordable and easy access to digital technology has empowered startling new voices from a part of the world rarely heard or seen in international film circles. The appearance of fresh, sharply alternative, and often very personal voices has had a tremendous impact on local film production. This book documents these developments as a genuine outcome of the democratization and liberalization of film production. Contributions from respected scholars, interviews with filmmakers, personal accounts and primary sources by important directors and screenwriters collectively provide readers with a lively account of dynamic film developments in Southeast Asia. Interviewees include Lav Diaz, Amir Muhammad, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Eric Khoo, Nia Dinata and others.Less

East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema

Michael Gott and Todd Herzog (eds)

Twenty-five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, ten years have passed since the first formerly communist states entered the E.U. and an ... More

Twenty-five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, ten years have passed since the first formerly communist states entered the E.U. and an entire post-Wall generation has now entered adulthood. Yet scholarship on European cinema still tends to divide the continent along the old Cold War lines. This collection is the first to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. The world's leading scholars in the field assemble in this volume to assess the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations, and socio-political debates over the past and the present. The volume focuses on three geographic or linguistic clusters whilst suggesting that the lines are often blurred between them: French- and German-language cinemas as well as more ‘marginal’ and overlooked players in European cinema. Contributions address recent films from or about Armenia, Austria, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Switzerland and the complex and often contradictory notions of East, West and ‘Centre’ that they employ. The volume is grouped around three sections: (1) ‘Redrawing the Lines: De/Re-centring Europe’, (2) ‘Belonging and the “Road to/from Europe”: Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets’ and (3) Spectres of the East. It is the most comprehensive investigation of East/West European cinema in the early 21st century.Less

John Woo’s The Killer

Kenneth E. Hall

Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to an end? However this question is answered, there is a need to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong Cinema. This book distinguishes ... More

Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to an end? However this question is answered, there is a need to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong Cinema. This book distinguishes itself from the other books on the subject by focusing in-depth on individual Hong Kong films, which together make the New Hong Kong Cinema. Though underappreciated in contemporary film criticism, Bullet in the Head is a landmark in John Woo's career as a film director.Less

China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization

Ying Xiao

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an ... More

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an original, pioneering study of the connections and intersections of film, media, music, and popular culture in contemporary China under postsocialist reform, capitalist globalization, and hybridization. It explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock ’n’ roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. This book examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. The research offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world.Less

Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream

Thomas Barker

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local ... More

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.Less

American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image

Anna Backman Rogers

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 ... More

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.Less

Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society

Johnny Walker

Combining industrial research and primary interview material with detailed textual analysis, Contemporary British Horror Cinema looks beyond the dominant paradigms which have explained away British ... More

Combining industrial research and primary interview material with detailed textual analysis, Contemporary British Horror Cinema looks beyond the dominant paradigms which have explained away British horror in the past, and sheds light on one of the most dynamic and distinctive – yet scarcely talked about – areas of contemporary British film production. Considering high-profile theatrical releases, including The Descent, Shaun of the Dead and The Woman in Black, as well as more obscure films such as The Devil’s Chair, Resurrecting the Street Walker and Cherry Tree Lane, Contemporary British Horror Cinema provides a thorough examination of British horror film production in the twenty-first century.Less

Early Cinema in Scotland

John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and María A. Vélez-Serna (eds)

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound ... More

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals. Less

Robert Guédiguian

Joseph Mai

This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes ... More

This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes the case that Guédiguian’s work represents one of the most discretely original but radical projects of contemporary French cinema: to make politically committed films with friends, predominately in a local space, over a long period of time. The book starts with a consideration of the philosophy of friendship and its relation to politics, relation, difference, time, and space. It concentrates on Guédiguian’s early life in the Estaque neighbourhood of Marseilles, where he became politically active and developed the friendships that would continue in his filmmaking, as well as Guédiguian’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. It then examines the political pessimism of the 1980s through Guédiguian’s four early films. The book examines the turn toward local activism and utopianism in the 1990s, and follows Guédiguian’s work as it spreads into diverse experimentation with genres and registers in more recent work. It emphasises Guédiguian’s political assessments and his frequent meditations on history, violence, and utopia. But it returns consistently to the underlying themes of friendship, and thus intervenes at the crossroads of affect, politics, philosophy, and art.Less

A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s

Sally Faulkner

A key decade in world cinema, the 1960s was also a crucial era of change in Spain. This book focuses in depth on this period in Spain, and analyses six films that reflect and interpret these ... More

A key decade in world cinema, the 1960s was also a crucial era of change in Spain. This book focuses in depth on this period in Spain, and analyses six films that reflect and interpret these transformations. The coexistence of traditional and modern values and the timid acceptance of limited change by Franco's authoritarian regime are symptoms of the uneven modernity that characterises the period. Contradiction – the unavoidable effect of that unevenness – is the conceptual terrain explored by these six filmmakers. One of the most significant movements of Spanish film history, the ‘New Spanish Cinema’ art films explore contradictions in their subject matter, yet are themselves the contradictory products of the state's protection and promotion of films that were ideologically opposed to it. The book argues for a new reading of the movement as a compromised yet nonetheless effective cinema of critique, and also demonstrates the possible contestatory value of popular films of the era, suggesting that they may similarly explore contradictions. It therefore reveals the overlaps between art and popular film in the period, and argues that we should see these as complementary rather than opposing areas of cinematic activity in Spain.Less

British Film Directors: A Critical Guide

Robert Shail

British national cinema has produced an exceptional track record of innovative, creative and internationally recognised filmmakers, amongst them Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and David Lean. This ... More

British national cinema has produced an exceptional track record of innovative, creative and internationally recognised filmmakers, amongst them Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and David Lean. This tradition continues today with the work of directors as diverse as Neil Jordan, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. This concise, authoritative volume analyses critically the work of 100 British directors, from the innovators of the silent period to contemporary auteurs. An introduction places the individual entries in context and examines the role and status of the director within British film production. Each entry includes a complete filmography of the director's British work, as well as suggested further reading. The individual career overviews include biographical information and an assessment of the director's current critical standing. Balancing academic rigour with accessibility, British Film Directors provides a reference source for film students at all levels.Less

Regarding the Real: Cinema, documentary, and the visual arts

Des O'Rawe

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, ... More

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.Less

Italian Horror Cinema

Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter (eds)

The first book-length academic investigation of Italian horror cinema, from the silent era to the present, this collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new ... More

The first book-length academic investigation of Italian horror cinema, from the silent era to the present, this collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors (Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and the wider role it has played within popular culture.Less

Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written ... More

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written books and articles, and continues to make films. However, his reputation outside of the German-speaking world still largely rests on his films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This book assembles thirty of the author's essays, speeches, glossaries, and interviews, revolving around the capacity for differentiation and the need for orientation toward ways out of catastrophic modernity. The volume brings together some of the author's most fundamental statements on literature, film, pre- and post-cinematic media, and social theory, nearly all for the first time in English translation. Together, these works highlight a career-spanning commitment to unorthodox, essayistic thinking.Less

Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National

Edna Lim

Celluloid Singapore is not about Singapore cinema per se, or Singapore, but both. It is a ground-breaking study of the three major periods in Singapore cinema’s fragmented history – the golden age ... More

Celluloid Singapore is not about Singapore cinema per se, or Singapore, but both. It is a ground-breaking study of the three major periods in Singapore cinema’s fragmented history – the golden age (50s and 60s), post-studio 70s and revival from the 1990s onwards. Set against the context of Singapore’s own trajectory of development, the book poses two central questions: how can the films of each period be considered Singapore films, and how is this cinema specifically national? Celluloid Singapore argues that the films of these three periods collectively constitute a national cinema through different performances of Singapore, offering a critical framework for understanding this cinema and its history in relation to the development of the country and the national.Less

Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema

Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens, and Lisa Colpaert

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are ... More

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.Less