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The political and economic stagnation common to the largely autocratic Arab regimes has been affecting culture and film continuously. In addition, the introduction of new technologies and the profound change of the regional mediascape have left their mark on local production, especially by pushing young talents with innovative ideas and styles to the fore. There was also the sudden death of Algerian film critic Mouny Berrah, along with other tragic and absurd losses for Arab cinema, namely talented Lebanese director Maroun Baghdadi, who fell into an empty elevator shaft upon return to his homeland, and United States-based Syrian Mustafa al-Akkad, who became the accidental victim of an extremist suicide bombing in Amman. Some Arab filmmakers and authors are meanwhile voicing reservations concerning still-prevalent cinematic, modernist, and individualist elitism. The persistent schism between Arab auteurs and popular mainstream cinema cannot be neglected.

This chapter discusses the cinema of Raj Kapoor. Raj Kapoor's key role in helping to popularise Indian cinema proves to be a worthy starting point in tracing the origins and development of popular narratives and genres. The Kapoor dynasty was paramount in the evolution of mainstream Indian cinema. Indeed, the international success of Awaara (The Vagabond) in 1951 marked the beginning of a decade that would produce some of Indian cinema's most memorable films. The chapter considers a range of areas, comprising of Raj Kapoor's status as an auteur, ideological representations, visual styles ranging from noir to expressionism, the use of song and dance as a narrative tool, and the film's relationship with the wider context of post-partition India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

This chapter examines the centrality of the work of artistic duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki to the project of writing a feminist women's film history by focusing on the aesthetic and conceptual choices they made and on their thought-provoking contributions to feminist film practice. In particular, it considers Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body). The chapter suggests that the female avant-garde film has, paradoxically, been marginalized by feminist film theory's focus on mainstream cinema as a site of patriarchal representation and spectatorship. It shows that Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel represents, for women's cinema, a strategy of dissidence. In form, content, concept, and approach, it calls for a revisitation of “film” outside the canon established in traditional film history. The chapter underscores the need to “heighten the visibility of women's contributions to traditions of formal innovation and explore how formal innovation enables women to enlarge discourses about women's subjectivity” and art.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Rollerball, the 1975 dystopian science fiction film of Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison. Rollerball was based on a short story in Esquire magazine, ‘Roller Ball Murder’, by William Harrison. While the increasingly extreme nature of reality television remains a central framework within which to critically analyse Rollerball, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States in November of 2016 opens up new ways of watching the film and heightens other ways in which it remains relevant. The most obvious of these is Rollerball's depiction of unchecked corporate power. Another aspect of Rollerball's narrative highlighted by the Trump presidency is the rise of so-called ‘fake news’. This book examines how the film simultaneously exhibits the cinematic aesthetics of mainstream, exploitation, and art-house cinema, in the process transcending its commercial prerogative of action entertainment to be a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future.

This chapter discusses the ambivalent relationship between horror and mainstream cinema. Despite horror's niche status, mass audiences are drawn to supernatural elements and themes of peril as a matter of course. However, it is relatively rare for the major studios to fund and distribute out-and-out horror films. This is not to say that the studio system has not colluded to generate financially successful horror and horror that was 'approved' by the industry through sanctioned awards. Nevertheless, it is instructive to note that horror, in general, exists mainly outside the mainstream, and is generally the province of independent production. The chapter then looks at Lionsgate and the marketing of SAW (2004) as a horror text. It also considers the type of horror in SAW, as well as the concept of 'torture porn'.

This chapter presents a background of Michael Reeves, the director of Witchfinder General (1968). Perhaps the best way to understand Reeves is to regard him as a home-grown ‘Movie Brat’. This was the name given to the geeky American cinephiles who were inspired by the critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave. These film-school-educated ‘Brats’ would make a number of innovative genre films which were to revolutionise Hollywood in the 1970s and beyond. Witchfinder General is not notable solely due to its strange status as ‘a disreputable classic’. It also draws on a number of British and American popular forms (such as the costume melodrama, the horror film and the Western). Moreover, it is a striking example of an auteur sensibility in what Robin Wood calls ‘that most discouraging of areas — the British commercial cinema’. Reeves' love of mainstream, Anglophone cinema went hand-in-hand with a rejection of the then-voguish European art cinema.

This chapter explores the development of contemporary documentary theory in the twenty-first century, beginning with the proliferation of documentary films in mainstream cinema and the portrayal of urban spatialities therein. Just as the cinematic city has traditionally been understood as a simple representation of its real counterpart, non-fiction film has also been regarded as a reflection of reality. This approach, however, has shifted in the last decades to the extent that nowadays most film theorists address documentary as a discourse on the real, a line of argument constructed from visual materials that ultimately expresses a point of view on the historical world. The documentary film provides the audience with a window to the historical world that is simultaneously an entrance to its inhabitants' mind, as it takes the viewer to a given time and place to make them understand its contemporary perception and socio-cultural connotations.

This chapter examines Lyès Salem’s popular debut film Masquerades as both a recuperation of the kind of politically neutral, feel-good transcultural entertainment audiences have long expected from mainstream film centers and a critique of the cultural assumptions underpinning such entertainment. Sophisticated in its reworkings of the romantic comedy, as well as its adoption of conventions of verisimilitude, pacing, and character development, Masquerades reminds us that the most whimsical narratives often pack a critical punch, and that genre can challenge as well as vehicle ideology. This chapter argues that beneath its slapstick humor, encoded in dialogues, costumes, and sets, as well as in what remains unseen, lies a particularly Algerian-inflected reflection on the collision of neoliberalism, the ruins of postindependence socialist ideology, and an autocratic state.