Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: "I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate." How would we go about finding those things? What method would enable us to retrieve them, and by doing so, to understand better how Hollywood films got made? The ABCs of Classic Hollywood attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American Studio System reached the peak of its economic and cultural power: Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis. To avoid the predictable generalizations that have plagued Film Studies, Ray works with the movies' details, treated as initially mysterious, but promising, clues: e.g., Grand Hotel's coffin and room assignments; The Philadelphia Story's diving board and license plate PA55; The Maltese Falcon's clocks and missing bed; Meet Me in St. Louis's violinist and ribboned cat. By producing at least 26 entries for each of these films (one for every letter of the alphabet), Ray demonstrates that a movie's details contain the record of the work and ideas that produced them, the endless negotiation between commercial efficiency and seductive enchantment. In our unconscious memories, we recognize something in the movies, something tantalizing and just out of reach. This book unlocks those memories, making them conscious and explicit, so that they will help us understand the most powerful and important storytelling system ever designed.

From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America. Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.

Much of our time at the movies is spent in other people’s homes. Cinema is, after all, often about everyday life. Spectacle of Property is the first book to address the question of the ubiquitous conjuncture of the moving image and its domestic architecture. Arguing that in cinema we pay to occupy spaces we cannot occupy, John David Rhodes explores how the house in cinema both structures and criticizes fantasies of property and ownership. Rhodes tells the story of the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at private property onscreen, analyzing the security and ease the house promises along with the horrible anxieties it produces. He begins by laying out a theory of film spectatorship that proposes the concept of the “spectator-tenant,” with reference to films such as Gone with the Wind and The Magnificent Ambersons. The book continues with three chapters that are each occupied with a different architectural style and the films that make use of it: the bungalow, the modernist house, and the shingle style house. Rhodes considers a variety of canonical films rarely analyzed side by side, such as Psycho in relation to Grey Gardens and Meet Me in St. Louis. Among the other films discussed are Meshes of the Afternoon, Mildred Pierce, A Star Is Born, Killer of Sheep, and A Single Man. Bringing together film history, film theory, and architectural history as no book has to date, Spectacle of Property marks a new milestone in examining cinema’s relationship to realism while leaving us vastly more informed about, if less at home inside, the houses we occupy at the movies.

This collection displays a range of approaches and contemporary developments in the expanding field of film-philosophy. The essays explore central issues surrounding the conjunction of film and philosophy, presenting a varied yet coherent reflection on the nature of this conjunction.

This book defends an account of ambiguity which illuminates the aesthetic possibilities of film and the nature of film criticism. Ambiguity typically describes the condition of multiple meanings. But we can find multiple meanings in what appears unambiguous to us. So, what makes ambiguity ambiguous? This study argues that a sense of uncertainty is vital to the concept. Ambiguity is what presses us to inquire into our puzzlement over a movie, to persistently ask “why is it as it is?” Notably, this account of the concept is also an account of its criticism. It recognises that a satisfying assessment of what is ambiguous involves both our reason and doubt; that is, reason and doubt can work together in our practice of reading. This book, then, considers ambiguity as a form of reasonable doubt, one that invites us to reflect on our critical efforts, rethinking the operation of film criticism.

This volume contains a variety of essays about Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning, from community colleges to small liberal arts institutions to large universities. The essays in the first section, “Florida Studies”, focus on the rich literary, historical, and cultural traditions of the region. The contributions in “Literary and Cultural Studies” offer readings and analyses of diverse texts and critical lenses. The final section, Pedagogy, explores strategies for and challenges within institutions of higher learning in Florida.

With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.

Signs of Life in the USA teaches students to read and write critically about popular culture by giving them a conceptual framework to do it: semiotics, a field of critical theory developed specifically for the interpretation of culture and its signs. Written by a prominent semiotician and an experienced writing instructor, the text’s high-interest themes feature provocative and current reading selections that ask students to think analytically about America’s impressive popular culture: How is TV’s Mad Men a lightning rod for America’s polarized political climate? Has the nature of personal identity changed in an era when we spend so much of our lives online? Signs of Life bridges the transition to college writing by providing students with academic language to talk about our common, everyday cultural experience. Read the preface. Order Multimodal Readings for Signs of Life in the USA packaged with Signs of Life in the USA, Seventh Edition using ISBN-13: 978-1-4576-1989-2.

From his first appearance as Mork from Ork on the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, Robin Williams was heralded as a singular talent. In the pre-cable television era, he was one of the few performers to successfully transition from TV to film. An Oscar-winning actor and preternaturally quick-witted comedian, Williams became a cultural icon, leaving behind a large and varied body of work when he unexpectedly took his own life in 2014. This collection of new essays brings together a range of perspectives on Williams and his oeuvre, including beloved hits like Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Morning, Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King, Dead Poets Society and Aladdin. Contributors explore his earlier work (Mork and Mindy, The World According to Garp) and his political and satirical films (Moscow on the Hudson, Toys). Williams's darker, less well-known fare, such as Being Human, One Hour Photo, Final Cut and Boulevard, is also covered. Williams's artistry has become woven into the fabric of our global media culture.

What role does love—of cinema, of cinema studies, of teaching and learning—play in teaching film? For the Love of Cinema brings together a wide range of film scholars to explore the relationship between cinephilia and pedagogy. All of them ask whether cine-love can inform the serious study of cinema. Chapter by chapter, writers approach this question from various perspectives: some draw on aspects of students' love of cinema as a starting point for rethinking familiar films or generating new kinds of analyses about the medium itself; others reflect on how their own cinephilia informs the way they teach cinema; and still others offer new ways of writing (both verbally and audiovisually) with a love of cinema in the age of new media. Together, they form a collection that is as much a guide for teaching cinephilia as it is an energetic dialogue about the ways that cinephilia and pedagogy enliven and rejuvenate one another.