This handbook takes us through the making of The Wandering Earth, one of the highest-grossing non-English films of all time. It is a rare, in-depth, behind-the-scenes study of the making of a masterpiece, taking the reader through the entire production process of a landmark Chinese science fiction film.The book brings to life how The Wandering Earth was created, from words to images, by a young…
Semio-pragmatics, an approach to the study of film and audiovisual media first proposed by Roger Odin in the early 1980s, shifted the focus from textual analysis to the interaction of text and context and to the institutional modes of framing and reading which shape the viewer’s engagement with the film. A response to an impasse in post-1968 film semiotics and psychoanalytical approaches to f…
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-cin…
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning t…
This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lum…
The global film industry has witnessed significant transformations in the past few years. Regions outside the USA have begun to prosper while non-traditional production companies such as Netflix have assumed a larger market share and online movies adapted from literature have continued to gain in popularity. How have these trends shaped the global film industry? This book answers this question …
An investigation of music videos as a form, a practice, and a literacy. Music videos were once something broadcast by MTV and received on our TV screens. Today, music videos are searched for, downloaded, and viewed on our computer screens—or produced in our living rooms and uploaded to social media. In We Used to Wait, Rebecca Kinskey examines this shift. She investigates music video as a for…
"The story of the (now restored) Regent Street Cinema is the fourth volume exploring the University of Westminster's long and diverse history. This multi-authored volume tells its history from architectural, educational, legal and cinematic perspectives and is richly illustrated throughout with images from the University of Westminster archive. A print paperback can be purchased direct from the…
From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of th…
Argentine Cinema and National Identity covers the development of Argentine cinema since the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, a period that has been understudied. This essential cultural history delves on the dialect tradition versus modernity that was in place during those years and also comprises an examination of the political economy of film production as well as the different laws, including th…