The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author’s wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning. Taking as her subject all of film history, the author traces out the history of the flashback, illuminating that history through structuralist narrative theory, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, and theories of ideology. From the American silent film era and the European and Japanese avant-garde of the twenties, from film noir and the psychological melodrama of the forties and fifties to 1980s art and Third World cinema, the flashback has interrogated time and memory, making it a nexus for ideology, representations of the psyche, and shifting cultural attitudes.

Flashbacks in Film examines film flashback as a rich multimodal narrative device, analyzing the cognitive underpinnings of film flashbacks and the mechanisms that lead viewers to successfully comprehend them. Combining a cognitive film theory approach with the theoretical framework proposed by blending theory, which claims that human beings’ general ability for conceptual integration underlies most of our daily activities, this book argues that flashbacks make sense to the viewer, as they are specifically designed for the viewer’s cognitive understanding. Through a mixture of analysis and dozens of case studies, this book demonstrates that successful film flashbacks appeal to the spectator’s natural perceptual and cognitive abilities, which spectators exercise daily. This book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in film studies, media studies, and cognitive linguistics.

In this second edition essential guide some 150 key genres, movements, theories and production terms are explained and analysed with depth and clarity.

For Americans World War II was "a good war," a war that was worth fighting. Even as the conflict was underway, a myriad of both fictional and nonfictional books began to appear examining one or another of the raging battles. These essays examine some of the best literature and popular culture of World War II. Many of the studies focus on women, several are about children, and all concern themselves with the ways that the war changed lives. While many of the contributors concern themselves with the United States, there are essays about Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan.

Mimetic theories of narration - Diegetic theories of narration - The viewe's activity - Principles of narration - Sin, murder, and narration - Narration and time - Narration and space - Modes and norms - Classical narration : the Hollywood example - Art-cinema narration - Historical-materialist narration : the soviet example - Parametric narration - Godard and narration.

The period 1907–1913 marks a crucial transitional moment in American cinema. As moving picture shows changed from mere novelty to an increasingly popular entertainment, fledgling studios responded with longer running times and more complex storytelling. A growing trade press and changing production procedures also influenced filmmaking. In Early American Cinema in Transition, Charlie Keil looks at a broad cross-section of fiction films to examine the formal changes in cinema of this period and the ways that filmmakers developed narrative techniques to suit the fifteen-minute, one-reel format. Keil outlines the kinds of narratives that proved most suitable for a single reel’s duration, the particular demands that time and space exerted on this early form of film narration, and the ways filmmakers employed the unique features of a primarily visual medium to craft stories that would appeal to an audience numbering in the millions. He underscores his analysis with a detailed look at six films: The Boy Detective; The Forgotten Watch; Rose O’Salem-Town; Cupid’s Monkey Wrench; Belle Boyd, A Confederate Spy; and Suspense.

Prompted by recent challenges to and debates about the relative public silence concerning the effects of the Allied air war over Europe during World War II, this collection of essays examines literary, visual (film and photography), and institutional (museums) representations of the bombing of civilian targets, predominantly in Germany. The authors examine narrative strategies of both well-known and relatively little known works as well as the moral and ideological presuppositions of the varied representations of the depredations of total war. The introduction and afterword by the editors invite the readers to expand the contours and historical context of the debates about the German public discourse on the bombing war beyond the narrow confines of perpetrators and victims. The volume will be of interest to literary scholars, historians, and the general reading public interested in warfare and its effects on civilian populations.

This book argues that the fundamental shift in Chinese Cinema away from Socialism and towards Post-Socialism can be located earlier than the emergence of the "Fifth Generation" in the mid-eighties when it is usually assumed to have occured. By close analysis of films from the 1949-1976 Maoist era in comparison with 1976-81 films representing the Cultural Revolution, it demonstrates that the latter already breaks away from Socialism.

One-volume reference work on the first twenty-five years of the cinema's international emergence from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s.

Offers readers an introduction to just under 30 critical and representative writings on the relationship between film and history. These writings represent a combination of insights from film theory, cultural studies, historiography, the history of cinema, and, film promotion and reception.