Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

Released after the large-scale frescos of Nashville (1975) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), 3 Women (1977) was seen as an intimate drama from director Robert Altman. Justin Wyatt's study of 3 Women explores the film's genre defying characteristics. He argues that the film goes beyond its initial interpretation as an example of art cinema owing to its surrealist, dreamlike quality. Wyatt considers four distinct aspects of the film; the function of space and Altman's ability to guide the action through the careful unfolding of the mise-en-scene; its critique of social and sexual manners; the construction of Shelley Duvall's impressive performance; and the ways through which the film can be interpreted generically as alternately a psychological drama, a puzzle film, a dark comedy, and a horror film. Using archival materials from the Robert Altman Archive at the University of Michigan Special Collections, Wyatt explains how this broader reading of 3 Women uncovers a most valuable film text with particular interest to those interested in performance, unique cinematic storytelling methods, and an exacting social satire of American life in the late 1970s. He situates the film within Altman's oeuvre, arguing that it is one of the most significant films in the filmmaker's illustrious filmography.

Spectacle, myth, fable - these words instantly leap to mind when considering director Sergio Leone's celebrated films. His popularization of the Spaghetti Western genre, through works like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), continues to have a profound impact on filmmakers worldwide. In this exciting new study, Italian film scholar Christian Uva explores a side of Leone's works rarely before discussed: the political. Grappling with the contradictions between Leone's politically critical cinematic eye and his aversion to ideological classification, Sergio Leone: Cinema as Political Fable makes sense of how the director's internal political tensions shaped the radical themes of his Western fables. Looking at Leone and his films through a number of lenses, the book examines the elements of Italian history and identity interwoven in the director's stories, provides cultural context for a career spanning from Italy's fascist regime to Leone's death in 1989, and discusses the influences that formed Leone's directorial identity. Uva focuses in particular on the postmodernist theory behind Leone's works, revealing the critical basis of his stylistic and narrative innovations and newly analyzing the most iconic sequences from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967), Duck, You Sucker (1971), and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). An admirably thorough take on the man and his works, Sergio Leone: Cinema as Political Fable provides fresh perspective on a director long-established in cinema canon.

Engineering Hollywood tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, this book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

The impact of significant loss has exerted a powerful influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers . The Melancholy Lens offers a detailed look at biographical and psychological factors discernible in the art of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr with an aim toward a greater understanding of their work.

"Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs a surprising current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and represent the nation to itself. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism, on closer view, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success. In every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition. Arranged chronologically, this critical study of six major sports films also tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption. The mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984); Black, brown, and women characters follow in White Men Can't Jump (1992), A League of Their Own (1992), and Ali. But despite their insistence on community and diversity these popular dramas show limited faith in civic institutions. Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial"--

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

Film is considered to be the dominant art form of the twentieth century. It can be considered many other things; a record of events, a modern mythology, a career, an industry, an art, a hobby, and much else. Michael Wood explores the history of film, its venture into the digital age, and its role and impact on modern society.

In the past two decades, several U.S. states have explored ways to mainstream media literacy in school curriculum. However one of the best and most accessible places to learn this necessary skill has not been the traditional classroom but rather the library. In an increasing number of school, public, and academic libraries, shared media experiences such as film screening, learning to computer animate, and video editing promote community and a sense of civic engagement. The Library Screen Scene reveals five core practices used by librarians who work with film and media: viewing, creating, learning, collecting, and connecting. With examples from more than 170 libraries throughout the United States, the book shows how film and media literacy education programs, library services, and media collections teach patrons to critically analyze moving image media, uniting generations, cultures, and communities in the process.

The film director or `auteur' has been central in film theory and criticism over the past thirty years. Theories of Authorship documents the major stages in the debate about film authorship, and introduces recent writing on film to suggest important ways in which the debate might be reconsidered.