This book pairs close readings of some of the classic writings of existentialist philosophers with interpretations of films that reveal striking parallels to each of those texts, demonstrating their respective philosophies in action. Individual chapters include significant excerpts from the original texts being discussed and illustrated. Pairings cover Schopenhauer and Waking Life, Stirner and Hud, Kierkegaard and Winter Light, Nietzsche and The Fountainhead, Heidegger, Blade Runner and The Thin Red Line, Camus, Leaving Las Vegas and Missing, Sartre, Husbands and Wives, and Michael Collins, de Beauvoir and Revolutionary Road, and Foucault and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Movies with Meaning offers a clear and insightful examination of the relationships between existential philosophers and film, providing both digests of their most significant texts and cinematic illustrations of what each had in mind. For the first time in one place, this book analyses the implications for film of the perspectives of a wide array of the most significant existentialist thinkers. Organized chronologically, like most existentialism anthologies, this is an ideal textbook for an intermediate level existentialism course, or as a companion to a selection of primary texts.

This comprehensive introduction to film focuses on three topics: how movies express meanings, how viewers understand those meanings, and how cinema functions globally as both an art and a business. Using clear, accessible, and jargon-free writing, this is the only introductory film text to examine the elements of film style and the viewer's contribution to the cinema experience. How do viewers interpret the effects filmmakers create? How do filmmakers anticipate, and build on, the likely ways viewers will react to certain kinds of stories and audio-visual designs? The text examines both how filmmakers create images and sounds and the mechanisms and processes by which viewers make sense of images and stories on screen. This approach helps students understand not only the basic concepts but also how their own reactions and opinions impact the overall film experience.

"The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions," said the existentiallist thinker Albert Camus. And no less a philosopher than Woody Allen has wondered:"How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?" "Movies and the Meaning of Life" looks at popular and cult movies, examining their assumptions and insights on meaning-of-life questions: What is reality and how can I know it? (The Truman Show, Contact, Waking Life); How do I find myself and my true identity? (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Boys Don't Cry, Memento); How do I find meaning from my interactions with others? (Pulp Fiction, Shadowlands, Chasing Amy); What is the chief purpose in life? (American Beauty, Life is Beautiful, The Shawshank Redemption); and How ought I live my life? (Pleasantville, Spiderman, Minority Report, Groundhog Day).

This comprehensive introduction to film text focuses on three topics: how movies express meanings, how viewers understand those meanings, and how cinema functions globally as both an art and a business. Using clear, accessible, and jargon-free writing, this is the only introductory film text to examine the elements of film style and the viewer's contribution to the cinema experience. How do viewers interpret the effects filmmakers create? How do filmmakers anticipate, and build on, the likely ways viewers will react to certain kinds of stories and audio-visual designs? The text examines both how filmmakers create images and sounds and the mechanisms and processes by which viewers make sense of images and stories on screen. This approach helps students understand not only the basic concepts but also how their own reactions and opinions impact the overall film experience.

VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. -- Publisher description.

This two-part volume contains a comprehensive collection of original studies by well-known scholars focusing on the Bible’s wide-ranging reception in world cinema. It is organized into sections examining the rich cinematic afterlives of selected characters from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; considering issues of biblical reception across a wide array of film genres, ranging from noir to anime; featuring directors, from Lee Chang-dong to the Coen brothers, whose body of work reveals an enduring fascination with biblical texts and motifs; and offering topical essays on cinema’s treatment of selected biblical themes (e.g., lament, apocalyptic), particular interpretive lenses (e.g., feminist interpretation, queer theory), and windows into biblical reception in a variety of world cinemas (e.g., Indian, Israeli, and Third Cinema). This handbook is intended for scholars of the Bible, religion, and film as well as for a wider general audience.

The Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory clearly and accessibly explains the major theoretical approaches now deployed in the study of the moving image, as well as defining key theoretical terms. This dictionary provides readers with the conceptual apparatus to understand the often daunting language and terminology of screen studies. Entries include: *audience * Homi K. Bhabha * black cinema * the body * children and media * commodification * cop shows * deep focus * Umberto Eco * the gaze * Donna Haraway * bell hooks * infotainment * master narrative * medical dramas * morpheme * myth * panopticon * pastiche * pleasure * real time * social realism * sponsorship * sport on television * subliminal * third cinema * virtual reality Consultant Editors: David Black, USA, William Urricchio, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, Gill Branston, Cardiff University, UK ,Elayne Rapping, USA

A daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive. Katherine Groo daringly takes readers to the margins of the film record, addressing the undertheorization of film history and offering a rigorous corrective. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful. Rather than filling holes, Groo endeavors to understand the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Bad Film Histories draws on numerous works of ethnographic cinema, from Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, to a Citroën-sponsored “croisière” across Africa, to the extensive archives of the Maison Lumière and the Musée Albert-Kahn, to dozens of expedition films from the 1910s and 1920s. The project is deeply grounded in poststructural approaches to history, and throughout Groo draws on these frameworks to offer innovative and accessible readings that explain ethnographic cinema’s destabilizing energies. As Groo describes, ethnographic works are mostly untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and largely unrestored even in their digital afterlives. Her examination of ethnographic cinema provides necessary new thought for both film scholars and those who are thrilled by cinema’s boundless possibilities. In so doing, she boldly reexamines what early ethnographic cinema is and how these films produce meaning, challenging the foundations of film history and prevailing approaches to the archive.

This book is one of the first to apply the theoretical tools proposed by French philosopher Bruno Latour to film studies. Through the example of the Hollywood Teen Film and with a particular focus on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book delineates how Teen Film has established itself as one of Hollywood’s most consistent and dynamic genres. While many productions may recycle formulaic patterns, there is also a proliferation of cinematic coming-of-age narratives that are aesthetically and politically progressive, experimental, and complex. The case studies develop a Latourian film semiotics as a flexible analytical approach which raises new questions, not only about the history, types and tropes of teen films, but also about their aesthetics, mediality, and composition. Through an exploration of a wide and diverse range of examples from the past decade, including films by female and African-American directors, urban and rural perspectives, and non-heteronormative sexualities, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies demonstrates how the classic Teen Film canon has been regurgitated, expanded, and renewed.