Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Film, Religion, and the Desarrollismo Period -- 1 Lighting Sainthood in the Time of Technocracy -- 2 Praying for Development in Post-Vatican II Comedies -- 3 Gender and Modernization in Nun Films -- 4 Narratives of Suspicion: Religion in the Nuevo Cine Español -- Conclusion: Spanish Cinema at the Intersection of Religion and Politics -- Notes -- Filmography -- Works Cited -- Index
"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --
How to Film Truth explores the history of documentary film as a search for truth by filmmakers, and a journey of discovery for subjects and audiences. This process, the act of documenting, exploring, and reflecting on our reality in all its created beauty, wonder, and mystery can itself be a devotional practice. The history can be seen as moving from actuality to ecstasy, from propaganda to empathy, and finally to confessional, emotional, personal, and communal healing.
Heide Fehrenbach analyzes the important role cinema played in the reconstruction of German cultural and political identity between 1945 and 1962. Concentrating on the former West Germany, she explores the complex political uses of film--and the meanings attributed to film representation and spectatorship--during a period of abrupt transition to democracy. According to Fehrenbach, the process of national redefinition made cinema and cinematic control a focus of heated ideological debate. Moving beyond a narrow political examination of Allied-German negotiations, she investigates the broader social nexus of popular moviegoing, public demonstrations, film clubs, and municipal festivals. She also draws on work in gender and film studies to probe the ways filmmakers, students, church leaders, local politicians, and the general public articulated national identity in relation to the challenges posed by military occupation, American commercial culture, and redefined gender roles. Thus highlighting the links between national identity and cultural practice, this book provides a richer picture of what German reconstruction entailed for both women and men.
This books traces the inscription of nation across Canada's film history, from early films of colonisation and white settlement to contemporary Canada's diverse multicultural output.
Before 9/11, films addressing torture outside of the horror/slasher genre depicted the practice in a variety of forms. In most cases, torture was cast as the act of a desperate and depraved individual, and the viewer was more likely to identify with the victim rather than the torturer. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, scenes of brutality and torture in mainstream comedies, dramatic narratives, and action films appear for little other reason than to titillate and delight. In these films, torture is devoid of any redeeming qualities, represented as an exercise in brutal senselessness carried out by authoritarian regimes and institutions. This volume follows the shift in the representation of torture over the past decade, specifically in documentary, action, and political films. It traces and compares the development of this trend in films from the United States, Europe, China, Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East. Featuring essays by sociologists, psychologists, historians, journalists, and specialists in film and cultural studies, the collection approaches the representation of torture in film and television from multiple angles and disciplines, connecting its aesthetics and practices to the dynamic of state terror and political domination.
Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - ‘the eccentric’ - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a celebration of female madness, both onscreen and off. This critically-acclaimed publication is packed with rare images that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, Paranormal Activity, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more. Prior to this ebook edition, Kier-La's highly acclaimed book has already been issued twice in hardcover and twice in paperback, garnering extensive press coverage. Endorsement including the following: “God, this woman can write, with a voice and intellect that’s so new. The truth in the most deadly unique way I’ve ever read.” – Ralph Bakshi, director of ‘Fritz the Cat’, ‘Heavy Traffic’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, etc. “Fascinating, engaging and lucidly written: an extraordinary blend of deeply researched academic analysis and revealing memoir.” – Iain Banks, author of ‘The Wasp Factory’
How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini's idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.
The first comprehensive scholarly study of Spanish erotic cinema, from the 1920s until the present dayThis book covers a significant part of the history of Spanish film, from the 1920s until the present day. Starting with a study of the kiss in silent films, the volume explores homoerotic narratives in the crusade films of the 1940s, the commodification of bodies in the late Franco period, and the so-called destape (literally aundressing) period that followed the abolition of censorship during the democratic transition.Reclaiming the importance of Spanish erotic cinema as a genre in itself, a range of international scholars demonstrate how the explicit depiction of sex can be a useful tool to illuminate current and historic social issues including ageism, colonialism, domestic violence, immigration, nationalisms, or women and LGBT rights. Covering a wide range of cinematic genres, including comedy, horror and melodrama, this book provides an innovative and provocative overview of Spanish cinema history and society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.ContributorsBrad Epps, Cambridge UniversitySally Faulkner, University of ExeterSantiago Fouz-HernA!ndez, Durham UniversityAntonio LA!zaro-Reboll, University of KentAnnabel MartA-n, Dartmouth CollegeAlejandro Melero Salvador, Universidad Carlos III in MadridJorge PA(c)rez, University of Texas, AustinCarolina Sanabria, University of Costa Rica Rob Stone, University of BirminghamTom Whittaker, University of LiverpoolEva Woods PeirA Vassar CollegeSarah Wright, Royal Holloway, University of LondonBarbara Zecchi, University of Massachusetts Amherst
