A compilation of essays, commentary, insights, and practical information from sixty leading Hollywood insiders furnishes helpful advice for independent filmmakers, with contributions by Christine Vachom, Geoff Gilmore, Bill Condon, Roger Ebert, Richard Pena, and other filmmakers, directors, critics, and producers. Original.

From Mildred Pierce and Brief Encounter to Raging Bull and In the Mood for Love, this lively and accessible collection explores film culture's obsession with the past, offering searching and provocative analyses of a wide range of titles. Screening the Past engages with current debates about the role of cinema in mediating history through memory and nostalgia, suggesting that many films use strategies of memory to produce diverse forms of knowledge which challenge established ideas of history, and the traditional role of historians. Classic essays sit side by side with new research, contextualized by introductions which bring them up to date, and provide suggestions for further reading as the work of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes and Wong Kar-wai is used to examine the different ways they deploy creative processes of memory. Pam Cook also investigates the recent history of film studies, reviewing the developments that have culminated in the exciting, if daunting, present moment. The result is a rich and stimulating volume that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cinema, memory and identity.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title "Cover to cover, Screening Asian Americans, a collection of 15 essays, is fabulous."--AsianWeek.com "This scholarly book uses 15 contributors to explore the various images of Asians, many of which have been negative."-Burlington County Times This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X Feng's introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow. Asian American cinema is charted in its diversity, ranging across activist, documentary, experimental, and fictional modes, and encompassing a wide range of ethnicities (Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese). Covered in the discussion are filmmakers--Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ang Lee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Wayne Wang--and films such as The Wedding Banquet, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, and Chan is Missing. Throughout the volume, as Feng explains, the term screening has a twofold meaning-referring to the projection of Asian Americans as cinematic bodies and the screening out of elements connected with these images. In this doubling, film representation can function to define what is American and what is foreign. Asian American filmmaking is one of the fastest growing areas of independent and studio production. This volume is key to understanding the vitality of this new cinema. A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons Peter X Feng teaches English and women's studies at the University of Delaware.

This ultimate insider's guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat!

The Leo Frank case of 1913 was one of the most sensational trials of the early twentieth century, capturing international attention. Frank, a northern Jewish factory supervisor in Atlanta, was convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a young laborer native to the South, largely on the perjured testimony of an African American janitor. The trial was both a murder mystery and a courtroom drama marked by lurid sexual speculation and overt racism. The subsequent lynching of Frank in 1915 by an angry mob only made the story more irresistible to historians, playwrights, novelists, musicians, and filmmakers for decades to come. Matthew H. Bernstein is the first scholar to examine the feature films and television programs produced in response to the trial and lynching of Leo Frank. He considers the four major surviving American texts: Oscar Micheaux's film Murder in Harlem (1936), Mervyn LeRoy's film They Won't Forget (1937), the Profiles in Courage television episode "John M. Slaton" (1964), and the two-part NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988). Bernstein explains that complex issues like racism, anti-Semitism, class resentment, and sectionalism were at once irresistibly compelling and painfully difficult to portray in the mass media. Exploring the cultural and industrial contexts in which the works were produced, Bernstein considers how they succeeded or failed in representing the case's many facets. Film and television shows can provide worthy interpretations of history, Bernstein argues, even when they depart from the historical record. Screening a Lynching is an engrossing meditation on how film and television represented a traumatic and tragic episode in American history-one that continues to fascinate people to this day.

Introduction: the consequences of newborn screening -- The expansion of newborn screening -- Patients-in-waiting -- Shifting disease ontologies -- Is my baby normal? -- The limits of prevention -- Does expanded newborn screening save lives? -- Conclusion: the future of expanded newborn screening

Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, Screening Modernism is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema’s postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, András Bálint Kovács’s encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovács begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism’s origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, Screening Modernism ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more.

“A towering achievement, and a volume I know I'll be consulting on a regular basis.”-Leonard Maltin "Authoritative, accessible, and elegantly written, Screening Reality is the history of American documentary film we have been waiting for." --Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times film critic From Edison to IMAX, Ken Burns to virtual environments, the first comprehensive history of American documentary film and the remarkable men and women who changed the way we view the world. Amidst claims of a new “post-truth” era, documentary filmmaking has experienced a golden age. Today, more documentaries are made and widely viewed than ever before, illuminating our increasingly fraught relationship with what's true in politics and culture. For most of our history, Americans have depended on motion pictures to bring the realities of the world into view. And yet the richly complex, ever-evolving relationship between nonfiction movies and American history is virtually unexplored. Screening Reality is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans. In the telling, professional filmmaker Jon Wilkman draws on his own experience, as well as the stories of inventors, adventurers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who framed and filtered the world to inform, persuade, awe, and entertain. Interweaving American and motion picture history, and an inquiry into the nature of truth on screen, Screening Reality is essential and fascinating reading for anyone looking to expand an understanding of the American experience and today's truth-challenged times.