The twelve essays in A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson offer various interpretations of Mel Gibson’s work, treating this prolific but controversial figure not only as a filmmaker but as a historian, religious thinker, and social philosopher. From The Man Without a Face and Braveheart to The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge, this interdisciplinary collection mines Gibson’s life and oeuvre for insight into existential problems, Aristotelian virtues, the politics of film, interreligious dialogue, adaptation issues, and much more.
A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor is the most updated and holistic volume on the director currently published. Situating Taymor’s work within the intersections of story and spectacle, contributors to this collection examine issues of creativity, gender, sexuality, and adaptation by focusing on themes from Taymor’s oeuvre including martyrdom, musicality, fidelity, postmodern representations, feminism and queerness, identity, desire, trauma, revenge, hybridity, and obscenity. The result reveals Julie Taymor to be a globally-influenced American director who exhibits and exemplifies the authentic artistry of ingenious storytelling and deserves scholarly attention. This work will be of particular interest to scholars of film, philosophy, popular culture, gender, feminisms, and queer identities.
The thirteen chapters in this collection analyze David Fincher’s development as a filmmaker, from television commercials and music videos to serving as front runner on the series Mindhunter. The contributors explore a variety of characteristics, including Fincher’s attitudes toward his audiences, his attention to detail, his Gothic sense of evil, his modernization of film noir, and his reinvention of the serial killer. The diversity of approaches highlights the paradoxes of Fincher’s films and style, accentuating the tensions between his innovative methods and storytelling and unpacking the perennial questions of love, life, and death that his films raise. Scholars of film, television, and media will find this book especially salient.
This volume offers eight interdisciplinary readings to the films of Sofia Coppola, analyzing her oeuvre with a focus on her treatment of masculinity, sexual politics, bodies, and love.
The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century offers new perspectives on contemporary literary adaptation as a dynamically global field. Featuring contributions from an international team of established and emerging scholars, this volume considers literary adaptation to be a complex global network of influences, appropriations, and audiences across a diversity of media. It offers site-specific case studies that situate literary adaptation within global market forces while challenging the homogenizing effects of globalization on local literatures and adaptation practices. The collection also provides a multi-disciplinary and transnational discussion around a wide array of topics in literary adaptation in a global context, such as soft power, decolonization, global justice, the posthuman, eco criticism, and forms of activism. This Companion provides scholars, researchers, and students with a survey of key methodologies, current debates, and ideologies emerging from a new and exciting phase in literary adaptation.
The first comprehensive volume of original essays on Australian screen culture in the twenty-first century. A Companion to Australian Cinema is an anthology of original essays by new and established authors on the contemporary state and future directions of a well-established national cinema. A timely intervention that challenges and expands the idea of cinema, this book brings into sharp focus those facets of Australian cinema that have endured, evolved and emerged in the twenty-first century. The essays address six thematically-organized propositions – that Australian cinema is an Indigenous screen culture, an international cinema, a minor transnational imaginary, an enduring auteur-genre-landscape tradition, a televisual industry and a multiplatform ecology. Offering fresh critical perspectives and extending previous scholarship, case studies range from The Lego Movie, Mad Max, and Australian stars in Hollywood, to transnational co-productions, YouTube channels, transmedia and nature-cam documentaries. New research on trends – such as the convergence of television and film, digital transformations of screen production and the shifting roles of women on and off-screen – highlight how established precedents have been influenced by new realities beyond both cinema and the national. Written in an accessible style that does not require knowledge of cinema studies or Australian studies Presents original research on Australian actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth, their training, branding, and path from Australia to Hollywood Explores the films and filmmakers of the Blak Wave and their challenge to Australian settler-colonial history and white identity Expands the critical definition of cinema to include YouTube channels, transmedia documentaries, multiplatform changescapes and cinematic remix Introduces readers to founding texts in Australian screen studies A Companion to Australian Cinema is an ideal introductory text for teachers and students in areas including film and media studies, cultural and gender studies, and Australian history and politics, as well as a valuable resource for educators and other professionals in the humanities and creative arts.
The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film brings together a lively and experienced team of contributors to investigate the ways in which this exciting discipline is developing.
In Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, readers take an evocative journey with author Keith Elliot Greenberg as he pieces together the puzzle of James Dean's final day and its everlasting impact. Greenberg travels to Dean's hometown to talk with folks who knew the star, and all the way to the California roads that underlay the tires of the actor's infamous Porsche Spyder. Taking the story back and forth in time, Greenberg gives insight into what drove Dean to live on the edge – the early loss of his mother, his relentless drive to explore for the sake of his craft. Dean once said, “Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.” He lived to experience, and the one love that compared to his love of acting was his love of racing cars. Greenberg puts the event in historical context, reflecting on the world Dean lived in at the time, an era after World War II, the end of the Korean War, the advent of rock and roll, with the sixties coming down the pike. The star's too-soon departure froze him as a symbol of American Cool, and as proven by the 20 000 people who return to Dean's grave each year to pay homage, a major influence on youth culture for myriad generations. With fresh interviews with insiders, riveting storytelling, and acute attention to details – from vehicle specs to Dean's stops along the way (including for an ominous speeding ticket) to how the news reached the world – Greenberg delivers a thoughtful look at this historical moment.
A comprehensive guide to European actors in American film, this book brings together 15 chapters with A-Z entries on over 900 individuals. It includes case studies of prominent individuals and phenomena associated with the emigres, such as the stereotyping of European actresses in 'bad women' roles, and the irony of Jewish actors playing Nazis.
