Through a shrewd analysis of the historical experience of imperialism and settler colonialism, Limbrick draws new conclusions about their effect on cinematic production, distribution, reception and filmic discourse.

This anthology adds to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies by examining settler colonial narratives in the under analyzed medium of film. Cinematic Settlers discusses different cinematic genres, national traditions, and specific movies in order to expose related threads, shared circulations of knowledge, and paralleled representations. Organized into thematic groupings—conquest, settlers, natives, and space—the contributors explore the question of how film compares to written genres and other visual media in representing and effecting settler colonialism on a global scale. Striving for inclusiveness, the volume covers different eras and settler colonial situations in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hawaii, the American West, Canada, Latin America, Russia, France, Algeria, German Africa, South Africa, and even the next frontier: outer space. By showing how films offer layered, contested, and dynamic settler colonial narratives that advance and challenge settler hegemonic readings, the essays enable students to better analyze and understand the complex history of diversity and colonialism in film. This book is important reading for undergraduate classes on the history of empire, colonialism, and film.

While Western films can be seen as a mode of American exceptionalism, they have also become a global genre. Around the world, Westerns exemplify colonial cinema, driven by the exploration of racial and gender hierarchies and the progress and violence shaped by imperialism. Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film traces the Western from the silent era to present day as the genre has circulated the world. Contributors examine the reception and production of American Westerns outside the US alongside the transnational aspects of American productions, and they consider the work of minority directors who use the genre to interrogate a visual history of oppression. By viewing Western films through a transnational lens and focusing on the reinterpretations, appropriations, and parallel developments of the genre outside the US, editors Hervé Mayer and David Roche contribute to a growing body of literature that debunks the pervasive correlation between the genre and American identity. Perfect for media studies and political science, Transnationalism and Imperialism reveals that Western films are more than cowboys; they are a critical intersection where issues of power and coloniality are negotiated.

Terrence Malick is one of American cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers. His films—from Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) to The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and, most recently, A Hidden Life (2019)—have been heralded for their artistry and lauded for their beauty, but what really sets them apart is their ideas. Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is the most comprehensive account to date of this unparalleled filmmaker’s intellectual and artistic development. Utilizing newly available archival sources to offer original interpretations of his canonical films, Martin Woessner illuminates Malick’s early education in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford as well as his cinematic apprenticeship at the American Film Institute to show how a young student searching for personal meaning became a famous director of Hollywood films. Woessner’s book presents a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the many texts, thinkers, and traditions that made this transformation possible—from the novels of Hamlin Garland, James Jones, and Walker Percy to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard to road movies, Hollywood Westerns, and the comedies of Jean Renoir. Situating Malick’s filmmaking within recent intellectual and cultural history, Woessner highlights its lasting contributions to both American cinema and the life of the mind. Terrence Malick and the Examined Life suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer.

Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, this book explores how far imperial culture penetrated antipodean city institutions. It argues that far from imperial saturation, the city 'Down Under' was remarkably untouched by the Empire.

Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance examines films of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from postcolonial countries around the globe. In the mid twentieth century, the political reality of resistance and decolonization lead to the creation of dozens of new states, forming a backdrop to films of that period. Towards the century’s end and at the dawn of the new millennium, film continues to form a site for interrogating colonization and decolonization, though against a backdrop that is now more neo-colonial than colonial and more culturally imperial than imperial. This volume explores how individual films emerged from and commented on postcolonial spaces and the building and breaking down of the European empire. Each chapter is a case study examining how a particular film from a postcolonial nation emerges from and reflects that nation’s unique postcolonial situation. This analysis of one nation’s struggle with its coloniality allows each essay to investigate just what it means to be postcolonial.

A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literary consequences in twentieth-century fiction

In this ground-breaking investigation into the seldom-studied film culture of colonial Korea (1910-1945), Dong Hoon Kim brings new perspectives to the associations between colonialism, modernity, film historiography and national cinema. By reconstructing the lost intricacies of colonial film history, Eclipsed Cinema explores under-investigated aspects of colonial film culture, such as the representational politics of colonial cinema, the film unit of the colonial government, the social reception of Hollywood cinema, and Japanese settlers' film culture. Filling a significant void in Asian film history, Eclipsed Cinema greatly expands the critical and historical scopes of early cinema and Korean and Japanese film histories, as well as modern Asian culture, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

During the interwar period Osa and Martin Johnson became famous for their films that brought exotic and far-off locations to the American cinema. Before the advent of mass tourism and television, their films played a major part in providing the means by which large audiences in the US and beyond became familiar with distant and 'wild' places across the world. Taking the celebrity of the Johnsons as its case study, this book investigates the influence of these new forms of visual culture, showing how they created their own version of America's imperial drama. By representing themselves as benevolent figures engaged in preserving on film the world's last wild places and peoples, the Johnsons' films educated US audiences about their apparent destiny to rule, contributing significantly to the popularity of empire. Bringing together research in the fields of film and politics - including gender and empire, historical anthropology, photography and visual studies - this book provides a comprehensive evaluation of the Johnsons, their work and its impact. It considers the Johnsons as a celebrity duo, their status as national icons, how they promoted themselves and their expeditions, and how their careers informed American expansionism, thus providing the first scholarly investigation of this remarkable couple and their extensive output over nearly three decades and across several continents.

Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976. Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism. Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.