Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. We experience narrative in words, pictures, and film, yet regardless of how the tale is told, story remains independent from the media that makes it concrete. Narrative follows humans wherever they travel and adapts readily to new forms of communication. Constantly evolving and always up-to-date, narrative is a nece...

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. Soundtrack Available fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs fro...

Virtual Voyages illuminates the pivotal role of travelogues within the history of cinema. The travelogue dominated the early cinema period from 1895 to 1905, was central to the consolidation of documentary in the 1910s and 1920s, proliferated in the postwar era of 16mm distribution, and today continues to flourish in IMAX theaters and a host of non-theatrical venues. It is not only the first chapter in the history of documentary but also a key element of ethnographic film, home mo...

Film/Genre revises our notions of film genre and connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played and recognises that the term 'genre' has different meanings for different groups, basing his new genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discussing a huge range of films from The Great Train Robbery to

The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as wel...

A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship in nearly thirty essays on a wide variety of such comics forms as gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels.The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements o...

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between.Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Deny...

This essential core textbook provides an approachable and extensive introduction to film theory, written by two highly experienced senior lecturers. Bringing a fresh, contemporary and accessible approach to what is often perceived to be a challenging and old-fashioned area of film studies that requires time and effort to grasp, the text illustrates why theory is important and demonstrates how it can be applied in a meaningful way. The book's sixteen chapters are clear and comprehensive and...

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Auth...

Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975–2001 brings together essays by filmmakers, exhibitors, cultural critics and scholars from multiple generations of the New York Downtown scene to illuminate individual films and filmmakers and explore the creation of a Downtown Canon, the impact of AIDS on younger filmmakers, community access to cable television broadcasts, and the impact of the historic downtown scene on contemporary experimental culture. The book includes J. Hoberman’s essay ‘No ...

A comprehensive overview of the film industry in Hollywood today, Contemporary Hollywood Cinema brings together leading international cinema scholars to explore the technology, institutions, film makers and movies of contemporary American film making.

The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before.Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global ...