Dear SCREEN-L Subscribers,
We hope the following titles will be of interest to you.
Surveillance Cinema
Catherine Zimmer
"Surveillance Cinema presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of cinema studies in its reconceptualization of the centrality of surveillance to film narratives, subject formations, and temporalities. Smartly pushing beyond the critical models that have long been associated with surveillance in and outside of cinema, Zimmer makes a persuasive case for examining surveillance within historical and political contexts. An excellent book, both far-reaching and convincing in its claims, Surveillance Cinema is sure to become one of the central works in the emerging field of surveillance studies."-Aviva Briefel,co-editor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror
In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema.
Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.
New York University Press
April 2015 288pp 9781479836673 PB £18.99 now only £15.19 when you quote CSL415FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/surveillance-cinema
Cinema and Counter-History
Marcia Landy
"A very ambitious book! The range of Marcia Landy's scholarship and knowledge of film is impressive." -Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History
"Once again, Marcia Landy impressively, masterfully, combines her well-known talents for broad critical reflection for trenchant close reading' of individual films to produce ground-breaking theorization of cinema's powers to both make and remake historical meaning and to counter dominant cultural representations. A far-reaching study with major insights at every turn." -Dana Polan, New York University
Despite claims about the end of history and the death of cinema, visual media continue to contribute to our understanding of history and history-making. In this book, Marcia Landy argues that rethinking history and memory must take into account shifting conceptions of visual and aural technologies. With the assistance of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cinema and Counter-History examines writings and films that challenge prevailing notions of history in order to explore the philosophic, aesthetic, and political stakes of activating the past. Marshaling evidence across European, African, and Asian cinema, Landy engages in a counter-historical project that calls into question the certainty of visual representations and unmoors notions of a history firmly anchored in truth.
Marcia Landy is Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies, with a Secondary Appointment in French and Italian, at University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (IUP, 2008).
Indiana University Press
April 2015 328pp 37 b&w illus. 9780253016164 PB £24.99 now only £19.99 when you quote CSL415FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/Book/50093/Cinema-and-Counter-History
Classic Hollywood
Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema, 1930-1960
Veronica Pravadelli
Translated by Michael Meadows
"Veronica Pravadelli looks back at the classical Hollywood cinema with a powerful magnifying glass. What comes into full view are not only new details, but an entire new geography. Trends, dividing lines, stylistic choices, plots, questions of gender, become much clearer. The result is a cutting edge analysis, surprising and convincing."-Francesco Casetti, author of Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films.
Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.
Veronica Pravadelli is a professor of film studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Roma Tre University and a former visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman's Postmodern Cinema, Alfred Hitchcock. Notorious and Le donne del cinema: dive, registe, spettatrici. The Italian edition of Classic Hollywood won two prizes for Best Book in Film Studies.
University of Illinois Press
November 2014 312pp 51 black and white photographs, discography 9780252080340 PB £19.99 now only £15.99 when you quote CSL415FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/classic-hollywood
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
On Classic Film Noir
Edited by Robert Miklitsch
"A thrilling example of the possibilities of renewed scholarly attention to the classic noir period. Its broad range of novel topics and uniformly astute analyses reframe and open up the field of film noir study in provocative and insightful ways that herald a new phase in scholarship not only of the genre but of Classic Hollywood itself."-David Greven, author of Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin
"An invaluable resource for anyone interested in film noir. Essential."-Choice
Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle.
But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, Robert Miklitsch curates a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes. Contributors analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women's pulp fiction, as well as investigate Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers' collective reconsideration unwinds the impact of hot-button topics like race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality.
As bracing as a stiff drink, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands writes the future of noir scholarship in lipstick and chalk lines for film fans and scholars alike.
Robert Miklitsch is a professor in the department of English language and literature at Ohio University. He is the author of Siren City: Sound and Source Music in American Film Noir.
University of Illinois Press
September 2014 264pp 35 black and white photographs, 1 line drawing 9780252080180 PB £19.99 now only £15.99 when you quote CSL415FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/kiss-the-blood-off-my-hands
Orienting Hollywood
A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay
Nitin Govil
"Impressively researched and astutely argued, Orienting Hollywood will no doubt change the way we think about and research transnationalism in film and media. Govil brilliantly integrates notions of aspirational practice, affective labor, contact tropes, industrial mirroring, and cultural echoing in a compelling and original analysis. Orienting Hollywood stands as an exemplary model of exactly the kind of integration between 'cultural' and 'political economic' research that many have called for, but few have realized. This book will be widely recognized and embraced as a key, innovative text in our field."-John T. Caldwell, author of Production Culture
"Orienting Hollywood brilliantly remaps the relationship between Hollywood and Bombay cinema through a critical analysis of industry relations that pushes beyond traditional 'national cinema' frameworks and theories of cultural imperialism. Compelling and convincingly argued, Nitin Govil frames the century-long interactions between Hollywood and Bombay cinema as part of a complex and contradictory history, opening up new ways of understanding the transnational dynamics of global media industries."-Shanti Kumar,author of Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television
With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India's transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.
Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.
New York University Press
March 2015 272pp 9780814789346 PB £18.99 now only £15.19 when you quote CSL415FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/orienting-hollywood
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