Performing Arts

Since the end of the Cold War there have been many competing ideas about how to explain contemporary conflicts, and about how the West should respond to them. This study, newly available in paperback, examines how the media interpret conflicts and international interventions, testing the sometimes contradictory claims that have been made about recent coverage of war.

Framing post-Cold War conflicts takes a comparative approach, examining UK press coverage across six different crises. Through detailed analysis of news content, it seeks to identify the dominant themes in explaining the post-Cold War international order, and to discover how far the patterns established prior to 11 September 2001 have subsequently changed. Based on extensive original research, the book includes case studies of two ‘humanitarian military interventions’ (in Somalia and Kosovo), two instances where Western governments were condemned for not intervening enough (Bosnia and Rwanda), and the post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Lynda La Plante is Britain’s most successful and well known screenwriter and the first woman to win the prestigious Dennis Potter writer’s award. Attracting millions of viewers, the popular and critical success of La Plante’s work is central to understanding changes that shook the UK television industry in the late twentieth century. This critical introduction, the first account of her work, focuses on three innovative serials: Widows (ITV, 1983), Prime Suspect (ITV 1991) and Trial and Retribution (ITV 1997).

In each chapter questions of gender and genre, acting and stardom and authorship and value are mapped against the changing relationship between women and the television industry. The final chapter traces La Plante’s metamorphosis from ‘just a writer for hire’ to the astute businesswoman she has become through a focus on the trans-national appeal of dramas such as Killer Net (C4 1997) and Bella Mafia (CBS 1997).

This fascinating collection looks at the career and films of Luc Besson, one of the most acclaimed figures in international cinema. Contributions have been assembled from all over the world, and their different approaches reflect this geographical diversity. Films covered range from Besson’s first feature, La Dernier Combat, to the international blockbusters The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc. The essays range from looking at costume design to musical scores, and the final chapter offers a transcript of a previously unpublished interview with the man himself.

He is the only French director to have crossed over successfully during the 1990s into the blockbuster spectacular we associate with Hollywood cinema and yet this is only the second book in English on this major international director. The films of Luc Besson will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the career and films of the ‘master of spectacle’.

The fifteen groundbreaking essays contained in this book address the concept of adaptation in relation to horror cinema. Adaptation is not only a key cultural practice and strategy for filmmakers, but it is also a theme of major importance within horror cinema as a hole. The history of the genre is full of adaptations that have drawn from fiction or folklore, or that have assumed the shape of remakes of pre-existing films. The horror genre itself also abounds with its own myriad transformations and transmutations.

The essays within this volume engage with an impressive range of horror texts, from the earliest silent horror films by Thomas Edison and Jean Epstein through to important contemporary phenomena, such as the western appropriation of Japanese horror motifs. Classic works by Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara receive cutting-edge re-examination, as do unjustly neglected works by Mario Bava, Guillermo del Toro and Stan Brakhage.

Cinema has long been recognised as the privileged bridge between Soviet ideologies and their mass public. Recent feminist-oriented work has drawn out the symbolic role of women in Soviet culture, but, not surprisingly, men too were expected to play their part. In this first full-length study of masculinity in Stalinist Soviet cinema, John Haynes examines the ‘New Soviet Man’ not only as an ideal of masculinity presented to Soviet cinemagoers, but also, precisely, as a man in his specific, and hotly debated social, cultural and political context.

A detailed analysis of Stalinist discourse sets the stage for an examination of the imagined relationship between the patriarch Stalin and his ‘model sons’ in the key genre cycles of the era: from the capital to the collective farms, and ultimately to the very borders of the Soviet state. Informed by contemporary and present day debates over the social and cultural significance of cinema and masculinity, New Soviet Man draws on a range of theoretical and comparative material to produce engaging and accessible readings accounting for both the appeal of, and the inherent potential for subversion within, films produced by the Stalinist culture industry.

New Soviet Man will be widely read by students and specialists in the fields of film studies, Russian and Soviet studies, gender and modern European history.

Beyond representation explores whether the last thirty years witnessed signs of 'progress’ or ’progressiveness’ in the representation of ‘marginalised’ or subaltern identity categories within television drama in Britain and the US. In doing so, it interrogates some of the key assumptions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and the politics of identity that have influenced and informed television drama criticism during this period.

This book examines ideas around politics and aesthetics, which emerge from such theories as Marxist-socialism and postmodernism, feminism and postmodern feminism, anti-racism and postcolonialism, queer theory and theories of globalisation, and evaluates their impact on television criticism and on television as an institution. These discussions are consolidated through a number of case studies that offer analyses of a range of television drama texts including ‘Ally McBeal', 'Supply and Demand', 'The Bill', 'Second Generation', 'Star Trek: Enterprise', 'Queer as Folk', 'Metrosexuality' and 'The Murder of Stephen Lawrence'.

‘Staging the UK' examines some of the most important performance in Britain from the mid-1980s into the new millennium. In a timely new critical approach, it considers contemporary British theatre in relation to national and supranational identities, critical concepts like globalisation and diaspora, and contemporary contexts such as the election of New Labour, devolution and European unification. It makes a significant contribution to the study of contemporary theatre by elucidating the relationships between performance, cultural identities and cultural power, and will be an invaluable textbook for courses on British theatre and culture.

'Staging the UK' takes a de-centred materialist approach. It looks at theatre in a range of institutions, practices and forms such as play texts, musicals, festivals, installation art, site-specific and physical theatre. It examines events such as the Edinburgh festivals, and significant companies, including the Scottish National Theatre, Brith Gof, Tinderbox Theatre Company, Complicite, Tamasha Theatre Company, DV8 Physical Theatre, Artangel, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group.

This book makes a significant contribution to the study of contemporary theatre by elucidating the relationships between performance, cultural identities and cultural power, and will be an invaluable textbook for courses on British theatre and culture.

Bertrand Tavernier is widely recognised as the leading French filmmaker of his generation. Both a consummate artist and a controversial public figure, he is a passionate advocate for social causes and also a tireless defender of world cinema in general and the French cinematic heritage in particular.

Lynn Higgins’ book offers a guided tour through Tavernier’s oeuvre, taking into account both its prodigious diversity and its unifying themes. It explores his use of genre and adaptation, his work with actors and his affection for characters, his treatment of France’s colonial history, his explorations of the powers of art and the complexities of intergenerational relations, both among fictional characters and within French cinema history.

This is the most comprehensive scholarly book about Tavernier. Original and lively, sophisticated and engaging, the book will appeal to anyone interested in film studies, gender studies, and French cultural studies including academics, students, cinema enthusiasts, and Tavernier fans.

Mathieu Kassovitz is arguably the most important filmmaker to have emerged from French cinema in the past two decades. As a director, his work often engages with highly controversial socio-political issues whilst still managing to attract and connect with a popular audience – and, above all, with a youth audience.
He is also one of the few contemporary French filmmakers who is capable of productively engaging with Hollywood, in terms of cinematic style, narrative and genre, yet still retaining his own identity as a French filmmaker. In addition to his directorial successes, Kassovitz has also achieved considerable critical and commercial success in France as a screen actor.
His films – whether directed by or acted in, or both – show an astonishing variety, from his early Métisse (1993), his break-through, La Haine (1995) through to Jeunet's Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2000), Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopatre (2002) and Gothika (2003).
Will Higbee's study is the first to explore of one of the most fascinating characters in French cinema.

Entertaining television challenges the idea that the BBC in the 1950s was elitist and ‘staid’, upholding Reithian values in a paternalistic, even patronising way. By focusing on a number of (often controversial) programme case studies – such as the soap opera, the quiz/game show, the ‘problem’ show and programmes dealing with celebrity culture – Su Holmes demonstrates how BBC television surprisingly explored popular interests and desires. She also uncovers a number of remarkable connections with programmes and topics at the forefront of television today, ranging from talk shows, 'Reality TV', even to our contemporary obsession with celebrity.

The book is iconclastic, percipient and grounded in archival research, and will be of use to anyone studying television history.

Now available in paperback, this study is a major appraisal of the contributions of German-speaking émigrés to British cinema from the late 1920s to the end of World War II. Through a series of film analyses and case studies, it challenges notions of a self-sufficient British national cinema by advancing the assumption that filmmakers from Berlin, Munich and Vienna had a major influence on aesthetics, themes and narratives, technical innovation, the organisation of work and the introduction of apprenticeship schemes. Whether they came voluntarily or as refugees, their contributions and expertise helped to consolidate the studio system and ultimately made possible the establishment of a viable British film industry.

Hochscherf talks about such figures as Ewald André Dupont, Alfred Junge, Oscar Werndorff, Mutz Greenbaum and Werner Brandes, and such companies as Korda’s London Film Productions, Powell and Pressburger’s The Archers and Michael Balcon’s Gaumont-British.

Cinema provides entertainment, but it also communicates a set of values, a vision of the world or an ideology. From its beginnings more than a century ago, European cinema has dealt with the tension between these two functions in a variety of ways: at the extremes, dictatorial regimes have sweetened the pill of ideology with the sugar of entertainment. Meanwhile, spectators have persisted in seeking out, above all, the pleasure film can provide.

Now available again in paperback, this book explores the complex relationship between entertainment, ideology and audiences in European film, through studies that range from the Stalinist musicals of the 1930s, to cinematic representations of masculinity under Franco, to recent French films and their Hollywood remakes.

Diverse and entertaining, this study is addressed to students of film – especially French, German, Russian or Spanish – and to those readers and academics interested in both the history of cinema and in European culture.

This book explores how South Africa is negotiating its past in and through various modes of performance in contemporary theatre, public events and memorial spaces. It analyses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a live event, as an archive, and in various theatrical engagements with it, asking throughout how the TRC has affected the definition of identity and memory in contemporary South Africa, including disavowed memories.

Hutchison then considers how the SA-Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project and the 2010 South African World Cup opening ceremony attempted to restage the nation in their own ways. She investigates how the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park embody issues related to memory in contemporary South Africa. She also analyses current renegotiations of popular repertoires, particularly songs and dances related to the Struggle, revivals of classic European and South African protest plays, new history plays and specific racial and ethnic histories and identities.

Performance in a time of terror offers a thought-provoking investigation of the way performance has given shape and form to wars on terror past and present, as both a tactic of violence and a strategy of resistance.

The book focuses on an array of performances created during the ‘war on terror’ of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the spate of carefully rehearsed beheadings carried out by Islamic insurgents in Iraq in 2004, a key proposal is that the radical in performance can be most clearly identified in acts of violence that have obliterated life. Here, the reader is also taken back in time to encounter how performance was employed as part of counterinsurgency operations during the ‘war on terrorism’ in Northern Ireland (1969–1998). Moving on to explore how theatre-makers and performance activists have used performance to generate habitable worlds for life in times of crisis, Hughes argues for a re-engagement with the conservative in the critical project of art-making. As part of this, original discussions of the resurgence of political theatre on London stages and the proliferation of performative anti-war activism during the war in Iraq (2003–2008), are provided. Also documented are an extraordinary series of theatre productions commissioned by counterterrorism agencies following the suicide attacks in the UK in 2005.

Performance in a time of terror will appeal to researchers and students of contemporary theatre and performance, especially those interested in the politics of performance. It will also be of general interest to anyone researching wars on terror and
terrorism from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Terence Fisher is best known as the director who made most of the classic Hammer horrors – including The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Devil Rides Out. But there is more to Terence Fisher than Hammer horror. In a busy twenty-five-year career, he directed fifty films, not just horrors but also thrillers, comedies, melodramas and science-fiction. This book offers an appreciation of all of Fisher's films and also gives a sense of his place in British film history.

Looking at Fisher’s career as a whole not only underlines his importance as a film-maker but also casts a new, interesting light on the areas in which he worked – Gainsborough melodrama, the 1950s B film, 1960s science-fiction and, of course, Hammer, one of the most successful independent film companies in the history of British cinema.

This book is a study of theatre's educational role during the 20th and the first years of the 21st centuries. It examines the variety of ways the theatre's educational potential has been harnessed and theorised, the claims made for its value and the tension bettween theatre as education and theatre as 'art': between theatre's aesthetic dimenstion and the 'utilitarian' or 'instrumental' role for which it has so often been pressed into service.

Following a preliminary discussion of some key theoretical approaches to aesthetics, dramatic art and learning and, above all, the relationships between them, the study is organised into two broad chronological periods: early developments in European and American theatre up to the end of World War II, and participatory theatre and education since World War II. Within each period, a cluster of key themes is introduced and then re-visited and examined through a number of specific examples - seen within their cultural contexts - in subsequent chapters. Topics covered include an early use of theatre to campaign for prison reform; workers' theatre, agit-prop and American living newspapers in the 1930s; theatre's response to the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945; post-war theatre in education; theatre in prisons; and the use of performance in historic sites.

‘Georges Franju' is the fullest study to date of this little-known French director, the co-founder of the Cinémathèque française, and the first book on him in English since 1967.

Born in 1912, but only enjoying his real debut as a director in 1948 with his notorious documentary about Parisian abattoirs 'Le Sang des bêtes', Franju went on to make thirteen more courts métrages and eight longs métrages, including his horror classic 'Les Yeux sans visage'. Ince takes a new approach to Franju's films, investigating the areas of genre and gender, and grouping the films thematically rather than chronologically. A chapter on Franju's cinematic aesthetics offers a new synthesis of existing writings, combined with the author's responses to the films. A full introduction and conclusion set Franju's directorial career in the context of his lifelong commitment to France's cinema institutions.

'Georges Franju' will be essential reading on Franju, and of great interest to researchers, academics and students in film studies

Theatres on film is an innovative contribution to the study of both theatre and film history, with its detailed discussion of popular and influential films that have taken the theatre as their subject, informed by a strong sense of the cultural and historical background.

This book focuses on the significance and effect of theatrical subject matter in key films in several genres, and ranges from Busby Berkeley to Ingmar Bergman, and from the haunted backstage world of The Phantom of the Opera to the sinister glamour of The Red Shoes and the theatrical politics of Mephisto and The Lives of Others.

Theatres on film will appeal to film- and theatregoers, as well as to readers with an academic or professional interest in its subject.

This is the first English-language book on controversial female director Catherine Breillat, whose films include Romance, A ma soeur! (Fat Girl), Anatomy of Hell and The Last Mistress.

This volume explores the director's complex relation to religion and to feminism, and it examines the differences between Breillat's films and patriarchal pornography, engaging in detailed analysis of her intimate scenes between men and women. Keesey also discusses the literature, films, paintings and photos that have influenced Breillat's work, and extends this to show how Breillat's films have influenced other filmmakers and artists in turn.

A lively and accessible introduction, this book will appeal to students and researchers, as well as all those with an interest in gender studies, French film and contemporary cinema.

This book provides for the first time modern-spelling, fully annotated editions of three important Elizabethan and Jacobean 'usury plays' – The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, and The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl. The edition includes an extensive scholarly introduction to the attitudes toward money-lending in early modern England, and to the authors, texts and historical contexts of these dramas.

The plays included in this edition also represent examples of 'city plays' and 'alien plays', thus making them widely relevant to scholars and teachers in many areas of early modern studies. They are also gaining new appreciation in their own right.

As befits a volume in the RPCL series, the edition is academically advanced to cater for specialised scholars. However, the introduction, editing and annotation remain accessible for undergraduates and theatregoers.

This is the first collection in English to focus exclusively on the various forms of popular film produced in Spain and to acknowledge the variety, range and depth of Spanish cinema.

Contributors from across Hispanic, media and cultural studies explore a range of genres, from the musicals of the 1930s and 1940s to contemporary horror movies, historical epics of the 1940s and 1950s and contemporary representations of the Spanish Civil War. The book includes reappraisals of key popular directors such as Luis Garcia Berlanga and Antonio Mercero as well as critical analyses of celebrated stars like Marisol. It provides innovative consideration of the promotion and reception of horror in the 1960s, recollections of cinema-going in Madrid, and reflections on successful recent works such as 'Abre los Ojos' and 'Solas'.

The contributors offer a range of critical and methodological perspectives, opening up new ways of analysing Spanish popular film.

The politics of Jean Genet's late theatre is the first publication to situate the politics of Genet's theatre within the social, spatial and political contexts of France in the 1950s and 1960s. The book's innovative approach departs significantly from existing scholarship on Genet. Where scholars have tended to bracket Genet as either an absurdist, ritualistic or, more recently, a resistant playwright, this study argues that his theory and practice of political theatre have more in common with the affirmative ideas of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. By doing so, the monograph positions Genet as a revolutionary playwright, interested in producing progressive forms of democracy.

This original and interdisciplinary reading of Genet’s late work will be of interest to students and practitioners of Theatre, as well as those interested in French and History.

Sean Connery’s tuxedo, Ursula Andress’ bikini, Oddjob’s bowler hat, and Q’s gadgets are just a few defining features of the 007 world examined in The James Bond phenomenon. Drawn from the fields of literary, film, music, and cultural studies, the essays in this collection range from revitalised readings of Ian Fleming’s original spy novels to the analysis of Pussy Galore’s lesbianism, Miss Moneypenny’s filmic feminism, and Pierce Brosnan’s techno-fetishism. Together, the essays not only consider the James Bond novels and films in relation to their historical, political, and social contexts from the Cold War period onwards, but also examine the classic Bond canon from an array of theoretical perspectives.

This updated and expanded edition features new essays on a range of hot topics, including Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, Playboy magazine’s obsession with the 007 lifestyle, Bond’s erotic Orientalism, and the rise of 007 video gaming.

Now available in paperback, this book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot’s achievement, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les diaboliques, Le mystère Picasso).

Clouzot’s films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although his films are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his is an art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment.

This is the first book to appear in English about theatre from the entire Nazi period (1933–45). It is based on detailed statistical analysis, contemporary press reports, research in German archives and interviews with surviving playwrights, actors and musicians. The volume has an extensive bibliography and is fully illustrated. It forms a much needed guide to this neglected area of European culture and will be of interest to historians, Germanists and theatre specialists.

The international contributors are William J. Niven, Glen Gadberry, Erik Levi, Rebecca Rovit, William Abbey and Katharina Havekamp.

Offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. Covers a variety of genres, such as B-movies, war films, women's pictures and theatrical adaptations; as well as social issues which affect film-making, such as censorship. Includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. Features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. Presents a provocative challenge to conventional wisdom about 1950s film and rediscovers the Festival of Britain decade.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Intervening at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and cinema, this book argues that the career of Robert Guédiguian is the result of one of the most original and coherent projects in contemporary French cinema: to make a committed, historically-conscious cinema, in a local space, over a long period of time, but most especially with friends.

The account starts with in-depth consideration of friendship and its relation to philosophy, politics, time, and space. The book chronologically traces this project as it begins in Guédiguian's hometown, the Communist-leaning Marseille. It further unfolds through the political transformations of the 1980s Left and the local activism and utopias of the 1990s, and spreads into Guédiguian's varied explorations of genre and register. Close analysis is accompanied with historical and social contextualization, but also with a consistent return to the underlying, radical and philosophically rich project.

This is the first full-length monograph in English about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English speaking world for his award winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. This study locates André Téchiné within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian war, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French wave. The originality of Téchiné's sixteen feature films lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national identity, as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture, and the centre-periphery relationship between Paris and his native southwest.

The book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates working on French cinema, undergraduates studying Téchiné on their film courses, and all those with a general interest in cinema, contemporary France, and lesbian and gay issues.

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world's great filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace patterns of continuity and change, and explore critical assessments of his work over time.

His career began in the silent era and ended as the French New Wave was winding down. In between, Duvivier made over sixty films in a long and at times difficult career. He was adept at literary adaptation, biblical epic, and film noir, and this groundbreaking volume illustrates in great detail Duvivier's eclecticism, technical efficiency and visual fluency in works such as Panique (1946) and Voici le temps des assassins (1956). It will particularly appeal to scholars and students of French cinema looking for examples of a director who could straddle the realms of the popular and the auteur.

In the years between 1941 and 1965, Lance Comfort made some of the most entertaining films in Britain. There was the striking success of his second feature as director, Hatter’s Castle (1941) and when he returned to this melodramatic vein in 1945 he made a series of highly proficient and enjoyable studies in obsession, including Bedelia (1946) with Margaret Lockwood as a murderess, and Temptation Harbour (1947) starring Robert Newton as a decent man in the grip of erotic attraction. Comfort’s career has never been charted in full – that is, from the apprenticeship in the 1930s, through the melodramas of the 1940s to the often rewarding co-features of the following two decades. His is in many ways a prototypical career in British cinema: his very attractive body of work has been marginalised by critical focus on a few giant figures.

This is a book that will appeal to all students and researchers in British cinema, as well as to anyone with an interest in British films – and why they were the way they were – in their most productive period.

This volume analyses major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal ‘proving ground’ that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and performance theory, this work breaks new ground in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship while proposing a fresh direction in the study of text and performance.

The limits of performance ‘challenges conventional wisdom’, offering ‘a novel take on the mal du siècle, that thematic hardy perennial of French Romanticism and the nineteenth century in general’, combined with ‘eminently readable and, therefore, compelling’ analysis of plays – ‘a thought-provoking addition to work in the field’ (Glyn Hambrook, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2008).

Alan Bennett is one of the UK’s most well-known and successful writers. His oeuvre is one where populist art forms and intellectually complex arguments co-exist seamlessly, allowing the work to appeal to a wide audience. Bennett’s familiar voice combines both an appreciation for the past with a critical assessment of contemporary Britain, often through relentlessly detailed observation of himself and of others.

Bennett has acted, written, directed, presented or edited in almost every conceivable dramatic medium, including stage, television, radio, film and print media. This book is the first to focus on his often neglected work for television, from the mid-1960s right through to the present. It encompasses formats such as the single play (the rarely seen 1970s collaborations with Stephen Frears and Lindsay Anderson), the two Talking Heads series, perceived as a reinvention of the television monologue, and his autobiographical documentaries.

While providing a context of television drama in which Bennett’s output is embedded, this study also provides compact overviews of his work in other media. The book is intended for those interested in Alan Bennett, his many voices and the history of television drama.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga.

This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms.

From a little before ten years of age Brian McFarlane became addicted to stories told on the screen, and the mere fact that he had difficulty in getting to see the films he wanted - or any for that matter - only made them seem more alluring. But it wasn't just seeing the films that mattered: he also wanted, and quite soon needed, to be writing about them and these obsessions have been part of his life for the next sixty-odd years.

Real and reel is a light-hearted and but deeply felt account of a lifetime's addiction. It is one particular writer and critic's story, but it will strike sparks among many others. Though many other interests have kept Brian McFarlane's life lively, nothing else has exerted such a long-standing grip on the author's imagination as film.

Editor of the Encyclopaedia of British Cinema, co-editor of Manchester University Press's British Film Makers series, and author of over a dozen critical works on film and adaptation, Brian McFarlane's autobiographical Real and reel can also be read as a biography of the subject of Film Studies itself.

This book traces the career of Roy Ward Baker, one of the great survivors of the British film and television industry. He directed the landmark British film Morning Departure (1949), worked at Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood in the early 1950s where he directed Marilyn Monroe's 'breakthrough' film (Don't Bother to Knock), and followed this with a succession of fine films for Rank, culminating in the best version of the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember in 1958. Yet within three years he was unable to secure a job in the British film industry and he moved to television series such as The Avengers, The Saint and Minder. Later Baker re-emerged as a major director of science-fiction (Quatermass and the Pit) and horror films (Asylum).

Geoff Mayer provides an industrial and aesthetic context in which to understand the interrelationship between a skilled classical director and the transformation of the British film industry in the 1950s.

This book explores the collaborative sitcoms of two of British television’s most well-known comedy writers. Written over a period of twenty-five years, the four series ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’, ‘Hi-de-Hi!’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord?’ have endured as much-loved and often-repeated classics.

The book explores the themes of Perry and Croft’s writing in terms of their own biography, and as articulations of British cultural and televisual history. Focusing on issues central to the concept of identity in British culture, class, gender, sexuality and race and analysing individual episodes and scenes in the four series, ‘Jimmy Perry and David Croft’ evaluates the contributions made by these two writers to the genre of situation comedy, and locates the programmes in the immediate contexts of their production.

Including new interview material from David Croft, this book will be invaluable to students and lecturers of television studies and cultural studies.

This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines – film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies – in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts.

Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director’s output to date, and the necessary background – personal or national, cultural or political – to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director’s choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates.

This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.

"This book is to be recommended as a good, informative, broad-based survey, useful for students of film, media, drama and cultural studies who are looking for an entry into this broad genre and to use this text as a general resource."
Christine Etherington-Wright, Studies in Musical Theatre

"Mundy is an unabashed aficionado of the British musical film, and his expertise and knowledge in this area are evident in this encyclopedic volume. The book follows an easy-to-read, chronological format and covers all major and many minor British musical films from inception of sound to the present."
W.W Dixon, University of Nebraska Lincoln Choice Current Reviews for Academic Libraries March 2008 Vol. 45 No. 07

The British musical film is the first book to examine a neglected area of British cinema as it developed from the early so-called ‘silent’ period to the present. Offering a comprehensive survey of musical films across the decades, it also includes detailed critical analysis of individual films and the creative personnel, including directors, stars, lyricists, composers and musical directors, who worked on them. Scholarly but clearly written, the book traces the development of a distinctive genre within British cinema, noting ways in which it differs from the Hollywood musical and setting the films in their historical and cultural context.

Adopting a chronological approach, the book starts with the importance of music to the cinema-going experience before the coming of synchronised sound in the late 1920s and then examines the explosion of musical films featuring British musical talent in the 1930s, and the role of musical films during the years of the Second World War. The book examines the transition in musical taste reflected in musical films during the 1950s, and the importance of pop music on-screen in the 1960s. Important innovations in the British musical film of the 1970s and 1980s are analysed, as are examples of contemporary musical films that reflect an increasingly heterogeneous British culture.

As well as analysing Oscar-winning musicals such as The Red Shoes and Oliver!, this study also uncovers musical films that have been unjustly neglected for far too long. In asserting the importance of the musical film and its relationship with a vibrant British popular music culture, this study makes a significant contribution to the growing awareness of the rich distinctiveness of British cinema.

Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinéma team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet his work remains little-known in comparison with his contemporaries, and this study is the first in English to look at the full span of his career. Starting with his decisively influential film criticism of the 1950s, it moves from the New Wave through the complex, experimental films of the 1970s to the challenging, playful dramas which ensured his visibility during the following two decades, and ends in the present, including Rivette’s most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007).

The book takes a thematic approach, offering detailed discussion of key elements of Rivette’s film world, including games, conspiracy and jealousy, as well as a study of what Rivette’s cinema adds to our understanding of key theoretical concepts in Film Studies such as narrative, space and adaptation.

Laughing Matters takes an analytic approach to film, television and radio comedy and provides an accessible overview of its forms and contexts. The introduction explains the value of studying comedy, concisely outlines the approach taken and summarises the relevant theories. The subsequent chapters are divided into two parts. The first part examines the specific forms comedy has taken as a constant and key element in film and broadcast comedy from their origins to the present. The second part shows how the genre gravitates towards contentious issues in British and American culture as it finds humour in the boundaries of class, gender, sexuality, race and logic.

The authors cover silent cinema comedy including Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, sound film comedies including the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, Romantic film comedy, radio, television situation and sketch comedy, comedy and genre (including parody and spoof), animations from cartoons to CGI, issues of gender and sexuality from drag comedy to queer reading, issues of taste and humour from Carry On to contemporary 'gross-out' , and issues of race and ethnicity including a case study of African-American screen comedy. Numerous opportunities for following up are highlighted and advice on further reading, writing academically about comedy and an extensive bibliography add to the value of this textbook.

The volume offers highly detailed and insightful critical analysis of a range of individual films of the period. This analysis draws upon an innovative range of critical methodologies which place the film texts within a rich variety of historical contexts.

The book sets out to examine British films of the 1970s in order to get a clearer understanding of two things – the fragmentary state of the filmmaking culture of the period, and the fragmentary nature of the nation that these films represent. It argues that there is no singular narrative to be drawn about British filmmaking in the 1970s, other than the fact that these films offer evidence of a Britain (and ideas of Britishness) characterised by vicissitudes. While this was a period of struggle and instability, it was also a period of openings, of experiment, and of new ideas. Newland looks at many films, including Carry On Girls, O Lucky Man!, That'll be the Day, The Shout, and The Long Good Friday.

Despite its popularity when it first appeared in print in 1600, Every Man out of His Humour has never appeared as a single modern critical edition until now. The volume's introduction and annotations convey early modern obsessions with wealth and self-display by providing historical contexts and pointing out the continuity of those obsessions into modern life. The play is of interest because of its influence on the course of city comedy and its wealth of information about social relationships and colloquial language at the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Jonson's experiments in generating theatrical meaning continued throughout his career, but Every Man out of His Humour – with its youthful vigour and extraordinary visualizations of the urban capacity for self-deceit – is a text that enriches the understanding of all the plays that come after it.

This second edition of No other Way To Tell It defines the form, analyses its codes and conventions, and reviews contrasting histories in America and British practice - taking into account new developments since the first edition.

These include television’s radically new ecology; with factual formats a growth area. Docudrama in film has also burgeoned recently, partly because the industries themselves have grown closer and partly because of continued interest in the lives of the famous and of those in the news. International co-production now exploits many different screening opportunities and possibilities, with the result that docudrama and become a cinematic as well as televisual staple. Docudrama is not only popular with audiences; it also causes constant flurries of commentary and controversy. Concerns about ‘borders’ and ‘boundaries’, a questioning of documentary’s claim to represent the real, doubts about the popular audience’s ability to cope with new approaches to the ideas of witness, testimony and confession, authenticity and truth - all fuel the debate.

This new edition situates docudrama and its ongoing debates within a newly vibrant and still highly contentious field of practice. This book will interest readers - academic and general - with an interest in fact-based drama in film, theatre and television

This book assesses Joss Whedon’s contribution to US television and popular culture. Examining everything from his earliest work to his most recent tweets and activist videos, it explores his complex and contradictory roles as both cult outsider and blockbuster filmmaker. Crucially, the book insists on the wider industrial, technological, political and economic contexts that have both influenced and been influenced by Whedon, rejecting the notion of Whedon as isolated television auteur.

Using key source material, with exclusive access to drafts of many of the episodes across Whedon’s career, as well as unique correspondence with Whedon collaborator Jane Espenson, this book offers unparalleled access to the creative process that helped produce the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse and Firefly. Energetic, engaging and informed by detailed scholarship and theoretical rigour, the book is not just an essential addition to the study of Whedon, but a timely and important re-invigoration of television studies in general.

Regarding the real develops an original approach to documentary film, focusing on its aesthetic relations to visual arts such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting and architecture. Throughout, the book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form; an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot help but interrogate its own narratives and intentions.

Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern arts in subverting structures of realism typically associated with the documentary. In the course of its discussion, it charts a fascinating path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas and Raymond Depardon.

Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting first with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films on to English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the rich history of ‘Nordic noir’, examines the appeal of this particular genre and attempts to reveal why it is distinct from the plethora of other crime fictions.

Examining the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s international success with his Millennium trilogy, as well as Henning Mankell’s Wallander across the various media, Peacock also tracks some lesser-known novels and television programmes. He illustrates how the bleakness of the country’s ‘noirs’ reflects particular events and cultural and political changes, with the clash of national characteristics becoming a key feature.

It will appeal to students and researchers of crime fiction and of film and television studies, as well as the many fans of the novels and dramatic representations.

This study focuses on seven women who used the fin-de-siècle’s popular stage as a space to develop their experimental performance practices: acts that won them international fame and critical acclaim.

The diverse entertainment careers of Maud Allan (1873–1956), Jane Avril (1868–1943), Loïe Fuller (1868–1926), Sylvia Grey (1866–1958), Yvette Guilbert (1867–1944), Letty Lind (1862–1923) and Cissie (Cecilia) Loftus (1876–1943) encompassed song, dance, impersonation and acting. In accounts, reviews, autobiographical writings, interviews and other cultural products associated with them it is clear that individual female celebrities understood their work as creative, professional and original performance practice. The absence of their creative work from studies of performance history reveals much about hierarchical approaches to cultural environments, gender and physical, non-scripted performances that demands to be interrogated.

Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial and provocative multi-media artist. Beyond his internationally performed and acclaimed theatrical productions, and his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, he is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist cognisant of the unique power of art to provoke moral speculation, and of the distinctive theatricality of the human being in times of crisis.

This collection of essays provides international perspectives on the full range of Barker’s achievements, theatrical and otherwise, and argues for their unique importance and urgency at the forefront of several genres of provocative modern art. It includes an interview with the artist and an essay by Barker himself.

Placing Robbe-Grillet’s filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique.

Now available in paperback, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet’s contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged.

This volume is the first to examine, in either French or English, the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix, often seen as the best example of the 1980s cinéma du look, with cult films, such as Diva and Betty Blue (37º 2 le matin)

.. After an introduction which places Beineix in the context of the 1980s and the arguments centering on a postmodern cinema, the volume devotes a chapter to each of Beineix’s feature films, including the film which marked his return to feature film making after a break of a decade, Mortel Transfert (2001). Prefaced by an excellent foreword by the director himself, which includes a broad condemnation of French critics. Includes many illustrations direct from the director's own collection, complementing the interviews Powrie made with him and his collaborators.

This book is at once a detailed study of a range of individual filmmakers and a study of the modernism in which they are situated. It consists of fifty categories arranged in alphabetical order, among which are allegory, bricolage, classicism, contradiction, desire, destructuring and writing. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects and juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework.

The author refers to particular films and directors that raise questions related to modernism, and, inevitably, thereby to classicism. Jean-Luc Godard’s work is at the centre of the book, though it spreads out, evokes and echoes other filmmakers and their work, including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, João César Monteiro, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles. This innovative and eloquently written text book will be an essential resource for all film students.

Montage enters into a dialogue with the cinema, probing and playing with its language of motion and stillness, continuity and discontinuity, constraint and openness, time and duration. Comprised of a series of elegantly-written and intellectually vibrant essays, Sam Rohdie’s book carefully expresses his ideas and arguments in a manner free from the complexities of contemporary theory and cultural criticism.

As much a book written with the cinema as about it, Montage explores associative and comparative possibilities in the films of directors such as Takeshi Kitano, Jean Renoir, D.W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Lev Kulsehov, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. It offers new and fascinating perspectives on mise en scène, framing, shots, and narrative variation. In combining the sensitive analysis of film forms and structures with an awareness of their historical and artistic relation to other art forms, it also elucidates an appreciation of montage aesthetics that is attentive to the influences of photography, painting and other arts.

Montage is a book that will enrich our ways of seeing, understanding, and enjoying the cinema.

The British television director Alan Clarke is primarily associated with the visceral social realism of such works as his banned borstal play Scum, and his study of football hooliganism, The Firm. This book uncovers the full range of his work from the mythic fantasy of Penda's Fen, to the radical short film on terrorism, Elephant.

Dave Rolinson uses original research to examine the development of Clarke's career from the theatre and the 'studio system' of provocative television play strands of the 1960s and 1970s, to the increasingly personal work of the 1980s, which established him as one of Britain's greatest directors.

Alan Clarke examines techniques of television direction, and proposes new methodologies as it questions the critical neglect of directors in what is traditionally seen as a writer's medium. It raises crucial issues in television studies, including aesthetics, authorship, censorship, the convergence of film and television, drama-documentary form, narrative and realism.

Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 1920–60 charts the evolving relationship between the two principal mass media of the period. It explores, for the first time in print, the creative symbiosis that developed between the two, including regular film versions of popular radio series as well as radio versions of hit films.

This fascinating volume, now available in paperback, examines specific genres (comedy and detective stories) to identify similarities and differences in their media appearances, and in particular issues arising from the nature of film as predominantly visual and radio as exclusively aural. Richards also highlights the interchange of personnel, such as Orson Welles, between the two media. Throughout the book runs the theme of comparison and contrast between the experiences of the two media in Britain and America. The book culminates with an in-depth analysis of the media appearances of three enduring mythic figures in popular culture: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Students, scholars and lay enthusiasts of cinema history, cultural history and media studies will find this an accessible yet scholarly read.

By formulating a notion of 'filmic reality', The reality of film offers new ways of understanding our relationship with cinema. It argues that cinema does not merely refer to, reproduce or represent reality, but has the capacity to create its own kinds of realities.

Filmic reality is explored through the work of six key film theorists: André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. Comprehensive introductions are provided to each of these thinkers, whilst many myths and misconceptions about them are effectively debunked. The notion of filmic reality that emerges from this discussion radically reconfigures our understanding of cinema.

This book is essential reading for film scholars, students and philosophers of film, while it will also appeal to graduate students and specialists in other fields.

Mockumentary is now an established part of the spectrum of television styles, with both deep roots in television history and a key part of innovations in the sitcom genre since the 1990s. Tracing the development of mockumentary series within the broader history of traditions of satire, drama and nonfiction programming, the author uses detailed discussions of popular and innovative television series from Britain, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

This is the first detailed study of the rich vein of mockumentary television programmes, covering series such as The Larry Sanders Show, The Daily Show, and the British and American versions of The Office to discuss how producers have experimented with mockumentary as a distinctive approach to storytelling.

This book explores how news and information about the conflict in Northern Ireland was disseminated through the most accessible, powerful and popular form of media: television. It focuses on the BBC and considers how its broadcasts complicated the 'Troubles’ by challenging decisions, policies and tactics developed by governments trying to defeat a stubborn insurgency that threatened national security.

The book uses highly original sources to consider how the BBC upset the efforts of a number of governments to control the narrative of a conflict that claimed over 3,500 lives and caused deep emotional scarring to thousands of people. Using recently released archival material from the BBC and a variety of government archives, the book addresses the contentious relationship between broadcasting officials, politicians, the army, police and civil service from the outbreak of violence throughout the 1980s.

Few filmmakers have taken the principle of the ‘talking picture’ so far as Eric Rohmer, the internationally reknowned director of the Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles. Occasionally dismissed as precious or overly literary, Rohmer’s features may leave the impression that there is more to listen to than to look at. Yet as the secretive director (b. Maurice Schérer in 1920) points out, dialogue is no less engaging than the best gunfights, and if his characters prefer discussing love to making it, they are no less the ‘heroes’ of the stories they tell.

Charges of political conservatism aside, the author of My Night at Maud’s, Summer and such period films as Perceval and the all-digital The Lady and the Duke emerges - like Hitchcock before him - as a singular inventor of cinematic forms. This critical overview, which contains an extensive bibliography and a filmography, will appeal to students of Film Studies, French Studies, and enthusiasts.

This is the first comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, examining the artistic and cultural influences which shaped his films.

Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, together with his significant contributions to wartime British cinema, re-established him as a leading British film maker. Asquith's post-war career includes several pictures in collaboration with Terence Rattigan, and the definitive adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), but his versatility is demonstrated in a number of modest genre films including The Woman in Question (1950), The Young Lovers (1954) and Orders to Kill (1958).

Since the 1970s Hollywood cinema has been the site of remarkable developments in film sound. New revolutionary sound technologies have been developed, a new generation of filmmakers have learned to use them as powerful storytelling tools, and audiences have enjoyed a different way of experiencing films, both theatrically and at home.
For the first time, through historical analysis and interviews with key players, such as Ray Dolby (founder and creator of Dolby Laboratories), Ioan Allen (the initiator of the Dolby Stereo programme), sound designer Gary Rydstrom (Titanic, Terminator 2, Toy Story, Saving Private Ryan, Finding Nemo), and supervising sound editor Bruce Stambler (The Fugitive, Batman Forever, Clear and Present Danger, The Fast and the Furious, XXX) this book aims at providing a substantial account of sound in contemporary Hollywood cinema since the early 1970s. Film enthusiasts and students alike will find this book provides an alternative take on Hollywood cinema to the traditional image-biased approach.

Now available in paperback, this is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the three-best known Mexican-born directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón.

Deborah Shaw examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films with a focus on both the texts and the production contexts in which they were made. These include studies on del Toro’s Cronos/Chronos, El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army; Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel; and Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja/Love in the Time of Hysteria, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men.

The Three Amigos will be of interest to all those who study Hispanic and Spanish cinema in particular, and world and contemporary cinema in general.