Death in Classic and Contemporary Film


Book Description

Mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors. This book brings together an accomplished set of authors with backgrounds in film analysis, psychology, and philosophy to examine how the knowledge of death, the fear of our mortality, and the ways people cope with mortality are represented in cinema.




Death in Classic and Contemporary Film


Book Description

Mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors. This book brings together an accomplished set of authors with backgrounds in film analysis, psychology, and philosophy to examine how the knowledge of death, the fear of our mortality, and the ways people cope with mortality are represented in cinema.




Classic Questions and Contemporary Film


Book Description

Featuring significant revisions and updates, Classic Questions and Contemporary Film: An Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd Edition uses popular movies as a highly accessible framework for introducing key philosophical concepts Explores 28 films with 18 new to this edition, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hotel Rwanda, V for Vendetta, and Memento Discusses numerous philosophical issues not covered in the first edition, including a new chapter covering issues of personal identity, the meaningfulness of life and death, and existentialism Offers a rich pedagogical framework comprised of key classic readings, chapter learning outcomes, jargon-free argument analysis, critical thinking and trivia questions, a glossary of terms, and textboxes with notes on the movies discussed Revised to be even more accessible to beginning philosophers




Classic Questions and Contemporary Film


Book Description

Featuring significant revisions and updates, Classic Questions and Contemporary Film: An Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd Edition uses popular movies as a highly accessible framework for introducing key philosophical concepts Explores 28 films with 18 new to this edition, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hotel Rwanda, V for Vendetta, and Memento Discusses numerous philosophical issues not covered in the first edition, including a new chapter covering issues of personal identity, the meaningfulness of life and death, and existentialism Offers a rich pedagogical framework comprised of key classic readings, chapter learning outcomes, jargon-free argument analysis, critical thinking and trivia questions, a glossary of terms, and textboxes with notes on the movies discussed Revised to be even more accessible to beginning philosophers




Screen Writings: Partial views of a total art, classic to contemporary


Book Description

'Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary' offers close readings of individual films intended to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex and significant humanistic goals. It fills the middle ground between vague, simple plot summaries and theoretical pronouncements. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists.




Between Life and Death


Book Description

The final literary testament of “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World” (New York Times), Between Life and Death is a startling, brave, funny, and poetic autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life. In Between Life and Death, celebrated Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk relives the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the worlds of the living and of the dead. With an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness. Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk explores the place of death in society, his own lust for life, and the encompassing struggles of the twentieth century. He writes about the colorful characters of his childhood neighborhood, battles in the 1948 War of Independence, and his defiant voyages across the Mediterranean on ships packed with Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe. With renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth with Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is destined for immortality. “How can one even review the final work of a writer as rewarding, innovative, and rebellious as Kaniuk?... Kaniuk’s achievement is inconceivable and awe-inspiring: at the age of seventy-seven, with a broken body, after his soul almost parted from this life, he managed to pull himself together for a short while, get back to his writing desk, and recount his near-death experience.… The writing is skilful and you cannot stop turning the pages.” —Time Out “Kaniuk’s best novel to date…The author captures a rare voice, a tone which is elegiac, full of rhythm, paratactic, and irresistible in its pull.… It achieves excellence and transparent wonder.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung




Encyclopedia of Gender in Media


Book Description

The Encyclopedia of Gender in Media critically examines the role of the media in enabling, facilitating, or challenging the social construction of gender in our society.




Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre


Book Description

This volume is the first English-language collection exclusively dedicated to the study of genre in relation to Spanish cinema. Providing a variety of critical perspectives, the collection gives the reader a thorough account of the relationship between Spanish cinema and genre, drawing on case studies of several of the most remarkable Spanish films in recent years. The book analyses the significant changes in the aesthetics, production and reception of Spanish film from 1990 onwards. It brings together European and North American scholars to establish a critical dialogue on the topics under discussion, while providing multiple perspectives on the concepts of national cinemas and genre theory. In recent years film scholarship has attempted to negotiate the tension between the nationally specific and the internationally ubiquitous, discussing how globalisation has influenced film making and surrounding cultural practice. These broader social concerns have prompted scholars to emphasise a redefinition of national cinemas beyond strict national boundaries and to pay attention to the transnational character of any national site of film production and reception. This collection provides a thorough investigation of contemporary Spanish cinema within a transnational framework, by positing cinematic genres as the meeting spaces between a variety of diverse forces that necessarily operate within but also across territorial spaces. Paying close attention to the specifics of the Spanish cinematic and social panorama, the essays investigate the transnational economic, cultural and aesthetic forces at play in shaping Spanish film genres today.




Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema


Book Description

This book is a thought-provoking study that expands on film scholarship on noir and feminist scholarship on postfeminism, subjectivity, and representation to provide an inclusive, sophisticated, and up-to-date analysis of the femme fatale , fille fatale , and homme fatal from the classic era through to recent postmillennial neo-noir .




Contemporary Latin American Cinema


Book Description

This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the international circuit. Written by leading specialists, the chapters not only offer textual analysis, but also trace the films' social context and production conditions, as well as critical national and transnational issues. Their well-rounded analyses provide a rich picture of the state of contemporary filmmaking in a range of Latin American countries. Nuanced and thought-provoking, the readings in this book will provide invaluable interpretations for students and scholars of Latin American film. Contributions by: Sarah Barrow, Nuala Finnegan, David William Foster, Miraim Haddu, Geoffrey Kantaris, Deborah Shaw, Lisa Shaw, Rob Stone, Else R. P. Vieira, and Claire Williams.