This volume is a timely and necessary intervention as it provides a rich, multifaceted approach to the study of cinema and visual representation. It presents a lucid and intelligent account of twentieth century film criticism essential for students in the fields of media studies and cultural studies. It leads the reader through the major contemporary philosophical and sociocultural theories of appreciating cinematic signs and themes. The book also gathers together informed discussions about the nature and principles of literary adaptation that will greatly benefit anyone interested in this field of study.

Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people’s views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of economics in cinema across a wide range of areas and genres, from the conflicts over resources in the lawless Old West to the post-scarcity societies of science fiction futures. This book studies how films have portrayed trade unions, scarcity, money, businesses, innovators, migrant workers, working women, globalization, the stock market, and the automation of work. It aims to be useful to those who are interested in cinema with economic themes and to those who want to learn about economics through cinema.

This book explores alternatives to realist, triumphalist, and heroic representations of war in British film and television. Focusing on the period between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Falkland War but offering connections to the moment of Brexit, it argues that the “lost continent” of existential, satirical, simulated, and abstractly traumatic war stories is as central to understanding Britain’s martial history as the mainstream inheritance. The book features case studies that stress the contribution of exiled or expatriate directors and outsider sensibilities, with particular emphasis on Peter Watkins, Joseph Losey, and Richard Lester. At the same time, it demonstrates concerns and stylistic emphases that continue to the present in television series and films by directors such as Lone Scherfig and Christopher Nolan. Encompassing everything from features to government information films, the book explores related trends in the British film industry, popular culture, and film criticism, while offering a sense of how these contexts contribute to historical memory.

From the precocious charms of Shirley Temple to the box-office behemoth Frozen and its two young female leads, Anna and Elsa, the girl has long been a figure of fascination for cinema. The symbol of (imagined) childhood innocence, the site of intrigue and nostalgia for adults, a metaphor for the precarious nature of subjectivity itself, the girl is caught between infancy and adulthood, between objectification and power. She speaks to many strands of interest for film studies: feminist questions of cinematic representation of female subjects; historical accounts of shifting images of girls and childhood in the cinema; and philosophical engagements with the possibilities for the subject in film. This collection considers the specificity of girls' experiences and their cinematic articulation through a multicultural feminist lens which cuts across the divides of popular/art-house, Western/non Western, and north/south. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, the contributors bring a new understanding of the global/local nature of girlhood and its relation to contemporary phenomena such as post-feminism, neoliberalism and queer subcultures. Containing work by established and emerging scholars, this volume explodes the narrow post-feminist canon and expands existing geographical, ethnic, and historical accounts of cinematic cultures and girlhood.

Isolated by the repressions and censorship of Franco's regime, Spanish cinema developed distinctive style and content from the 1930s to the 1970s, largely without reference to its international counterparts. Through a series of close readings of films made in the Republican period under Franco and more recently under socialism, contributors here seek to present a clearer picture of Spanish national cinema.

Of all the Biblical heroes, the character of King David is perhaps the most paradoxical and also the most difficult to grasp. He is the Biblical Man for all seasons: a warrior, a lover, a poet, a killer and a restorer. This elaborate and fascinating archetypal hero influenced and inspired the representation of the Israeli soldier in Israeli media, art and cinema, from the establishment of the State of Israel until the present day. This book investigates whether Israeli art and film now place a focus on soldiers not as fighters, but as victims and the relationship between David as an adult and the State of Israel half a century after its establishment. As in gender studies, it is only in the last twenty years that research on masculinities has become a prominent part of film studies. Although studies of men and masculinity have gained momentum, little has been published that focuses on the media and their relationship to men as men. In carrying out a study on the representation of the Israeli Defense Force in Israeli cinema, the matter of gender becomes fundamental, especially in relation to the Motherland of Israel: Eretz Israel, which is feminine by definition. Israeli films are also deeply concerned with territory and territoriality. As such, the book also carries out an ethnography of Israeli cinema, with a focus on the significant relationship between ‘gender and nation’ and ‘body and space’.

The theme of female transformation informs the Hollywood representation of femininity from the studio era to the present. Whether it occurs physically, emotionally, or on some other level, transformation allows female protagonists to negotiate their own complex desires and to resist the compulsory marriage plot. A sweeping study of Hollywood from Now, Voyager, The Heiress, and Flamingo Road to Carrie, the Alien films, The Brave One, and the slasher horror genre, this book boldly unsettles commonplace understandings of genre film, female sexuality, and Freudian theory as it makes a strong new case for the queer relevance of female representation.

The present book aims to explore how the perpetrator of crimes against humanity is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. In recent years the number of diverse forms of cultural productions focused on the figure of perpetrator has increased significantly, thus eliciting a turn toward this problematic figure. The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. A significant number of documentary films examining crimes against humanity from the perpetrators’ perspective have been released in the first two decades of this century. This current tendency together with the growing scholarly interest in the explorations of the perpetrator underscore the timeliness of the present book. It aims to explore how the perpetrator is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. The perpetrator documentary films’ objects of study in this book are contextualized in the following contexts: Indonesian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, Chilean and Argentine dictatorship, Spanish Civil War and its aftermaths, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nazi legacy, South Africa Apartheid and USA ́s state perpetrations. Among others, the documentary films analysed are as follows: The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, National Bird, Fahrenheit 11/9, Waltz with Bashir, Z32, El Pacto de Adriana, El Color del Camaleón, 70 y Pico, and El hijo del cazador. The Representation of Perpetrators in Global Documentary Film will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Filmmaking, Communication Studies, Media Studies, Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

This book traces the uneven history of queer media visibility through crucial turning points including the Hollywood Production Code era, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television during the1990s, and the re-imagination of queer representations on TV after the events of 9/11. Kohnen intervenes in previous academic and popular accounts that paint the increase in queer visibility over the past four decades as a largely progressive development. She examines how and why a limited and limiting concept of queer visibility structured around white gay and lesbian characters in committed relationships has become the embodiment of progressive LGBT media representations. She also investigates queer visibility across film, TV, and print media, and highlights previously unexplored connections, such as the lingering traces of classical Hollywood cinema's queer tropes in the X-Men franchise. Across all chapters, narratives and arguments emerge that demonstrate how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and imagined geographies, histories, and people of the American nation.

Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.