Film Studies

Cinemulacrum, a conflation of "cinema," the art of the Hollywood film, and simulacrum, a reality counterfeit, was coined to designate contemporary media culture. This period is distinguished by the advent of digital film/video, an ideology of fantasy as the central narrative of movies and television, and a ruling audience demographic of the young adult. A pre-cinemulacrum era (1960-1980) and Age of Cinemulacrum (1980 to the present day) are demarcated to examine the fall--and rise--of classical Hollywood and the hegemony of television in a media dyad of movies and television. Cinemulacrum argues that the convergence of technology, ideology, and audience represent the primary factors surrounding the social immediacy of movies and television, and that video, fantasy, and the young adult have replaced film, realism, and the family as the outstanding attributes of contemporary media culture. ...

Arranged chronologically, Film Histories is a wide-ranging anthology that covers the history of film from 1885 to the present. Each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on key developments within the respective period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various approaches to film history are taken by the authors of the articles, exposing readers to different forms of historical research. ...

The Last Great American Picture Show brings together essays by scholars and writers who chart the changing evaluations of the American cinema of the 1970s, sometimes referred to as the decade of the lost generation, but now more and more recognized as the first New Hollywood, without which the cinema of Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino could not have come into existence. ...

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases. With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. ...

The Cinema of Urban Crisis explores the relationships between cinema and urban crises in the United States and Europe in the 1970s. Discussing films by Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, Lawrence Webb reflects on processes of globalization and urban change that were beginning to transform cities like New York, London, and Berlin.

Fun and fright have long been partners in the cinema, dating back to the silent film era and progressing to the Scary Movie franchise and other recent releases. This guide takes a comprehensive look at the comedy-horror movie genre, from the earliest stabs at melding horror and hilarity during the nascent days of silent film, to its full-fledged development with The Bat in 1926, to the Abbott and Costello films pitting the comedy duo against Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy and other Universal Studio monsters, continuing to such recent cult hits as Shaun of the Dead and Black Sheep. ...

By meticulously compiling the details of how movies have been made and financed since the medium's inception, chronicling their performances at the box office, and offering expert commentary about the most important trends of the last one hundred years, the authors of this book have given readers a singularly unique perspective on the film-making industry and a superlative blueprint for future successful filmmaking ventures. Taking us decade by decade, this book focuses on the revenues, costs, production and distribution of 300 of the most critically and financially successful movies of all time from the business's origins through 2005. ...

The 1970s were turbulent times and the films made then reflected the fact. Vampire movies-always a cinema staple-were no exception. Spurred by the worldwide success of Hammer Film's 'Dracula Has Risen from the Grave' (1969), vampire movies filled theaters for the next ten years-from the truly awful to bonafide classics. Audiences took the good with the bad and came back for more. ...

From 1939, when World War II started in Europe, to 1975, when the mega-success of the blockbuster Jaws put an end to what we might call the American “New Wave,” the US film industry traveled through precipitous peaks and valleys. During the war years Hollywood joined the fight: cooperating with government, raising morale, and selling war bonds.

American cinema has undergone a series of profound transitions since 1976. In many histories of American film, 1976 marks the end of one New Hollywood—the so-called “Hollywood Renaissance” of art cinema-inspired, personal filmmaking driven by young auteurs—and the start of another New Hollywood, this one more oriented toward blockbuster films that, many critics argue, eschew classical principles of narration in order to foreground special effects sequences and to provide opportunities for merchandizing and other product tie-ins.

American independent cinema, often called “indie cinema,” has no clear historical starting point and no single definition. Most broadly, the term refers to films made outside the Hollywood system, although some scholars date independent cinema from 1908, when enterprising filmmakers defied the near-monopoly of the Motion Picture Patents Company, formed by Thomas A. Edison and others hoping to control the rapidly expanding industry. ...

This is the remarkable story of the maturing of American cinema of the late 60s and 70s. Buck Henry, who wrote The Graduate, talks exclusively about movie satire of the time. Paul Schrader in New York reveals his thoughts on his existential screenplay for Taxi Driver. Writer Robert Towne explores the dark ideas in Chinatown, and director Charles Burnett talks about the birth of Black American cinema.

The Story of Film: Part 11 explains how, and then travels to India where the world’s most famous movie star, Amitabh Bachchan, shows how Bollywood was doing new things in the 70s. And we discover that Bruce Lee movies in Hong Kong kickstarted the kinetic films of Hong Kong, where Master Yuen Wo Ping talks exclusively about his action movies and his wire fu choreography for The Matrix.