Charles Burnett's 1977 film, Killer of Sheep is one of the towering classics of African American cinema. As a deliberate counterpoint to popular blaxploitation films of the period, it combines harsh images of the banality of everyday oppression with scenes of lyrical beauty, and depictions of stark realism with flights of comic fancy. From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is the first book-length collection dedicated to the film and designed to introduce viewers to this still relatively unknown masterpiece. Beginning life as Burnett's master's thesis project in 1973, and shot on a budget of $10,000, Killer of Sheep immediately became a cornerstone of the burgeoning movement in African American film that came to be known variously as the LA School or LA Rebellion. By bringing together a wide variety of material, this volume covers both the politics and aesthetics of the film as well as its deeper social and contextual histories. This expansive and incisive critical companion will serve equally as the perfect starting point and standard reference for all viewers, whether they are already familiar with the film or coming to it for the first time.

Charles Burnett's 1977 film, Killer of Sheep is one of the towering classics of African American cinema. As a deliberate counterpoint to popular blaxploitation films of the period, it combines harsh images of the banality of everyday oppression with scenes of lyrical beauty, and depictions of stark realism with flights of comic fancy. From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is the first book-length collection dedicated to the film and designed to introduce viewers to this still relatively unknown masterpiece. Beginning life as Burnett's master's thesis project in 1973, and shot on a budget of $10,000, Killer of Sheep immediately became a cornerstone of the burgeoning movement in African American film that came to be known variously as the LA School or LA Rebellion. By bringing together a wide variety of material, this volume covers both the politics and aesthetics of the film as well as its deeper social and contextual histories. This expansive and incisive critical companion will serve equally as the perfect starting point and standard reference for all viewers, whether they are already familiar with the film or coming to it for the first time.

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it. Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

Illustrating the cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change, this book reveals the intricacies of the cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, drama, and literature.

This scholarly anthology presents a new framework for understanding early cinema through its usage outside the realm of entertainment. From its earliest origins until the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema provided widespread access to remote parts of the globe and immediate reports on important events. Reaching beyond the nickelodeon theatres, cinema became part of numerous institutions, from churches and schools to department stores and charitable organizations. Then, in 1915, the Supreme Court declared moviemaking a “busines, pure and simple,” entrenching the film industry’s role as a producer of “harmless entertainment.” In Beyond the Screen, contributors shed light on how pre-1915 cinema defined itself through institutional interconnections and publics interested in science, education, religious uplift, labor organizing, and more.

Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical, following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis, Singin' in the Rain, and Gigi showed the exciting possibilities of putting musicals on the silver screen. The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations traces how the genre of the stage-to-screen musical has evolved, starting with screen adaptations of operettas such as The Desert Song and Rio Rita, and looks at how the Hollywood studios in the 1930s exploited the publication of sheet music as part of their income. Numerous chapters examine specific screen adaptations in depth, including not only favorites such as Annie and Kiss Me, Kate but also some of the lesser-known titles like Li'l Abner and Roberta and problematic adaptations such as Carousel and Paint Your Wagon. Together, the chapters incite lively debates about the process of adapting Broadway for the big screen and provide models for future studies.

Global Finance on Screen is the first collection exclusively dedicated to a growing body of multi-format and multimedia audiovisual work that this book designates as the finance film. Finance film provides critical visualizations of the secretive, elitist, PR firewalled, and gender and race-biased world of finance, and its mysterious characters, jargon and products. It reconstructs for the screen and for broader audiences finance’s logics, responsibilities, practices, and ethos, and traces the effects of money, markets, investment, credit, debt, bubbles, and crashes on our well-being, desires, values, and actions. The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses; as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Freefall, Margin Call, Justice&Co, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism: A Love Story and In a Strange Land.

Detailed and comprehensive, this book is the first survey of cinema exhibition in Britain from its inception until the present. Charting the development of cinema exhibition and cinema-going in Britain from the first public film screening by the Lumière Brothers’ at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic in February 1896, through to the development of the multiplex and giant megaplex cinemas, the history of cinema exhibition is placed in its wider social, cultural and economic contexts. Adopting a chronological structure, this book takes into account how changes in the structure of the film industry, especially regarding the exhibition sector, impacted upon the cinema-going experience. From silent screen to multi-screen will be valuable for social historians as well as scholars and students in film studies, media studies and cultural history.