From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion. In this, mediated Mormonism and the conversations on social justice that it fosters create the pathway toward an inclusive, feminist-friendly, and queer-positive future for a broader culture that uses Mormonism as a gauge to calibrate its own values.

Dialogue between film and theatre studies is frequently hampered by the lack of a shared vocabulary. Stage-Play and Screen-Play sets out to remedy this, mapping out an intermedial space in which both film and theatre might be examined. Each chapter’s evaluation of the processes and products of stage-to-screen and screen-to-stage transfer is grounded in relevant, applied contexts. Michael Ingham draws upon the growing field of adaptation studies to present case studies ranging from Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and RSC Live’s simulcast of Richard II to F.W. Murnau’s silent Tartüff, Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, and Akiro Kurosawa’s Ran, highlighting the multiple interfaces between media. Offering a fresh insight into the ways in which film and theatre communicate dramatic performances, this volume is a must-read for students and scholars of stage and screen.

Adaptation studies has historically been neglected in both the English and Film Studies curricula. Reflecting on this, Screen Adaptation celebrates its emergence in the late 20th and 21st centuries and explores the varieties of methodologies and debates within the field. Drawing on approaches from genre studies to transtexuality to cultural materialism, the book examines adaptations of both popular and canonical writers, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and J.K.Rowling. Original and provocative, this book will spark new thinking and research in the field of adaptation studies. Mapping the way in which this exciting field has emerged and shifted over the last two decades, the book is also essential reading for students of English Literature and Film.

Although films affect and reflect the way Americans look at politics, they have received far less attention than television or newspapers. This is changing, particularly on college campuses, where courses on politics and film are growing in popularity. This book consists of short essays on approximately fifty American political films. It is distinctive in two ways. Firstly, it defines politics broadly enough to include a range of films, not only on obviously political topics such as the presidency, congress, and elections, but also on the media, law and courts, war and peace, and a variety of policy issues. Secondly, it goes beyond plot and dialogue to discuss the language of film, including visual aspects, sound, mise-en-scène, and other ways that films communicate their messages to audiences. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to the films included. The essays also explain the political context of each film and, when films are based on historical events, discuss the accuracy of their depictions. References to additional sources are included at the end of each essay. This book explores the extent to which films take on the political issues of the day and their influence on public perceptions of politics. Do films support the status quo or do they challenge it?

In this theoretically rich work, Mason Kamana Allred unearths the ways Mormons have employed a wide range of technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences that contribute to the growth of their religious systems of meaning. Drawing on methods from cultural history, media studies, and religious studies, Allred focuses specifically on technologies of vision that have shaped Mormonism as a culture of seeing. These technologies, he argues, were as essential to the making of Mormonism as the humans who received, interpreted, and practiced their faith. While Mormons' uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition's use of visual technology, Allred excavates older practices and technologies for negotiating the spirit, such as panorama displays and magic lantern shows. Fusing media theory with feminist new materialism, he employs media archaeology to examine Mormons' ways of performing distinctions, beholding as a way to engender radical visions, and standardizing vision to effect assimilation. Allred's analysis reveals Mormonism as always materially mediated and argues that religious history is likewise inherently entangled with media.

Why has the myth of Pygmalion and his ivory statue proved so inspirational for writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and directors and creators of films and television series? The 'authorised' version of the story appears in the epic poem of transformations, Metamorphoses, by the first-century CE Latin poet Ovid; in which the bard Orpheus narrates the legend of the sculptor king of Cyprus whose beautiful carved woman was brought to life by the goddess Venus. Focusing on screen storylines with a Pygmalion subtext, from silent cinema to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lars and the Real Girl, this book looks at why and how the made-over or manufactured woman has survived through the centuries and what we can learn about this problematic model of 'perfection' from the perspective of the past and the present. Given the myriad representations of Ovid's myth, can we really make a modern text a tool of interpretation for an ancient poem? This book answers with a resounding 'yes' and explains why it is so important to give antiquity back its future.

Satan has figured in film since the very birth of cinema. The Satanic Screen documents all of Satan’s cinematic incarnations, covering not only the horror genre but also a whole range of sub-genres including hardcore porn, mondo and underground film. Heavily illustrated with rare still photographs, posters and arcana, the book investigates the perennial symbiotic interplay between Satanic cinema and leading occultists, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the Black Arts and their continuing representation in populist culture. Revised and updated since its first acclaimed publication in 2001, Schreck’s study of the diabolical in film has since become a widely referenced standard work on the subject, enriched by Schreck's own personal engagement with magic and spiritual practice, which provides cineastes and sorcerers alike a veritable Encyclopedia Satanica of one of the oldest and most culturally profound genres in motion picture history.

The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films offers readers a long overdue, comprehensive look at the rich history of fairy tales and their influence on film, complete with the inclusion of an extensive filmography compiled by the author. With this book, Jack Zipes not only looks at the extensive, illustrious life of fairy tales and cinema, but he also reminds us that, decades before Walt Disney made his mark on the genre, fairy tales were central to the birth of cinema as a medium, as they offered cheap, copyright-free material that could easily engage audiences not only though their familiarity but also through their dazzling special effects. Since the story of fairy tales on film stretches far beyond Disney, this book, therefore, discusses a broad range of films silent, English and non-English, animation, live-action, puppetry, woodcut, montage (Jim Henson), cartoon, and digital. Zipes, thus, gives his readers an in depth look into the special relationship between fairy tales and cinema, and guides us through this vast array of films by tracing the adaptations of major fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "Snow White," "Peter Pan," and many more, from their earliest cinematic appearances to today. Full of insight into some of our most beloved films and stories, and boldly illustrated with numerous film stills, The Enchanted Screen, is essential reading for film buffs and fans of the fairy tale alike.

Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary' offers close readings of individual films intended to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex and significant humanistic goals.

This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers – pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen. Reviews of the original edition: ‘An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work is sensitive both to cinema history and to the literary origins of the "swashbuckler"....Essential for any library with books on film, it may very well be the definitive book on its subject.’ – Library Journal