DIVCollection of essays on the impact that non-mainstream and middlebrow film genres have had on popular culture--including sexploitation, horror, cult, XXX, and indie films./div

More and more, just a few canonical classics, such as Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942) or Victor Fleming’s “Gone With The Wind” (1939), are representing the entire film output of an era, to a new generation that knows little of the past, and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal present. What will happen to the rest of the films that enchanted, informed and transported audiences in the 1930s, 1940s, and even as recently as the 1960s? This collection of essays aims to highlight some of the lesser-known treasures of the past – those titles that have been pushed aside by today’s wave of cinema amnesia.

Between the advent of print advertising and the dawn of radio came cinema ads. These ads, aimed at a captive theater audience, became a symbol of the developing binary between upper-class film consumption and more consumerist media. In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf examines how the ad industry jockeyed for direct advertisement space in American motion pictures. In fact, advertisers, who recognized the import of film audiences, fought exhibitors over what audiences expected in a theater outing. Looking back at these debates in four case studies, Groskopf reveals that advertising became a marker of class distinctions in the cinema experience as the film industry pushed out advertisers in order to create a space free of ads. By restricting advertising, especially during the rise of high-class, palatial theaters, the film industry continued its ongoing effort to ascend the cultural hierarchy of the arts. An important read for film studies and the history of marketing, Profit Margins exposes the fascinating truth surrounding the invention of cinema advertising techniques and the resulting rhetoric of class division.

Preface Introduction: Whose Jazz, Whose Cinema? 1: The Ethnic Oedipus: The Jazz Singer and Its Remakes 2: Black and Tan Fantasies: The Jazz Biopic 3: Jazz Becomes Art 4: Signifyin(g) the Phallus: Representations of the Jazz Trumpet 5: Duke's Place: Visualizing a Jazz Composer 6: "Actor and Musician": Louis Armstrong and His Films 7: Nat King Cole, Hoagy Carmichael, and the Fate of the Jazz Actor Conclusion: New York, New York and Short Cuts Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This anthology addresses the salient aesthetic, ideological and economic determinants of independent American cinema over the past three decades.

A thought-provoking study of what contemporary French cinema has to say about immigration and social cohesion.

Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years.

Cyprus, the idyllic “island of Aphrodite,” is better known as a site of conflict and division between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, rather than for its film production. Constandinides and Papadakis work to rectify this dearth of information by discussing the ouevre of filmmakers engaging with the island's traumatic legacies: anti-colonial struggles, post-colonial instability, interethnic conflict, external interventions and war. Starting with the cinema of the 1960s, when the island became a republic, the collection focuses on the recent decades of filmmakers exploring issues of conflict, memory, identity, nationalism, migration and gender, as well as the work of filmmakers who chose to cooperate across the ethnic divide. Cypriot Cinemas utilizes a methodology that engages all necessary perspectives for an illuminating critical discussion: historical, theoretical and comparative (Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot films in relation to regional film cultures/practices). While the volume develops a discussion based on the reading of the political in Cypriot films, it also looks at other film cultures and debates such as (s)exploitation films and transnational cinema.

Through the examination of a range of literary and cinematic texts, from William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the novels of Henry James, Silverman offers a bold new look at masculinities which deviate from the social norm.

The Road Movie Book is the first comprehensive study of an enduring but ever-changing Hollywood genre, its place in American culture, and its legacy to world cinema. The road and the cinema both flourished in the twentieth century, as technological advances brought motion pictures to a mass audience and the mass produced automobile opened up the road to the ordinary American. When Jean Baudrillard equated modern American culture with 'space, speed, cinema, technology' he could just as easily have added that the road movie is its supreme emblem. The contributors explore how the road movie has confronted and represented issues of nationhood, sexuality, gender, class and race. They map the generic terrain of the road movie, trace its evolution on American television as well as on the big screen from the 1930s through the 1980s, and, finally, consider road movies that go off the road, departing from the US landscape or travelling on the margins of contemporary American culture. Movies discussed include: * Road classics such as It Happened One Night, The Grapes of Wrath, The Wizard of Oz and the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road to films * 1960's reworkings of the road movie in Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde * Russ Meyer's road movies: from Motorpsycho! to Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! * Contemporary hits such as Paris Texas, Rain Man, Natural Born Killers and Thelma and Louise * The road movie, Australian style, from Mad Max to the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.