Film Studies

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Listening to Others

A collection of original essays and previously untranslated critical writings on the renowned Brazilian documentary filmmaker, Eduardo Coutinho.

Through a Nuclear Lens

Examines the increasingly reciprocal nature of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange through films that center on nuclear issues.

Is Harpo Free?

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

The Biggest Thing in Show Business

A freewheeling, nonlinear exploration of the performing duo and their decade-long collaboration from 1946 to 1956.

The Human Figure on Film

Offers a fresh approach to the problem of the human figure in an age of digital cinema.

Yiddish Cinema

Offers a bold new reading of Yiddish cinema by exploring the early diasporic cinema's fascination with media and communication.

Bay Lodyans

Considers how popular Haitian films not only provide entertainment but also help audiences in Haiti and the diaspora think through daily challenges.

Torturous Etiquettes

Explores the “torture” of mannered behavior and the prevalence of etiquette as a theme in classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema.

Distancing Representations in Transgender Film

Argues that transgender representations in film make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life.

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity

Examines literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of Chinese women, across centuries and continents.

A Silence from Hitchcock

Extensive meditations on silence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Life Above the Clouds

Edited by Steven DeLay
Subjects: Philosophy

The definitive philosophical exploration of the work of pioneering filmmaker Terrence Malick.

Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives

Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.

Ana M. López

Brings together Ana M. López's field-defining essays on Latin American film and media in one indispensable volume.

Cinema of Discontent

Uses popular films to reveal the tensions generated during Japan’s postwar "economic miracle," challenging the prevailing view that it was a story of great national success.

Woman-Centered Brazilian Cinema

Illuminates the complex factors that have helped or hindered creative work by and about women in the twenty-first-century Brazilian film industry.

The Hard Sell of Paradise

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Orienting Italy

Explores Italian filmmakers' representations of China and the Chinese, both at home and abroad.

Nietzsche in Hollywood

Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Holiday in His Eye

Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

The Tyranny of Common Sense

Elucidates how neoliberalism rules all areas of life and operates as a form of common sense, taking Mexico as a case study.

No Jurisdiction

A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.

Whiteness at the End of the World

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

White Cottage, White House

Argues that Irish American masculinity functioned to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in Hollywood cinema from 1930 to 1960.

Action, Action, Action

Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.

The Cinematographer's Voice

A unique exploration of contemporary filmmaking from cinema’s ultimate insiders.

Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East

Traces the circulation of Hollywood films in North Africa and the Middle East from the early twentieth century to the present.

Writ on Water

A powerful and original statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of “film imagination” to our lives as human beings in the world.

Screening #MeToo

Considers how Hollywood films since the 1960s have both reflected and shaped attitudes toward rape and sexual violence.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

Examines the filmic representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity and its role in mediating racial politics in Mexico.

The Coming Death

Explores questions of death and mortality in several key texts of East Asian literature and cinema.

A Voyage with Hitchcock

Extensive meditations on the theme of the voyage in six Hitchcock films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion.

Alton's Paradox

Uses extensive archival research to explore the manifold contributions of foreign film workers to emerging film industries in Latin America from the 1930s to early 1940s.

Encountering the Impossible

The first academic explanation for how spectators use their imaginations as part of the experience and appreciation of popular fantasy filmmaking.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema

Sheds light on emergent Latin America cinema that addresses the politics of environmental destruction, the unevenness of climate change consequences, and new ways of visualizing the world beyond the human.

Curtains of Light

Provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre.

Race and the Suburbs in American Film

Explores how suburban space and the body are racialized in American film.

Seeing Symphonically

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation

Examines the place of book-to-film adaptations by one of Italy's most famous postwar film directors.

Unholy Trinity

Examines representations of religion in Mexican film from the Golden Age to the early twenty-first century.

Perpetual Movement

Offers both a production history and a close analysis, with a chapter for each of the film's eleven shots.

Was It Yesterday?

Explores how nostalgia operates in contemporary US film and television.

The Godfather and Sicily

Offers a distinctive interpretation of The Godfather as a novel and film sequence.

Premises and Problems

Edited by Luiza Franco Moreira
Introduction by Luiza Franco Moreira
Subjects: Literature
Series: SUNY Press Open Access

Discusses world literature and cinema from the perspective of literary languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position.

Avant-Gardes in Crisis

Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s.

Mexico Unmanned

Demonstrates how transhistorical myths of masculinity are both perpetuated and challenged in recent Mexican cinema.

Tastemakers and Tastemaking

Considers how and why taste persists in the analysis of Mexican film and television by looking at key figures and their impact on the curation of violence.

Knowing It When You See It

Lively analysis of how Henry James's fiction anticipates later filmmakers' concerns with what we can see and what we can know.

Giallo!

Traces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon.

Mind Reeling

Across a variety of genres, shows how mental disorders are depicted in cinema.

Capitán Latinoamérica

Analyzes contemporary superhero-themed cinema, television, and web series in Latin America.

Postcolonial Lack

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai

Examines Shanghai both as a real city and an imaginary locale, from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives.

Miraculous Realism

An authoritative study of this postsecular film movement from the French-Belgian border region that rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Slapstick Camera

Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.

Funny How?

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Letters from Hollywood

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.

The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.

Brute Force

Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.

Forms of Disappointment

Analyzes parallel developments in post–Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity.

Cinematic Skepticism

Drawing on the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, argues that skepticism is an ethical problem that pervades contemporary film.

Sounds Like Helicopters

Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music’s original subversive energy.

Rumble and Crash

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century.

From El Dorado to Lost Horizons

Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.

Philosophy-Screens

Draws from twentieth-century French thought on film and aesthetics to address the philosophical significance of the pervasiveness of screens in contemporary technological life as well as the mutation of philosophy that such a pervasiveness seems to require.

Tuitions and Intuitions

Makes the case that philosophy has an essential role to play in the serious study of film.

The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage

Explores the wide-ranging impact of the Mexican Revolution on global cinema and Western intellectual thought.

The Projected Nation

Investigates how Argentine cinema has represented rural spaces and urban margins from the 1910s to the present.

Found in Transition

Presents an updated account of Hong Kong and its culture two decades after its reversion to China.

Affectual Erasure

Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film.

Blood Circuits

Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism.

Rule, Britannia!

Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.

Welcome to Fear City

Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis.

Liminal Sovereignty

Uses cultural representations to investigate how two religious minority communities came to be incorporated into the Mexican nation.

An Archive of the Catastrophe

Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.

Fire and Snow

A broad examination of climate fantasy and science fiction, from The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series to The Handmaid's Tale and Game of Thrones.

Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Reconsiders mostly German narratives from around 1800 to recover echoes of a queer messianic that still resonate today.

Immanent Frames

Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief.

Adapting Gender

Demonstrates how film adaptations intersect with feminist discourse in neoliberal Mexico.

Queer Art Camp Superstar

The first book-length study of Trecartin’s artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media.

Rx Hollywood

How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones.

A Dream of Hitchcock

Explores the director's repeated voyages into the dreamlike.

Affective Images

Explores intervisual case studies in relation to migration, xenophobia, and gender.

Are You Watching Closely?

Identifies a new genre—misdirection films—and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences.

Ripping England!

Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture.

American Stranger

Reconstructs how Ray became a “rebel auteur” in cinema culture.

Hitchcock's Moral Gaze

Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock’s films.

Passionate Detachments

Investigates the cultural value of film violence.

John Huston as Adaptor

Argues that understanding Huston’s film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker.

Movies and Midrash

Brings popular cinema and Jewish religious texts into a meaningful dialogue.

Brechtian Cinemas

Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on the practice and study of cinema.

Gestures of Love

Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.

Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries

A story of self, braided to a story of American culture.

Regarding Life

Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships.

Seeing Like the Buddha

Considers film as a form of Buddhist ritual and contemplative practice.

Cinematic Cuts

Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings.

Doing Time

Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer.

Ghost Faces

Combines psychoanalysis, queer theory, masculinity studies, and cultural studies to explore contemporary manhood in film.

Invented Lives, Imagined Communities

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.

Libre Acceso

Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film.