This book presents a critical cultural study of the Trans New Wave as a cinematic genre and explores its emergence in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a diverse range of texts, the cultural, social, aesthetic and ethical implications of the genre are placed within the context of rapidly changing understandings of gender diversity. From the cinematic borderlands of independent film festivals to wider public recognition via digital technologies, the genre encompasses a diverse range of texts from short films, documentaries, experimental films, to feature films and narratives that range across life histories, narratives and themes. The book presents transliteracy as an original theoretical approach to reading film representations of the Trans New Wave, and combines it with a new theoretical concept of cinematic ethnogenesis to investigate how the genre emerged from specific communities and the reciprocal interaction of audiences and texts. This interdisciplinary volume engages with contemporary issues of gender diversity, transgender studies, screen and media studies and film festival studies, and as such will be of great interest to scholars working in these fields and in media and cultural studies more generally.

Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. From 2001 to 2011, promising young filmmakers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervor for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important critics worldwide. This development, sometimes called "New Wave cinema," is fully explored in this book. By using a comparative approach and searching for similarities among cinematic styles and trends, the study reveals that the young Romanian directors are part of a larger, European, way of filmmaking. The discussion moves from specific themes, motifs and narratives to the philosophy of a whole generation, such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu, and others.

Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.

The Age of New Waves examines the origins of the concept of the "new wave" in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in world cinema over the past three decades. The book suggests that youth, cities, and the construction of a global market have been the catalysts for the cinematic new waves of the past half century. It begins by describing the enthusiastic engagement between French nouvelle vague filmmakers and a globalizing American cinema and culture during the modernization of France after World War II. It then charts the growing and ultimately explosive disenchantment with the aftermath of that massive social, economic, and spatial transformation in the late 1960s. Subsequent chapters focus on films and visual culture from Taiwan and contemporary mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s, and they link the recent propagation of new waves on the international film festival circuit to the "economic miracles" and consumer revolutions accompanying the process of globalization. While it travels from France to East Asia, the book follows the transnational movement of a particular model of cinema organized around mise en scène--or the interaction of bodies, objects, and spaces within the frame--rather than montage or narrative. The "master shot" style of directors like Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Jia Zhangke has reinvented a crucial but overlooked tendency in new wave film, and this cinema of mise en scène has become a key aesthetic strategy for representing the changing relationships between people and the material world during the rise of a global market. The final chapter considers the interaction between two of the most global phenomena in recent film history--the transnational art cinema and Hollywood--and it searches for traces of an American New Wave.

This book analyses how contemporary genre cinema represents trans-identified characters. Informed by key debates within transfeminism, queer theory, contemporary trans studies – and engaging with the concerns voiced by gender critical feminism – this culturally oriented book critiques the representation of trans characters in a range of cinematic genres, including the musical, period costume drama, the road movie, melodrama, coming-of-age stories, and romances. The case studies address the ways in which trans identifications have been coded within the narrative and stylistic expectations of the genres. Are genre films successful in affirming trans identifications or do they reinforce trans stereotypes and anti-trans discourses? This is a timely and accessible book, which addresses Anglophonic, European and Latin American cinemas, and is ideal for students studying courses in Film Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies or Gender Studies.

The core volume in the Traditions in World Cinema series, this book brings together a colourful and wide-ranging collection of world cinematic traditions - national, regional and global - all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi.

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.

These new essays by leading scholars examine some famous and less well-known instances of polemical encounters. The essays are enhanced by an interview with Gayatri Spivak, specially conducted by Jane Gallop for this volume Historically rigorous, theoretically astute, and sometimes wickedly funny, Polemic makes criticism a critical issue.

This anthology critically re-examines and re-articulates the discursive boundary that binds the region called East Asia in order to produce Trans-Pacific Studies. Recognizing that the creation of regional boundaries depends on a new configuration of both inter- and intra-national power relations and the ideological constructs that generate historical, ideological, and cultural effects, this volume proposes that the term “trans-Pacific” be mobilized to complicate the phrase “East Asian” as the boundary of academic discipline and socio-cultural discourse. The anthology also examines the historical conditions under which “East Asia” was constructed as an area and the trans-Pacific directives that nurtured the sense of nationality in each component nation of East Asia.With the contribution of: Sun Ge (The Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences); Soyoung Kim (Korean National University of Arts); Hyoduk Lee (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies); Jie-Hyun Lim (Hanyang University); Lisa Lowe (University of California); Tessa Morris-Suzuki (The Australian National University); Naoki Sakai (Cornell University), Yuko Shibata (Saint John's University); Annmaria Shimabuku (University of California); Ikuo Shinjou (University of the Ryukyus); Hyon Joo Yoo (University of Vermont).

Teaching Sound Film: A Reader is a film analysis-and-criticism textbook that contains 35 essays on 35 geographically diverse, historically significant sound films. The countries represented here are France, Italy, England, Belgium, Russia, India, China, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Russia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Taiwan, Austria, Afghanistan, South Korea, Finland, Burkina Faso, Mexico, Iran, Israel, Colombia, and the United States. The directors represented include Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Woody Allen, Aki Kaurismäki, Ken Loach, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke, and Hong Sang-soo. Written with university students (and possibly also advanced high school students) in mind, the essays in Teaching Sound Film: A Reader cover some of the central films treated—and central issues raised—in today’s cinema courses and provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills. These essays are clear and readable—that is, sophisticated and meaty yet not overly technical or jargon-heavy. This makes them perfect introductions to their respective films as well as important contributions to the field of film studies in general. Moreover, this book’s scholarly apparatus features credits, images, bibliographies for all films discussed, filmographies for all the directors, a list of topics for writing and discussion, a glossary of film terms, and an appendix containing three essays, respectively, on film acting, avant-garde cinema, and theater vs. film.