Film Studies
Beijing Film Academy 2022
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity
This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self which far from being a stable marker of urban liberal millennial Indian identity has a schizophrenic quality one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion optimism and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book however belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.
The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies popular culture analyses and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star the urban space web series YouTube videos and social media content.
Shaping Global Culture through Screen Writing
Women Who Write Our Worlds
This book tells inspirational stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring stories to life through screenwriting. As such the book evidences that women’s work is important; that ‘films can change lives’. The collection divides the chapters according to worlds in recognition of the fact that though we live on one planet the conditions of existence are vastly different between first and third worlds; between the wealthiest and the poorest.
Each chapter shows how attitudes have shifted policies have been rewritten and life experiences and horizons have been altered for specific communities through these instances of screenwriting. The themes touched upon include gender race disability culture war colonization labour relations political ideologies to name a few. The parallels found amongst these themes across national religious and cultural divides are also telling. The book is wide in its scope considering screenwriting a skill which can apply to games social media music videos virtual reality … in fact any of the burgeoning formats alive on our devices and through constantly evolving platforms. All are considered screenwriting.
The book is a celebration of the female writers who have told screen stories that educate and heal.
The book suits readers across disciplines including screenwriting filmmaking women’s studies history sociology and many other areas.
Essay Film and Narrative Techniques
Screen-writing Non-fiction
The collection explores various methods of screen-writing for essay film through a diverse set of reflections and analyses of canonical and unconventional approaches of essay filmmaking. It includes contributions from filmmakers and practice-led researchers who reflect on their production process in the form of production diaries or self-critique and analyses from scholars who investigate the production contexts of essay film as well as interviews with filmmakers on how their practices are conceptualised and contextualised. Overall it takes essay film as an expression of personal camera collaborative/collective work and experimental work where the boundaries between different art forms blurs and merges.
Beijing Film Academy 2021
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
Without Empathy
Irony and the Satirical Impulse in Eight Major Filmmakers
Irony and the satirical impulse in cinema have gradually lost favor mockery increasingly more selective in its choice of targets. As Linda Hutcheon notes irony is becoming a problematic mode of expression in the 21st century.
The book examines selectively the work of eight film auteurs: Luis Bunuel RW Fassbinder Stanley Kubrick Robert Altman Paul Verhoeven Aki Kaurismaki Aleksei Balabanov and David Lynch much of whose work is not always regarded thus and the films examined are often more ironic than satirical.
The introduction examines the various categories of satire and the chapters then study the filmmakers individually through selected works offering interpretations of films and identifying a consistent approach. Since the work is often ambiguous the book speculates on each film’s purport engaging in textual interpretation of individual works to understand concerns underneath the most obvious. The Afterword tries to find common targets and strategies on the filmmakers’ part.
At the Movies, Film Reviewing, and Screenwriting
Selective Affinities and Cultural Mediation
This book examines film reviewing and screenwriting as key sites of cultural mediation providing new insights on the relationship between criticism and reviewing as well as the way reviewers handle concepts of story dialogue and narrative.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the cultural field and his theory of taste the book provides an assessment of the place of film reviewing in contemporary screen culture. The book analyses a case study comprised of ten years of television scripts of the Australian film reviewing programme At the Movies (2004–2014). Hosted by two of Australia’s most eminent film critics Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton for over two decades this study of At the Movies provides a unique window into film reviewing movie consumption and wider cultural attitudes in this period of Australian cultural history. It examines the programme’s cultural significance and the contribution of Margaret and David to screen culture.
This book makes a significant contribution to an under-studied area of media studies (the review) screenwriting research through the analysis of broadcast scripts and cultural studies through the study of an important television programme.
Men, War and Film
The Calling Blighty Films of World War II
The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service produced towards the end of the Second World War were one-reel films in which soldiers gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front. These are the first ever films where men speak openly in their regional accents and they have profound meaning for remembrance documentary representation and the ecology of film in wartime.
Of the 400 films (or ‘issues’) made 64 survive. Each of those contained around 25 individual messages. Men – and a very few women - from a particular city town or region were grouped together for the films to make regional screenings back in UK cinemas and town halls possible. Personnel from all three services are featured but the men are predominantly from the army units. Screenings took place at a cinema in the subjects’ local area and were usually organised by the regional Army Welfare Committee. The names and addresses of those to be invited to the screenings were sent to the UK along with the films.
Until now these films have barely been researched and yet are a valuable source of social history as well as representing a different mode from the mainstream of British wartime documentary. This book expands the history of Calling Blighty and places it in a broader context both past and present. New research reveals the origins of the film series and draws comparisons with written and oral contemporary sources.
Steve Hawley is an artist/filmmaker whose work has been screened worldwide and has collaborated closely with the North West Film Archive UK. He is emeritus professor at the Manchester Metropolitan University UK.
Using memoirs and diaries Steve Hawley has researched the roles in the Burma campaign of participants in the surviving films and traced over 160 of the families of the men – and two men still alive – and recreated these wartime screenings.
Hawley’s book is part description of the films part reclamation of a largely unknown genre of wartime filmmaking partly an account of the Burma campaign and partly a discussion of war and memory. Engagingly and warmly written.
It will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of war studies especially those specializing in the social rather than military history of warfare and historians of British wartime cinema and documentary. Also useful for an undergraduate audience in history media/film studies.
Potential for readers with an interest in the Second World War particularly the war in Burma and those with an interest in family history of the period.
The Films of Aleksandr Rou
Father of Soviet Fairy-Tale Cinema
Fifty years after his death the Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Rou remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ‘King of the Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Main Storyteller of the Country’ he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972.
From the heights of Stalinist propaganda cinema through Khrushchev’s Thaw and into the Brezhnev Stagnation era Rou’s films celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of young audiences.
In English-speaking countries Rou’s work remains relatively little known having received only limited theatrical distribution in the West. With home entertainment now offering wider opportunities to discover his unique and exhilarating oeuvre this book provides a timely introduction to the work of one of the world’s great masters of fairy-tale cinema.
The book traces the developments of Rou’s work on fairy-tale film providing cultural and technical contexts of production and analysing in a competent manner the features that mark Rou’s personal style whilst highlighting variations on narratives actors and special effects. It is a joyful read and an impeccably organised text which is well structured and brings out much more clearly the various phases in the development of Rou’s films. The chapters provide excellent introductions that serve to contextualise and connect the narrative.
Outback
Westerns in Australian Cinema
Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.
The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.
When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.
