You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, Memory and Popular Film establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory in film and of film as memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown.
From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in particular, Warner Bros., Brand Hollywood provides the first sustained examination of the will-to-brand in the contemporary movie business. Outlining changes in the marketing and media environment during the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Grainge explores how the logic of branding has propelled specific kinds of approach to the status and selling of film. Analyzing the practice of branding, the poetics of corporate logos, and the industrial politics s...
From the trailers and promos that surround film and television to the ads and brand videos that are sought out and shared, promotional media have become a central part of contemporary screen life. Promotional Screen Industries is the first book to explore the sector responsible for this thriving area of media production. In a wide-ranging analysis, Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson explore the intermediaries – advertising agencies, television promotion specialists, movie trailer houses, digital design companies – that compete and collaborate in the fluid, fast-moving world of promotional screen work. Through interview-based fieldwork with companies and practitioners based in the UK, US ...
An introduction to film history, this anthology covers the history of film from 1895. It is arranged chronologically, and each chapter contains an introduction on the key developments within the period. Various types of film history are undertaken to enable students to become familiar with different types of film historical research.
Through a series of detailed visual analyses of popular films, the author demonstrates that the visual creation of 'pastness' does not necessarily sever our connection to history as is commonly claimed, but can yield new insights into the relationship between the present and the past.
Through engaging case studies on news magazines, Hollywood film, brand advertising, and movie colorization, this volume examines the resurgence of the black and white image in the 90s.
Responding to a lack of studies on the film festival’s role in the production of cultural memory, this book explores different parameters through which film festivals shape our reception and memories of films. By focusing on two Asian American film festivals, this book analyzes the frames of memory that festivals create for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media. It further establishes that festival locations—both cities and screening venues—play a significant role in shaping our experience of films. Finally, it shows that festivals produce performances which help guide audiences towards certain readings and direct the film’s role as a memory ob...
This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.