The Death of Classical Cinema uncovers the extremely rich yet insufficiently explored dialogue between classical and modernist cinema, examining the work of three classical filmmakers—Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Vincente Minnelli—and the films they made during the decline of the traditional Hollywood studio system. Faced with the significant challenges posed by alternative art cinema and modernist filmmaking practices in the early 1960s, these directors responded with films that were self-conscious attempts at keeping pace with the developments in film modernism. These films—Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Hitchcock's Marnie, and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town—were widely regarded as failures at the time and bolstered critics' claims concerning the irrelevance of their directors in relation to contemporary filmmaking. However, author Joe McElhaney sheds new light on these films by situating them in relation to such acclaimed modernist works of the period as Godard's Contempt, Fellini's La dolce vita, Antonioni's Red Desert, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. He finds that these modernist films, rather than being diametrically opposed in form to the work of Hitchcock, Lang, and Minnelli, are in fact profoundly linked to them.

Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.

Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.

The first in-depth study of its subject, this book seeks to account for a type of modernist film that revolves around bereavement. Identifying the roots of the genre in classical melodrama and horror cinema, and tracing perennial themes and aesthetic devices through to the European and American "intellectual melodramas" of the postwar decades, the book provides a taxonomy of characteristics. In the course of detailed case studies, the book deploys the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and Daniel Frampton while making use of Freudian psychoanalysis and present-day grief counseling theory. In making its case for the new genre, the book reflects upon the ways in which the very notion of genre has, in the post-classical period, responded to changing exhibition patterns, the rise of domestic spectatorship and the proliferation of Web-based film literature.

Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system to illuminate an art that is also a multibillion-dollar business. He connects currents in French film criticism and theory with an unfolding account of American cinema past and present, offering penetrating insights into directors and their work. Beginning with Allan Dwan, who learned how to make movies before Hollywood was born by watching D. W. Griffith, Krohn presents a panorama that encompasses Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone, Star Wars and I Love Lucy. He covers everything from gangsters to gremlins, from blockbusters to no-budget cult films like Moon Over Harlem and Plan 9 from Outer Space, in a style that is accessible to anyone who loves movies, or has a passion for writing about them.

While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

Figuring the past" geeft een nieuwe kijk op kostuumdrama's die aan het begin van deze eeuw gemaakt zijn en onderzoekt de manieren waarop de hedendaagse cinema het historische verleden herschept. De auteur verkent de relatie tussen visuele motieven en culturele representaties in een aantal belangrijke films van onder anderen James Ivory, Martin Scorsese en Jane Campion. Door te kijken naar de maniëristische voorkeur voor citatie, detail en stilering, pleit de auteur voor een esthetiek van fragmenten en figuren die centraal staan in de historische kostuumdrama's als een0internationaal genre. In gedetailleerde casestudies worden drie belangrijke kenmerken van het genre - het huis, het tableau en de brief - in relatie gebracht met de veranderende begrippen van visuele stijl, melodrama en geslacht.

This book examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and the independent and experimental films.

An overview of film studies