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Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to screen adaptation. While – arguably – audiences of children’s adaptations prefer that the adaptation adhere to the source as closely as possible, in the case of metafiction its defining ‘meta’ element does not directly transmediate. Yet a more direct filmic equivalence for metafiction – metafilm – reflects filmicity rather than bookishness. This book studies first what children’s metafiction purports to be and to do for the youth reader (infants to young adults). The second chapter examines the distinctive challenges in adapting children’s metafiction to film. The third chapter presents a number of children’s films, adaptations and not, featuring ‘bookish’ themes, characters, settings, and symbols, and develops a ‘film grammar’ for how these are traditionally depicted. The fourth chapter discusses children’s metafilm and draws from a selection of these films. The final, fifth, chapter presents a sub-type of children’s metafilm adaptations which ‘break the fifth wall’ by reflexively focusing not on a single medium (literature or film) but rather on the adaptation processes themselves. These adaptations are meta-adaptations. The book contains over fifty film stills and a glossary of terms. It discusses works like Inkheart, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the Harry Potter series and the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is grounded in and contributes to contemporary adaptation criticism and theory.

Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.

Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar women’s fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. Interrogating a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, the book takes the reader through the diverse print and storytelling media that women constructed around interwar film-going, arguing that literary forms came to constitute an intermedial gendered cinema culture at this time. Using detailed case studies, this innovative book draws upon new archival research, industrial analysis and close textual readings to consider cinema’s place in the fictions and critical writings of major literary figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry. Through the lens of feminist film historiography, Off to the Pictures presents a bold new view of interwar cinema culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.

Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

Truth and Consequences interrogates the ways in which over two dozen works of fiction and film find meaning in the game show. Writers and filmmakers use the game show intermedially as a metaphor for what it means to be a person, a lover, a family, and a citizen in the media age. Despite media culture’s promises of global equality and connectivity (and one’s efforts to realize that promise), individuals wind up isolated by market-driven deception, wealth, or ethnicity. People use media to achieve greater intimacy with others, but the market nudges them to keep their distance from each other in the name of exploring options. Other networks can still assert themselves, such as the family, but can only sustain themselves if they openly defy and rewrite the rules of the media culture they inhabit. Although America espouses a commitment to democratic freedom, the state partners with imagemakers to make one’s lack of choice entertaining and resistance self-defeating. Amidst these obstacles, Americans still feel called upon to remember, to connect, to buzz in, to answer in the hopes that an escape awaits in the next round, behind the next door.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. Through different theoretical approaches and thematic focuses, the book attempts to contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole by mapping meaningful areas of in-betweenness including the intermedial and interart relations in-between cinema, music, theatre, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, language and the new, digital technologies of the moving image.

In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, interact both with previous or outmoded media and with what we now refer to as New Media? This collection addresses these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions, and diverse forms of entertainment, exploring these sometimes parallel and sometimes more densely intertwined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with, and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing, and thinking both before and after the ‘birth’ of cinema. Contributors examine the interrelations between cinema, literature, painting, photography, and gaming, not only to each other, but amid a host of other minor and major media such as the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone, and the computer. Each chapter provides insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this auto-technological or auto-medial training, allowing audiences to glimpse the many ways they were being conditioned and articulated in the mechanical era by this quintessential example of art form become industry. Comic cinema then considers through its own medial relations to the construction of human perception and consciousness (or aesthetics). Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film adds to the conversation of film comedy in two primary, interrelated ways. One is it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means for staging (or attempting) cultural criticism. Another focuses on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture emergent in the 20th century that cinema helped generate, foster, and question. As a result, comedic film often addresses technology (industrial, mechanical, visual, digital, military, etc.) and techne generally that constitute the grounds of possibility for cinema itself that fall into its purview of self-reflexive cultural criticism. Cinema becomes an important site for producing and critiquing visual technology within US and global cultural politics, examining the status of the mechanically-produced and reproduced moving image, and the thematizing of its own power. In so doing, cinema simultaneously represents itself as a unique medium that is also part of a larger trajectory of visual and audiovisual technologies that have contributed not only to cinema’s formation but also created media environment in which it must function.