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1
MS-DOS 6 companion: The comprehensive reference that fully explores the power and features of MS-DOS 6. Richmond, Wash: Microsoft Press, 1993.
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Jayamanne, Laleen. Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463726245.
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Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor - a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.
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Canada. Dept. of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Aviation : convention on the marking of plastic explosives for the purpose of detection (with annex and declaration), Montreal, March 1, 1991, signed by Canada March 1, 1991, ratified by Canada November 29, 1996, in force June 21, 1998, in force for Canada June 21, 1998 =: Aviation : convention sur le marquage des explosifs plastiques et en feuilles aux fins de détection (avec annexe et déclaration), Montréal, le 1er mars 1991, signé par le Canada le 1er mars 1991, ratification du Canada le 29 novembre 1996, en vigueur le 21 juin 1998, en vigueur pour le Canada le 21 juin 1998. Ottawa, Ont: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada = Ministre des travaux publics et services gouvernementaux Canada, 1998.
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Raine, Michael, and Johan Nordström, eds. The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789089647733.
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This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.
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Lamberti, Edward. Performing Ethics Through Film Style. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474444002.001.0001.
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Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has had a significant influence on film theory in recent years. This book proposes a relationship between Levinasian ethics and film style. It argues that films can convey Levinasian ethics not just through their subject matter but also through their use of style. The book brings this relationship between ethics and style into a productive dialogue with theories of performativity, such as J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, Jacques Derrida’s notion of originary performativity and Judith Butler’s reconfiguration of performativity within the socio-political sphere. It explores Levinas’s influence on film through the study of three directorial bodies of work: those of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. The book focuses on a range of films, including the Dardennes’ Je Pense à Vous (1992), La Promesse (1996), Le Fils (2002) and The Kid with a Bike (2011), Schroeder’s Maîtresse (1975), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Terror’s Advocate (2007) and Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) and Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008). In doing so, it demonstrates how films can perform a Levinasian ethics through different styles.
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Padmanabhan, Mekala. Orchestra and song. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199352227.003.0011.
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Orchestras have played a seminal role in creating a vibrant soundscape in Indian films since inception. From the earliest skeletal complement comprising violin, tabla and harmonium in silent films to the dynamic and expansive orchestral colour, timbre and styles of the twenty-first century, Tamil film orchestral sonorities have drawn global attention to the ‘Kollywood sound’. Music directors have adopted a cross-cultural approach to musical composition, enriching film background scores and song interludes while establishing film music’s distinctiveness as a musical genre. This chapter explores the logistical, artistic and creative processes employed by Tamil film music directors to create memorable musical narratives within the cinematic context.
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Jin, Dal Yong. Cultural Globalization in Korean Cinema. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039973.003.0004.
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This chapter examines the swift change experienced by the Korean film industry in conjunction with the Korean Wave. It investigates the primary causes of the roller coaster-like shifts within Korean cinema, including government cultural policies due to the significant role of the government in the midst of neoliberal globalization. It then maps out the nature of cultural hybridity in domestic films by comparing hybridized films between the Hallyu 1.0 era and the Hallyu 2.0 era. By textually analyzing film genres and themes of 240 films produced domestically between 1989 and 2012, the chapter explores not only the ways in which Korean cinema develops hybridity in domestic films, but also whether hybridity has generated new possible cultures that are free from Western influence. This eventually leads us to determine the major characteristics of hybrid Korean cinema in the Hallyu 2.0 era and its future direction in the global film market.
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Atakav, Eylem. Feminism and Women’s Film History in 1980s Turkey. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039683.003.0010.
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This chapter explores the relationship between feminism and women's film history in the context of 1980s Turkey. In discussing women's film history, the chapter includes not only the history of women filmmakers and the films they have made but also the link between the history of Turkish film industry and feminism. It begins with a historical overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and then examines its visible traces in film texts produced during the 1980s in order to argue that those films can be most productively understood as explorations of gendered power relations. The chapter then considers how the enforced depoliticization introduced in Turkey after the 1980 coup opened up a space for feminist concerns to be expressed within commercial cinema. It also shows how this political context gave rise to the newly humanized, more independent heroine that characterized Turkish cinema during the period, but suggests that the films were nevertheless made largely within the structures of a patriarchal commercial cinema.
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Cooper, L. Andrew. Dario Argento. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037092.003.0001.
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This book explores the extreme violence that pervades Dario Argento's films, and particularly the ways in which they push the limits of visual and auditory experience by offending, confusing, sickening, and baffling the viewers. It looks at Argento's approach to his work over more than four decades of filmmaking, and his commitment to innovation that is evident in two closely related genres whose disturbing violence reaches previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering, and mental anguish: crime thriller and supernatural horror. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to Giallo (2009), Argento's films challenge a viewer's accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre. This book also looks at the centrality of collaboration, particularly with family, in Argento's work by analyzing sixteen films that feature him as writer and director. Finally, it discusses how Argento's films function as rhetorical interventions against dominant views on film criticism, interpretation, narrative, and conventions through an examination of interpretive possibilities that connect the films to broader tendencies in film history.
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Murray Levine, Alison J. Vivre Ici. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781786940414.001.0001.
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Vivre Ici analyzes a selection of films from the vast viewing landscape of contemporary French documentary film, a genre that has experienced a renaissance in the past twenty years. The films are connected not just by a general interest in engaging the “real,” but by a particular attention to French space and place. From farms and wild places to roads, schools, and urban edgelands, these films explore the spaces of the everyday and the human and non-human experiences that unfold within them. Through a critical approach that integrates phenomenology, film theory, eco-criticism and cultural history, Levine investigates the notion of documentary as experience. She asks how and why, in the contemporary media landscape, these films seek to avoid argumentation and instead, give the viewer a feeling of “being there.” As a diverse collection of filmmakers, both well-known and less so, explore the limits and possibilities of these places, a collage-like, incomplete, and fragmented vision of France as seen and felt through documentary cameras comes into view. Venturing beyond film analysis to examine the production climate for these films and their circulation in contemporary France, Levine explores the social and political consequences of these “films that matter” for the viewers who come into contact with them.
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Devereaux, Michelle. The Stillness of Solitude. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.001.0001.
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The Stillness of Solitude explores the Romantic connections between a selection of seven films from contemporary American filmmakers Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman. Linking the current socio-cultural moment, which has been described as ‘metamodern’, to the Romantic era, it describes how the Romantic relation to selfhood, intersubjectivity, and ‘being in the world’ informs the films studied. The first section of the book lays out the aesthetic argument, the second describes the role of imagination and emotion in creating that aesthetic, and the third explores narratives of personal growth and their relation to cultural history. The overall structure of the book traces the progression of Romantic thought and situates the films historically, while simultaneously engaging with an up-to-the-moment present. It explores gender, childhood, the artistic process, revolution, scepticism, the natural world, love, and death through specific discourses of contemporary film theory including aesthetics, cinematic metatextuality, feminist criticism, eco-criticism and animal studies, and ethical studies. It argues for the emergence of a particular strain of American ‘independent’ cinema that draws extensively on 1970s New Hollywood film in ways differing from 1990s ‘smart’ cinema, and considers how the films use both classical Hollywood and American/European arthouse cinema tropes to create an uneasy dialectic between the two, emphasising the anxieties of our own time, nostalgia for an imaginary past, and fear of an uncertain future.
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DeFrantz, Thomas F. Hip-Hop in Hollywood. Edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199897827.013.001.
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In the early 1980s, Hollywood began to exploit hip-hop dance—especially breaking—to produce a limited series of movie musicals. These “breaksploitation” films set a standard of participation for young artists, and in particular, young artists of color, to enter the movie industry as laborers, and to enter the global imagination of film audiences as representative agents of change. This chapter explores the traditions of Hollywood musicals and dance artists of color just before the hip-hop film production era; the innovations of these early 1980s films in terms of their casting, creative approaches, and presentation of contemporary social dance; and the communities that these mediated projects both catered to and generated. Together, these films inspired a global audience for breakdancing, and are inextricably linked to the sweep and scale of young people’s interest in these corporeal practices.
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Fay, Jennifer. Inhospitable World. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190696771.001.0001.
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Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.
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Avila, Jacqueline. Cinesonidos. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190671303.001.0001.
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Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico’s Época de Oro is the first book-length study concerning the function of music in the prominent genres structured by the Mexican film industry. Integrating primary source material with film music studies, sound studies, and Mexican film and cultural history, this project closely examines examples from five significant film genres that developed during the 1930s through 1950s. These genres include the prostitute melodrama, the fictional indigenista film (films on indigenous themes or topics), the cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian nostalgia), the revolutionary melodrama, and the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy). The musics in these films helped create and accentuate the tropes and archetypes considered central to Mexican cultural nationalism. Distinct in narrative and structure, each genre exploits specific, at times contradictory, aspects of Mexicanidad—the cultural identity of the Mexican people—and, as such, employs different musics to concretize those constructions. Throughout this turbulent period, these tropes and archetypes mirrored changing perceptions of Mexicanidad manufactured by the state and popular and transnational culture. Several social and political agencies were heavily invested in creating a unified national identity to merge the previously fragmented populace owing to the Mexican Revolution (1910–ca.1920). The commercial medium of film became an important tool in acquainting a diverse urban audience with the nuances of national identity, and music played an essential and persuasive role in the process. In this heterogeneous environment, cinema and its music continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity.
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Willis, Andy. From Killer Snakes to Taxi Hunters: Hong Kong Horror in an Exploitation Context. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424592.003.0004.
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From the Shaw Brothers production line to the clones of Bruce Lee, Hong Kong cinema has long been seen as driven by raw commercial concerns. Like many other commercial film industries, most notably Hollywood, production in the Hong Kong film industry has also been focused on popular cycles of production. These have included phases when family melodramas, historical swordplay and kung-fu films, screwball comedies and triad based crime films have all proved successful at the domestic and regional box-office. As with other commercially focused film industries there has also been a low budget sector within Hong Kong industry. Here producers and directors have fashioned energetic, populist films that were designed to appeal to audiences’ desire for films that contained sex and violence. The horror genre seemed the perfect vehicle to satiate these needs. This chapter explores the work of filmmakers who worked at this rougher end of Hong Kong horror in the 80s and 90s. As well as placing them into this exploitation context of production, this chapter discusses their excessive content and the visual style employed by directors such as Kuei Chih-hung (Killer Snakes, Hex) and Herman Yau (The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) to deliver their exploitative content.
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Cooper, Sarah. Film and the Imagined Image. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474452786.001.0001.
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Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence, films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over, and soundscapes do not only engage the thoughts and senses of spectators in a perceptually rich experience. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is visible on screen and they provide instruction on how to do so as spectators think and feel, listen and view. Bringing together philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship, and cognitive psychology with an international range of films from beyond the mainstream, Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.
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Lehmann, Courtney. Ontological Shivers. Edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198724193.013.34.
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This essay explores major movements in film history through the lens of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, including films by Irving Thalberg and George Cukor, Renato Castellani, Franco Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann, and Deepa Mehta. More specifically, the essay offers a critical examination of theoretical developments in the notion of realism—including classical realism, neorealism, realismo rosa, and post-realism.
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Hunter, I. Q. Adaptation XXX. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199331000.013.24.
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Pornographic adaptations—erotic parodies of mainstream films—have long been dismissed from critical notice as much because of their allegedly slapdash adaptation strategies as because of their demotic cultural associations. Focusing mostly on commercially produced US films, Chapter 24 traces the history of pornographic adaptations from the softcore exploitation films of the 1960s through “Golden Age” hardcore films such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) to contemporary DVD and online “XXX versions” and looks in detail at porn versions of Fanny Hill and Psycho (1960). The essay explores how far such film adaptations uncover disavowed erotic subtexts in their sources and considers what the process of porn adaptation can reveal about the more general processes of producing and consuming adaptations.
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Weisenfeld, Judith. Race, Religion, and Documentary Film. Edited by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190221171.013.2.
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This chapter uses Ingagi and The Silent Enemy, both independent films released in 1930, to examine the intersections of race and religion in the context of American documentary film conventions. The filmmakers claimed documentary status for their films, despite the fact that both were largely scripted and contained staged representations. Many audience members and critics nevertheless took their representations of the religious practices of Africans and Native Americans to be truthful and invested in the films’ authenticity because their visual codes, narratives, and advertising confirmed accepted stereotypes about race, religion, and capacity for civilization. Examining these two films in the context of the broader history of documentary representations of race and religion—from travelogues, adventure, ethnographic, and expeditionary films through more recent productions—this chapter explores how the genre has helped to shape and communicate ideas about race and religion.
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Jackson, Robert. Fade In, Crossroads. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190660178.001.0001.
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Fade In, Crossroads is a history of the relations between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era to midcentury. In providing a narrative of the South’s contributions to the film medium from the late nineteenth century through the golden age of Hollywood, it considers the many southerners who worked as inventors, executives, filmmakers, screenwriters, performers, and critics during this period. It explores early production centers within the South as well as the effects of the migration of millions of black and white southerners beyond the region to such destinations as Los Angeles, where they made inroads in the growing film industry. It is also the story of how the rise and fall of the American film industry coincided with the rise and fall of the South’s most important modern product and export—Jim Crow segregation. This work looks at important southern historical legacies on film: the Civil War film tradition (which includes the two most successful films of all time, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind); the notorious tradition of lynching films during an era of prolific lynching in the South; and the remarkable race film industry, whose independent African American filmmakers forged an important cinematic tradition in response to the racial limitations of both the South and Hollywood. It also examines the activities of southern censorship officials, who utilized the medium in the service of Jim Crow, and traces the influence of film on future Civil Rights Movement figures.
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Gibbons, William. A Clockwork Homage. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190265250.003.0006.
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This chapter focuses on games that use classical music to allude to the films of auteur director Stanley Kubrick, whether as homage, parody, or both. By invoking Kubrick’s work, these games aim to connect with his legacy as an artistically lauded filmmaker whose works also had wide appeal. The chapter explores connections between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the massively successful early space flight simulator Elite, which includes features explicitly modeled on Kubrick’s film. It continues by examining two very different games that make reference to Kubrick’s notoriously violent film A Clockwork Orange: Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Batman: Arkham Origins.
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Tortolani, Erica, and Martin F. Norden, eds. ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.001.0001.
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Silent-era film scholarship has all too often focused on a handful of German directors, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, but little attention has been paid to arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the period: Paul Leni. This collection – the first comprehensive English-language study of Leni’s life and career – offers new insights into his national and international films, his bold forays into scenic design and his transition from German to Hollywood filmmaking. The contributors give fresh insights into Leni’s most influential films, including Waxworks (1924), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), and explores such lesser-known productions as The Diary of Dr. Hart (1918), Backstairs (1921) and the Rebus film series (1925–7). Engaging with new historical, analytical, and theoretical perspectives on Leni’s work, this book is a groundbreaking exploration of a cinematic pioneer.
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Borelli, Melissa Blanco, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199897827.001.0001.
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This anthology offers contemporary perspectives on dance in the context of the popular screen. It analyzes the role played by the dancing body in popular culture and its multi-layered meanings in film, television, music videos, video games, commercials, and Internet sites such as YouTube. It explores how dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus, and how the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style set in motion multiple choreographies of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. It also considers the types of bodies that are associated with specific dances and their relation to power, access, and agency, as well as the role(s) of a specific film in the genealogy of Hollywood dance films. The book is divided into five sections that examine dance in films such asMoulin Rouge!, Dance Girl Dance, Dirty Dancing, and Save the Last Dance; the different aspects of commercial dance films in the context of identity politics, technology, commercialism, and the politics of moving bodies; how dance and its practice are constructed in films as a form of self-discovery and individual expression; the impact of music videos on popular dance and its dissemination; and how dance video games such as Dance Central influence concepts of choreography, embodiment, and dance pedagogy.
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Crowl, Samuel. ‘Nobody’s Perfect’. Edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199687169.013.15.
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This chapter explores the differing impact of the transvestite on stage and film. Its primary focus is on Sven Gade’s 1920 silent film Hamlet, starring the Danish film star Asta Nielsen as the prince, and Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest, with Helen Mirren reimagining Prospero and Prospera. The nine decades between the two films measure the course of several generations of technical and social progress. Further, their exemplary use of cross-dressing and gender-bending serve yet again to show larger historical crossings between Shakespeare’s generation and our own. Gade’s Hamlet serves as a defining historical moment for cross-dressing and gender-bending in filmed Shakespeare. Taymor’s Tempest provides a similar occasion for a contemporary audience—but with two important differences. Because Gade’s Hamlet is silent, visuals necessarily dominate text, whereas in Taymor’s Tempest visuals and text take on an integral balance and mutual reinforcement.
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Dahlquist, Marina. “The Best-Known Woman in the World”. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037689.003.0003.
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This chapter examines the fate of Pearl White's serials on the Swedish market during the early 1900s. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of censorship on White's films, and American serial films in general, in Sweden. Aside from censorship imposing stringent regulations on crime serials, traditional forms of marketing diluted the impact of the format and upset the chronology for the episodes, undercutting the popularity of the serial queens. Despite all the hype concerning her international following, White was never perceived as a truly big star in Sweden, mainly because only a selected few of her films actually made it to Swedish audiences. Out of her eleven serial films, only The Perils of Pauline and the three Exploits of Elaine serials were screened in Sweden. Furthermore, none of the Swedish copies have survived. The chapter also discusses Pathé Frère's impact on the Swedish film industry.
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Cenciarelli, Carlo, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190853617.001.0001.
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It has long been suggested that films have changed the way we listen, but cinema’s contribution to broader listening cultures has only recently started to receive serious academic attention. Taking this issue as its central topic, The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores—from philosophical, archival, empirical, and analytical perspectives—the genealogies of cinema’s audiovisual practices, the relationship between film aesthetics and listening protocols, and the extension of cinematic modes of listening into other media and everyday situations.
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Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Cinema Pessimism. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190067717.001.0001.
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Cinema Pessimism uses the medium of film to explore the dilemmas of democratic representation. When is representation an aid to democracy, and when is it an obstacle? Why are democratic populations so perpetually dissatisfied with their representatives? An exploration of film representation gives us a unique standpoint from which to answer these and other questions. Representation contains dangers for democracy, including its ability to foster illusions of power and freedom in a citizenry rather than genuine autonomy. Film itself can be a powerful political narcotic, suppressing rather than expressing the humanity that is supposed to flourish in democracy. Most popular films today, like many elected representatives, frustrate and interrupt democracy rather than sustain it. In its best form, however, representation, both filmic and political, can add something irreplaceable to our political life. Democratic citizens are hard to represent because human beings only reveal themselves over time. Representing them thus holds special challenges that this work explores. Great representatives and great representations are rare, but when they do appear, they enhance our politics by sustaining the reciprocity and equality that are at the heart of any well-ordered human society. We can draw these lessons from films even as we resist the increasing saturation of modern life with representations that distract or degrade us.
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McSweeney, Terence. Studying The Hurt Locker. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325734.001.0001.
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This book, drawing on a broad tapestry of research, offers an exploration of The Hurt Locker (2009), its stylistic and narrative devices, its cultural impact, its reception, and its relationship to the genre of the war film. The book begins with an analysis of what The Hurt Locker ultimately portrays about the Iraq War, which was officially brought to an end by President Barack Obama on the 18 December 2011, but still continues to be fought onscreen. It also explores the central contentions that are key to the affective impact of The Hurt Locker during the time of its release and after a decade later. The book places the film in a richly textured historical, political, and industrial context, arguing that The Hurt Locker is part of a long tradition of films about American wars that play a considerable role in how audiences come to understand the conflicts that they depict. Thus, films about a nation's wars are never “only a movie” but rather should be considered a cultural battleground themselves on which a war of representation is waged.
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Muzyczuk, Daniel. Discontinuities and Resynchronisations. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0007.
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This chapter explores three distinct attempts in Polish film history to use the medium for research into synaesthesia. The first can be found in the films of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson made before the Second World War and after their emigration to Great Britain. Their experimental attitude is exposed through analysis of their work from 1944 entitled The Eye and the Ear. Second, the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, established in the wake of Stalinism, became an important space where new approaches into investigating of the sound and vision relationship could develop. Primarily oriented towards electroacoustic composition, the studio was also used for producing scores for popular cinema. The third site for exploration was the Workshop of Film Form, a group of artists-filmmakers based in Łódź whose work exposed the primary elements of film language. Their research resulted in some of the best-developed experiments in synaesthesia.
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Nanney, Lisa. John Dos Passos and Cinema. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781942954873.001.0001.
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John Dos Passos & Cinema, the first study to use the novelist’s little-known writing for the screen to assess the trajectory of his prolific career, explores both how film aesthetics shaped his revolutionary modernist narratives and how he later reshaped them directly into film form. The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of his screen writing during the 1930s for Hollywood feature films and in an innovative independent treatment; it examines the complexities of his role in the 1937 political documentary The Spanish Earth; and it explores the unproduced screen treatment of his attempts from the 1940s on to adapt his epic trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism of that period. John Dos Passos & Cinema thus provides a new context for and reading of his modernist literary innovations and his conservative political reorientation in the 1930s that redefined his literary career.
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Bishop, Daniel. The Presence of the Past. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.001.0001.
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In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.
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Turner, Peter. The Blair Witch Project. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733841.001.0001.
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Few films have had the influence and impact of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Its arrival was a horror cinema palette cleanser after a decade of serial killers and postmodern intertextuality, a bare bones ‘found footage’ trendsetter. The Blair Witch Project was the tenth biggest box office earner of 1999. Even with strong competition in the horror genre, the film managed to stand out from the rest. It was arguably a product of its time more than any other film of the 1990s, heralding the advent of digital filmmaking. Backed up by an internet marketing campaign, The Blair Witch Project became a glowing example of what could be achieved with cheap emerging technology, imagination, and a ‘less is more’ approach. By the year 2000, and due to the influx of digital video cameras, there were far more independent features being made than ever before. This book explores the aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project, how identification is encouraged in the film, and the way it successfully creates fear in contemporary audiences. The book tells the story of the film from his conception and production, and then provides a unique analysis of the techniques used, their appeal to audiences and the themes that helped make the film such an international hit, including the pioneering internet marketing.
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Hobbs, Simon. Cultivating Extreme Art Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427371.001.0001.
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The use of hard-core sex and brutal violence in films such as Antichrist, Romance and Irreversible has been branded by many as an unsophisticated attempt to attract audiences. These accusations of gimmickry have been directed towards a range of extreme art films, however they have rarely been explored in detail. This book therefore seeks to investigate the validity of these claims by considering the extent to which these often infamous sequences of extremity inform the commercial identity of the film. Through close textual analysis of various paratexts, the book examines how sleeve designs, blurbs, and special features manage these extreme reputations, and the extent to which they exploit the supposed value of extremity. The book positions the tangible home video product as a bearer of meaning, capable of defining the public persona of the film. The book explores the ways home video artefacts communicate to both highbrow and lowbrow audiences by drawing from contradicting marketing traditions, as well as examining the means through which they breach long-standing taste distinctions. Including case studies from both art cinema and exploitation cinema – such as Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom, Weekend and Antichrist – the book explores the complicated dichotomies between these cinematic traditions, offering a fluid history of extreme art cinema while challenging existing accounts of the field. Ultimately, the book argues that extremity – far from being a simple marketing tool – is a complex and multifaceted commercial symbol.
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Church, David. Post-Horror. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475884.001.0001.
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Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed “elevated horror” and “post-horror” in popular film criticism, texts such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from high-minded critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema. It argues that the affect produced by these films’ minimalist aesthetic has fueled taste-based disagreements between professional film critics, genre fans, and more casual viewers about whether the horror genre can or should be upheld as more than a populist entertainment form, especially as the genre turned away from the post-9/11 debates about graphic violence that consumed the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book thus explores the aesthetic qualities, historical precursors, affective resonances, and thematic concerns of this emerging cycle by situating these texts within revived debates between over the genre’s larger artistic, cultural, and entertainment value. Chapters include thematic analyses of trauma, gaslighting, landscape, existential dread, and political identity across a range of films straddling the line between art-horror and multiplex fare since approximately 2013.
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Street, Sarah. A Suitable Job for a Woman. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039683.003.0016.
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This chapter examines Natalie Kalmus's role as an ambassador for Technicolor Corporation during the 1930s and 1940s. Kalmus became involved in Technicolor through her husband Herbert Kalmus, who founded the company in 1915 with Daniel Comstock and W. Burton Westcott. She was credited as “color consultant” on most Technicolor films from the late 1920s to 1949. Drawing on her papers by the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, this chapter considers Kalmus's record and somewhat controversial legacy as a woman commanding an extremely important place in the history of color film. It explores how, as a public figure and advocate of color, Kalmus wielded influence beyond film production, advising women to wear particular colors to go with their hair and mood. It shows that Kalmus was exemplary of a mode of employment created and perpetuated by gendered assumptions about color expertise.
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Lash, Dominic. The Cinema of Disorientation. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474462778.001.0001.
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Perhaps because they are so immediately absorbing, narrative films can also be profoundly confusing and disorienting. This fascinating book neither proposes fool-proof methods for avoiding confusion, nor does it suggest that disorientation is always a virtue. Instead, it argues that the best way to come to terms with our confusion is to look closely at exactly what is confusing us, and why. At the heart of the book are original close readings of four important recent films: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012), Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006) and Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage (2014). Clearly written but critically and theoretically bold, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions explores both how we get (or fail to get) our bearings with respect to a film, and what we might discover by (and while) doing so.
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Vosen Callens, Melissa. Ode to Gen X. University Press of Mississippi, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496832412.001.0001.
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Even for the casual viewer, the Netflix series Stranger Things will likely feel familiar, reminiscent of popular 1980s coming-of-age movies. While Stranger Things and these classic 1980s films are all tales of childhood friendship and shared adventures, they are also narratives that reflect and shape the burgeoning cynicism of the 1980s. Throughout Ode to X: Institutional Cynicism in “Stranger Things” and 1980s Film, Melissa Vosen Callens explores the parallels between iconic 1980s films featuring children and teenagers and the first three seasons of Stranger Things, moving beyond the 1980s Easter eggs to a common underlying narrative: Generation X’s (Gen X) growing distrust in American institutions. Throughout, Vosen Callens demonstrates how Stranger Things draws on popular 1980s popular culture to pay tribute to Gen X’s evolving outlook on three key and interwoven American institutions: family, economy, and government.
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Morcom, Anna. The Hindi film orchestra. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199352227.003.0012.
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This chapter explores the Hindi film orchestra in historical, social and cinematic contexts. It charts the place, meaning and status of the western orchestra in Indian cinema from the silent era through the post-Independence period to the marked changes that have occurred since India’s liberalization from the 1990s. Although western classical music was not adopted and institutionalized in the mainstream in India (unlike East Asia, for example), this chapter demonstrates how it nevertheless became interwoven with Indian postcolonial modernity in a powerful yet largely background and thus unseen form through the cinema. Recently, with India’s intensive globalization, the orchestra is showing signs of acquiring a more visibly mediated status in Indian film music and in India more generally.
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Goldmark, Daniel. Pixar and the Animated Soundtrack. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.022.
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This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Of the many ways in which the animation production company Pixar differentiated itself from the classic animated shorts and films produced by Disney, the complete shunning of the Disney musical archetype may be the most pronounced. Pixar replaced the musical numbers and dance sequences with montages and flashbacks, scored with either original music or preexisting songs, furthering Pixar’s near-obsession with nostalgia and resurrection of the distant past. Combining unusually nuanced attention to the soundtrack with a longing for bygone popular culture, the Pixar films show a new stage of development for animated films, taking on the stereotype that Hollywood cartoons are for kids. This chapter explores Pixar’s approach to music and the soundtrack to show how advances in sound design, as well as an evolving approach to film scoring taken by veteran Hollywood composers, have brought a new level of complexity and even respectability to the long-maligned animated feature.
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Warren, Shilyh. Subject to Reality. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042539.001.0001.
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This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”
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Grossman, Julie. Women and Film Noir. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038594.003.0003.
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This chapter explores the relationship between classic noir and female-authored pulp fiction. Linking noir with its female-authored source material will help reorient gender associations with film noir so that male experience is not its exclusive focus. Moreover, such linkage renders the shared concerns of film noir and melodrama more evident and interprets the relationship between gender and genre more as a dialogue, less as an opportunity to rank texts in terms of an evaluation-laden hierarchy. The chapter then looks at 1940s novels written by women that were brought to the screens as “film noirs.” These works exemplify the nonschematic presence of gender issues in noir and the continuities between the treatment of gender in the genre and the exploration of gender in the source novels.
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Platte, Nathan. Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371112.001.0001.
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Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood explores the network of musicians and filmmakers whose work defined the sound of Hollywood’s golden age (c. 1920s–1950s). The book’s central character is producer David O. Selznick, who immersed himself in the music of his films, serving as manager, critic, and advocate. By demonstrating music’s value in film and encouraging its distribution through sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, and soundtrack albums, Selznick cultivated audiences’ relationship to movie music. But he did not do it alone. Selznick’s films depended upon the men and women who brought the music to life. This book shows how a range of specialists, including composers (Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and others), orchestrators, music directors (Lou Forbes), editors (Audray Granville), writers, instrumentalists, singers, and publicists, helped make the music for Selznick’s films stand apart from competitors’. Drawing upon thousands of archival documents, this book offers a tour of American cinema through its music. By investigating Selznick’s efforts in the late silent era, his work at three major Hollywood studios, and his accomplishments as an independent producer (including his films with Alfred Hitchcock), this book reveals how the music was made for iconic films like King Kong (1933), A Star is Born (1937), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939), Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), The Third Man (1948), and A Farewell to Arms (1957).
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Beyond High Theories of Intimacy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0012.
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Chapter 10 explores the ways in which intertexuality within and between the stages of writing, directing, and performing the film The Piano Teacher create a multi-authored text. In the absence of an ethnography of production impossible for films made in the past, the authors devised a “soft ethnography” approach focused on some key players in this “multiply authored” semiotic model (namely, the prize-winning author, director, and lead actor) to suggest the flow and feedback between these different “signatures” in the text. This soft ethnography is grounded in knowledge of the writer’s discursive history and politics, the director’s television/film sense of liberation via “obscene” cinema, and the actor’s “directing” (via her construction of character) through her performance as a developing part of her star persona. These personal/public negotiations are symptomatic of the reflexive “synthesize and extend” interdisciplinary approach of Real Sex Cinema.
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Dahlquist, Marina. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037689.003.0001.
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This book explores the historiographic importance, narrative patterns, marketing, and cultural reception of the serial genre through a wider contextualization of the serial phenomenon and its fearless female heroines led by Pearl White, who plays the title character in The Perils of Pauline. It investigates the complexities of Pearl White's performance and the overall cultural power of serial queens in many markets at a critical historical juncture in the history of cinema. It examines how the serial film became part of a rethinking of production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. It also considers the American film industry's expansion on the international market, fueled in large part by the profitable serial format, along with the serial craze's international impact. The book suggests that American serial films are an illustration of both globalization and an accompanying hegemonic practice of Hollywood cinema and the vicissitudes of glocalization.
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Xiao, Ying. China in the Mix. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496812605.001.0001.
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Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an original, pioneering study of the connections and intersections of film, media, music, and popular culture in contemporary China under postsocialist reform, capitalist globalization, and hybridization. It explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock ’n’ roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. This book examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. The research offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world.
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Radner, Hilary, and Alistair Fox. Film Analysis: Image and Movement. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0002.
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This chapter assesses Raymond Bellour’s contribution to the area of research known as “film analysis,” arguing that it is best understood as an “art” rather than a scientific practice. Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of Classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. The chapter explores the significant concepts that define Bellour’s approach: segmentation; “the unattainable text” (also referred to as “the undiscoverable text” or “le texte introuvable”); le blocage symbolique (also referred to as “the symbolic blockage”);“the textual volume”; Hitchcock and psychoanalysis; and enunciation.
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Fay, Jennifer. The Ecologies of Film Noir. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190696771.003.0004.
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Postwar American film noir explores an artificial world that does not foster human happiness and growth, but leads to a kind of human incapacity to act and respond. Beyond merely depicting these negative environments, noir lays bare the attachments to bad living and unsustainable striving that underwrite the accumulating culture of the Anthropocene at midcentury. Positioning itself as the genre that critiques postwar peaceful prosperity, noir gives us the characters, places, and scripts for human expiration as the counter to both nuclear survivalism and consumer capitalism. The hospitality of film noir is rental property. Indeed, impermanent dwelling of the individual and humanity as a whole is one of noir’s lessons for the Anthropocene. American noir is an ecological genre that teaches us in the spirit of Roy Scranton’s book how “to die in the Anthropocene.”
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Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501752315.001.0001.
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This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. The book adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. The book reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. The book elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. The book demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. This book reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.
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Shuback, Alan. Hollywood at the Races. University Press of Kentucky, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813178295.001.0001.
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An examination of the symbiotic relationship that existed between the Hollywood film community and horse racing, primarily between 1930 and 1960, Hollywood at the Races explores the extraordinary participation of producers, directors, and actors in the sport of kings. All three of Southern California’s major racetracks were founded in part or in whole by Hollywood luminaries: Hal Roach was cofounder of SantaAnita; Bing Crosby founded Del Mar with help from Pat O’Brien; and the Warner brother founded Hollywood Park with assistance from dozens of people in the film community. Moreover, people like Crosby, Betty Grable, Mervyn LeRoy, and Don Ameche owned racehorses, while MGM’s chief of production, Louis B. Mayer, was one of the nation’s leading owner-breeders. Racing also had an interest in Hollywood, as evidenced by the exploits of breeder-owner Jock Whitney, who helped finance David O. Selznick’s productions of GonewiththeWind and Rebecca. A horse owned by Rita Hayworth (aka the Princess Aly Khan) nearly won Europe’smost important race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, and screenwriter- producer Gene Markey became the co-owner of Calumet Farm when he married his fourth wife.During this period, Hollywood produced at least 120 racing-themed films, among them A Day at the Races, National Velvet, and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. Thelast two starred Mickey Rooney, an inveterate horseplayer who, like Chico Marx and Jimmy Durante, lost a fortune at the track.The book concludes with an analysis of the twin declines of racing and cinema in America in recent decades.
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Chang, Jing Jing. Screening Communities. Hong Kong University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888455768.001.0001.
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Screening Communities uses multi-media archival sources, including government archives, memoirs, fan magazines, newspaper reports, and films to narrate the complexity of social change and political turmoil, both screened and lived, in postwar Hong Kong. In particular, Screening Communities explores the political, ideological, and cultural work of Hong Kong film culture and its role in the building of a postwar Hong Kong community during the 1950s and 1960s, which was as much defined by lived experiences as by a cinematic construction, forged through negotiations between narratives of empire, nation, and the Cold War in and beyond Hong Kong. As such, in order to appreciate the complex formation of colonial Hong Kong society, Screening Communities situates the analysis of the “poetics” of postwar Hong Kong film culture within the larger global processes of colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and Cold War. It argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema is a three-pronged process of “screening community” that takes into account the factors of colonial governance, filmic expression of left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers, and the social makeup of audiences as discursive agents. Through a close study of genre conventions, characterization, and modes of filmic narration across select Cantonese films and government documentaries, I contend that 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema, broadly construed, became a site par excellence for the construction and translation (on the ground and onscreen) of a postwar Hong Kong community, whose context was continually shifting—at once indigenous and hybrid, postcolonial and global.