Product Description: Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race...read more

Product Description: Movies Change Lives is a rigorous interdisciplinary examination of cinema as a vehicle for personal and social transformation. Interdisciplinary scholar Tony Kashani builds a theory of humanistic transformation by discussing many movies while engaging the works of philosopher/psychologist Erich Fromm, cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall, critical pedagogy theorist Henry Giroux, political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the great French thinker Edgar Morin, the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung, the co-founder of string theory, physicist Michio Kaku, and Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas, among others...read more

Product Description: In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it." This collection examines how filmmakers have tried to change the world by engaging in emancipatory politics through their work, and how audiences have received them...read more

Product Description: Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape...read more

Product Description: The Cinema of Urban Crisis explores the relationships between cinema and urban crises in the United States and Europe in the 1970s. Discussing films by Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, Lawrence Webb reflects on processes of globalization and urban change that were beginning to transform cities like New York, London, and Berlin...read more

Product Description: Children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness within Hitchcock's complex cinematic texts. Though the child often plays a small part, their significance - symbolically, theoretically, and philosophically - offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence within the cinematic complexity of Hitchcock's films...read more

Product Description: Cinema frequently depicts various types of work, but this representation is never straightforward. It depends on and reflects many factors, especially the place and time the film is made and the type of audience it addresses. Here, the contributors employ transnational and transhistorical perspectives to compare filmic depictions of work...read more

Product Description: Cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. Detectives drink alone. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Families around the world argue at dinner. Food documentaries challenge popular consumption-centered visions. In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation, authors Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard use a foodways paradigm, drawn from the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, to illuminate film's cultural and material politics...read more

Product Description: Ever since motion pictures first landed on screen, there have been many key questions that the studios and movie watchers have tried to answer. What makes a movie an Oscar winner? How does one movie become a hit and another movie flop? Why do some films earn critical acclaim while other films become critical turkeys or bombs? How do audiences perceive film? What makes a movie resonate with a viewer? Are we unduly influenced by negative behaviors on screen? These questions have spurred debates, discussions, and many theories...read more

Product Description: In cinema studies today, rarely do we find a direct investigation into the culture of capitalism and how it has been refracted and fabricated in global cinema production under neoliberalism. However, the current economic crisis and the subsequent Wall Street bailout in 2008 have brought about a worldwide skepticism regarding the last four decades of economic restructuring and the culture that has accompanied it...read more

Product Description: Exploring research into mobile phone use as props to subjective identity, Norman Taylor employs concepts from Michelle Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and actor network theory to discuss the affect of mechanisms of make-believe, from celebrity culture to avatar-obsessed game players, and digital culture...read more

Book by Pomerance, Murray, Sakeris, John

Product Description: Horror and slasher films are often dismissed for their apparent lack of sophistication and dearth of redeemable values. However, despite criticism from film snobs who turn up their noses and moralists who look down upon the genre, slasher films are more than just movies filled with gory mayhem...read more

Product Description: Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight...read more

Product Description: This volume gets to the heart of what films mean to people on personal, political and commercial levels. Exploring value judgements that underpin social, academic and institutional practices, it examines the diverse forms of worth attributed to a range of international films in relation to taste, passion, morality and aesthetics...read more

Product Description: Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Wood offers a wealth of insight into the nature of film, considering its role and impact on society as well as its future in the digital age...read more

Product Description: Cinemas, Identities and Beyond examines different modes of representing and constructing identities in and through the medium of film, transcending the narrow confines of the local / national / regional, and challenging spatial and temporal boundaries...read more

The only text of its kind to explore central topics in sociology through feature films This one-of-a-kind text takes readers beyond watching movies; it helps them “see” films sociologically and develops critical thinking and analytical skills that will be useful in college coursework and beyond. Cinematic Sociology's 15 essays from expert scholars in sociology and cultural studies explore the ways social life is presented-distorted, magnified, or politicized- in popular film. Exploring a variety of captivating classic and current films such as Forty Year Old Virgin, The Devil Wears Prada, North Country, and My Fair Lady, this unique book helps students to view films sociologically while also providing much needed pedagogy for teaching sociology through film. Contributor to THE ASA/SAGE Teaching Innovations & Professional Development Awards Fund

Turner provides a clear introduction to major theoretical issues in the history of film production and film studies, examining the function of film as a national cultural industry, and its place in our popular culture.

Product Description: This book is an easy-to-read, fun and provocative discussion of how to understand, appreciate, and evaluate film. Written by professor and film guru Michael Gose, the book is loved by students and moviegoers alike. Michael Gose masterfully raises key questions and examples that illuminate perspectives and issues raised in film...read more