Bøker i Routledge Advances in Film Studies-serien

The contention of Film and the American Presidency is that over the twentieth century the cinema has been a silent partner in setting the parameters of what we might call the presidential imaginary. This volume surveys the partnership in its longevity, placing stress on especially iconic presidents such as Lincoln and FDR. The contributions to this collection probe the rich interactions between these high institutions of culture and politics-Hollywood and the presidency-and argue that not only did Hollywood acting become an idiom for presidential style, but that Hollywood early on understood its own identity through the presidency''s peculiar mix of national epic and unified protagonist. Additionally, they contend that studios often made their films to sway political outcomes; that the performance of presidential personae has been constrained by the kinds of bodies (for so long, white and male) that have occupied the office, such that presidential embodiment obscures the body politic; and that Hollywood and the presidency may finally be nothing more than two privileged figures of media-age power.

This book investigates film's complex role in representing ecological traumas. Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe.

This volume presents a new definition of the field of Iranian film studies, one that engages global media flows, transmedia interaction, and a heterogeneous Iranian national cinema.

This volume brings together original research on religion and cinema. Contributors look beyond the film text, content, or aesthetics, instead concentrating on the cinema-related actions, strategies, and policies developed by the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations in order to influence cinema.

Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance examines films of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from postcolonial countries around the globe.

This volume investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South.

This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinema and space, in which space is used as a discursive tool to understand Asian cinema. The variety of spaces examined includes natural geographic elements, buildings, cities, and landscapes, both urban and rural.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon has arguably become the best known Japanese film of all time. This book addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, and the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to significantly different perspectives of eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event.

As a rapidly aging continent, Europe increasingly depends on the successful integration of migrants. Unfortunately, contemporary political and media discourses observe and frequently also support the development of nationalist, eurosceptic and xenophobic reactions to immigration and growing multiethnicity. Confronting this trend, European cinema has developed and disseminated new transcultural and postcolonial alternatives that might help to improve integration and community cohesion in Europe, and this book investigates these alternatives in order to identify examples of good practices that can enhance European stability. While the cinematic spectrum is as wide and open as most notions of Europeanness, the films examined share a fundamental interest in the Other. In this qualitative film analysis approach, particular consideration is given to British, French, German, and Spanish productions, and a comparison of multiethnic conviviality in Chicano cinema.

Breaking Down Joker offers a compelling, multi-disciplinary examination of a landmark film and media event that was simultaneously both celebrated and derided, and which arrived at a time of unprecedented social malaise. The collection breaks down Joker to explore its aesthetic and ideological representations within the social and cultural context in which it was released.An international team of authors explore Joker's sightlines and subtexts, the affective relationships, corrosive ideologies, and damning, if ambivalent, messages of this film. The chapters address such themes as white masculinity, identity and perversion, social class and mobility, urban loneliness, movement and music, and questions of reception and activism.With contributions from scholars from screen studies, theatre and performance studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, geography, cultural studies, and sociology, this fully interdisciplinary collection offers a uniquely multiple operational cross-examination of this pivotal film text and will be of great importance to scholars, students, and researchers in these areas.

Hybrid Documentary and Beyond focusses on the theories, production techniques, ethical implications and impact of hybrid documentaries.