Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2014

        The British Film Institute, the government and film culture, 1933–2000

        by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Christophe Dupin

        The British Film Institute (BFI) is one of the UK's oldest and most important government-supported cultural institutions. From a modest start in the 1930s it grew rapidly after the war to encompass every kind of film-related activity from production to archiving to exhibition to education. At the beginning of the twenty-first century its turnover was approaching £30m and it had become a central point of reference for anyone whose interest in film stretched beyond what's on at the local multiplex. There was nothing straightforward about this rise to prominence. It was achieved in the face of government indifference, active obstruction from the film trade, internecine warfare within the organisation and fierce contestation on the part of the BFI's own core public. Based on intensive original research in the BFI's own voluminous archives and elsewhere, this book examines the interplay of external and internal forces that led to the BFI's unique development as a multi-faceted public body. This volume will be a treasure trove for anyone interested in film and the workings of cultural institutions, or more generally in twentieth-century British film history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Film theory & criticism
        November 2015

        Swedish crime fiction

        Novel, film, television

        by Steven Peacock

        Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting first with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films and onto English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the rich history of 'Scandinavian noir', examines the appeal of this particular genre and attempts to reveal why it is distinct from the plethora of other crime fictions. Examining the popularity of Steig Larsson's international success with his Millennium trilogy, as well as Henning Mankell's Wallander across the various media, Peacock also tracks some lesser-known novels and television programmes. He illustrates how the bleakness of the country's 'noirs' reflects particular events and cultural and political changes, with the clash of national characteristics becoming a key feature. It will appeal to students and researchers of crime fiction and of film and television studies, as well as the many fans of the novels and dramatic representations.

      • Trusted Partner
        Film theory & criticism
        February 2014

        The Encyclopedia of British Film

        Fourth edition

        by Edited by Brian McFarlane

        With well over 6,300 articles, including over 500 new entries, this fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of British Film is a fully updated invaluable reference guide to the British film industry. It is the most authoritative volume yet, stretching from the inception of the industry to the present day, with detailed listings of the producers, directors, actors and studios behind a century or so of great British cinema. Brian McFarlane's meticulously researched guide is the definitive companion for anyone interested in the world of film. Previous editions have sold many thousands of copies and this fourth edition will be an essential work of reference for enthusiasts interested in the history of British cinema, and for universities and libraries.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2006

        Art history

        A critical introduction to its methods

        by Michael Hatt, Charlotte Klonk

        Art History: A critical introduction to its methods provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history's own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates. By explaining the underlying philosophical and political assumptions behind each method, along with clear examples of how these are brought to bear on visual and historical analysis, the authors show that an adherence to a certain method is, in effect, a commitment to a set of beliefs and values. The book makes a strong case for the vitality of the discipline and its methodological centrality to new fields such as visual culture. This book will be of enormous value to undergraduate and graduate students, and also makes its own contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about theory and method. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2016

        Capital and popular cinema

        The dollars are coming!

        by Valentina Vitali

        Popular cinema has mostly been discussed from a 'cult' perspective that celebrates uncritically its 'transgressive' qualities. Capital and popular cinema responds to the need for a more solid academic approach by situating 'low' film genres in their economic and culturally-specific contexts and by exploring the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films' aesthetics. Through the examination of three different cycles in film production - the Italian giallo of Mario Bava, the Mexican films of Fernando Méndez, and the Hindi horror cinema of the Ramsay Brothers - Capital and popular cinema proposes a comparative approach that accounts for the whole of a national film industry's production ('popular' and 'canonic'), and is applicable to the study of film genres globally. Based on new research, Capital and popular cinema will be of interest to undergraduate and post-graduate students, researchers and scholars of cult and exploitation cinema, genre cinema, national cinema, film and media theory, and area studies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 1996

        Analysing performance

        A critical reader

        by Patrick Campbell

        Each chapter in this important critical reader tackles the theory and practice of modern performance work, and enables students and teachers to see what is at stake in analysing dance, drama, music and videos using contemporary critical theories. Including Elizabeth Wright on psychoanalysis, Baz Kershaw on the politics of performance, Jatinder Verma on multiculturalism, E. Ann Kaplan on MTV and video, Lizabeth Goodman on feminism and AIDS, Stephen Connor on postmodernism and many others. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2016

        The child in Spanish cinema

        by Sarah Wright

        In this, the first full-length treatment of the child in Spanish cinema, Sarah Wright explores the ways that the cinematic child comes to represent 'prosthetic memory'. The central theme of the child and the monster is used to examine the relationship of the self to the past, and to cinema. Concentrating on films from the 1950s to the present day, the book explores religious films, musicals, 'art-house horror', science-fiction, social realism and fantasy. It includes reference to Erice's The Spirit of The Beehive, del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Mañas's El Bola and the Marisol films. The book also draws on a century of filmmaking in Spain and intersects with recent revelations concerning the horrors of the Spanish past. The child is a potent motif for the loss of historical memory and for its recuperation through cinema. This book is suitable for scholars and undergraduates working in the areas of Spanish cinema, Spanish cultural studies and cinema studies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2016

        Acts and apparitions

        Discourses on the real in performance practice and theory, 1990–2010

        by Elizabeth Tomlin

        Acts and apparitions examines how new performance practices from the 1990s to the present day have been driven by questions of the real and the ensuing political implications of the concept's rapidly disintegrating authority. This book departs significantly from existing scholarship on contemporary performance in its rejection of the dramatic/postdramatic binary and its interrogation of previous applications of Derridean poststructuralism to theatrical representation and notions of the real. It offers new perspectives on the political analysis of contemporary theatre and performance across a wide range of models from Forced Entertainment and the Wooster Group, to Roland Schimmelpfennig and Howard Barker; from verbatim theatre to audio tours and the interactive performances of Ontroerend Goed. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2015

        Classical Hollywood cinema

        Point of view and communication

        by James Zborowski

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2016

        Capital and popular cinema

        The dollars are coming!

        by Valentina Vitali

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2016

        The documentary diaries

        Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker

        by Alan Rosenthal

        How do you make a successful documentary in an era of media turmoil, network disruption and increasing financial restrictions? This is the question Alan Rosenthal, distinguished international filmmaker and teacher, sets out to answer in The documentary diaries. Using seven of his recent releases as case studies - ranging from high-budget historical and political documentaries to shoestring observational films and hybrid docudramas - he explores with style and humour the challenges facing the contemporary documentarian, and demonstrates how they can be overcome. Numerous aspects of film production are examined, notably proposal and script writing, fund raising, managing co-productions, dealing with commissioning editors and choosing distributors. Additional mini-chapters provide extra perspective on key topics, and the book is completed by a wealth of supplementary material, including excerpts from script drafts, variations on proposals and discussions of marketing strategies. The documentary diaries offers piercing insights into the world of documentary filmmaking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals alike. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2016

        Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’

        Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire

        by Jeff Rosen

        The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle and Darwin. However, Cameron also made numerous photographs that she called 'Fancy subjects', depicting scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and Biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. This book is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron's use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News, cabinet photographs and autotype prints, textiles and wall paper, book illustrations and lithographs from period folios, all as a way to contextualise the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her 'Fancy subjects' and popular debates about such topics as Biblical interpretation, democratic government and colonial expansion. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2016

        Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema

        by Lisa Shaw, Robert Stone

        In this volume, eighteen experts from a variety of academic backgrounds explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. This volume illustrates how - rather than simply helping to tell the story of - songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex and rich subject for analysis. Screening songs... constitutes a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary collection. Of particular interest to scholars and academics in the areas of Film Studies, Hispanic Studies, Lusophone Studies and Musicology, this volume opens up the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cinema to vital, new, critical approaches. The soundtracks of films as varied as City of God, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Buena Vista Social Club are analysed alongside those of lesser-known works that range from the melodramas of Mexican cinema's golden age to Brazilian and Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Fiction films are studied alongside documentaries, the work of established directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Nelson Pereira dos Santos alongside that of emerging filmmakers, and performances by iconic stars like Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas alongside the songs of Spanish Gypsy groups, Mexican folk songs and contemporary Brazilian rap. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2016

        Space and being in contemporary French cinema

        by James S. Williams

        This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world. The book proposes that we think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies. Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser) ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2015

        Classical Hollywood cinema

        Point of view and communication

        by James Zborowski

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2016

        The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

        by Nuria Triana-Toribio, Andy Willis, Deborah Martin

        The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. The book situates Martel's features and unstudied short films in relation to trends in recent national and international filmmaking. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms. ;

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter