Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Film, Media, Mass Communication
  4. Media, mass communication
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

7176 results in Media, mass communication

Page 146 of 359

  • 3 - Pedagogic Practices and Newer Approaches to Contemporary Bollywood Cinema

  • Neelam Sidhar Wright
  • Book:
    Bollywood and Postmodernism
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 46-62

  • Summary

    FILM INSTITUTIONS AND REPRESENTATIVES

    The supposed Western appetite for sophisticated and realistic Indian films seems to trickle down into the film festivals, which ironically claim to celebrate and raise the international profile of popular Indian cinema. For example, the offcial press release for the British Film Institute's 2007 Indian cinema now film showcase included an opening paragraph which openly rejected the ‘frivolity and glitz of Bollywood’. Even in the programme's synopses for the few contemporary Bollywood films that were selected for the festival, there was a need to include justifications for the film's unintegrated song sequences and historical inaccuracies. Furthermore, unusual choices behind the appointment of Western ambassadors for popular Indian cinema also add to the problem. In 2004, the independent Hollywood producer Ismail Merchant wrote a foreword to Dinesh Raheja and Jitendra Kothari's The Bollywood Saga, a book which aimed to celebrate and promote popular Indian cinema. But Merchant's firm Western base and history of producing elegant Western period dramas made him an unusual spokesperson for Bollywood cinema, and in his foreword he in fact criticises ‘the glut of such formalised entertainment without variation in style or substance [which] may soon alienate all but the most jaded of cinema-goers’ (Merchant, cited in Raheja and Kothari: 10-11). Merchant goes on to warn against Bollywood's dangerous over-production and its over-hyped films, and he suggests that instead of copying from the West, it is ‘imperative’ that Bollywood filmmakers instead learn from world cinema.

    Correspondingly, auteur Satyajit Ray has been a long-standing representative of Indian cinema in the West, despite his distinctively European film style and lack of popularity with the mass Indian audience. Ray's high international profile has proved an obstacle for Indian popular cinema, particularly given his condemnation of popular Hindi films. In his 1976 essay ‘What is wrong with Hindi films?’ Ray suggested that popular Indian films had in some ways become a source of shame. He blamed the negative influence of American cinema, which depicted a way of life ‘so utterly at variance’ (22) with that of Indians, and instead presented Italian neo-realism as a positive role model, arguing that it would be impossible for India ever to achieve Hollywood's high-tech polish.

  • 15 - Independent Documentaries and Online Uses in China: From Cinephilia to Activism

  • from Part III - Displacement, Participation and Spectatorship
    • By Judith Pernin, Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) in Paris
  • Edited by Camille Deprez, Judith Pernin
  • Book:
    Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 233-246

  • Summary

    Since the late 1980s, radical transformations of the Chinese film industry and art circles have led to the emergence of a significant body of independent documentary films produced and circulated without the backing of state institutions. This was definitely a breakthrough, since state documentary studios and television stations were the sole producers and broadcasters of non-fiction films in China for more than thirty years. Reforms that gradually adjusted the film and television industries to a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s generated, as a side effect, a grey area in which individual projects could be produced without prior submission to the censorship process. The modest beginning of what has been called the ‘independent Chinese documentary movement’ was initiated by about five individuals producing a few personal films outside of their paid jobs. From the late 1990s onwards, digital cameras and post-production software facilitated access to individual video practices. As a result, this group of filmmakers enlarged and diversified: both amateurs and professionals began shooting independent documentaries on various topics, such as rural life, the elderly, young starving artists, migrant workers and the like. Producing independent works also meant breaking from the conventions of the official documentary film model by filming long and free conversations with ‘ordinary people’, relying on filmic narration instead of a voice-of-god supporting official ideology, and favouring the observational over the expository documentary mode. Presented by their authors as subjective works with a personal touch, these films tended to favour emotion over information.

    This brief presentation indicates that the film movement was not only induced by a top-down loosening process of the censorship system, or by the emergence of a market economy. Grassroots efforts to elaborate specific production and circulation methods for independent documentaries were crucial to shaping new practices adapted to the constraints of the Chinese film industry or, more accurately, designed to bypass them. The ever-growing number of independent documentaries, primarily shown at filmmakers’ homes and therefore restricted to the private sphere, prompted later film enthusiasts to organise screenings in privately run spaces, such as bars, art galleries or on university premises. These small-scale, semi-private events organised by unofficial film-related groups established from the mid-1990s onwards eventually evolved into independent festivals in the 2000s. These film activities fall under the category of the unofficial (minjian), and are carried out in physical spaces, as well as on the Internet.

  • 7 - Contemporary Bollywood Remakes

  • Neelam Sidhar Wright
  • Book:
    Bollywood and Postmodernism
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 148-189

  • Summary

    SHIFTING TOWARDS THE FIGURAL: SANJAY LEELA BHANSALl's DEVDAS

    Further insight into postmodern aesthetics in the contemporary Bollywood remake can be offered through an in-depth analysis of one of the genre's earliest, most prominent examples: the Devdas lineage. As mentioned earlier, filmic re-presentations of Chattopadhyaya's novel are profuse. However, for my analysis, I want to draw attention to two of the most popular and widely regarded versions: Bimal Roy's 1955 classic, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 version - a divergent alternative to Roy's pseudo-original. The somewhat ritualistic inclination to juxtapose the superiority of an original text against its ‘inferior’ remake applies greatly in the case of these two films. Roy's film marked the start of a classic era of socio-realist films in India, held in high regard for their refreshingly underplayed performances, their compassion for humanity (as social commentary and morality tales), and their attention to ‘real’ characters. Contrarily, Bhansali's remake is a flagship for the contemporary Bollywood blockbuster, famous for its operatic style and record-breaking budget (costing Rs 500 million, it was the most expensive Indian film in history at the time of its release). However, simply debating which film is better and why will neither satisfy nor advance our understanding and appreciation of the Bollywood remake genre. What is more, as my investigation will reveal, it seems inappropriate to judge Bhansali's remake against Roy's original when the two films have been produced not only in separate decades, but also through a completely different genus of cinema.

    There is an almost unanimous sense of disregard present in much of the discourse surrounding Bhansali's Devdas and his work as a director, which parallels Western criticisms of postmodern and low popular art forms. The circulation of Bhansali's Devdas within high and low art circles reveals a familiar paradox: the film (a national and international box-offce hit) was loved by mass audiences, yet was panned in critical film reviews worldwide. It was a characteristically populist mainstream Bollywood production in India, yet was promoted in high-art film festivals (Cannes) and exhibited in art-house cinemas in the West. Bhansali's film therefore exists simultaneously as art cinema (through its exhibition) and ‘depthless melodrama’ (through its critical reception) - a label that the director has become much accustomed to in his career. In her book 100 Bollywood Films, Rachel Dwyer (2005) comments on Bhansali's trademark cinema of ‘excess’.

  • Conclusion

  • Edited by Camille Deprez, Judith Pernin
  • Book:
    Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 247-255

  • Summary

    The variety of case studies included here should not give the impression that this volume was conceived as a comprehensive overview of the issue of independent documentary in contemporary times. Rather, it aimed at prompting new interest for, and innovative academic perspectives on, the manifold significations of independent documentary production today. Besides demonstrating the complexity, variability, pragmatism and paradoxes that this notion of ‘independent’ documentary entails, this collection of case studies also endeavoured to reveal important similarities among different practitioners in the field. In fact, the book chapters may be reshuffled to highlight other significant connections between them.

    BIG NAMES, UP-AND-COMING FILMMAKERS AND A NEW APPROACH TO AUTHORSHIP

    As Kristian Feigelson noted in his chapter on Chris Marker, the constant evolution of image technologies challenges documentary filmmaking practices, and it is striking to see how some celebrated authors, who started their careers well before the digital turn, have successively embraced the new possibilities offered by direct sound recording, analogue video and amateur camcorders, and subsequently by digital cameras and computerised editing devices and circulation modes. A forerunner and a doyen, Chris Marker has a few contenders in this field, as the works of Agnes Varda, Chantal Ackerman, Harun Farocki, Ogawa Shinsuke, Abbas Kiarostami and Werner Herzog demonstrate. Instead of being inhibited by successive technological developments, these filmmakers have actively participated in the renewal of documentary in film, video and digital media, using a playful approach to technology and rethinking their work methods to interrogate the documentary form. It is perhaps this very attitude that constitutes their legacy, and that has inspired subsequent generations of documentarists such as Rithy Panh. Although thematically coherent, each of Panh's films represents an opportunity to experiment with the documentary apparatus, while simultaneously confronting Cambodia's recent history, both ethically and methodically. Either televised or theatrical documentaries, his films are undoubtedly the creative works of an author whose achievements reach far beyond the realm of images. His cinematic stance on Cambodian history constitutes a personal and universal reflection on genocide.

    If an experimental approach to the documentary is pervasive in recent independent films, the ideological legacy of previous filmmakers is still not accepted at face value. Following the post-1990s global power shifts and the critical reassessment of ethnography, new authors had to carefully re-evaluate their elders’ teachings, especially when the relations between filmmakers and filmed subjects were involved.

  • 4 - Brand Wagon: The Courtship of Multiplex Audiences and the 2003 Asia Extreme Roadshow

  • Daniel Martin
  • Book:
    Extreme Asia
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 92-121

  • Summary

    Far Eastern film escapes from kung-fu clichés with Tartan Asia Extreme.

    Marketing slogan of Asia Extreme 2003

    The first Asia Extreme touring film festival, in summer 2003, marked a key turning point for the brand. For the first time, Tartan added its Asia Extreme brand to theatrical releases, and screened films together, rather than separately. Promoting brand recognition was given priority over individual films. Also, for the first time, Asia Extreme films were released in multiplex cinemas: the 2003 Asia Extreme festival (referred to by Tartan as a ‘roadshow’) was exclusive to the now-defunct UGC chain of cinemas. Seven films went ‘on tour’ to eight UGC cinemas around the UK; each individual film would play for two weeks, then move on to another cinema. Each venue rotated through all seven films between May and August.

    Prior to this new release strategy, Tartan's cult Asian films had only been released in London cinemas and art houses nationwide. Between August 2000 and September 2001 Tartan released six titles, but it was not until 2002 that the Asia Extreme DVD brand became official. In 2002 Tartan released two more films theatrically, which would later bear the new Asia Extreme brand: the hitman thriller Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and the ‘restrained’ horror The Eye (2002). Both films were directed by the Pang Brothers, a transnational duo who have made films in both the Thai and Hong Kong film industries. Though both films were accompanied by a more aggressive marketing strategy (free postcards were distributed at the art-house cinemas at which they were shown), they were still confined to repertory cinemas. The 2003 Asia Extreme festival was Tartan's first push for multiplex audiences and the marketing strategy they employed demonstrates their determination to win the favour of a much wider audience.

    The disparate group of films chosen for the festival indicates Tartan's deter- mination to expand the brand. Having launched the notion of an ‘Extreme Asian Cinema’ with the horror films Ring and Audition, Tartan increasingly moved away from ‘straight’ horror. Of the seven films in the Asia Extreme festival, none could be described as horror movies; several represent genre hybrids like Battle Royale. Four of the seven films chosen were from South Korea: Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999), Bad Guy (Kim Ki-duk, 2002), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002) and Public Enemy (Kang Woo-suk, 2002).

  • 5 - Savagery and Serenity: Extreme Cinema and the Films of Kim Ki-duk

  • Daniel Martin
  • Book:
    Extreme Asia
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 122-141

  • Summary

    You could say that it started with a fishhook.

    Grady Hendrix, Sight & Sound, February 2006

    For Asian cinema in the UK 2004 was a significant year. Tartan Films released more Asian films in British cinemas than ever before, offering another Asia Extreme seven-film roadshow, the high-profile stand-alone releases of Oldboy (2003) and the first two Infernal Affairs (2002, 2003) films under the Asia Extreme brand, not to mention several art-house-confined ‘non-extreme’ Japanese and Korean films. But if 2004 was an important year for Asian film in general, it was even more significant for the work of one South Korean director in particular: Kim Ki-duk.

    Kim's Bad Guy (2002) was the first of his films released in the UK, having been part of Tartan's first Asia Extreme roadshow in 2003. In 2004, Tartan released two Kim Ki-duk films, but there were significant differences in the promotion of the films: while The Isle (2000) was Asia Extreme branded and sent out with that year's roadshow, Kim's Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring (2003) was released outside of the Asia Extreme label and sold to a very different audience, on very different terms. However, despite the marked difference in the way these two films were presented to British critics and audiences, an inclusive impression of Kim's body of work began to emerge in discourses. Indeed, Kim's profile among Western critics was arguably at its peak in 2004, thanks as well to two high-profile festival awards. Kim's Samaritan Girl (2004) won the Silver Bear award for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, and just a few months later, Kim's 3-Iron (2004) won Best Director at the Venice Film Festival.

    However, despite Bad Guy being the first of Kim's films to receive a theatrical release in the UK, it was The Isle that first received critical attention. Tartan acquired the rights to the film back in 2001, around the time of their acquisition of Battle Royale, and began hyping the film immediately. The Isle had notoriously caused vomiting and walk-outs when it first screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2000, and the film was immediately caught up in negotiations between Tartan and the British Board of Film Classification when cuts were demanded by the latter. The film's eventual release in 2004 was, therefore, accompanied by a great deal of prejudice and anticipation.

  • Conclusion: The Legacy of Asia Extreme

  • Daniel Martin
  • Book:
    Extreme Asia
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 June 2015, pp 163-168

  • Summary

    During a panel discussion entitled ‘So, what's Japanese cinema got to do with it?’ at the BFI Southbank cinema in London, on 5 December 2007, panelist Tony Rayns was asked if there is a dominant image or understanding of Japanese cinema in Britain. Rayns answered, describing the climax of Ring, ‘undoubtedly, it's a spectral woman with long hair over her face coming out of a well’. In reference to the worldwide proliferation of Ring-esque Japanese horror films, Rayns said, ‘Japan is sick of them. The world is sick of them.’

    Rayns’ frustration at the enduring popularity of the same few Asian films should not come as any surprise. It is remarkable, though, that seven years after the theatrical release of Ring, its influence was still so strongly felt. The credit can only lie with Asia Extreme. This book has examined the changing meanings of cult Asian cinema in the UK, as both the basis on which the films were promoted, and the frames of reference with which critics consumed them, changed drastically. Orientalism is alive and well as a practice within both the marketing and reception of contemporary Asian cinema. While representations of the Far East as Other do not have to define the reception of these films by British audiences and critics, they inevitably will when an aggressive and targeted marketing campaign suggests such an interpretation. Likewise, ‘cult’ films can attain their status through these aggressive marketing campaigns; the term ‘cult’ should therefore no longer be applied only to those films which generate a spontaneous fan reaction.

    What Tartan achieved with Asia Extreme remains unique and unprecedented, in spite of the company's many imitators. Tartan's broader efforts in releasing a much wider range of contemporary cinema were also successful: the company's highest-earning theatrical release was the American documentary Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004), and in 2008, the company released Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a shot-for-shot remake of the same director's 1997 Austrian film. What was significant about Funny Games is that Tartan also co-produced and co-financed the film, an experimental move into film production.

    Tartan's boldest expansion of its activities, and its Asia Extreme brand in particular, came with the launch of ‘Tartan USA’ in 2004. Hamish McAlpine deviated little from his tried-and-tested self-promotion tactics, presenting the company as risk taking and taboo breaking.

  • Introduction: Why 1997 and Hana-Bi?

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    The cinema of Japan has, over the course of its post-Pacific War history, been an unstable institution. It has been subject to a series of fluctuating fortunes that have in fact contributed significantly to its defining tenets and characteristics, a truly national film industry in that both its fate and its individual products and the characteristics that have defined them have remained closely tied to the sociopolitical flux of the country in which they were made. Of course one could make similar claims about many national cinemas, but in Japan there is a particularly marked sense in which the fortunes of its filmmakers and studios have been both reflected in and predicated upon the fortunes of the nation. Conceptualisations and histories of Japanese cinema, in both Western and Japanese discourse, have tended to replay several well-rehearsed epithets regarding the highs of its golden eras and the attendant lows that have succeeded them, about marked peaks and troughs regarding economic success and stagnation, technological advancement and problems relating to the same (developments such as the Fukushima nuclear reactor). Successive eras of Japanese history – especially its modern, Meiji-era (1868) development and beyond – can likewise be delineated, suggesting a direct correlation that has endured into the new millennium. However this seemingly perennial paradigm did in some ways begin to erode and to change in the years following 1997, and to understand why 1997 was a significant year it is necessary to elaborate a little on the context.

    In many ways the contemporary story of Japanese cinema suggests 1989 as a decisive turning point. Tezuka Yoshiharu (2012) has discussed the late 1980s in Japan as one of three key instances when a national identity crisis resulted from Japan being opened up and/or exposed to the world at large (pp. 9–12). He identifies what has been termed Kokusaika, or internationalisation, as part of Francis Fukuyama's infamous 1992 declaration of the end of history, and analyses how ‘the essential cultural uniqueness of Japan’ began to erode as a result (p. 10). As well as signalling a new social era (the Heisei era), the year 1989 marked an end to a largely stagnant cinematic decade in which hitherto prevalent generic trends (especially yakuza, samurai and shomin-geki films) stalled and Japanese films began to wane on the international stage.

  • 3 - Japanese Horror Cinema

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 63-94

  • Summary

    Of all the commercial genres to have proliferated in modern Japanese cinema, none has achieved the international success and visibility of the horror film. Horror films have long constituted a vital feature of this country's cinema, but since the late 1990s they have become arguably the face of Japanese filmmaking, and furthermore the prevalent image of an increasingly transnational paradigm. There are several key and interrelated means of conceiving of the importance of J-horror. Most saliently it seizes on the recent past as a site of tension and anxiety, a textual shadow or even doppelganger of the present that haunts modernity as a spectral repressed or foreclosed. Moreover, as this latter point implies, psychoanalytical imperatives have been writ large – a veritable matrix of concerns with subject formation and problems therein – as a national adjunct to which it is interesting to note the extent to which several films’ technical methodology, their means of production, becomes a site of narrative discourse and/or semantic signification. Angela Ndalianis (2010) has analysed in detail the horror genre's influence on associative media, on the extent to which its emotional affectivity lends itself to cultural products such as theme park rides, whilst more significantly Mark Cousins (2004, pp. 475–7) has talked of so-called J-horror (which does technically refer to the Japanese horror canon but seems more often to designate its supernatural cinema, thanks largely to producer Ichise Takashige) as one of the key cinematic genres at the close of the twentieth century, precisely because it proliferated at a time when an apparently global pre-millennial fear, even paranoia, became apparent at the same time as traditional celluloid was beginning to give way to digital forms of cinematic expression and projection. There was a sense in some quarters that authentic film was a dying art (Willis, 2005, p. 1), as though cinema's traditional mechanical means, as well as its capacity to designate or extol a specific, phenomenological dimension, a relationship with a perceived real that offers a potentially verisimilar transparency, was disturbed by this ghost of the machine, and as such that individual horror films themselves are in some way working through problems and tensions that are beyond their supernatural narrative concerns.

  • 1 - Jidai-geki and Chambara: The Samurai Onscreen

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 13-38

  • Summary

    The Japanese warrior's powerful hold on the social imagination persists despite the vast and growing temporal, political, and cultural distance between the eras of samurai rule and today.

    (Mason, 2011, p. 68)

    In 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Japan Foundation's annual UK touring programme of related Japanese films that have not been granted widespread distribution, a catalogue of works collectively entitled ‘Once upon a time in Japan’ was put together to be played throughout the UK. Concerned with films set in and reflective of a variety of historical periods, this collection underlined what has become an increasingly prevalent feature of contemporary Japanese cinema: namely a pervasive looking back, a re-viewing of the past, with a concomitant sense of the futility that such an undertaking may carry within it, the sub-textual concern with the present as a question as much as an answer. In other words, the past is opened up in many modern Japanese jidai-geki for a number of contrastive reasons – in order to reflect on the present and also to probe the past as part of a variously self-reflexive or even subversive discourse on modernity and postmodernity as cultural modes. As such the prominent return to the historical drama that characterises modern Japanese cinema, most often in the guise of the samurai film, frequently engages with a cinematic history as much as (if not more than) a social one, a lineage of the past onscreen rather than a window onto any empirically viable or objective past, and a consideration of the discursive practices of historicity and historiography in place of narrative or generic transparency. Even those films that do not dwell on history as spectacle nonetheless retain a subtly trangressive imperative wherein they deny or frustrate any simple or unitary diegtic suture or illusionist realism. They are often about the respective limits and the possibilities of cinema as an agent for transmitting or representing what Robert Rosenstone terms ‘the burden of the past’ (1995, p. 4), and as such have broader ramifications for a study of the jidai-geki and its popular and populist face in the chambara (swordplay) film.

Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
  • Adam Bingham
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015
  • Updates the story of Japanese cinema for the 21st century. Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi is the first study of the significant developments in Japanese genre filmmaking since the turn of the new millennium.This book explores the key films, filmmakers, themes and genres in post-1997 Japanese cinema, during fifteen years in which productivity in the Japanese film industry has reached a higher peak than at any time since the 1950s and a dialogue with earlier traditions of Japanese cinema has been firmly established. Key Features: * Considers films and filmmakers that have yet to feature predominantly in western discourse on Japanese cinema * Analyses in detail the dialogue that can be seen between new Japanese cinema and the significant trends and practices of past generations * Includes a discussion of the modern state of the Japanese documentary feature, based on interviews with some of its leading practitioners * Includes a review of Japanese-language criticism and a consideration of how the country's cinema has been perceived within Japan

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

    Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study of more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found-footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national or transnational cinema in Question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies).

Page 146 of 359