During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don't Cry, and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media.

In One Shot Hitchcock, some of the best writers and thinkers in film studies have taken up the challenge of writing about a single shot from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Fifteen of Hitchcock's most engaging, horrifying, beautiful, sexual, and bizarre shots are interrogated and loved. Single shots are looked at from multiple angles, considering its importance for the film in question, and for other ways we can think about the cinema. This book is not only for people who enjoy watching and discussing Hitchcock's films, but for those who wish to discover new ways of writing about the films they love.

Provides the first critical overview of acting, stardom, and performance in post-war Italian film (1945-54), with special attention to the figure of the non-professional actor, who looms large in neorealist filmmaking. Italian post-war cinema has been widely celebrated by critics and scholars: films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Paisan (Rossellini, 1946) remain globally influential, particularly for their use of non-professional actors. This period of regeneration of Italian cinema initiated the boom in cinemagoing that made cinema an important vector of national and gender identity for audiences. The book addresses the casting, performance, and labour of non-professional actors, particularly children, their cultural and economic value to cinema, and how their use brought ideas of the ordinary into the discourse of stars as extraordinary. Relatedly, O'Rawe discusses critical and press discourses around acting, performance, and stardom, often focused on the 'crisis' of acting connected to the rise of non-professionals and the girls (like Sophia Loren) who found sudden cinematic fame via beauty contests.

"During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don't Cry , and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media."--

These days, the term "reenactment" usually refers to live reconstructions of historic events, often of a military nature, performed by hobbyists. Civil War reenactments are the most popular in the United States, while European enthusiasts most often engage in recreations from the Napoleonic era. Visual art has its own versions. Recent years have brought many reenactments of historic performances from the 1960s and 1970s, works which otherwise would exist only in photos, videos, and text descriptions. But what exactly is being reenacted, and what is the effect of the representation? What meaning is resurrected out of this "doubling"? In the exhibition Life, Once More, contemporary works and texts by Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan and Barbara Visser reflect on these timely (and timeless) questions.

Mind the Screen pays tribute to the work of the pioneering European film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, author of several volumes on media studies and cinema culture. Covering a full scope of issues arising from the author’s work—from melodrama and mediated memory to avant-garde practices, media archaeology, and the audiovisual archive—this collection elaborates and expands on Elsaesser’s original ideas along the topical lines of cinephilia, the historical imaginary, the contemporary European cinematic experience, YouTube, and images of terrorism and double occupancy, among other topics. Contributions from well-known artists and scholars such as Mieke Bal and Warren Buckland explore a range of media concepts and provide a mirror for the multi-faceted types of screens active in Elsaesser’s work, including the television set, video installation, the digital interface, the mobile phone display, and of course, the hallowed silver screen of our contemporary film culture.

This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

Over 6000 different languages are used in the world today, but the conventions of 'media speak' are far from universal and the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, audiences or scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles argues that the specific contingencies of translation are vital to screen media's global storytelling. Looking at a range of examples, from silent era intertitling to contemporary crowdsourced subtitling, and from avant-garde dubbing to the increasing practice of 'fansubbing', Tessa Dwyer proposes that screen media itself is a fundamentally 'translational' field.