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Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.

This chapter deals with the key themes of nineteenth-century realism and of Lukács's model of cinematic realism, establishing central themes and characteristics of an intuitionist-realist model of cinematic realism. The focus is on identifying distinctive features of the intuitionist and Lukácsian cinematic realism, and on relating these realist traditions to more general philosophical concerns of realism, and to other forms of contemporary film theory. The chapter assesses the significance of the nineteenth-century Lukácsian and intuitionist-realist traditions in relation to the general and pressing question of the importance of realism by suggesting ways forward for the further development of studies into theories and practices of cinematic realism.

This chapter examines time in contemporary culture. Slowness as an aesthetic practice and a mode of reception features prominently in much contemporary photography and film, defying the fast-paced entertainment conventions and the capitalist commodification of time, as are evident, for example, in recent blockbusters. While mainstream films favor fast-paced cutting, jerky and unfocused panning, or hectic zooming, slow cinema and slow photography embrace grammars of minimalism to interrupt the cult of speed. Slowness in this sense is more than a binary term in opposition to speed: it is an aesthetic art practice that may include the employment of digital or analogue technologies; slow diegesis and slow narrative; the gallery or cinema as a contemplative exhibition or reception space; and a responsive spectatorship. The chapter then debates the concept of slow art in dialogue with international art practice, as exemplified in the performance art of Lee Lozano and Marina Abramović, before analyzing the representation of time in the works of two prominent German photographers: West German Michael Wesely and East German Ulrich Wüst.

Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society charts the rebirth of the British horror film in the twenty-first century, paying close attention to both the cultural and economic factors that contributed to the horror genre’s buoyancy amid UK film production. Using primary research – including data from funding institutions and primary interview material with key industry players – and detailed film analysis, this book will show in what ways horror offered a significant contribution to British film production post-2000, and how it evidenced diversity across a broad spectrum of filmmakers, industrial trends, technologies and social issues.

This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the Indian cinema has acquired evidently postmodern qualities and explains what postmodernism means in the context of Bollywood cinema. It also considers what postmodernism tells us about the change and function of Bollywood film language after the twenty-first century. The book describes Bollywood's ‘postmodern turn’ as a form of transformation that reworks or revisits previous aesthetic trends in order to produce a radically different aesthetic. ‘New Bollywood’ refers to contemporary films characterised by a strong postmodern aesthetic style which was not as present in the 1990s. This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of ‘contemporary Bollywood’, postmodernism as a means of reading and interpreting films, and the structure of the book.

Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including the relation to recent developments in a techno-economical context, as well as this changing context’s impact on modes of viewing. This introductory chapter also briefly reviews existing studies on taxonomies that have so far offered formal-structural approaches to narrative complexity.

This chapter explores two traditions of realist film theory and cinema, namely, ‘intuitionist realist tradition’ and the ‘nineteenth-century Lukácsian tradition’. It examines the rejection of the supposed distinction between a phenomenological and a realist Kracauer, arguing that phenomenology and realism can be discerned within both Kracauer's early and late writings, as part of a sustained critique of mainstream cinema as a force for both the reinforcement of abstraction and dominant ideology, and the liberation of the subject. Realist film theory and cinema attempt to reconnect some gaps, in particular, those that have emerged between categories such as ‘realism’, ‘anti-realism’ and ‘modernism’. The chapter focuses on the substantive assessment of the shared ideas that link the three main theorists within the classical intuitionist realist tradition and of the relationship between realist film theory and relevant aspects of contemporary film theory.

This chapter looks at the ways technologized bodies are designed and engineered, and especially how these processes are gendered. It argues that it is vital to understand the logic and techniques of design and engineering given that many disability experiences are produced through the intersection between body and technology, and the chapter analyses science and speculative fiction and film in which artificial, robotic and cyborg bodies are designed and produced, outlining how this production needs to be understood through a disability lens. The chapter will focus on texts where women are engineered, but also where they undertake the engineering; it also asserts that a disability-inflected conception of female engineering animates contemporary cultural production, highlighting the ideas of subject and community this produces.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the study, which comprises five films that offer complex and sophisticated treatments of the linked themes of nationhood and history. One of the most visible manifestations of the changing narrative can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject. The book then raises the issues of the interpretation of history by fiction in contemporary films; cinema’s ostensible distortion of historical reality; culture’s willingness to substitute glossy images for historical understanding and insight, and the powers that underlie the idealized construction of nationhood. It explores the reshaping of our collective imaginary relation to history, and to nation.

The introduction of Cinema's Bodily Illusions offers an overview of proprioceptive aesthetics as a problem in contemporary film and film theory. It lays out the problems of the book: proprioception and the ecological approach, the critique of modernism, and the technicity of the cinema.

This concluding chapter addresses issues concerning the evaluation of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Russ Meyer's Pussycat remains excluded in the criterion's catalogue of “important classic and contemporary films” marking the “defining moments in cinema”, primarily because the film—like so many other cult films—is dogged by the insistent problem of evaluation. Most cult films distinguish themselves not by how well they meet the criteria by which mainstream movies are measured, but how well and thoroughly they flaunt conventional standards. Cult fans are fond of saying that there is nothing quite like their beloved films, placing a higher value on transgressiveness, novelty, and messiness than on any conventional criteria: hence the preponderance of “bad” movies in the cult canon.

This chapter assesses the images that have been used to depict queer Native people in contemporary narrative film. Contemporary narrative film, which offers the most widely viewed representations of queer Native people, often reenacts fragmenting visions of the erotic. Films like Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing replicate the legacies of settler colonialism in their depictions of Two-Spirit Native people, leaving queer Indigenous people with an untenable choice in which they are “forced to choose.” They must either embrace family and nation in the silence of desire, or embrace sexuality at the expense of tribal and familial alliances.

This chapter explores the horror and fantasy in The Mummy (1932). Universal Pictures' treatments of the vampire and werewolf themes had specific bodies of folklore to draw upon for inspiration, but as The Mummy featured what was for all intents and purposes a new variety of monster, the studio had a blank slate. The film not only introduced audiences to the living mummy Imhotep but also transported them to an entire world of gods, magic, and curses. As well as taking inspiration from weird fiction and popular Egyptology, The Mummy frequently uses contemporary horror films as reference points, synthesising both old and new to create the latest movie monster. In doing so, it established most of the conventions that would be re-used in later mummy films.

Starting from the illuminating example of Julio Cortázar’s 1956 mind-bending short story Continuidad de los parques (Continuity of Parks), this chapter offers an introductory outline of the aims and approaches of this study on narrative complexity in contemporary film. Cortázar’s intricate story generates various questions for its readers that are related to the topics explored in this book. What do such puzzling and enigmatic stories do in cinema? How do viewers make them work? What difficulties do they pose? What is engaging about these stories’ challenges, and what do audiences draw from these experiences?