This new book investigates the relationship of film to history, power, memory, and cultural citizenship. The book is concerned with two central issues: firstly, the participation of film and filmmakers in articulating and challenging projects of modernity; and, secondly, the role of film in shaping particular understandings of self and other to evoke collective notions of belonging. These issues call for interdisciplinary and multi-layered analyses that are ideally met through dialogue across place, time, identities and genres. The contributors to this volume enable this dialogue by considering the ways in which cultural expression and identity expressed through film serve to create notions of belonging, group identity, and entitlement within modern societies.

An important reexamination of early film history, translated from the French for the first time.

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema.

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban. Within audience studies, however, an increasing number of scholars are turning their attention away from the bright lights of the urban, and towards the less well-lit and infinitely more variegated history of rural cinema-going. Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in A Global Context is the first volume to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. It aims to provide a rich and wide-ranging introduction to this growing field, and to further develop some of its key questions. It brings together eighteen international scholars or teams, all representatives of a dynamic, new field. Moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of rural exhibition, distribution and cinema experience, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world. To this end, the volume also innovates by bringing discussions of North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Kenya, Brazil, China, Thailand, South Africa and Australia.

At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.

What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called "disabled." Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes. This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.

Growing concerns about climate change and the increasing occurrence of ever more devastating natural disasters in some parts of the world and their consequences for human life, not only in the immediately affected regions, but for all of us, have increased our desire to learn more about disaster experiences in the past. How did disaster experiences impact on the development of modern sciences in the early modern era? Why did religion continue to play such an important role in the encounter with disasters, despite the strong trend towards secularization in the modern world? What was the political role of disasters? Historical Disasters in Context illustrates how past societies coped with a threatening environment, how societies changed in response to disaster experiences, and how disaster experiences were processed and communicated, both locally and globally. Particular emphasis is put on the realms of science, religion, and politics. International case studies demonstrate that while there are huge differences across cultures in the way people and societies responded to disasters, there are also many commonalities and interactions between different cultures that have the potential to alter the ways people prepare for and react to disasters in future. To explain these relationships and highlight their significance is the purpose of this volume.

Making British Culture explores an under-appreciated factor in the emergence of a recognisably British culture. Specifically, it examines the experiences of English readers between around 1707 and 1830 as they grappled, in a variety of circumstances, with the great effusion of Scottish authorship – including the hard-edged intellectual achievements of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson as well as the more accessible contributions of poets like Robert Burns and Walter Scott – that distinguished the age of the Enlightenment.

The political films that have emerged on the global film festival circuit since the 1990s mark a shift in cinematic strategies for critically addressing dominant, militant, or otherwise repressive ideologies. From a focus on the representation of oppression in films like The Battle of Algiers, films such as Timbuktu, Nobody Knows About Persian Cats and Chop Shop now contribute to the active formation of political characters and viewers, a form not fully realized until the 21st century due to shifts in information technologies and resulting political organization. This book demonstrates that a contemporary form of political cinema has emerged, centered on the production of subjectivity and networks of protest, which depicts the active formation of political identities that resonates with off-screen protest movements.

This book is a sweeping historical survey of the origins, development and nature of state power. It demonstrates that Eurasia is home to a dominant tradition of arbitrary rule mediated through military, civil and ecclesiastical servants and a marginal tradition of representative and responsible government through autonomous institutions. The former tradition finds expression in hierarchically organized and ideologically legitimated continental bureaucratic states while the latter manifests itself in the state of laws. In recent times, the marginal tradition has gained in popularity and has led to continental bureaucratic states attempting to introduce democratic and constitutional reforms. These attempts have rarely altered the actual manner in which power is exercised by the state and its elites given the deeper and historically rooted experience of arbitrary rule. Far from being remote, the arbitrary culture of power that emerged in many parts of the world continues to shape the fortunes of states. To ignore this culture of power and the historical circumstances that have shaped it comes at a high price, as indicated by the ongoing democratic recession and erosion of liberal norms within states that are democracies.