In the first book to study the short film using the yin yang complementarity, Raskin proposes a new paradigm—describing major forms of yin and yang, redefined as ungendered, freed of patriarchal bias. Yin evokes such properties as holding back and an openness to interpretation while yang promotes structure, causality, and control. Ten exemplary short films show how the model illuminates their storytelling. Features richly illustrated, shot-by-shot breakdowns—many in color—and links. "Richard Raskin changed my way of thinking about short films twenty years ago with his marvelous book The Art of the Short Fiction Film. And now he manages to do it again! The Yin and Yang of Short Film Storytelling offers a totally new approach to analyzing and making short films. This beautifully written book is fascinating to read and gives valuable tools as well as enormous inspiration to all short film lovers, whether film makers or film researchers. Don't miss this big little pearl!" — Saara Cantell, Film Director, Script Writer, Doctor of Arts (Finland) "Short films are the laboratory of cinema. And no one is more comfortable in this laboratory than Richard Raskin. His book gives an entirely new and fresh approach to creating short films. Think different! Read it, study these ten case studies, and enter an entirely new and original way of shaping shorts armed with the advice of the master of short filmmaking." — Elliot Grove, Founder Raindance Film Festival and British Independent Film Awards "Richard Raskin is a world-renowned scholar and filmmaker whose work has been foundational in bringing attention and respect to short films. His brilliant new book promises to be another touchstone that inspires shorts enthusiasts, scholars, and filmmakers. With its beautifully curated selection of ten "case study" films, it provides an original and fascinating framework that conveys the richness and depth that one can bring to the appreciation - and making - of short form media." — Cynthia Felando, Editor of Short Film Studies and Senior Lecturer, University of California, Santa Barbara "Raskin's book is a must-read for any film-lover or scholar of film and literature. In this wonderfully lucid and creative work, the central concepts and thesis are carefully spelled out, brilliantly applied, and made truly illuminating. Raskin has also stripped the yin-yang distinction of its sexist pitfalls in a way that enhances its utility and appeal. The book is destined to be a classic!" — Andrew Effrat, former Dean of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "This is a fascinating read. Raskin has taken his encyclopedic knowledge of short films and created a tool, an analytical system, to help illuminate what makes a short film successful. I love that it's a tool that can be applied to almost any piece of art for that matter." — David Greenspan, Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at Cannes in 2001; directed or edited numerous episodes of Grey's Anatomy, Station 19, and other TV series

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment. Short films or micro-narratives, cinematic pieces or units re-assembled into image archives and looping themes, challenge the concepts that have traditionally been used to understand cinematic experience, like linear causality, sequentiality, and closure, and call attention to complex and modular forms of cinematic expression and perception. Such forms, in turn, seem to meet the requirements of digital convergence, which has pushed the development of more compact and mobile hardware for the display and use of audiovisual content on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Meanwhile, contemporary economies of digital content acquisition, filing, and sharing equally require the shrinking of cinematic content for it to be recorded, played, projected, distributed, and installed with ease and speed. In this process, cinematic experience is shortened and condensed as well, so as to fit the late-capitalist attention economy. The essays in this volume ask what this changed technical, socio-economic and political situation entails for the aesthetics and experience of contemporary cinematics, and call attention to different concepts, theories and tools at our disposal to analyze these changes.

Ms. นางแอ่น เจียรวนนท์ (Nangaen Chearavanont, 8th November, 1928 to ), a.k.a.: Tse Yin (謝燕), edited this book as a sequel to Mr. Wong Yin Ching (黃燕清)’s earlier work “Hong Kong Stories (香港掌故)” (1958), she added English explanations, further information and new contents, photographs, diagrams and maps, let new generation easily to understand the Hong Kong real life from 1900s to 1950s.

New Authors and collections. Following the great success of 2015's Gothic Fantasy, deluxe edition short story compilations, this latest in the series is packed with tales set in bleak and paradisiacal worlds of boundless imagination from classic authors and exciting budding contemporary writers. New and notable writers featured are: Kim Antieau, Steve Carr, Carolyn Charron, Megan Dorei, Sarah Lyn Eaton, Michelle Kaseler, Claude Lalumière, Gerri Leen, Konstantine Paradias, Jeff Parsons, Kelsey Shannahan, Nidhi Singh, Jeremy Szal, J.M. Templet, Russ Thorne, M. Darusha Wehm, and Andrew J. Wilson. These appear alongside classic stories by authors such as Edward Bellamy, Samuel Butler, Robert W. Chambers, Jack London and Mary Shelley.

This book presents Chinese short-short stories in English and Chinese, integrating language learning with cultural studies for intermediate to advanced learners of Mandarin Chinese and students of contemporary Chinese literature. Each chapter begins with a critical introduction, followed by two or more stories in parallel Chinese and English texts; each story is followed by a vocabulary list, discussion questions, and a biography of the author. The chapters are organized around central concepts in Chinese culture such as li (ritual), ren (benevolence), mianzi (face/prestige), being filial, and the dynamics of yin and yang, as well as the themes of governance, identity, love, marriage, and change. The stories selected are short-shorts by important contemporary writers ranging from the most literary to everyday voices. Specifically designed for use in upper-level Chinese language courses, Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text offers students a window onto China today and pathways to its traditions and past as they gain language competence and critical cultural skills.

This dissertation is an attempt to define a Chinese "modernism," exemplified by the narrative practices of four major writers in Taiwan today, from the perspective of comparative literature and recent development of literary theory. I propose that modernity of Taiwanese fiction is not so much a result of Western influences as an evolution of Chinese narrative tradition itself. To argue my point I delineate a poetics of Chinese narrative, from which I devise a method of reading and a criterion of evaluation for contemporary Taiwanese fiction in defining its achievement and historical significance. This study of Taiwanese fiction also aims at providing a better understanding of fundamental aesthetic assumptions of Western "modernism" in the context of its own literary tradition. Chapter One, "Introduction," investigates the theoretical foundation and its line of development in Western and Chinese poetics respectively. It first examines the Platonic view of mimesis and Aristotelian aesthetic view of fictionality and their influence on the critical tradition, the continuity of the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry as seen in the structuralist and deconstructionist theories, then the relationship between subjective fictionality and ironic objectivity in Chinese poetics, the continuity of the dilemma in the Chinese novelists in their dual allegiance to the ideal and the real. A final section gives a critical overview of the literary scene in Taiwan. The following four chapters provide examples of the internal tension between fictionality and ironic awareness in the Taiwanese modernist texts. I suggest that instead of stretching the metaphorical potential of fiction to a highly intellectualized abstraction or playing down the interpretive claims of fiction by dramatizing its vulnerability like their Western counterpart, the Taiwanese modernists create their texts on the borderline between the high and the low. Self-assertive as well as self-denying, each of them confronts his own intellectual vision with paradox and ambivalence. In Ch'en Ying-chen, this is expressed as a battle between a lyrical vision of ideological values and an instinctive self-clowning, in Ch'i-teng Sheng, as a form of competition between pattern and contingency, in Wang Chen-ho, as a celebration and abuse of the fictionality of fiction, and in Wang Wen-hsing, an intense self-parody. I conclude that the sensitivity to the irrational and contradiction, inherent with a resistance to didacticism, constitutes the best part of the Chinese humanistic tradition, which is continuously enriched with new dimensions by the contemporary Taiwanese writers.

A New History of Documentary Film, Second Edition offers a much-needed resource, considering the very rapid changes taking place within documentary media. Building upon the best-selling 2005 edition, Betsy McLane keeps the same chronological examination, factual reliability, ease of use and accessible prose style as before, while also weaving three new threads - Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology and Environmental/Nature Films - into the discussion. She provides emphasis on archival and preservation history, present practices, and future needs for documentaries. Along with preservation information, specific problems of copyright and fair use, as they relate to documentary, are considered. Finally, A History of Documentary Film retains and updates the recommended readings and important films and the end of each chapter from the first edition, including the bibliography and appendices. Impossible to talk learnedly about documentary film without an audio-visual component, a companion website will increase its depth of information and overall usefulness to students, teachers and film enthusiasts.

Maryel Locke and Charles Warren present twelve original essays by film critics, filmmakers, theologians, and philosophers that examine the 1985 film Hail Mary, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and its companion film, The Book of Mary, directed by Anne-Marie Miéville. (The films are collectively released under the title Hail Mary.) The interpretative essays offer a rich spectrum of analysis and opinion representing many divergent points of view about critical theory, the status of women, and the value of film as a medium. Locke and Warren also include two important interviews with Godard, brief biographies and complete filmographies of Godard and Miéville, a short breakdown of the two films including the English subtitles, and the script of the French dialogue to complete a remarkably comprehensive treatment of this important film. The only film based on the biblical story of the Virgin Mary, Godard’s Hail Mary is a contemporary Swiss/French representation of Mary’s virgin pregnancy, the birth of her son, and her relationship with Joseph and her young child. Miéville’s companion film is about a young girl named Mary whose parents get a divorce. While neither film is overtly religious, the initial release of Hail Mary brought public protests, court cases, a physical attack on Godard, and condemnation by the Pope.

By considering the screenplay as a literary object worthy of critical inquiry, this volume breaks new ground in film studies. Though the history of the screenplay is as long and rich as the history of film itself, critics and scholars have neglected it as a topic of serious research. Script Culture and the American Screenplay treats the screenplay as a literary work in its own right, presenting analyses of screenplays from a variety of frameworks, including feminism, Marxism, structuralism, philosophy, and psychology. In distancing the text of screenplays from the on-screen performance typically associated with them, Kevin Alexander Boon expands the scope of film studies into exciting new territory with this volume. Script Culture and the American Screenplay is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides a general background for screenplay studies, tracing the evolution of the screenplay from the early shot lists and continuities of George Méliès and Thomas Harper Ince to the more detailed narratives of contemporary works. Part 2 offers specific, primarily thematic, critical examinations of screenplays, along with discussions of the original screenplay and the screenplay adaptation. In all, Boon explains that screenplay criticism distinguishes itself from traditional film studies in three major ways. The primary focus of screenplay criticism is on the screenplay rather than the film, the focus of screenplay studies is on the screenwriter rather than the director, and screenplay criticism, like literary criticism, is written to illuminate a reader’s understanding of the text. Boon demonstrates that whether we are concerned with aesthetics and identifying rules for distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, or whether we align ourselves with more contemporary theories, which recognize texts as distinguishable in their inter-relationships and marked difference, screenplays constitute a rich cache of works worthy of critical examination. Film scholars as well as students of film, creative writing, and literary studies will appreciate this singular volume.