Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives—including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of intellectual inquiry is the wide reach of films discussed, from The Circus (1928), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) to Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Shorter films, such as “The Pawnshop” (1916), “The Rink” (1916), and “A Dog’s Life” (1918) are also examined. These essays analyze the tensions between the carefully constructed worlds of Chaplin’s films and their cultural contexts. The varied approaches and range of materials in this volume not only comprehensively assess the screen icon but also foster a conversation that exemplifies the best of intellectual exchange. Refocusing Chaplin provides a unique view into the work of one of cinema’s most important and influential artists.

This first collection of critical essays on Preston Sturges-director, screenwriter, comic genius of Hollywood-reawakens interest in the filmmaker's life and works and reminds readers why his movies continue to be culturally significant and immensely enjoyable.

In order to understand "vision", we have to look into concepts of blindness, both diegetically in typical film characters and in the representation of sight or lack thereof. A critical-historical investigation into theories of vision shows that the way we understand visuality today – scientifically and culturally – is very different from pre-modern notions and practices. In this book, Dago Schelin questions categories such as active and passive vision, tactile visuality, as well as blind vision, and discusses them alongside a variety of movies that deal with vision and blindness. Is there a connection between the filmmaker's gaze and an older pre-Keplerian ontology of vision? What is the role of sound in vision? Are our eyes mere camcorders or might they be projectors? These and other questions comprise the fascinating journey on which this study embarks.

Charlie Chaplin was a skilled comedian, filmmaker and composer, and the mission of this book is to educate readers on the wide variety of Chaplin’s artistry: the subtlety of his mimetic satire, the sophistication of his film direction, and his prodigious musical skill that resulted in some of film’s greatest orchestral arrangements. This encyclopedia also emphasizes the singular nature of Chaplin’s biography: his unprecedented renown, the wide list of notables in art and culture with whom he fraternized, and the controversies that seemed to dog each stage of his life, perhaps most notably in his run-ins with the FBI and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, both of whom suspected him of communist leanings. Charlie Chaplin: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works captures his life, and legacy. It features a chronology, an introduction that offers a brief account of his life, and a dictionary section listing entries on Chaplin’s childhood, career, family, and associates. The bibliography is one of the largest available of works concerning Chaplin.

This book looks at Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, Modern Times (1936), through the lens of film aesthetics, structure, and post-modern perspective. The naïve Tramp character of Modern Times is often seen as the embodiment of a revolutionary reaction to his age. However, this study of the film shows that it is not only difficult but also impossible to accept the long-established critical reception of Chaplin’s film and its characters in our own "Post-modern Times." Drawing from extensive research and bringing post-modern context to the film through a comparative analysis of Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), the book introduces how exhilarating a comprehensive study of film can be for engaged viewers. Illustrating that a detailed filmic reading of Modern Times can be a guide, or an extended case study, for analysing culture, this book will be of interest to students and teachers in film studies, literary studies, and the visual arts.

Examines François Ozon, one of France’s most prolific and best known international (queer) directors.

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

This book is devoted to tracing the variety of ways that theatre, theatricality, and performance are embedded in Hollywood cinema as screened stages. A screened stage is the literal or metaphorical appearance of a stage on screen. When the Hollywood style emerged in cinema history it traumatically severed the entwined relationship between film and theatre. The book makes the argument that cinema longs for theatre after that separation. The histories of stage and screen persistently crisscross one another making their separation problematic. The screened stage from the end of the nineteenth century until now offers a miniaturized version of cinema and theatre history. Moments of the stage within the screen compress historical styles and movements into saturated representations on film. Such examples overflow the cinematic screen into singular manifestations of presentness. Screened stages uncover what it means to be simultaneously present and absent. This book would be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, film, dance, and performance.

Using an auterist lens to challenge the notions of taste, genre and aesthetics that are commonly used to form the cinematic canon, this book explores the twelve films Veber directed between 1976 and 2008. These include Le Jouet (1976), Les fugitifs (1986) and L'emmerdeur (2008).

This book looks at Spike Jonze's ground-breaking work in both features and short forms, exploring the impact of his filmmaking across a range of philosophical and cultural discussions