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Hedy Lamarr's life was punctuated by salacious rumors and public scandal, but it was her stunning looks and classic Hollywood glamour that continuously captivated audiences. Born Hedwig Kiesler, she escaped an unhappy marriage with arms dealer Fritz Mandl in Austria to try her luck in Hollywood, where her striking appearance made her a screen legend. Her notorious nude role in the erotic Czech film Ecstasy (1933), as well as her work with Cecil B. DeMille (Samson and Delilah, 1949), Walter Wanger (Algiers, 1938), and studio executive Louis B. Mayer catapulted her alluring and provocative reputation as a high-profile sex symbol. In Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film, Ruth Barton ex...
A stimulating overview of the intellectual arguments and critical debates involved in the study of British and Irish cinemas British and Irish film studies have expanded in scope and depth in recent years, prompting a growing number of critical debates on how these cinemas are analysed, contextualized, and understood. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema addresses arguments surrounding film historiography, methods of textual analysis, critical judgments, and the social and economic contexts that are central to the study of these cinemas. Twenty-nine essays from many of the most prominent writers in the field examine how British and Irish cinema have been discussed, the concepts and method...
In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.
Gaspar Noé's Irreversible is uncompromising and visceral, an essential piece of modern cinema. Punctuated by dazzling avant-garde techniques, the film depicts, in reverse-chronological order, a woman's rape and her boyfriend and friend's subsequent hunt for vengeance through the underworld of Paris. Confrontational yet influential, Irreversible has polarized audiences since its release in 2002, making it until now almost impossible to study dispassionately. This first book-length study of Irreversible situates Noé's work in the ecosystem of contemporary French media, exploring how Irreversible and a larger-scale cinéma du corps actually inspired France's film resurgence in the early twent...
The volume offers a broad range of academic approaches to contemporary and historical Irish filmmaking and representations of nationality, national identity, and theoretical questions around the construction of Ireland and Irishness on the screen.
In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children’s fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children’s literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children’s literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children’s literature as a lens through which to view ...
The sports film has become one of commercial cinema's most recognizable genres. From classic boxing films such as Raging Bull (1980) to soccer-themed box-office successes like Bend it Like Beckham (2002), the sports film stands at the interface of two of our most important cultural forms. This book examines the social, historical and ideological significance of representations of sport in film internationally, an essential guide for all students and enthusiasts of sport, film, media and culture. Sport and Film traces the history of the sports film, from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, its consolidation as a distinct fiction genre in the mid 1920s in Hollywood films such as Harold Lloy...
Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing: Feminist Interventions and Imaginings analyzes and explores women’s writing of the post-Tiger period and reflects on the social, cultural, and economic conditions of this writing’s production. The Post-Celtic Tiger period (2008–) in Ireland marks an important moment in the history of women’s writing. It is a time of increased visibility and publication, dynamic feminist activism, and collective projects, as well as a significant garnering of public recognition to a degree that has never been seen before. The collection is framed by interviews with Claire Kilroy and Melatu Uche Okorie—two leading figures in the field—an...
As one of the foremost Spanish directors of all time, Luis Buñuel’s filmography has been the subject of innumerable studies. Despite the fact that the twenty films he made in Mexico between 1947 and 1965 represent the most prolific stage of his career as a filmmaker, these have remained relatively neglected in writing on Buñuel and his work. This book focuses on nine of the director’s films made in Mexico in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films’ narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. Although in recent years Buñuel’s Mexican films have begun to ...
Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series in...