BiblioVault - Books about Film & Video

A Reader on International Media Piracy

Pirate Essays

Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

Piracy is among the most prevalent and vexing issues of the digital age. In just the past decade, it has altered the music industry beyond recognition, changed the way people watch television, and made a dent in the buisness of the film and software industries. From MP3 files to recipes from French celebrity chefs to the jokes of American stand-up comedians, piracy is ubiquitous. And now piracy can even be an arbiter of taste, as seen in the decision by Netflix Netherlands to license heavily pirated shows. In this unflinching analysis of piracy on the Internet and in the markets of the Global South, Tilman Baumgärtel brings together a collection of essays examining the economic, political, and cultural consequences of piracy. The contributors explore a wide array of topics, which include materiality and piracy in Rio de Janeiro; informal media distribution and the film experience in Hanoi, Vietnam; the infrastructure of piracy in Nigeria; the political economy of copy protection; and much more. Offering a theoretical background for future studies of piracy, A Reader in International Media Piracy is an important collection on the burning issue of the Internet Age.

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Reading the Rabbit

Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation

Sandler, Kevin S

Rutgers University Press, 1998

"A wide-ranging inquiry into an important area of contemporary scholarly interest, and also an engaging, well written and intelligently conceived collection." -Eric Smoodin, author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era

Despite the success of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and their Looney cohorts, Warner Bros. animation worked in the shadow of Disney for many years. The past ten years have seen a resurgence in Warner Bros. animation as they produce new Bugs Bunny cartoons and theatrical features like Space Jam as well as television shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. While Disney's animation plays it safe and mirrors traditional cinema stories, Warner Bros. is known for a more original and even anarchistic style of narration, a willingness to take risks in story construction, a fearlessness in crossing gender lines with its characters, and a freedom in breaking boundaries. This collection of essays looks at the history of Warner Bros. animation, compares and contrasts the two studios, charts the rise and fall of creativity and daring at Warner's, and analyzes the ways in which the studio was for a time transgressive in its treatment of class, race, and gender. It reveals how safety and commercialization have, in the end, triumphed at Warner Bros. just as they much earlier conquered Disney.

The book also discusses fan parodies of Warner Bros. animation on the Internet today, the Bugs Bunny cross-dressing cartoons, cartoons that were censored by the studio, and the merchandising and licensing strategies of the Warner Bros. studio stores. Contributors are Donald Crafton, Ben Fraser, Michael Frierson, Norman M. Klein, Terry Lindvall, Bill Mikulak, Barry Putterman, Kevin S. Sandler, Hank Sartin, Linda Simensky, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Gene Walz, and Timothy R. White.

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Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema

Lúcia Nagib

Amsterdam University Press, 2020

This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of 'world cinema' with the more substantive concept of 'realist cinema'. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: 'non-cinema', or a cinema that aspires to be life itself; 'intermedial passages', or films that incorporate other artforms as a channel to historical and political reality; and 'total cinema', or films moved by a totalising impulse, be it towards the total artwork, total history or universalising landscapes. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, proving that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.

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Recording Memories from Political Violence

A Film-maker's Journey

Cahal McLaughlin

Intellect Books, 2010

Based on work the author has carried out with survivor groups in Northern Ireland and South Africa, Recording Memories from Political Violence draws on written and audiovisual texts to describe and analyze the use of documentary filmmaking in recording experiences of political conflict. A variety of issues relevant to the genre are addressed at length, including the importance of ethics in the collaboration between the filmmaker and the participant and the effect of location on the accounts of participants. Cahal McLaughlin draws on the diverse fields of film and cultural studies, as well as nearly twenty years of production experience, in this informed and instructive contribution to documentary filmmaking and post-conflict studies.

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Recording Reality, Desiring the Real

Elizabeth Cowie

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating.

Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, she asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, Cowie examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, and Milica Tomic’s Portrait of My Mother.

Recording Reality, Desiring the Real stakes documentary’s central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement, which together create a new understanding of spectatorship.

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Reframing Berlin

Architecture, Memory-Making and Film Locations

Christopher S. Wilson and Gul Kacmaz Erk

Intellect Books, 2024

A study of the ways Berlin has been depicted in cinema and the ways its architectural transformations inform our understanding of the city and its memories.

Concerned with the connection between the built environment and the passage of time, Reframing Berlin uses film locations in the city to reveal the influence that urban transformation has on memory-making. Covering the city’s history since the beginning of cinema, the book proposes the term urban strategy to understand the range of consequential actions taken by politicians, developers, and other powerful figures to shape the nature and future of buildings, streets, and districts. Organizing these strategies from demolition to memorialization, the authors study the ways these actions forget or recall aspects of place. Using cinematic representations of Berlin as an audiovisual archive, the study details how the city has adjusted to its traumatic twentieth-century history through architectural transformations. Two dissimilar case studies frame each strategy, indicating that an approach that works for one building may not be sufficient for another.

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Resolutions 3

Global Networks of Video

Ming-Yuen S. Ma

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Resolutions 3 explores the wide-ranging implications of video art and video-based production in contemporary media culture. It is the third volume in a series composed of Resolution: A Critique of Video Art (1986) and Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996). While Resolution was one of the first critical texts on video art in the United States, Resolutions was one of the first books to address video as a medium across disciplines from theoretical, activist, and transnational perspectives.

Resolutions 3 articulates this legacy as a challenge to reengage with the explosive viral reach of moving image–based content and its infiltration into and impact on culture and everyday life. The contributors to this work analyze what is now a fourth decade of video practices as marked within and outside the margins of art production, networked interventions, projected spectacle, museum entombment, or 24/7 streaming. Intending to broaden, contest, and amplify the mediated space that was defined by its two predecessors, this volume investigates the ever-changing state of video’s deployment as examiner, tool, journal reportage, improvisation, witness, riff, leverage, and document.

Contributors: Kathleen Ash-Milby, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; Myriam-Odile Blin, Rouen U, France; Nancy Buchanan, California Institute of the Arts; Derek A. Burrill, U of California, Riverside; Sean Cubitt, U of Melbourne; Faisal Devji, New York U; Jennifer Doyle, U of California, Riverside; Jennifer Friedlander, Pomona College; Kathy High, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Lucas Hilderbrand, U of California, Irvine; Nguyen Tan Hoang, Bryn Mawr College; Kathy Rae Huffman; Amelia Jones, McGill U; David Joselit, Yale U; Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College; Jessica Lawless, Santa Fe Community College; Hea Jeong Lee; Jesse Lerner, Pitzer College; Akira Mizuta Lippit, U of Southern California; Lionel Manga; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Kenneth Rogers, U of California, Riverside; Michael Rush, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State U; Freya Schiwy, U of California, Riverside; Beverly R. Singer, U of New Mexico; Yvonne Spielmann, U of the West of Scotland; Catherine Taft, Getty Research Institute; Holly Willis, U of Southern California.

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(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Edited by Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet

Intellect Books, 2014

Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns—new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre, and stardom in a transnational age—this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish film, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema.

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A Revolution for the Screen

Abel Gance's Napoleon

Paul Cuff

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle across ensuing decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film has formed a backdrop to an array of formal, contextual, and ideological battles. In this book, Paul Cuff takes account of those battles and challenges received opinion on Gance's view of both his film and its subject.

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Rhetoric of Modern Death in American Living Dead Films

Outi Hakola

Intellect Books, 2015

Zombies, vampires, and mummies are frequent stars of American horror films. But what does their cinematic omnipresence and audiences’ hunger for such films tell us about American views of death? Here, Outi Hakola investigates the ways in which American living-dead films have addressed death through different narrative and rhetorical solutions during the twentieth century. She focuses on films from the 1930s, including Dracula, The Mummy, and White Zombie, films of the 1950s and 1960s such as Night of the Living Dead and The Return of Dracula, and more recent fare like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Mummy, and Resident Evil. Ultimately, the book succeeds in framing the tradition of living dead films, discussing the cinematic processes of addressing the films’ viewers, and analyzing the films’ socio-cultural negotiation with death in this specific genre.

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The Right to Play Oneself

Looking Back on Documentary Film

Thomas Waugh

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh’s essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s and Joris Ivens’s manifestos of “committed” documentary from the 19 0s, reflects the book’s theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists.

Waugh analyzes an eclectic international selection of films and issues from the 1920s to the present day. The essays provide a transcultural focus, moving from documentaries of the industrialized societies of North America and Europe to those of 1980s India and addressing such canonical directors as Dziga Vertov, Emile de Antonio, Barbara Hammer, Rosa von Praunheim, and Anand Patwardhan. Woven through the volume is the relationship of the documentary with the history of the Left, including discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary, such as Challenge for Change and ACT UP’s Women’s Collective.

Together with the introduction by the author, Waugh’s essays advance a defiantly and persuasively personal point of view on the history and significance of documentary film.

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Robert Altman

In the American Grain

Frank Caso

Reaktion Books, 2015

Known as an iconoclast and maverick, film director Robert Altman has consistently pushed against the boundaries of genre. From refashioning film noir in The Long Goodbye, the western in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the psychological drama in Images, science fiction in Quintet, and the romantic comedy in A Perfect Couple, he has always tested the limits of what film can and should do. In this book, Frank Caso examines the development of Altman’s artistic method from his earliest days in industrial film to his work in television and feature films.

Altman is one of those directors whose films audiences can easily recognize, but what exactly are the distinctive elements that have become his signature? Caso identifies more than twenty such elements in Altman’s style, tracing some—such as his use of free-hand cameras and engagement with Christian imagery—to the beginning of his career. Caso also examines Altman’s unsettling mix of offbeat comedic tone with a predominance of violence, murder, and death, showing how their counterpointing effects rendered his films at once naturalistic and otherworldly.

Exploring these and other aspects of the Altmanesque style, Caso maps the innovations that have made Altman a master filmmaker. Enriched with illustration throughout, Robert Altman will appeal to fans of this distinctive American auteur or anyone interested in ground-breaking cinema.

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The Roots of Modern Hollywood

The Persistence of Values in American Cinema, from the New Deal to the Present

Nick Smedley

Intellect Books, 2014

In this insightful study of Hollywood cinema since 1969, film historian Nick Smedley traces the cultural and intellectual heritage of American films, showing how the more thoughtful recent cinema owes a profound debt to Hollywood’s traditions of liberalism, first articulated in the New Deal era. Although American cinema is not usually thought of as politically or socially engaged, Smedley demonstrates how Hollywood can be seen as one of the most value-laden of all national cinemas. Drawing on a long historical view of the persistent trends and themes in Hollywood cinema, Smedley illustrates how films from recent decades have continued to explore the balance between unbridled individualistic capitalism and a more socially engaged liberalism. He also brings out the persistence of pacifism in Hollywood’s consideration of American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Middle East. His third theme concerns the treatment of women in Hollywood films, and the belated acceptance by the film community of a wider role for the American post-feminist woman. Featuring important new interviews with four of Hollywood’s most influential directors—Michael Mann, Peter Weir, Tony Gilroy, and Paul Haggis—The Roots of Modern Hollywood is an incisive account of where Hollywood is today and the path it has taken to get there.

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Rosebud Sleds and Horses' Heads

50 of Film's Most Evocative Objects - An Illustrated Journey

Scott Jordan Harris

Intellect Books, 2013

Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Michael Myers’s mask. Marilyn Monroe’s billowy white dress. Indiana Jones’s trusty hat. These objects are icons of popular culture synonymous with the films they appear in, and, at long last, a book has come along that sorts and chronicles fifty of them.

Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads presents incisive discussion of fifty of the most significant objects in cinema history and explores their importance within their films and within the popular imagination. With original full color illustrations, this book surveys objects from a range of genres, from the birth of cinema to the present day.

Curated and written by a prominent film critic who routinely writes for some of the leading publications in the English language, as well as broadcasts for the BBC, Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads is the only book of its kind. With a fascinating, original, and instantly understandable concept, it will find grateful audiences in film buffs around the world.

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