Blaxploitation action narratives as well as politically radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song typically portrayed black women as trifling "bitches" compared to the supermacho black male heroes. But starting in 1973, the emergence of "baad bitches" and "sassy...

Since the release of Rosemary's Baby in 1968, the American horror film has become one of the most diverse, commercially successful, widely discussed, and culturally significant film genres. Drawing on a wide range of critical methods---from close textual readings and structuralist genre...

Beginning with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about...

Here is a critical and historical overview of unconventional and aesthetically challenging films, all of feature length. The author focuses on the particular forms of contemporary avant-garde films, which often rely on characteristics associated with historical films of the same genre. Included...

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the...

Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2011 During the 1990s, Austin achieved "overnight" success and celebrity as a vital place for independent filmmaking. Directors Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez...

Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research. Offers a unique collection of cutting edge research that...

Documentaries such as Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born into Brothels, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound, along with March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth have achieved critical as well as popular success. Although...

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halloween. Night of the Living Dead. These films have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers' psyches and are now considered seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths between audience, auteur, and cultural history, author Kendall R. Phillips reveals...

Feminist Hollywood examines the differences between commercial cinema and counter cinema by focusing on the work of contemporary women directors who have entered Hollywood from the realm of independent filmmaking. Christina Lane compares their early documentaries or avant-garde films with their...

Film is considered by some to be the most dominant art form of the twentieth century. It is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often offered to us as quite false, frankly and beautifully fantastic, and they are sometimes...

A History of Spanish Film explores Spanish film from the beginnings of the industry to the present day by combining some of the most exciting work taking place in film studies with some of the most urgent questions that have preoccupied twentieth-century Spain. It addresses new questions...

Hollywood's West examines popular perceptions of the frontier as a defining feature of American history. Seventeen essays by prominent film scholars illuminate the allure of life on the edge of civilization and analyze how this region has been represented on big and small screens. Characterizations...

2024 Bram Stoker AwardÂ®ï¸ Winner for Superior Achievement in Long Nonfiction A smart, funny crash course in 25 iconic horror movies, from Psycho to Hereditary, for people who love getting the reference but hate being scared. ...

FromKing KongtoCandyman, the boundary-pushing genre of horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. This book offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Black horror from the 1890s to present day. In this second...

The Invention of the Western Film ranges across literature, visual arts, social history, ideology, and legend to provide, for the first time, an in-depth exploration of the early Western, from short kinetoscopes of the 1890s through 'classic' features of the 1940s. By examining the American Indian's...

Beginning with the era of synchronized sound in the 1920s, music has been an integral part of motion pictures. Whether used to heighten the tension of a scene or evoke a subtle emotional response, scores have played a significant--if often unrealized--role in the viewer's enjoyment. ...

An examination of an extremely popular box office genre - the gross-out movie - Laughing Screaming is a serious study of this unashamedly lowbrow product.

Literature and Film is a cornucopia of vibrant essays that chart the history and confluence of literature and film. It explores in detail a wide and international spectrum of novels and adaptations, bringing together the very latest scholarship in the field.

Few figures have captured Hollywood's and the public's imagination as completely as have medieval heroes. Cast as chivalric knight, warrior princess, "alpha male in tights," or an amalgamation, and as likely to appear in Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti westerns as films set in the Middle...

Sinister, swaggering, yet often sympathetic, the figure of the gangster has stolen and murdered its way into the hearts of American cinema audiences. Despite the enduring popularity of the gangster film, however, traditional criticism has focused almost entirely on a few canonical movies...

David Pirie's acclaimed 'A Heritage of Horror' was the first book on the British horror movie, and the first to detect and analyse the roots of British horror, identifying it as 'the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own.' It has long...

A New History of Documentary Film, Second Edition offers a much-needed resource, considering the very rapid changes taking place within documentary media. Building upon the best-selling 2005 edition, Betsy McLane keeps the same chronological examination, factual reliability, ease of use and...

Coined in the early 1990s to describe a burgeoning film movement, 'New Queer Cinema' has turned the attention of film theorists, students and audiences to the proliferation of intelligent, stylish and daring work by lesbian and gay filmmakers within independent cinema, and to the proliferation of...

The horror film is meant to end in hope: Regan McNeil can be exorcized. A hydrophobic Roy Scheider can blow up a shark. Buffy can and will slay vampires. Heroic human qualities like love, bravery, resourcefulness, and intelligence will eventually defeat the monster. But, after the 9/11, American...

With an introduction by Greg Palast, author of bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Progressive Hollywood features Rampell?s interviews and interactions with Hollywood luminaries such as producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Robert Greenwald; actors Jack Nicholson, Rob Reiner, Mike Farrell, Ed...

During the Great Depression, pulp fiction writers created a new, distinctly American detective story, one that stressed the development of fascinating, often bizarre characters rather than the twists and turns of clever plots. This new crime fiction adapted brilliantly to the screen, birthing a...

World War II has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands, of films produced in the United States alone. From training camp scenes in See Here, Private Hargrove to images of brutal combat in Saving Private Ryan, filmmakers have been tasked with replicating pivotal moments in the war. But...

Film comedy has been around as long as cinema itself. Over the years, particular forms of the genre have emerged, evolved, and spawned other branches of comedy. While these subgenres may vary in their approach to humor, all of them have the same goal: amusing audiences. In Reeling with Laughter:...

An engrossing look at black-themed films in pre-blaxploitation Hollywood The sixties were a tremendously important time of transition for both civil rights activism and the U.S. film industry. Soul Searching examines a subject that, despite its significance to African American...

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers--including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja...

Acting as a corrective to the skewed avant-garde history that neglects women, Women and Experimental Filmmaking gathers essays by some of the top scholars in cinema studies dealing with women experimental filmmakers. Tracking the topic across racial, economic, geographic, and even...

Modleski argues that Hitchcock was neither misogynist or sympathetic in his portrayal of women in film. With an analysis that uses psychoanalysis and feminist criticism she shows Hitchcock's approach to be ambivalent to women.