In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil’s early film culture helped to project a new image of the country.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: "Merit", University of Reading (German Studies), course: MA (Res), language: English, abstract: This dissertation examines two DEFA films produced in the 1960’s by Joachim Kunert and Konrad Wolf,who became part of East Germany’s 2nd generation of filmmakers and who explored the causes of National Socialism and the remedies for the dreadful catastrophe that overcame Germany between 1933 and 1945. The collapse of the Reich in 1945 saw the end of the 12 year National Socialist reign of terror over Germany. The Nazi’s had ensured that they had control of cultural life in Germany and had invested heavily in a film industry that created a national myth in order to support Nazi Party aims and which manipulated the public. The defeat of Germany saw the discrediting and failure of fascist, national identity, myth making, artistic stereotypes and the foundational films produced in Germany during the period 1933-45. By the 1960’s DEFA, the GDR’s state film production company had been exploring the origins of National Socialism for twenty years, starting with Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946, DEFA. The GDR’s state film company, DEFA, was given the task of” [...]restor[ing] democracy in Germany and remove all traces of fascist and militaristic ideology from the minds of every German[...] (Allen, 1999,3). These films were produced to enable the Germans to have an “honest confrontation with the military and moral catastrophe that [...]the Germans had brought on themselves[...]” (Barnouw,2008,48) and sought to “develop a cinematic language[...]to confront the recent German past (Pinkert,2008,20). The “grammar” of DEFA anti- fascist films was established by such films as Staudte, Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns orIrgendwo in Berlin, 1946, Gerhard Lamprecht, DEFA and Die Buntkarierten,1949, Kurt Maetzig, DEFA or Rotation,1949, Wolfgang Staudte,DEFA. These films were made by a generation that had grown up in the Weimar period and who had experienced the slide from Weimar chaos to National Socialist Dictatorship at first hand. The film makers were born in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, Staudte in 1906, Lamprecht in 1897 and Maetzig in 1911. Their early films are an almost emotional expression of the moment of defeat containing heartfelt investigations of the causes of the catastrophe from within the Soviet Occupation Zone and later in the GDR. The 1950’s saw DEFA turn its attention to films which explored the everyday concerns of GDR citizens struggling to build a new state centring on the Berlin films of the middle of that decade.

Films are essential to national imagination and promotional publicity markets "domestic films" not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. When assessing new films, reviewers make reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporary and later generations, popular cinema is embedded in both national imagination and endless intertextual and intermedial frameworks. Moreover, films themselves become symbols which are cited and recycled as illustrations of cultural, social, and political history as well as national mentality. In Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions, Anu Koivunen analyzes the historicity as well as the intertextuality and intermediality of film reception as she focuses on a cycle of Finnish family melodrama and its key role in thinking about gender, sexuality, nation, and history. Close-reading posters, advertisements, publicity-stills, trailers, review journalism, and critical commentary, she demonstrates how The Women of Niskavuori (1938 and 1958), Loviisa (1946), Heta Niskavuori (1952), Aarne Niskavuori (1954), Niskavuori Fights (1957), and Niskavuori (1984) have served as sites for imagining "our agrarian past", our Heimat and heritage as well as "the strong Finnish woman" or "the weak man in crisis". Based on extensive empirical research, Koivunen argues that the Niskavuori films have inspired readings in terms of history and memory, feminist nationalism and men's movement, left-wing allegories and right-wing morality as well as realism and melodrama. Through processes of citation, repetition, and re-cycling the films have acquired not only a heterogeneous and contradictory interpretive legacy, but also significant affective force.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Film, History and Memory broadens the focus from 'history', the study of past events, to 'memory', the processes – individual, generational, collective or state-driven – by which meanings are attached to the past.

"An entertaining, action-packed addition to the TCM program that celebrates an essential, but often overlooked or disregarded part of the film industry: stunts. Offering readers a unique perspective as well as history of the impact and evolution of stunt work, and behind-the-scenes stories from the stunt professionals who risked life and limb to make the magic happen"--

Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil. A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.

This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.

From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood’s paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano. Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style’s pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas’ El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico’s silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema offers a unique, wide-ranging exploration of the intersection between traditional modes of film production and new, transitional/transnational approaches to film genre and related discourses in a contemporary, global context. This volume’s content—the films, genres, and movements explored, as well as methodologies used in their analysis—is diverse and, crucially, up-to-date with contemporary film-making practice and theory. Significantly, the collection extends existing scholarly discourse on film genre beyond its historical bias towards a predominant focus on Hollywood cinema, on the one hand, and a tendency to treat “other” national cinemas in isolation and/or as distinct systems of production, on the other. In view of the ever-increasing globalisation and transnational mediation of film texts and screen media and culture worldwide, the book recognises the need for film genre studies and film genre criticism to cast a broader, indeed global, scope. The collection thus rethinks genre cinema as a transitional, cross-cultural, and increasingly transnational, global paradigm of film-making in diverse contexts.

This fully revised directory of international foundations, trusts, charitable and grantmaking NGOs and other similar non-profit institutions provides a comprehensive picture of foundation activity on a worldwide scale. Now in its 33rd edition, The Europa International Foundation Directory includes: Information on some 2,700 organizations, organized by country or territory, including details of funding priorities and projects, geographical area of activity, principal staff and contact details Details of co-ordinating bodies and centres that assist foundations, grantmaking organizations and other NGOs Bibliography Comprehensive index section This new edition has been revised and expanded to include the most comprehensive and up-to-date information on this growing sector.