Film Studies
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.
A Silence from Hitchcock
Extensive meditations on silence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Ana M. López
Brings together Ana M. López's field-defining essays on Latin American film and media in one indispensable volume.
Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives
Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.
Life Above the Clouds
The definitive philosophical exploration of the work of pioneering filmmaker Terrence Malick.
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.
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.
Screening #MeToo
Considers how Hollywood films since the 1960s have both reflected and shaped attitudes toward rape and sexual violence.
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.
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.
The Godfather and Sicily
Offers a distinctive interpretation of The Godfather as a novel and film sequence.
Was It Yesterday?
Explores how nostalgia operates in contemporary US film and television.
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.
Race and the Suburbs in American Film
Explores how suburban space and the body are racialized in American film.
Avant-Gardes in Crisis
Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s.
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.
Unholy Trinity
Examines representations of religion in Mexican film from the Golden Age to the early twenty-first century.
Encountering the Impossible
The first academic explanation for how spectators use their imaginations as part of the experience and appreciation of popular fantasy filmmaking.
Seeing Symphonically
Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.
Premises and Problems
Discusses world literature and cinema from the perspective of literary languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position.
Perpetual Movement
Offers both a production history and a close analysis, with a chapter for each of the film's eleven shots.
Curtains of Light
Provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre.
Mexico Unmanned
Demonstrates how transhistorical myths of masculinity are both perpetuated and challenged in recent Mexican cinema.
Mind Reeling
Across a variety of genres, shows how mental disorders are depicted in cinema.
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.
Capitán Latinoamérica
Analyzes contemporary superhero-themed cinema, television, and web series in Latin America.
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.
The Slapstick Camera
Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.
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.
Letters from Hollywood
Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai
Examines Shanghai both as a real city and an imaginary locale, from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives.
Postcolonial Lack
Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.
Funny How?
Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.
Brute Force
Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.
The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939
Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.
Cinematic Skepticism
Drawing on the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, argues that skepticism is an ethical problem that pervades contemporary film.
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.
Sounds Like Helicopters
Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music’s original subversive energy.
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.
Rumble and Crash
Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century.
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.
Liminal Sovereignty
Uses cultural representations to investigate how two religious minority communities came to be incorporated into the Mexican nation.
Rule, Britannia!
Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.
The Projected Nation
Investigates how Argentine cinema has represented rural spaces and urban margins from the 1910s to the present.
Blood Circuits
Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism.
Found in Transition
Presents an updated account of Hong Kong and its culture two decades after its reversion to China.
Welcome to Fear City
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis.
Affectual Erasure
Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film.
An Archive of the Catastrophe
Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.
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.
Echoes of a Queer Messianic
Reconsiders mostly German narratives from around 1800 to recover echoes of a queer messianic that still resonate today.
Adapting Gender
Demonstrates how film adaptations intersect with feminist discourse in neoliberal Mexico.
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.
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.
Immanent Frames
Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief.
A Dream of Hitchcock
Explores the director's repeated voyages into the dreamlike.
Ripping England!
Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
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.
Passionate Detachments
Investigates the cultural value of film violence.
Brechtian Cinemas
Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on the practice and study of cinema.
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.
Gestures of Love
Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.
Movies and Midrash
Brings popular cinema and Jewish religious texts into a meaningful dialogue.
John Huston as Adaptor
Argues that understanding Huston’s film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker.
Cinematic Cuts
Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings.
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.
Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries
A story of self, braided to a story of American culture.
Encounters with Godard
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film and ethics.
Invented Lives, Imagined Communities
How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
Doing Time
Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer.
Libre Acceso
Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film.
Ghost Faces
Combines psychoanalysis, queer theory, masculinity studies, and cultural studies to explore contemporary manhood in film.
Looking with Robert Gardner
Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner’s achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema.
Lessons Learned from Popular Culture
Informative and entertaining introduction to the study of popular culture.
The Spike Lee Brand
A rare look at Spike Lee’s creative appropriation of the documentary film genre.