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      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        June 2024

        Round our way

        Sam Hanna's visual legacy

        by Heather Nicholson

        Sam Hanna (1903-96), a pioneering filmmaker from Burnley, Lancashire, was dubbed the 'Lowry of filmmaking' by BBC broadcaster Brian Redhead in the 1980s. The well-meant label stuck, even though it misses the variety of Hanna's remarkable output. Hanna's intimate glimpses into the lives of strangers enable us to imagine the possible stories that lie behind the images. Away from mid-century exponents of documentary filmmaking and photography, Hanna shows us humanity and a microcosm of a world in change, where his subjects are caught up in issues far beyond their grasp that we, as onlookers years later, encounter and see afresh. Written and curated by historian Heather Norris Nicholson, Round our way combines stills, essays and archive photography to document Hanna's unique visual record on film, particularly in northern England, but also further afield, during decades of profound change.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2022

        The looking machine

        Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking

        by David MacDougall

        This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, MacDougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers

        Theory, practice and difference

        by Parvati Nair, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

        This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        June 2024

        Gendered urban violence among Brazilians

        Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London

        by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans

        This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.

      • Trusted Partner
        Film, TV & radio
        May 2012

        Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema

        by Edited by Lisa Shaw and 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
        December 2019

        Screening the Paris suburbs

        From the silent era to the 1990s

        by Philippe Met, Annie Fourcaut, Roland-François Lack, Jean-Louis Pautrot, Keith Reader, Margaret Flinn, Eric Bullot, Tristan Jean, Malcolm Turvey, Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, Térésa Faucon, Philippe Met, Camille Canteux, Derek Schilling, Guillaume Soulez, David Vasse, Derek Schilling

        Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social types in which to anchor their fictions, from bourgeois villas and bucolic riverside cafés to post-war housing estates and postmodern new towns. For the first time in English, contributors to this volume address key aspects of this long film history, marked by such towering figures as Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard. Idyllic or menacing, expansive or claustrophobic, the suburb served divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes across the better part of a century. Themes central to French cultural modernity - class conflict, leisure, boredom and anti-authoritarianism - cut across the fifteen chapters.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2013

        Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil

        by Luciana Martins, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil provides a major contribution to the field of visual culture through a study of still and moving images of Brazil in the first four decades of the twentieth century, when the camera played a key role in making Brazilian peoples and places visible to a variety of audiences. The book explores what is distinctive about the visual representation of Brazil in an era of modernisation, also attending to the significance of the different technical properties of film and photography for the writing of new histories of visual technologies. It offers new insights into the work of key writers, photographers, anthropologists and filmmakers, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mário de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker. Unearthing a wealth of materials from archives in the USA, Britain, and Brazil, the book seeks to contribute to the postcolonial theoretical project of pinpointing locally distinctive histories of visual technologies and practices. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2012

        Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers

        Theory, practice and difference

        by Parvati Nair, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

        This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        July 2025

        Ida Lupino

        Multifaceted performer and cinematic pioneer

        by Gillian Kelly

        This book contributes to a welcome new wave focusing on the importance of female filmmakers, providing a reappraisal of Ida Lupino, a cinematic figure of significant importance. Given her ability to move between popular and independent cinemas and her status as both a Hollywood star and director/writer/producer of socially relevant films overlooked by the mainstream, Lupino is a particularly interesting case study. Employing a range of critical approaches, including feminist theory, auteur theory and critical theory, this book investigates key themes and motifs that developed across Lupino's unusual and unique career as one of the most significant female players in film history. Investigating her oeuvre as actress, director, writer and producer, it discusses Lupino as a complex and important filmmaker whose career, on both sides of the camera, requires substantially more critical attention than it has been awarded thus far.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2013

        British films of the 1970s

        by Paul Newland

        British films of the 1970s offers highly detailed and insightful critical analysis of a range of individual films of the period. This analysis draws upon an innovative range of critical methodologies which place the film texts within a rich variety of historical contexts. The book sets out to examine British films of the 1970s in order to get a clearer understanding of two things - the fragmentary state of the filmmaking culture of the period, and the fragmentary nature of the nation that these films represent. It argues that there is no singular narrative to be drawn about British filmmaking in the 1970s, other than the fact that these films offer evidence of a Britain (and ideas of Britishness) characterised by vicissitudes. While this was a period of struggle and instability, it was also a period of openings, of experiment, and of new ideas. Newland looks at many films, including Carry On Girls, O Lucky Man!, That'll be the Day, The Shout, and The Long Good Friday. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        The looking machine

        by David MacDougall, Paul Henley, Andrew Irving

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Monstrous adaptations

        Generic and thematic mutations in horror film

        by Richard Hand, Jay McRoy

        The fifteen groundbreaking essays contained in this book address the concept of adaptation in relation to horror cinema. Adaptation is not only a key cultural practice and strategy for filmmakers, but it is also a theme of major importance within horror cinema as a hole. The history of the genre is full of adaptations that have drawn from fiction or folklore, or that have assumed the shape of remakes of pre-existing films. The horror genre itself also abounds with its own myriad transformations and transmutations. The essays within this volume engage with an impressive range of horror texts, from the earliest silent horror films by Thomas Edison and Jean Epstein through to important contemporary phenomena, such as the western appropriation of Japanese horror motifs. Classic works by Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara receive cutting-edge re-examination, as do unjustly neglected works by Mario Bava, Guillermo del Toro and Stan Brakhage.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Reframing difference

        Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France

        by Carrie Tarr

        Reframing difference is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, cinema beur (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and cinema de banlieue (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassovitz and Djamel Bensalah. Her analyses compare the work of male and female, majority and minority film-makers, and emphasise the significance of authorship in the representation of gender and ethnicity. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French. This timely book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between cinema and citizenship in a multicultural society.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Spanish cinema 1973–2010

        Auteurism, politics, landscape and memory

        by Maria M. Delgado, Robin Fiddian

        This collection offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinema production following the isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The seventeen key films analysed in the volume span a period of 35 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. They encompass different genres (horror, thriller, melodrama, social realism, documentary), both popular (Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and more select art house fare (En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia, El espíritu de la colmena/Spirit of the Beehive) and are made in English (as both first and second language), Basque, Castilian, Catalan and French. Offering an expanded understanding of 'national' cinemas, the volume explores key works by Guillermo del Toro and Lucrecia Martel alongside an examination of the ways in which established auteurs (Almodóvar, José Garci, Carlos Saura) and younger generations of filmmakers (Cesc Gay, Amenábar, Bollaín) have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state. The result is a bold new study of the ways in which film has created new prisms that have determined how Spain is positioned in the global marketplace.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2019

        Bertrand Tavernier

        by Lynn Anthony Higgins

        Bertrand Tavernier is widely recognized as the leading French filmmaker of his generation. Both a consummate artist and a controversial public figure, he is a passionate advocate for social causes and also a tireless defender of world cinema in general and the French cinematic heritage in particular. Lynn Higgins' book offers a guided tour through Tavernier's oeuvre, taking into account both its prodigious diversity and its unifying themes. It explores his use of genre and adaptation, his work with actors and his affection for characters, his treatment of France's colonial history, his explorations of the powers of art and the complexities of intergenerational relations, both among fictional characters and within French cinema history. This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly book about Tavernier. Original and lively, sophisticated and engaging, the book will appeal to anyone interested in film studies, gender studies, and French cultural studies including academics, students, cinema enthusiasts, and Tavernier fans.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Postcolonial African cinema

        Ten directors

        by David Murphy, Patrick Williams

        This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2010

        Humphrey Jennings

        by Keith Beattie, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard

        Humphrey Jennings has been described as the only real poet that British cinema has produced. His documentary films are remarkable records of Britain at peace and war, and his range of representational approaches transcended accepted notions of wartime propaganda and revised the strict codes of British documentary film of the 1930s and 1940s. Poet, propagandist, surrealist and documentary filmmaker - Jennings' work embodies an outstanding mix of startling apprehension, personal expression and representational innovation. This book carefully examines and expertly explains the central components of Jennings' most significant films, and considers the relevance of his filmmaking to British cinema and contemporary experience. Films analysed include Spare Time, Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, The Silent Village, A Diary for Timothy and Family Portrait. ;

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