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Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forcesFilms and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, TheDark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana,WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst othersExplores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwiseInvestigates Hollywood's treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000sShows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama.

American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism's focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century.

Winner of the History of Science Society's Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize in the History of Science. From the early exploits of Teddy Roosevelt in Africa to blockbuster films such as March of the Penguins, Gregg Mitman's Reel Nature reveals how changing values, scientific developments, and new technologies have come to shape American encounters with wildlife on and off the big screen. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now have had an enormous impact on how Americans see, think about, consume, and struggle to protect animals across the globe. For more information about the author go to: http://gmitman.com/

Ecocinema Theory and Practice is the first collection of its kind-an anthology that offers a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of eco-film criticism, a branch of critical scholarship that investigates cinema's intersections with environmental understandings. It references seminal readings through cutting edge research and is designed as an introduction to the field as well as a sourcebook. It defines ecocinema studies, sketches its development over the past twenty years, provides theoretical frameworks for moving forward, and presents eloquent examples of the practice of eco-film criticism through essays written by the field's leading and emerging scholars. From explicitly environmental films such as Werner Herzong's Grizzly Man and Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow to less obvious examples like Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Christopher Nolan's Inception, the pieces in this collection comprehensively interrogate the breadth of ecocinema. Ecocinema Theory and Practice also directs readers to further study through lists of recommended readings, professional organizations, and relevant periodicals.

Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research and is used extensively to examine the most influential global medium of all time. The book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from 1950s to the present, which has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, westerns, nature and road movies, as listed in the filmography are extensively analysed while particularly privileging ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. The five chapters all use detailed film readings to exemplify various aspects of this 'feel good' utopian phenomenon which begins with an exploration of the various meanings of ecology with detailed examples like Titanic helping to frame its implications for film study. Chapter two concentrates on nature film and its impact on ecology and utopianism using films like Emerald Forest and Jurassic Park, while the third chapter looks at road movies and also foreground nature and landscape as read through cult films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Grand Canyon. The final two science fiction chapters begin with 1950s B movie classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man and compare these with more recent conspiracy films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run alongside the Star Trek phenomenon. The last chapter provides a postmodernist appreciation of ecology and its central importance within contemporary cultural studies as well as applying post-human, feminist and cyborg theory to more recent debates around ecology and 'hope for the future', using readings of among others the Terminator series, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and Alien Resurrection.

What do the Hollywood 'school films' of the 1980's and 1990's communicate about education and race? This book looks at The Graduate , Blackboard Jungle , The English Patient , Dead Poets Society , Pulp Fiction , Ghost , The Wizard of Oz , Top Gun and Forrest Gump to answer the question.

Dan Graham's Rock My Religion (1982--1984) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eddie Cochran) and historical figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). It represented a coming together of narrative voice-overs, singing and shouting voices, and jarring sounds and overlaid texts that proposed a historical genealogy of rock music and an ambitious thesis about the origins of North America's popular culture. Because of its passionate embrace of underground music, its low-fi aesthetics, interest in politics, and liberal approach to historiography, the video has become a landmark work in the history of contemporary moving image and art; but it has remained, possibly for the same reasons, one of Graham's least written about works--underappreciated and possibly misunderstood by the critics who otherwise celebrate him. This illustrated study of Graham's groundbreaking work fills that critical gap. Kodwo Eshun examines Rock My Religion not only in terms of contemporary art and Graham's wider body of work but also as part of the broader culture of the time. He explores the relationship between Graham and New York's underground music scene of the 1980s, connecting the artistic methods of the No Wave bands--especially their group dynamics and relationship to the audience--and Rock My Religion's treatment of working class identity and culture.

For Smith, whose 1950 Virgin Land virtually defined the \"myth and symbol school\" of American Studies that was to dominate Cold War representations of American identity, competing thematic understandings of the frontier-as the key to international trade, as character forming crucible of the American character, and as \"garden of the world\"-dominated nineteenth-century efforts to build and defend the nation. In keeping with the great nineteenth-century endeavor of transforming history into a \"science,\" Turner reveals himself as a rigorously Darwinian thinker; he applies the same systematic approach to explain the evolution of new social and historical species-the American-as Darwin applied to natural history: natural selection and the struggle for survival, survival of the fittest under conditions of scarcity, adaptation, and the development from primitive to complex organisms.

WhenThe Blair Witch Projecthit US movie theatres in October 1999 it became an overnight sensation, creating a media buzz that grew in part because of an extraordinary marketing campaign. An elaborate website, as well as afauxtelevision documentary calledThe Curse of the Blair Witchreleased in advance of the film, led many early viewers to mistakeThe Blair Witch Projectfor nonfiction, suggesting that its events really happened. We quickly learned that none of it was true – that the events captured in the film were fully staged and acted – but the story (and the