The candid and heartbreakingly honest memoir of Sylvia Kristel, the cinema icon of the 1970s who played the lead role in the worldwide sensation erotic Emmanuelle films.

For over 50 years, Albert R. Broccoli's Eon Productions has navigated the ups and downs of the volatile British film industry, enduring both critical wrath and acclaim in equal measure for its now legendary James Bond series. Latterly, this family run business has been crowned with box office gold and recognised by motion picture academies around the world. However, it has not always been plain sailing. Changing financial regimes forced 007 to relocate to France and Mexico; changing fashions and politics led to box office disappointments; and changing studio regimes and business disputes all but killed the franchise. And the rise of competing action heroes has constantly questioned Bond's place in popular culture. But against all odds the filmmakers continue to wring new life from the series, and 2012's Skyfall saw both huge critical and commercial success, crowning 007 as the undisputed king of the action genre. Some Kind of Hero recounts this remarkable story, from its origins in the early '60s right through to the present day, and draws on hundreds of unpublished interviews with the cast and crew of this iconic series.

Counterpractice highlights a generation of women who used art to define a culture of experimental thought and practice during the period of the French women’s movement or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (1970–81). It considers women’s art in relation to some of the most exciting thinkers to have emerged from the French literature and philosophy of the 1970s – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – forcing a timely reconsideration of the full spectrum of revolutionary practices by women in the years following the events of May ’68. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 images, the book also features an illuminating foreword by art historian Griselda Pollock.

Sex and Film is a frank, comprehensive analysis of the cinema's love affair with the erotic. Forshaw's lively study moves from the sexual abandon of the 1930s to filmmakers' circumvention of censorship, the demolition of taboos by arthouse directors and pornographic films, and an examination of how explicit imagery invaded modern mainstream cinema.

A US government official is assassinated, a list of names, all male, all German, is found and two men on the list are already dead. What is the connection? When the mission looks impossible, who do you call? UNACO.

Surrealism has long been recognised as having made a major contribution to film theory and practice, and many contemporary film-makers acknowledge its influence. Most of the critical literature, however, focuses either on the 1920s or the work of Buuel. The aim of this book is to open up a broader picture of surrealism's contribution to the conceptualisation and making of film.Tracing the work of Luis Buuel, Jacques Prvert, Nelly Kaplan, Walerian Borowcyzk, Jan vankmajer, Raul Ruiz and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Surrealism and Cinema charts the history of surrealist film-making in both Europe and Hollywood from the 1920s to the present day. At once a critical introduction and a provocative re-evaluation, Surrealism and Cinema is essential reading for anyone interested in surrealist ideas and art and the history of film.

While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the "sex thieves" are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the "penis snatcher," asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon--unique in its spatial and temporal scale--without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor's success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.

French film in the 1980s might have lacked the invention of the New Wave but gritty police thrillers and nostalgic costume-dramas such as Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources brought French cinema to a wider audience than ever before. This landmark study is not merely a history of French film in the 1980s, but offers a set of critical essays on the crisis of masculinity in contemporary French culture, and its interrelationship with nostalgia. After a brief overview both of the crisis in the French film industry during the 1980s, and of the socio-political crisis of masculinity in the wake of 1970s feminism, the book is divided into three sections: the retro-nostalgic film, the Polar, or police thriller, and the comic film. Films studied in detail include Diva, Subway, Coup de foudre, Vivement dimanche , La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille, and Tenue de soir e, while the volume covers actors from G rard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Yves Montand to Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, and Emmanuelle B art.

This magisterial book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America. Annette Förster presents a careful assessment of the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; an exploration of the stage and screen careers of French actress and filmmaker Musidora and Canadian-born actress and filmmaker Nell Shipman; an analysis of the interaction between the popular stage and the silent cinema from the perspective of women at work in both realms; fresh insights into Dutch stage and screen comedy, the French revue and the American Northwest drama of the 1910s; and much more, all grounded in a wealth of archival research.

Why is a cross-eyed man from the small town of Cento in northern Italy now regarded as one of the greatest draftsmen of the seventeenth century? Featuring important Guercino drawings from the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, this volume looks deeply into the nature of the artist’s extraordinary talent for drawing.