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Covering the silent era to the present, this wide-ranging collection of essays examines Greek cinema as an aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomenon with the potential to appeal to a diverse range of audiences. Using a range of methodological tools, the authors investigate the ever-shifting forms and meanings at work within Greece's national cinema and locate it within the booming interdisciplinary study of European cinema at large. Designed for undergraduate courses in film studies, this well-researched volume fills a substantial gap in the market for critical works on Greek cinema in English.
This introduction to American Independent Cinema offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century to the present and a study of key individual films, filmmakers and film companies. Readers will develop an understanding of the complex dynamic relations between independent and mainstream American cinema.The main argument revolves around the idea that independent American cinema has developed alongside mainstream Hollywood cinema with institutional, industrial and economic changes in the latter shaping and informing the former. Consequently the term 'independent' has acquired different meanings at different points in the history of Holly...
The independent sector has produced many of the most distinctive films to have appeared in the US in recent decades. From 'Sex, Lies and Videotape' in the 1980s to 'The Blair Witch Project' and New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and the ultra-low budget digital video features of the 2000s, indie films have thrived, creating a body of work that stands out from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. But what exactly is 'independent' cinema? This, the first book to examine the question in detail, argues that independence can be defined partly in industry terms but also according to formal and aesthetic strategies and by distinctive attitudes towards social and political issues, suggesting that independence is a dynamic rather than a fixed quality. Chapters focus on distribution and relationships with Hollywood studios; narrative ('Clerks' and 'Slacker' to 'Pulp Fiction', 'Magnolia' and 'Memento') and other formal dimensions (from 'Blair Witch's' 'authenticity' to expressive and stylized camerawork and editing in work from Harmony Korine to the Coen brothers); approaches to genre and alternative socio-political visions.
This book illustrates the many ways that actors contribute to American independent cinema. Analyzing industrial developments, it examines the impact of actors as writers, directors, and producers, and as stars able to attract investment and bring visibility to small-scale productions. Exploring cultural-aesthetic factors, the book identifies the various traditions that shape narrative designs, casting choices, and performance styles. The book offers a genealogy of industrial and aesthetic practices that connects independent filmmaking in the studio era and the 1960s and 1970s to American independent cinema in its independent, indie, indiewood, and late-indiewood forms. Chapters on actors’ involvement in the evolution of American independent cinema as a sector alternate with chapters that show how traditions such as naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and Third Cinema influence films and performances.
The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics brings together forty essays by leading film scholars and filmmakers in order to discuss the complex relationship between cinema and politics. Organised into eight sections - Approaches to Film and Politics; Film, Activism and Opposition; Film, Propaganda, Ideology and the State; The Politics of Mobility; Political Hollywood; Alternative and Independent Film and Politics; The Politics of Cine-geographies and The Politics of Documentary - this collection covers a broad range of topics, including: third cinema, cinema after 9/11, eco-activism, human rights, independent Chinese documentary, film festivals, manifestoes, film policies, film as a resp...
For almost three decades the big Hollywood studios have operated classics divisions or specialty labels, subsidiaries that originally focused on the foreign art house film market, while more recently (and controversially) moving on to the American 'indie' film market. This is the first book to offer an in depth examination of the phenomenon of the classics divisions by tracing its history since the establishment the first specialty label in 1980, United Artists Classics, to more contemporary outfits like Focus Features, Warner Independent and Picturehouse.This detailed account of all classics divisions examines their business practices, their position within the often labyrinthine structure ...
East Asian Screen Industries is a guide to the film industries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC. The authors examine how local production has responded to global trends and explore the effects of widespread de-regulation and China's accession to the World Trade Organisation.
Hollywood is facing unprecedented challenges – and is changing rapidly and radically as a result. In this major new study of the contemporary film industry, leading film historian Tino Balio explores the impact of the Internet, declining DVD sales and changing consumer spending habits on the way Hollywood conducts its business. Today, the major studios play an insignificant role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents and have fled to safety, relying on big-budget tentpoles, franchises and family films to reach their target audiences. Comprehensive, compelling and filled with engaging case studies (TimeWarner, DreamWorks SKG, Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, IMAX, Netflix, Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate and Sundance), Hollywood in the New Millennium is a must-read for all students of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, communication studies, and radio and television.
'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?' That question was to be repeated endlessly during the anti-Communist investigations carried out by the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC) in the early 1950s. The refusal of ten members of the film industry to answer the question in 1947 led to the decision by studio bosses to fire them and never to hire known Communists in the future. The Hearings led to scores of actors, writers and directors being named as Communists or sympathisers. All were blacklisted and fired. Hollywood's Blacklists is a history of the political and cultural factors relevant to understanding the why and the how of the various investigations of the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. What was HUAC? What propaganda role did films play during World War II and the Cold War? What values were at stake in the confrontation between Left and Right that saw the former so resoundingly defeated and expelled from Hollywood? Answers to these and other questions are offered via analyses of the motives of the various players and of the tactics deployed by HUAC to reward collaboration and punish dissent.