Product Description: Ephemeral Media explores the practices, strategies and textual forms helping producers negotiate a fast-paced mediascape. Examining dynamics of brevity and evanescence in the television and new media environment, this book provides a new perspective on the transitory, and transitional, nature of screen culture in the early twenty-first century...read more

From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in particular, Warner Bros., Brand Hollywood provides the first sustained examination of the will-to-brand in the contemporary movie business. Outlining changes in the marketing and media environment during the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Grainge explores how the logic of branding has propelled specific kinds of approach to the status and selling of film. Analyzing the practice of branding, the poetics of corporate logos, and the industrial politics surrounding the development of branded texts, properties and spaces - including franchises ranging from Looney Tunes to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to The Matrix - Grainge considers the relation of branding to the emergent principle of ‘total entertainment’.   Employing an interdisciplinary method drawn from film studies, cultural studies and advertising and media studies, Brand Hollywood demonstrates the complexities of selling entertainment in the global media moment, providing a fresh and engaging perspective on branding’s significance for commercial film and the industrial culture from which it is produced.

Arranged chronologically, Film Histories is a wide-ranging anthology that covers the history of film from 1885 to the present. Each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on key developments within the respective period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various approaches to film history are taken by the authors of the articles, exposing readers to different forms of historical research. Topics include: the history of audiences, exhibition, marketing, censorship, aesthetic history, political history, and historical reception studies.Film Histories concentrates on the so-called historical turn in film studies, demonstrating that film history is about more than simply key films, directors, and movements. Also included is a preface explaining the structure and organization of the book. The contents are divided into sections on American and non-American research, thus designed to reach a wide student audience at the undergraduate level. Chapter introductions provide an overview of international developments in film.

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