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In the 1980s, Egypt witnessed a growing revival of religiosity among large sectors of the population, including artists. Many pious stars retired from art, \"repented\" from \"sinful\" activities, and dedicated themselves to worship, preaching, and charity. Their public conversions were influential in spreading piety to the Egyptian upper class during the 1990s, which in turn enabled the development of pious markets for leisure and art, thus facilitating the return of artists as veiled actresses or religiously committed performers. Revisiting the story she began in\"A Trade like Any Other\": Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt, Karin van Nieuwkerk draws on extensive fieldwork among performers to offer a unique history of the religious revival in Egypt through the lens of the performing arts. She highlights the narratives of celebrities who retired in the 1980s and early 1990s, including their spiritual journeys and their influence on the \"pietization\" of their fans, among whom are the wealthy, relatively secular, strata of Egyptian society. Van Nieuwkerk then turns to the emergence of a polemic public sphere in which secularists and Islamists debated Islam, art, and gender in the 1990s. Finally, she analyzes the Islamist project of \"art with a mission\" and the development of Islamic aesthetics, questioning whether the outcome has been to Islamize popular art or rather to popularize Islam. The result is an intimate thirty-year history of two spheres that have tremendous importance for Egypt-art production and piety.

This collection departs from the observation that online forms of communication—the email, blog, text message, tweet—are actually haunted by old epistolary forms: the letter and the diary. By examining the omnipresence of writing across a variety of media, the collection adds the category of Epistolary Screens to genres of self-expression, both literary (letters, diaries, auto-biographies) and screenic (romance dramas, intercultural cinema, essay films, artists’ videos and online media). The category Epistolary encapsulates an increasingly paradoxical relation between writing and the self: first, it describes selves that are written in graphic detail via letters, diaries, blogs, texts, emails and tweets; second, it acknowledges that absence complicates communication, bringing people together in an entangled rather than ordered way. The collection concerns itself with the changing visual/textual texture of screen media and examines what is at stake for our understanding of self-expression when it takes Epistolary forms.

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe's national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of \"world cinema\" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition. Onder invloed van de rivaliteit met Hollywood en de val van de muur in 1989 vond er in de jaren '90 in veel West-Europese landen een levendig debat plaats over de toekomst van de nationale filmtradities. Van het bestaan van zich onderscheidende 'nationale' stijlen, zoals bijvoorbeeld neo-realisme, zou niet langer kunnen worden uitgegaan. Film zou een benepen kunstvorm geworden zijn, die redding zoekt in het bewaren van de 'nationale' erfenis of hoopt op artistieke vernieuwing van televisie en door de overheid gesubsidieerde prestigeprojecten. In European Cinema blikt Thomas Elsaesser terug op het debat en geeft een genuanceerder beeld van verschillende factoren die sinds de jaren zestig een rol speelden. Er is o.m. aandacht voor de raakvlakken met de 'world cinema' en de opkomst van de Aziatische film, de invloed van het internationale film festival circuit, de rol van televisie en de veranderende esthetiek in auteur-cinema. Nieuwe toeschouwers hebben andere voorkeuren, en nieuwe technologieën bieden de mogelijkheid om bestaande identiteiten te hervormen, maar de Europese cinema heeft nog steeds een belangrijke functie in het vaststellen van kritische en creatieve agenda's, ook al is haar economische en institutionele basis in beweging.

Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico. After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.

The Eyes Have Itexplores those rarified screen moments when viewers are confronted by sights that seem at once impossible and present, artificial and stimulating, illusory and definitive.Beginning with a penetrating study of five cornfield sequences-including The Wizard of Oz, Arizona Dream,andSigns-Murray Pomerance journeys through a vast array of cinematic moments, technical methods, and laborious collaborations from the 1930s to the 2000s to show how the viewer's experience of \"reality\" is put in context, challenged, and willfully engaged.Four meditations deal with \"reality effects\" from different philosophical and technical angles. \"Vivid Rivals\" assesses active participation and critical judgment in seeing effects with such works asDefiance, Cloverfield, Knowing, Thelma & Louise, and more. \"The Two of Us\" considers double placement and doubled experience with such films asThe Prestige, Niagara,andA Stolen Life. \"Being There\" discusses cinematic performance and the problems of believability, highlighting such films asGran Torino, The Manchurian Candidate, In Harm's Way, and other films. \"Fairy Land\" explores the art of scenic backing, focusing on the fictional world ofBrigadoon,which borrows from both hard-edged realism and evocative landscape painting.

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world.   Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre.   A companion website to this book is available at  https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/ (https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/) Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)  

Imagine attending a fascinating film forum among a distinguished and varied panel of cinema legends. An afternoon or evening where contemporary filmmakers from around the world--Kazakhstan, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Cameroon, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, the People's Republic of China, Mexico, Poland, the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France--gather together to discuss how they arrive at the creative choices that bring their film projects to life.Can't spare the time from work or class? Travel expense too great?What? You can't even find such a collaborative event?Then imagine curling up with a good book, maybe a shot of espresso in hand, and becoming engrossed in the exciting and informative conversation that Elena Oumano has ingeniously crafted from her personal and individual interviews with these artists. Straying far from the usual choppy question-and-answer format,Cinema Todaysaves you from plowing through another tedious read, in which the same topics and issues are directed to each subject, over and over-an experience that is like being trapped in a revolving door.Oumano stops that revolving door by following a lively symposium-in-print format, with the filmmakers' words and thoughts grouped together under various key cinema topics. It is as though these experts are speaking to each other and you are their audience--collectively they reflect on and explore issues and concerns of modern filmmaking, from the practical to the aesthetic, including the process, cinematic rhythm and structure, and the many aspects of the media: business, the viewer, and cinema's place in society. Whether you are a movie lover, a serious student of cinema, or simply interested in how we communicate in today's global village through films that so profoundly affect the world,Cinema Todayis for you.

Drawing on a variety of popular films, includingAvatar, Enter the Void, Fight Club, The Matrix, Speed Racer, X-MenandWar of the Worlds,Supercinemastudies the ways in which digital special effects and editing techniques require a new theoretical framework in order to be properly understood. Here William Brown proposes that while analogue cinema often tried to hide the technological limitations of its creation through ingenious methods, digital cinema hides its technological omnipotence through the use of continued conventions more suited to analogue cinema, in a way that is analogous to that of Superman hiding his powers behind the persona of Clark Kent. Locating itself on the cusp of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive approaches to cinema,Supercinemaalso looks at the relationship between the spectator and film that utilizes digital technology to maximum, 'supercinematic' effect.

American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in Psycho, and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity.Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror's critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as The Shining and Dawn of the Dead responded to deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and rising numbers of women in the workforce. Labors of Fear explores these critical issues and extends them in discussions of recent works such as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Midsommar, Survival of the Dead, It Follows, Get Out, and Us. Covering films ranging from the 1970s onward, these essays address novel and newly recognized modes and conditions of labor: reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, social media and self-branding, intellectual labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment. In its singular way, horror continues to make spine-tingling sense of what is most destructive in the wider sociopolitical context of US capitalism.

Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Gary Cooper-Glamour in a Golden Agepresents original essays from eminent film scholars that analyze movie stars of the 1930s against the background of contemporary American cultural history.Stardom is approached as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled these actors and actresses to be discovered, featured in films, publicized, and to become recognized and admired-sometimes even notorious-parts of the cultural landscape. Using archival and popular material, including fan and mass market magazines, other promotional and publicity material, and of course films themselves, contributors also discuss other artists who were incredibly popular at the time, among them Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, and Constance Bennett.