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.

Late-Career Fairy Tales: The ‘Storyteller Quartet’

Leading the crime cinema: Feminist perspectives in King of Boys and 40 Sticks
Female characters in African crime films play diverse roles influencing the progression of the stories and diegetic situations. This is particularly significant in African crime films where male characters have dominated leading roles. Through the analysis of Kemi Adetiba’s King of Boys (2018) and Victor Gatonye’s 40 Sticks (2020) this article discusses the leading female characters’ embodiment of agency of gendered power in the context of crime genre lawlessness as a useful metaphor for representing women leadership and motherhood. The inferences drawn from observation of the films interspersed with secondary data sourced from books journals online articles and behind-the-scenes documentaries inform the discussions on female characters’ depiction in the sampled films as material to a critique of gendered antagonisms as microcosms of women within African societies.

Gender in New Nollywood cinema: The case of Citation (2020) and Blood Sisters (2022)
The conceptualization of gender from Old to New Nollywood seems to shift between rigid masculinities alongside subjugated females and assertive females confronting masculine aggressions respectively. This article articulates New Nollywood’s approach to representing gender-related issues like violence and sexual exploitation and challenging women’s silence in corporate and domestic spaces. The paper argues that the narration of gender archetypes in Kunle Afolayan’s Citation and Biyi Bandele and Kenneth Gyang’s Blood Sisters – both New Nollywood films – challenge the African patriarchal context in the corporate and domestic spaces where the films are set.

Le cose non dette, Patrizia Fregonese de Filippo (dir.) (2023), Italy: Kalabrone Film and A.C.E.R.
Review of: Le cose non dette Patrizia Fregonese de Filippo (dir.) (2023) Italy: Kalabrone Film and A.C.E.R.

The Non-Professional Actor: Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond, Catherine O’Rawe (2024)
Review of: The Non-Professional Actor: Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond Catherine O’Rawe (2024)
London: Bloomsbury Academic 249 pp.
ISBN 978-1-50139-435-5 h/bk £90

Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Marco Malvestio and Stefano Serafini (eds) (2023)
Review of: Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion Marco Malvestio and Stefano Serafini (eds) (2023)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 255 pp.
ISBN 978-1-47449-016-0 h/bk £90
ISBN 978-1-47449-018-4 e-book £24.99

Quo Vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology, Ivo Blom (2023)
Review of: Quo Vadis? Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology Ivo Blom (2023)
Turin: Edizione Kaplan 312 pp.
ISBN 978-8-89955-966-3 p/bk €40.00

Italian Cinema in the Present Tense, Millicent Marcus (2023)
Review of: Italian Cinema in the Present Tense Millicent Marcus (2023)
Toronto: University of Toronto Press 290 pp.
ISBN 978-1-48754-619-9 p/bk $39.95

Fashioning Submission: Documenting Fashion, Taste and Identity in WWII Italy through Bellezza Magazine, Silvia Vacirca (2023)
Review of: Fashioning Submission: Documenting Fashion Taste and Identity in WWII Italy through Bellezza Magazine Silvia Vacirca (2023)
Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis International 219 pp.
ISBN 978-8-86977-421-8 p/bk £17.99

Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad, Matthew Edwards and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (eds) (2023)
Review of: Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad Matthew Edwards and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (eds) (2023)
Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi 208 pp.
ISBN 978-1-49684-446-0 p/bk $30

Italian Americans in Film: Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities, Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto (eds) (2023)
Review of: Italian Americans in Film: Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto (eds) (2023)
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 309 pp.
ISBN 978-3-03106-464-7 p/bk $149.17

Women’s Work in Post-War Italy: An Oral and Filmic History, Flora Derounian (2023)
Review of: Women’s Work in Post-War Italy: An Oral and Filmic History Flora Derounian (2023)
Bristol: Intellect xi+218 pp.
ISBN 978-1-78938-812-1 h/bk $134.95

Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68, Mauro Resmini (2023)
Review of: Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68 Mauro Resmini (2023)
Minneapolis MN and London: University of Minnesota Press 302 pp.
ISBN 978-1-51791-138-6 p/bk $28.00

Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality, Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (2023)
Review of: Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (2023)
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 216 pp.
ISBN 978-1-80207-721-6 h/bk $130.00

C’era una volta in America: Storia del cinema italiano negli Stati Uniti, 1946–2000, Damiano Garofalo (2023)
Review of: C’era una volta in America: Storia del cinema italiano negli Stati Uniti 1946–2000 Damiano Garofalo (2023)
Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore 246 pp.
ISBN 978-8-84987-732-8 p/bk €17.31

Secret Violences: The Political Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni 1960–1975, Sławomir Masłoń (2023)
Review of: Secret Violences: The Political Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni 1960–1975 Sławomir Masłoń (2023)
New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic 185 pp.
ISBN 978-1-50139-823-0 h/bk £81.00

Comunicazioni sociali, Special Issue: ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Audiovisual Industries: Critical Research Approaches and Methods’, Rosa Barotsi, Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating (eds) (2023)
Review of: Comunicazioni sociali Special Issue: ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Audiovisual Industries: Critical Research Approaches and Methods’ Rosa Barotsi Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating (eds) (2023)
Milan: Vita e pensiero 124 pp.
ISSN 0392-8667 p/bk €101.00

Kinematografia i literatura sardyńska a tożsamość regionalna: Od Grazii Deleddy do Salvatore Mereu, Ewa Baszak (2022)
Review of: Kinematografia i literatura sardyńska a tożsamość regionalna: Od Grazii Deleddy do Salvatore Mereu Ewa Baszak (2022)
Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego 222 pp.
ISBN 978-8-32293-773-0 p/bk

Basilicata and Southern Italy between Film and Ecology, Alberto Baracco and Manuela Gieri (eds) (2023)
Review of: Basilicata and Southern Italy between Film and Ecology Alberto Baracco and Manuela Gieri (eds) (2023)
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 286 pp.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13572-9
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-03113-572-9
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-13573-6

Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking, Laura Di Bianco (2023)
Review of: Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking Laura Di Bianco (2023)
Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press 215 pp.
ISBN 978-0-25306-464-6 p/bk $25.00

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.

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An overview of Robert Altman's films dealing with Los Angeles as a topic or having been shot there.

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Of the conditions that have affected non-commodity or avant-garde filmmaking in Los Angeles two are especially important: the capitalist film industry itself and the variety and magnificence of the California landscape: the mountains and the desert on the one hand and the other the unusual architectural features of the city itself. The changing interaction among these is best illuminated by an historically periodized survey

World Film Locations: Los Angeles
Volume 2
World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.
When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux.
The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.
This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.
Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.
A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.

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Disneyland is not a film location but a carefully planned venue laid out according to the tenets of narrative placemaking an urban design philosophy that connects architecture and space through storytelling.

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Everyone knows you need a car to get around L.A. It is after all a so-called “driving city.” But some L.A.-based films yank their protagonists from their cars and push them into the great unknown. Severed from an infrastructure's theoretical efficiency these characters are isolated unstable unsure. They don't know where they're going both literally and figuratively. Walking in a city of drivers becomes a means for them to begin their journeys toward something resembling clarity if not peace.

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Robert Benton's elegiacal neo-noir showcases both his stellar cast of aging movie stars Paul Newman Gene Hackman Susan Sarandon and James Garner as well as the modernist architecture they inhabit in order to highlight Benson's vision of a decaying ruthless Hollywood wrapped up in facades of elegance and grace.

Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.

Sex Sounds: On Aural Explicitness in Call Me by Your Name
On its reception Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) remained insufficiently explicit for some critics who lamented instances such as the pan shot that takes us away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) in bed together: ‘Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time however the camera coyly drifts over to an open window their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood’. This response is certainly understandable and recalls a similar rallying cry from Rose Troche's 1994 film Go Fish: ‘What would you rather our collective lesbian image be? Hot passionate say-yes-to-sex-dykes or touchy-feely soft-focus sisters of the woodlands?’ Guadagnino in making a mainstream high-profile adaptation has in the eyes of some critics opted for the ‘touchy-feely soft-focus’ route. However I would like to suggest that the film locates its explicitness in its sound design. This clever strategy is used to clearly convey actions which are not shown directly on screen. The film is filled with the sound of clothing slipping on and off of bodies and with the sound of bodies in contact. In the scenes in which Oliver fellates Elio there is audible sound design that articulates the action taking place. Drawing on work that discusses the importance of sound audio design and affect I would like to counter the suggestion that Call Me by Your Name is overtly coy in its display of sex. By attending to the details of the film's sound design we can see that it deliberately evokes the affect of pornography in order to amplify the film's explicitness.

Rethinking screenwriting credits and the unproduced screenplay: Innovative approaches to accreditation using the script reading as an output
This article explores the definition of what constitutes a ‘produced’ screenplay and how it relates to the screenwriter and their accreditation for their work by industry standard definitions. The article challenges the industry-accepted norm that a screenwriter’s work is recognized after the script has been translated to the screen and argues instead that in line with other media and craft forms the screenplay and the author can achieve recognition through other forms of showcase. Through comparisons with industry examples we assert that the script reading is in and of itself a valid production and can serve as a means of allowing writers to achieve accreditation for their work as writers without relying on union conventions that privilege the screen work over other forms to allow writers to receive accreditation for their writing. To explore this the article uses two case studies The Script Department a virtual screenwriting studio that uses podcasting to produce script reading dramatizations and one of their most successful productions The Clearing written by Belinda Lees. The Script Department’s success in attracting mainstream industry interest as well as the success of Lees’s screenwriting on the platform demonstrates that a reliance on a single mode of production (i.e. film or television) as a means of evaluating a writer’s credentials is no longer definitive and that the script reading as a performative exercise can be both a form of showcase and of benefit to the writer looking to improve their craft.

Adaptation screenplays as performance texts: Axiological linguistic acts in a case of Basque writing
Rather than being a ‘blueprint’ statement of instruction and following propositions made by Thomas Leitch adaptation screenplays are ‘recipes’ that both record a ‘doing’ and serve as a performance space of engagement with production teams. This is explicable in terms of how they propose a new enargeia by way of clear narrative idea that they frame through quasi-recursive recontextualization of both the literary field and the specifics of originary texts and then express via an integrated set of linguistic acts by way of axiological statement of intentionality for a film of a particular sort. The progression of this logic is explained through exploration of a seminal instance of Basque literature-to-film adaptation of Bernard Atxaga’s book Obabakoak written as a screenplay for the film Obaba by Montxo Armendáriz.

Stand-up comedy to the screen: A satirical autoethnographic approach
Disrupting conventional screenwriting practice several Australian stand-up comedians have used their stand-up comedy personas and material within a satirical autoethnographic approach to develop their narrative television comedy series. Stand-up comedians use autoethnographic tools of personal experience and a critique of cultural beliefs with a satirical comedic style to develop onstage material. Their unique ‘point of view’ that may challenge societal norms together with their cultural identity contributes to their onstage persona. Stand-up comedy has democratized the Australian screen by giving diverse creators a platform to prove their talent and provide proof that there is an audience for their projects. This study examines how Australian stand-up comics Josh Thomas and Kitty Flanagan use a satirical autoethnographic approach to critique cultural beliefs such as those relating to gender sexuality and age within their stand-up comedy and further develop their stage personas and material to create their respective narrative television comedy series Please Like Me (2013–16) and Fisk (2021–22). The author will discuss how she similarly used satirical autoethnography to develop her Melbourne International Comedy Festival show The MILF Next Door subverting cultural expectations relating to mature divorced mothers. Finally the author will discuss how aspects of her show may be developed for narrative television comedy using satirical autoethnographic approaches.

Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the Film
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.

The Sexiest Risk-Taker? Armie Hammer, White Masculinity and Call Me by Your Name
On their shared appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show back in 2017 actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet sat down with DeGeneres to discuss their performances as Oliver (Hammer) and Elio (Chalamet) in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017). In the interview both Hammer and Chalamet talk candidly with DeGeneres about their preparation and execution of the roles and the multiple “make out” scenes they had directed by Luca Guadagnino. DeGeneres an openly lesbian host of her self-titled talk show respected Hammer and Chalamet for presenting gay characters and a queer romance in a genuine and sensitive light even though both are heterosexual males in real-life. However at the end of the interview DeGeneres cheekily embarrasses Hammer in front of Chalamet and her studio audience with a feature story in People with the magazine's claim of Hammer being the “Sexiest Man Alive.” While this is not an uncommon labeling of celebrity in US popular culture broadly put Hammer's co-star Chalamet's response to the photograph and feature story in People was: “I knew he was sexy and took risks but I didn't know if he was the sexiest risk-taker.” As such repositioning the meaning of Hammer's performance as Oliver in terms of risk aids in a more balanced understanding of Hammer's star power in Call Me By Your Name as both reference and refracting point.

Introduction: Somewhere in Northern Italy
This introduction considers what is so appealing and acclaimed about Call Me by Your Name as well as the primary angles this book will present. It introduces the film as a romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) as an LGBTQ+ text and as an Italian production. It emphasises the fluidity of these terms with regard to the film and how that fluidity can be helpful to understanding of the film's openness and freshness. The introduction also explains how the collection is structured with brief introductions for each of the three parts – Style Themes and Reception – and each of the chapters. In doing so it introduces the range and diversity of voices that will carry through the book to provide multiple perspectives on Call Me by Your Name.