Analyses how independent documentaries are forging a new public sphere in today’s China. There has been an explosion in Chinese independent documentary making since the turn of the twenty-first ...century. How are we to understand this vibrant burst of activity? This timely study is based on detailed interviews with Chinese documentary makers rarely available in English, and insights gained by the author while working as a journalist in Beijing. Through detailed analyses of key contemporary documentary titles, it reveals the ways in which independent films probe, question and challenge the dominant ideas and narratives circulating in China’s state-sanctioned media.Key features: A detailed account of one of the world’s most active, vibrant and challenging contemporary documentary sectors * Draws extensively on first-hand interviews with filmmakers * Offers in-depth, critical analyses of China’s most challenging contemporary independent documentaries * Discusses China’s state-sanctioned film and television sectors to cast new light on how the official public sphere is shaped and guided by the state
Film is in a state of rapid change, with the transition from analog to digital profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and distribution, but also the theoretical conceptualization of the medium film ...and the practice of film archiving. New forms of digital archives are being developed that make use of participatory media to provide a more open form of access than any traditional archive has offered before. Film archives are thus faced with new questions and challenges. From Grain to Pixel attempts to bridge the fields of film archiving and academic research, by addressing the discourse on film ontology and analysing how it affects the role of film archives. Fossati proposes a new theoretization of film archival practice as the starting point for a renewed dialogue between film scholars and film archivists.
Het bewegende beeld bevindt zich in een overgangsperiode waarin analoge (fotochemische) film geleidelijk vervangen wordt door digitale film. Deze overgang heeft niet alleen diepgaande invloed op filmproductie en -distributie, maar ook op de manier van archiveren van film en de theoretische conceptualisering van dit medium. Van digitale archieven worden steeds nieuwe vormen ontwikkeld. Deze archieven - digitale filmdatabases en YouTube bijvoorbeeld - maken gebruik van media die participatie van vele gebruikers mogelijk maken en worden zo toegankelijker dan ooit. Ondertussen is er nog onvoldoende dialoog tussen archivarissen en filmwetenschappers. From Grain to Pixel slaat een brug tussen archiveringspraktijken en wetenschappelijk onderzoek dat gebaseerd is op relevante debatten in film- en nieuwe mediastudies. Fossati stelt een nieuwe theorie op voor het archiveren en restaureren van film. Dit biedt mogelijkheden voor een hernieuwde dialoog tussen archivarissen en wetenschappers.
Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival ...curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age. A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.
Spanish Horror Film Lazaro-Reboll, Antonio; Badley, Linda; Palmer, R. Barton
11/2012
eBook
Spanish Horror Film is the first in-depth exploration of the genre in Spain from the 'horror boom' of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the most recent production in the current renaissance of ...Spanish genre cinema, through a study of its production, circulation, regulation and consumption. The examination of this rich cinematic tradition is firmly located in relation to broader historical and cultural shifts in recent Spanish history and as an important part of the European horror film tradition and the global culture of psychotronia.Key Features: The first critical study on Spanish horror film to be published in English.An overview of key directors, cycles and representative films as well as of more obscure and neglected horror production.A detailed analysis of the work of directors such as Jesús Franco, Amando de Ossorio, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Eloy de la Iglesia, Jaume Balagueró, Nacho Cerdá and Guillermo del Toro's Spanish" films.A focus on critical and cult contexts of reception in Spain
Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, ...these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and “otherness”; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.
Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, ...Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.
Beginning in the 1950s, "Euro Horror" movies materialized in astonishing numbers from Italy, Spain, and France and popped up in the US at rural drive-ins and urban grindhouse theaters such as those ...that once dotted New York's Times Square. Gorier, sexier, and stranger than most American horror films of the time, they were embraced by hardcore fans and denounced by critics as the worst kind of cinematic trash. In this volume, Olney explores some of the most popular genres of Euro Horror cinema-including giallo films, named for the yellow covers of Italian pulp fiction, the S&M horror film, and cannibal and zombie films-and develops a theory that explains their renewed appeal to audiences today.
This series presents diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which ...constitute a particular tradition.
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