André F. Nebe uses his humour structure analysis to make viewers' preferences and corresponding audiovisual offerings in films visible. Complex and multi-layered audiovisual (hypotactic) humour is used in the more successful films, while less successful films make simple (paratactic) humour offerings. The humour structure analysis offers insights into promising humour offerings and can also be used in the story development phase for writers, directors, producers and dramaturges.

Despite the massive influx of Hollywood movies and films from other European countries after World War II, Austrian film continued to be hugely popular with Austrian and German audiences. By examining the decisive role that popular cinema played in the turbulent post-war era, this book provides unique insights into the reconstruction of a disrupted society. Through detailed analysis of the stylistic patterns, narratives and major themes of four popular genres of the time, costume film, Heimatfilm, tourist film and comedy, the book explains how popular cinema helped to shape national identity, smoothed conflicted gender relations and relieved the Austrians from the burden of the Nazi past through celebrating the harmonious, charming, musical Austrian man.

Since 1949, Chinese film has been greatly influenced by a variety of historical, cultural, and political events in the history of the People’s Republic of China. This volume explores the development of Chinese film from 1949 to 1976. This volume restores Chinese film to its original historical form and assesses its complex relationship with society, politics, culture, and art in the Maoist period. The 17-year films, Cultural Revolution-era films, the influence of model operas, and the documentary newsreels of Xinwen Jianbao are discussed. Combining a macro-perspective with a micro-perspective, the author analyzes the special characteristics of Chinese film in this period and showcases the inheritance and differences between earlier Chinese film and Chinese film in the newly founded the People’s Republic of China. The book will be essential reading for scholars and students in film studies, Chinese studies, cultural studies, and media studies, helping readers develop a comprehensive understanding of Chinese film.

Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the encouragement of this social play and, at school, the playground is also an important site for this activity. However, in the literacy classroom, some children encounter a discontinuity between their experiences of narrative at home and those that are valued in school. Through film children develop understandings of the common characteristics of narrative and the particular 'language' of film. This book demonstrates the ways in which children are able to express and develop distinct and complex understandings of narrative, that is to say, where they can draw on their own experiences (including those in a moving image form). Children whose primary experiences of narrative are moving images face particular challenges when their experiences are not given opportunities for expression in the classroom, and this has urgent implications for the teaching of literacy.

Do you love cinema and want to know more about its history? Are you a film fan looking for an informative yet light-hearted review of the last one hundred and thirty years of the silver screen? If so, you've found what you're looking for! In this book, TV and movie star David Barry takes us on a journey through the history of cinema, from the silent movies at the time of the birth of the industry all the way up to today's CGI-fuelled blockbusters. The author guides us through this huge subject in an easy-to-follow fashion, with amusing facts and hilarious anecdotes peppered throughout the book. Quotes from some of the movie world's best-known lines of dialogue are used to illustrate the narrative, and some amazing trivia is supplied, enabling the reader to impress their friends and acquaintances with little-known geek-level movie facts. With something here for everyone, you'll never be at a loss when answering - or even setting - quiz questions! Whether you're already a movie-buff with plenty of knowledge, or a film fan seeking an understanding of how we got to where we are today, this is the perfect book for you.

“Erudite and wide-ranging, perceptive and provocative, lively and up-to-date – Shane Blackman has produced a book with something to offer to just about anyone interested in drugs in contemporary society. Blackman uncovers hidden histories, points out the contradictions running through media, popular culture and official policy and highlights the challenges facing us. Chilling Out is a book that will be a boon to students and a valuable resource for both teachers and researchers.”Nigel South, Professor, Department of Sociology and Research Professor, Department of Health and Human Sciences, University of Essex. How are drug war politics, drug prevention, popular culture and drug consumption interconnected? What are the major contradictions, assumptions and silences within the moral arguments of drug policy makers? What are the implications for the viability of drugs policy? This book critically examines the assumptions underlying drug prohibition and explores the contradictions of drug prevention policies. For the first time in this field, it combines a wide-ranging exploration of the global political and historical context with a detailed focus on youth culture, on the basis that young people are the primary target of drug prevention policies. Chilling Out provides a critical map of drugs, bringing together work on drugs as a source of political state repression and regulation of morality through medical discourse, work on drugs as cultural commodities in film, popular music, advertising and tourism, work on ‘drug normalisation’, subcultural deviance and the politics of drug education. This clear and enlightening text for sociology, health and media and cultural studies courses argues for an holistic and a critical understanding of drugs in society, which can be the basis for a more coherent approach to drug control. Practitioners and policy makers will find it a thought-provoking and informative source.

Made-in-Canada-Humour is an interdisciplinary survey and analysis of Canadian humour and humorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book focuses on a variety of genres. It includes celebrated Canadian writers and poets with ironic and satiric perspectives; oral storytellers of tall tales in the country and the city; newspaper print humorists; representative national and regional cartoonists; and comedians of stage, radio and television. The humour gives voice to Canadian values and experiences, and consequently, techniques and styles of humour particular to the country. While a persistent comic theme has been joking at the expense of the United States, both countries have influenced one another’s humour. Canada’s unique humorous tradition also reflects its emergence from a colonial country to a postcolonial and postmodern nation with contemporary humour that addresses gender and racial issues.

Exploring cultural and social differences in defining a children's film / Becky Parry -- Screening innocence in children's film / Debbie Olson -- Screen adaptations of the Wizard of OZ and metafilmicity in children's film / Ryan Bunch -- Children's films and the avant-garde / Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer -- Intertextuality and 'adult' humour in children's film / Sam Summers -- Children's film and the problematic 'happy ending' / Noel Brown -- The cop and the kid in 1930s American film / Pamela Robertson-Wojcik -- History, forbidden games, children's play, and trauma theory / Ian Wojcik-Andrews -- Changing conceptions of childhood in the work of the Children's Film Foundation / Robert Shail -- Migrant children and the 'space between' in the films of Angelopoulos / Stephanie Hemelryk Donald -- Iranian cinema and a world through the eyes of a child / John Stephens -- The American tween and contemporary Hollywood cinema / Timothy Shary -- Growing up on Scandinavian screens / Anders Lysne -- Mary Pickford, Alma Taylor, and girlhood in Early Hollywood and British cinema / Matthew Smith -- Craft and play in Lotte Reiniger's fairy tale films / Caroline Ruddell -- Disney's musical landscapes / Daniel Batchelder -- Hayley Mills and the Disneyfication of childhood / David Buckingham -- Danny Kaye as children's film star / Bruce Babington -- Real animals and the problem of anthropomorphism in children's film / Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramos-Gay -- Nation, identity, and the arrikin streak in Australian children's cinema / Adrian Schober -- Nationalism in Swedish Children's Film and the Case of Astrid Lindgren / Anders Wilhelm Åberg -- Unreality, Fantasy, and the Anti-Fascist Politics of the Children's Films of Satyajit Ray / Koel Banerjee -- Gender, Ideology, and Nationalism in Chinese Children's Cinema / Yuhan Huang -- Ethnic and racial difference in the Hungarian animated features Macskafogó/Cat City (1986) and Macskafogó 2/Cat City 2 (2007) / Gábor Gergely -- Negotiating East and West when representing childhood in Miyazaki's Spirited away / Katherine Whitehurst -- Coming of age in South Korean cinema / Sung-Ae Lee -- The Walt Disney Company, family entertainment, and global movie hits / Peter Krämer -- Reading Jason and the argonauts as a children's film / Susan Smith -- Hollywood and the baby boom audience in the 1950s and 1960s / James Russell -- Don Bluth and the Disney renaissance / Peter Kunze -- On 'love experts', evil princes, gullible princesses, and Frozen / Amy M. Davis -- Hollywood, regulation, and the 'disappearing' children's film / Filipa Antunes -- How children learn to 'read' movies / Cary Bazalgette -- Star Wars, children's film culture, and fan paratexts / Lincoln Geraghty -- Norwegian tween girls and everyday life through Disney tween franchises / Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen -- A multimethod study on contemporary young audiences and their film/cinema discourses and practices in Flanders, Belgium / Aleit Veenstra, Philippe Meers, and Daniël Biltereyst -- An empirical report on young people's responses to adult fantasy films / Martin Barker -- Disney's adult audiences / James R. Mason.

Get the lowdown on the best fiction ever written. Over 230 of the world’s greatest novels are covered, from Quixote (1614) to Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002), with fascinating information about their plots and their authors – and suggestions for what to read next. The guide comes complete with recommendations of the best editions and translations for every genre from the most enticing crime and punishment to love, sex, heroes and anti-heroes, not to mention all the classics of comedy and satire, horror and mystery and many other literary genres. With feature boxes on experimental novels, female novelists, short reviews of interesting film and TV adaptations, and information on how the novel began, this guide will point you to all the classic literature you’ll ever need.