This book examines the Western genre in the period since Westerns ceased to be a regular feature of Hollywood filmmaking. For most of the 20th Century, the Western was a major American genre. The production of Westerns decreased in the 1960s and 1970s; by the 1980s, it was apparent that the genre occupied a less prominent position in popular culture. After an extended period as one of the most prolific Hollywood genres, the Western entered its “afterlife”. What does it now mean for a Hollywood movie to be a Western, and how does this compare to the ways in which the genre has been understood at other points in its history? This book considers the conditions in which the Western has found itself since the 1980s, the latter-day associations that the genre has acquired and the strategies that more recent Westerns have developed in response to their changed context.

What links Italian neorealism to Django Unchained, French comic books to Third-World insurgency, and Bollywood song-and-dance to Eastern Bloc film distribution? As this volume illustrates, the answers lie in the Spaghetti Western genre.As the reference points of American popular culture became ever more prominent in post-war Europe, the hundreds of films that make up the Italian (or 'Spaghetti') Western documented profound shifts in their home country's cultural outlook, while at the same time denying specifically national discourses. An object of fascination and great affection for fans, filmmakers and academics alike, the Western allitaliana arose from a diverse confluence of cultural strands, and would become a pivotal moment in cinematic history.Reappraising a diverse selection of films, from the internationally famed works of Sergio Leone to the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci and the more obscure outputs of such directors as Giuseppe Colizzi and Ferdinando Baldi, this comprehensive study brings together leading international scholars in a variety of disciplines to both revisit the genre's cultural significance and consider its on-going influence on international film industries.

For decades, the Western film has been considered a dying breed of cinema, yet filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ethan and Joel Coen find new ways to reinvigorate the genre. As Westerns continue to be produced for contemporary audiences, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relevance of this enduring genre. In Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained, Lee Broughton has compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays that look at various forms of the genre, on both the large and small screen. Contributors to this volume consider themes and subgenres, celebrities and authors, recent idiosyncratic engagements with the genre, and the international Western. These essays also explore issues of race and gender in the various films discussed as well as within the film genre as a whole. Among the films and television programs discussed in this volume are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford; Django Kill; Justified; Meek’s Cutoff; Tears of the Black Tiger; Appaloosa; The Frozen Limits; and Red Harvest.Featuring a diverse selection of chapters that represent current thinking on the Western. Critical Perspectives on the Western will appeal to fans of the genre, film students, and scholars alike.

This is a definitive study of films that have been built around the themes of love, death, and the afterlife—films about lovers who meet again (and love again) in heaven, via reincarnation, or through other kinds of after-death encounters. Far more than books about mere ghosts in the movies or religion in movies, Love in the Afterlife presents a complex but highly distinctive and unique pattern—the love-death-afterlife pattern—as it was handed down by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (in the Isis and Orpheus myths, for example), developed by Freud and his followers in the duality of “Eros and Thanatos,” and then featured in popular movies from the 1920s to the recent past. Among its other qualities, Love in the Afterlife may encourage readers to look at movies differently and reflect upon the possibility that other patterns in cinema may have gone undetected for years. Furthermore, this book will show how the love-death-afterlife theme found its way into all sorts of different film types: melodramas, comedies, war films, horror films, film noir, and other genres. The book will be well illustrated and quotations from film reviews will enliven its pages. A long appendix gives production data on almost sixty individual films.

With fresh appraisals of popular Westerns, this book examines the history of the genre with a focus on definitional aspects of canon, adaptation and hybridity. The author covers a range of largely unexplored topics, including the role of "heroines" in a (supposedly) male-oriented system of film production, the function of the celluloid Indians, the transcultural and transnational history of the first spaghetti Western, the construction of femininity and masculinity in the hybrid Westerns of the 1950s, and the new paths of the Western in the 21st century.

The financial collapse of 2008 extended and deepened a prolonged, multilayered crisis that has transformed, often in unexpected ways, how we think about all aspects of social life. Amid these turbulent times, film studies scholars have begun to ask new questions and create fresh strategies in order to integrate intellectual and political work in ways that directly address our current predicament. This timely volume reconsiders the relationships between cinema and society at a time when neoliberal policies threaten not only civic culture but also nearly every aspect of human life. Screening the Crisis brings together established authors as well as brilliant young scholars in the field of film studies to explore the ways in which new tendencies in US cinema enhance awareness of the complexity of the problems facing contemporary society. The issues addressed include economic inequality, shifts in gender roles, racial conflicts, immigration, surveillance practices, the environmental crisis, the politics of housing, and the fragility of nationhood. These questions are explored through in-depth studies and contextualized analyses of a wide variety of recent films, genres, and filmmakers. With its ample range of topics and perspectives, this collection provides an essential reference work for those who want to research how US cinema has responded to the manifold interconnected crises that characterize our current times.

Identifies key – and in some cases previously overlooked – cult horror films from around the world and reappraises them by approaching and interrogating them in new ways. New productions in the horror genre occupy a prominent space within the cinematic landscape of the 21st century, but the genre's back catalogue of older films refuses to be consigned to the motion picture graveyard just yet. Interest in older horror films remains high, and an ever-increasing number of these films have enjoyed an afterlife as cult movies thanks to regular film festival screenings, television broadcasts and home video releases. Similarly, academic interest in the horror genre has remained high. The frameworks applied by contributors to the collection include genre studies, narrative theory, socio-political readings, aspects of cultural studies, gendered readings, archival research, fan culture work, interviews with filmmakers, aspects of film historiography, spatial theory and cult film theory. Covering a corpus of films that ranges from recognised cult horror classics such as The Wicker Man, The Shining and Candyman to more obscure films like Daughters of Darkness, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Shivers, Howling III: The Marsupials and Inside, Broughton has curated an international selection of case studies that show the diverse nature of the cult horror subgenre. Be they star-laden, stylish, violent, bizarre or simply little heard-of obscurities, this book offers a multitude of new critical insights into a truly eclectic selection of cult horror films.

The western, one of Hollywood’s great film genres, has, surprisingly, enjoyed a revival recently in Asia and in other parts of the world, whilst at the same time declining in America. Although the western is often seen as an example of American cultural dominance, this book challenges this view. It considers the western from an Asian perspective, exploring why the rise of Asian westerns has come about, and examining how its aesthetics, styles and politics have evolved as a result. It analyses specific Asian Westerns as well as Westerns made elsewhere, including in Australia, Europe, and Hollywood, to demonstrate how these employ Asian philosophical and mythical ideas and value systems. The book concludes that the western is a genre which is truly global, and not one that that is purely intrinsic to America.

"As the Western began to flourish in literature, it also began to appear in illustrations and early comic strips of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William Grady charts the history of the genre in comic strips and books from its origins in this period through its mid-century heyday to its gradual decline in the 60s and 70s, ending with a brief look at the current "afterlife" of Western comics over the last few decades. In doing so, he also argues for the importance of comics in the development of the Western alongside both literature and film/television. He explains how the mythic-historical settings of Western comics allowed the young readers at whom they were aimed to explore different aspects of their contemporary society, wrestle with taboo topics, and envision different futures for the US. Grady begins by exploring the origins of the Western genre in the late 19th century and shows the importance of illustrated narratives and cartoons in helping readers visualize the West, thus establishing much of its iconic imagery of frontier life, including racist stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples. He moves forward in time to show how the West became mythologized and fantastic elements were introduced into the real landscape in comic strips such as Gasoline Alley and Krazy Kat, until the Great Depression, where strips emphasized the escapist adventures of the West in Red Ryder, Lone Ranger, and others. The postwar Western spread into comic books and was used alternately as positive and negative commentaries on the Cold War and America's place in the world, but in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, Western comics portrayed darker reflections of American culture and history and eventually more or less died out. Despite the genre's apparent demise, Grady ends by examining its ongoing influence over the last decades as its tropes are used to interrogate and subvert the idea of the mythic West and explore diverse perspectives on the genre"--

Being a student of American history, with a leaning toward the United States’ western movement, the author has made A Man Called Ants as historically accurate as possible. He has interwoven his characters with men and events that actually took place during this period. The town of River Fork did not exist, but many similar towns did, only to die and become ghost towns, or disappear entirely. The horror of the Wilderness battles are known to a great extent and the greed of the cotton merchants did happen. The tears as well as the pride of the Choctaw and other Indian nations can never be forgotten. And Judge Isaac Parker did indeed bring law and order to over seventy-four-thousand miles with only a handful of deputies. This historical novel puts one right in the room when Lincoln was talking to Grant. It gives insight into the life of an 1800s outlaw who was forever changing his name. Was Ansel Anderson Earley, known to most as Ants, an actual person? You decide.