Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives examines the detective figure in four noir and neo-noir films: Out of the Past (1947), Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), and Chinatown (1974). Exploring the way that these characters each move from an initial state of reluctant passivity to one of passionate engagement with the world around them, it questions the cinematic forces required to motivate and move them. In its close examinations of each film, the book meditates on the detectives' hunts and how they interact with the cinematic apparatus that captures and presents them to an audience, and it tracks the receptive experience of these films in relation to these questions of motivation and movement.
The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.
Eccentric Laughter explores new ways to watch postwar British film comedies, arguing that their representations of eccentricity offered a set of possible queer futures for a Britain that had been destabilized by years of conflict and social upheaval. Far from being the apolitical cinema described by previous critics, these comedies—including both perennial favorites from Ealing Studios and neglected films ripe for rediscovery—make a joke of and suggest alternatives to the heterocentric home and family. Referencing a wide range of theories, the book gives details of how these films' comic queernesses are not structured on fixed identities but on an open play of possibilities, depicting eccentricity, artifice, drag, ruins, and the wild in ways that can still offer inspiration for experiments in living today. Engaging with contemporary queer theories and politics, the book argues that these films continue to address questions of urgent relevance to students and other viewers in the twenty-first century. Films discussed include The Belles of St. Trinian's, Genevieve, The Lavender Hill Mob, Simon and Laura, The Stranger Left No Card, and Young Wives' Tale.
Is Harpo Free? is a lively appreciation of film and television's ability to artistically explore concepts typical of philosophical metaphysics, such as free will, causality, and personal identity. Rather than using films and television programs as vehicles for philosophical arguments, the book instead celebrates the artistic ways in which they give life to various metaphysical concepts and how the artistic expression of these concepts and ideas helps us understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Through close analysis of a varied selection of works and their use of narrative, form, and style, Is Harpo Free? exemplifies a novel approach to appreciating the philosophical substance of films and television programs. Films and television programs discussed include A Night at the Opera; Run, Lola, Run; Shane; Harvey; Three Colours: Blue; The Americans; Dark; and Fargo.
Global awareness of autism has skyrocketed since the 1980s, and popular culture has caught on, with film and television producers developing ever more material featuring autistic characters. Autism in Film and Television brings together more than a dozen essays on depictions of autism, exploring how autistic characters are signified in media and how the reception of these characters informs societal understandings of autism. Editors Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer have assembled a pioneering examination of autism’s portrayal in film and television. Contributors consider the various means by which autism has been expressed in films such as Phantom Thread, Mercury Rising, and Life Animated and in television and streaming programs including Atypical, Stranger Things, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Community. Across media, the figure of the brilliant, accomplished, and “quirky” autist has proven especially appealing. Film and television have thus staked out a progressive position on neurodiversity by insisting on screen time for autism but have done so while frequently ignoring the true diversity of autistic experience. As a result, this volume is a welcome celebration of nonjudgmental approaches to disability, albeit one that is still freighted with stereotypes and elisions.
In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid- to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films' engagement both with Judaic ideals and with a series of Jewish sociohistorical predicaments of troubled communication (immigration, displacement, the breakdown of tradition, and so on) that the films seek to reflect. Accordingly, the authors create a resonant conversation between Yiddish cinema, populated by an endless procession of disconnected characters ardently striving to rejoin the world of communication, and the brilliant yet underappreciated ideas of pioneering Czech-Jewish media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), who escaped Nazi persecution and built the first part of his intellectual career in Brazil. Indeed, the authors claim that the popular art of Yiddish cinema articulates in dramatic terms a version of the central Flusserian hypothesis that "the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality" and, by doing so, embodies a remarkable Jewish media theory "from below." Films discussed include The Wandering Jew (1933), The Dybbuk (1937), Where is My Child? (1937), A Little Letter to Mother (1938), Kol Nidre (1939), Motel the Operator (1939), Tevye (1939), The Living Orphan (1939), and Long Is the Road (1948).
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book. Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.
"Etiquette," as noted toastmaster Herbert V. Prochnow once pointed out, "is knowing how to yawn with your mouth closed"—that is, to spare the feelings of the other person, one must stifle one's own. To be polite, therefore, is to perform. Onscreen, closeups often reveal the effort that goes into maintaining that performance: with a fleeting frown or a slight scowl, an actor reveals the "torture" of mannered behavior. In Torturous Etiquettes, Daniel Varndell examines such gestures to reveal the difficulties of the social encounter. Drawing on the history of etiquette, the book deconstructs an array of examples from classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema, taking a close look at onscreen representations of rudeness, ridiculing, racist and sexist etiquettes, hospitality, table manners, and more. In doing so, it reveals etiquette to be a persistent theme in cinema and questions the role it plays in either upholding or denying the basic humanity of others.
Detecting Men examines the history of the Hollywood detective genre and the ways that detective films have negotiated changing social attitudes toward masculinity, heroism, law enforcement, and justice. Genre film can be a site for the expression and resolution of problematic social issues, but while there have been many studies of such other male genres as war films, gangster films, and Westerns, relatively little attention has been paid to detective films beyond film noir. In this volume, Philippa Gates examines classical films of the thirties and forties as well as recent examples of the genre, including Die Hard, the Lethal Weapon films, The Usual Suspects, Seven, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Murder by Numbers, in order to explore social anxieties about masculinity and crime and Hollywood's conceptions of gender. Up until the early 1990s, Gates argues, the primary focus of the detective genre was the masculinity of the hero. However, from the mid-1990s onward, the genre has shifted to more technical portrayals of crime scene investigation, forensic science, and criminal profiling, offering a reassuring image of law enforcement in the face of violent crime. By investigating the evolution of the detective film, Gates suggests, perhaps we can detect the male.
Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Westworld, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.
