This book was first published in 2009. Apollo was the ancient god of light and the divine patron of the arts. He is therefore a fitting metaphor for... cinematography, which is the modern art of writing with moving light. This book interprets films as visual texts and provides the first systematic theoretical and practical demonstration of the affinities between Greco-Roman literature and the cinema. It examines major themes from classical myth and history such as film portrayals of gods, exemplified by Apollo and the Muses; Oedipus, antiquity's most influential mythic-tragic hero; the question of heroism and patriotism in war; and the representation of women like Helen of Troy and Cleopatra as products of male desire and fantasy. Covering a wide range of European and American directors, genres and classical authors, this study provides an innovative perspective on the two disciplines of classics and cinema and demonstrates our most influential medium's unlimited range when it adapts ancient texts.

"The most lucid, complex and brilliant analysis of the Fifth Generation Film (indeed of the entire 'generations' phenomenon in the People's Republic... of China) that I have ever seen."—Ella Shohat, City University of New YorkDai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In the book she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyzes the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tienanmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.

Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno--affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument--developed an astute... philosophical critique of modernity in which technological media played a key role. This book explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin's artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture evolves in response to digital technology.

Since the late 1960s, films from Latin America have won widening audiences in North America and Europe. Until now, no single book has offered an... introduction to the diverse personalities and practices that make up this important regional film movement. In Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, Julianne Burton presents twenty interviews with key figures of Latin American cinema, covering three decades and ranging from Argentina to Mexico. Interviews with pioneers Fernando Birri, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Glauber Rocha, renowned feature filmmakers Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Carlos Diegues, prize-winning documentarists Patricio Guzmán and Helena Solberg-Ladd, among others, endeavor to balance personal achievement against the backdrop of historical, political, social, and economic circumstances that have influenced each director's career. Presented also are conversations that cast light on the related activities of acting, distribution, theory, criticism, and film-based community organizing. More than their counterparts in other regions of the world, Latin American artists and intellectuals acknowledge the degree to which culture is shaped by history and politics. Since the mid-1950s, a period of rising nationalism and regional consciousness, talented young artists and activists have sought to redefine the uses of the film medium in the Latin American context. Questioning the studio and star systems of the Hollywood industrial model, these innovators have developed new forms, content, and processes of production, distribution, and reception. The specific approaches and priorities of the New Latin American Cinema are far from monolithic. They vary from realism to expressionism, from observational documentary to elaborate fictional constructs, from "imperfect cinema" to a cinema that emulates the high production values of the developed sectors, from self-reflexive to "transparent" cinematic styles, from highly industrialized modes of production to purely artisanal ones. What does not vary is the commitment to film as a vehicle for social transformation and the expression of national and regional cultural autonomy. From early alternative cinema efforts in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba to a contemporary perspective from within the Mexican commercial industry to the emerging cinema and video production from Central America, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America offers the most comprehensive look at Latin American film available today.

The story of Soviet film in the period covered by Peter Kenez is central to the history of world cinema. The author explores the roots of Soviet cinema... in the film heritage of pre-Revolutionary Russia; the changes in content, style, technical means, and production capacities generated by the Revolution of 1917; the constraints on form and subject imposed from the 1930s in the name of Socialist Realism; the relative freedom of expression accorded to film-makers during World War Two; and the extraordinary repression during the final years of the Stalin era.

This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship... between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.

Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the... relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums.

Following the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, young bohemian artists rushed to the newly formed Nicaraguan national film institute INCINE to contribute... to "the recovery of national identity" through the creation of a national film project. Over the next eleven years, the filmmakers of INCINE produced over seventy films--documentary, fiction, and hybrids--that collectively reveal a unique vision of the Revolution drawn not from official FSLN directives, but from the filmmakers' own cinematic interpretations of the Revolution as they were living it.This book examines the INCINE film project and assesses its achievements in recovering a Nicaraguan national identity through the creation of a national cinema. Using a wealth of firsthand documentation--the films themselves, interviews with numerous INCINE personnel, and INCINE archival records--Jonathan Buchsbaum follows the evolution of INCINE's project and situates it within the larger historical project of militant, revolutionary filmmaking in Latin America. His research also raises crucial questions about the viability of national cinemas in the face of accelerating globalization and technological changes which reverberate far beyond Nicaragua's experiment in revolutionary filmmaking.

This volume aims both to establish cinema as a vital force in Shanghai culture and to direct attention to early Chinese cinema, a crucial chapter in... Chinese cultural history long neglected by Western scholars.The editor’s introduction surveys the history and historiography of Chinese cinema through the 1940’s and identifies subjects and sources that await further research. In Part I, “Screening Romance,” Zhen Zhang discusses how the influence of teahouse culture gradually yielded to cinematic and narrative concerns in the early 1920’s. Kristine Harris’s analysis of a costume drama reveals the director’s cultural heritage and a rich psychological subtext created by new film techniques. Leo Ou-fan Lee examines the ways various urban institutions were utilized to promote a certain type of film culture in Shanghai.In Part II, “Imaging Sexuality,” Andrew Field traces the public perception of cabaret girls in Shanghai, and Michael Chang studies the discursive processes by which three generations of early movie stars were elevated to stardom. Yingjin Zhang contends that prostitution was a focal point in the urban imagination and that its public presentation furnished Chinese filmmakers with a highly contested space for projecting different ideologies.In Part III, “Constructing Identity,” Zhiwei Xiao examines the role Nationalist film censorship played in promoting a new national culture, and Sue Tuohy locates in film music a wide range of conflicting ideals and models. Shelley Stephenson brings us to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where a Manchurian-born, Chinese-educated Japanese film star masked her true identity.Representing the disciplines of film, literature, and ethnomusicology, the contributors seek to redefine concepts of cinema and urban culture in Chinese historiography. The volume will appeal to scholars whose interests lie, not just in film studies and Chinese history, but in the fields of modernity, urban studies, and popular culture.

This collection charts the terrain of contemporary Japanese animation, one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of... transnational cultural production in the last twenty-five years. The essays offer bold and insightful engagement with anime's concerns with gender identity, anxieties about body mutation and technological monstrosity, and apocalyptic fantasies. The contributors dismantle the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and offer compelling arguments for the value and importance of the study of anime and popular culture as a key link in the translation from the local to the global.

Cinema: A Visual Anthropology provides a clear and concise summary of the key ideas, debates, and texts of the most important approaches to the study of... fiction film from around the world.  The book examines ways to address film and film experience beyond the study of the audience. Cross-disciplinary in scope, Cinema uses ideas and approaches both from within and outside of anthropology to further students' knowledge of and interest in fiction film.   Including selected, global case studies to highlight and exemplify important issues, the book also contains suggested Further Reading for each chapter, for students to expand their learning independently. Exploring fundamental methods and approaches to engage this most interesting and vibrant of media, Cinema will be essential reading for students of anthropology and film. Edited by Marcus Banks, Key Texts in the Anthropology of Visual and Material Culture is an innovative series of accessible texts designed for students. Each volume concisely introduces and analyses core topics in the study of visual anthropology and material culture from a distinctively anthropological perspective.

After the modern Mexican state came into being following the Revolution of 1910, hyper-masculine machismo came to be a defining characteristic of... "mexicanidad," or Mexican national identity. Virile men (pelados and charros), virtuous prostitutes as mother figures, and minstrel-like gay men were held out as desired and/or abject models not only in governmental rhetoric and propaganda, but also in literature and popular culture, particularly in the cinema. Indeed, cinema provided an especially effective staging ground for the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity.In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity. In particular, his analyses of Mexican cinematic icons Pedro Infante and Gael García Bernal and of Arturo Ripstein's cult film El lugar sin límites illuminate cinema's role in fostering distinct figurations of masculinity, queer spectatorship, and gay male representations. De la Mora completes this exciting interdisciplinary study with an in-depth look at how the Mexican state brought about structural changes in the film industry between 1989 and 1994 through the work of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), paving the way for a renaissance in the national cinema.

The new edition will be printed in full color. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a single movie and includes aids for students watching the... film, discussing and writing about the film, and understanding the film in a broader cultural context. Each chapter contains vocabulary helpful to understanding and discussing the film, structured exercises in understanding the film once it has been viewed especially for discussion in class and, new to the second edition, an accompanying reading for each film designed to provide perspective on the film itself. This best-selling textbook, by author Anne-Christine Rice, continues to define language learning through film. New features! More cultural, historical and literary information about the film and its story. New and additional readings. A new section for each film dealing with art.

This best-selling textbook, by author Anne-Christine Rice, has defined the market of language learning through film. NEW IN THE 2ND EDITION: - 4... new films - Supplementary reading selections (Historical documents, literary works, interviews, critiques and excerpts from screenplays) - Critical analysis of the original French dialogues and their English subtitles - Expanded biographies of the directors and actors - Enhanced focus on cultural understanding and research - Exploration of parallels between films