This exciting collection of unpublished essays on Ernst Lubitsch addresses multiple gaps in scholarly and critical engagement with the director. His understudied early German films shed light on Jewish culture, on the relation of comedy to gender and the influence of theatre on his filmmaking. The popular historical epics brought Lubitsch an invitation to Hollywood in 1922. There, Lubitsch helped develop the film musical and notably contributed to the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy. Th...

Reveals how objects and technologies function as discursive agents in film, with formal, narrative, and argumentative consequences.From Doors to Screens treats filmic representations of non-filmic technologies as potentially meaningful intermedial encounters, wherein the objects and media represented interact with the basic characteristics of film in ways that affect cinematic expression, meaning-making, and argumentation. Focusing on door...

The topic of "Kafka after Kafka" is a fascinating one: the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics in dialogical exchange with Kafka's works. The present collection of new essays highlights the engagement of lesser knownartists and commentators with Kafka, and represents those who are well known, such as Arendt, Blanchot, Nabokov, and Coetzee, from new perspectives. The eleven essays contained here represent the most recent scholarly engagements with this topic. An essay ...

The strange and wonderful place of Twin Peaks captivated audiences for more than two decades before its long-awaited return to television in 2017. David Lynch and Mark Frost created a land that embodies the politics of American culture. With its focus on small-town America and life outside urban centers, rural and suburban values play a big part in the overall Twin Peaks narrative. More than just a soapy murder investigation or a mysterious puzzle to be solved, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: T...

The idea of a visual manifestation of the work of Franz Kafka was denied by many—first and foremost by Kafka himself, who famously urged his publisher to avoid an image of an insect on the cover of Metamorphosis. Be that as it may, it is unlikely that such a central progenitor of twentieth-century art and thought as Kafka can be fully understood without reference to the revolutionary artistic medium of his century: cinema.Mediamorphosis compiles articles by some o...

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any ...

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles TimesPulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticismLiving by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover...

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed producti...

A practical, hands-on guide - for actors, directors, teachers and students - to Brecht's theory and practice of theatre, with a full set of exercises to help put theory into practice.The Complete Brecht Toolkit examines, one by one, Brecht's many, sometimes contradictory ideas about theatre - and how he put them into practice. Here are explanations of all the famous key terms, such as Alienation Effect, Epic Theatre and Gestus, as well as many others which go to make up wh...

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories-multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large.In these new and r...

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark...

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature fiction films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and als...