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Peter Jackson is one of the most acclaimed and influential contemporary film-makers. This is the first book to combine the examination of Jackson's career with an in-depth critical analysis of his films, thus providing readers with the most comprehensive study of the New Zealand film-maker's body of work. The first section of the book concentrates on Jackson's biography, surveying the evolution of his career from the director of cult slapstick movies such as Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992) to an entrepreneur responsible for the foundation of companies such as Wingnut Films and Weta Workshop, and finally to producer and director of mega blockbuster projects such as The Lord of th...
This book is devoted to the critical study of the cinema of John Milius, filling a major gap in the literature by combining the examination of the artistic, historical and cultural significance of Milius’ work, with an in-depth analysis of his films. Although most contemporary film-viewers have forgotten him, John Milius has been one of the most influential and controversial film-makers in the history of American cinema. Along with the likes of George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Milius was a central figure of the so called ‘New Hollywood’. Milius, who gained an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter for Apocalypse Now (1979), reached the apex of his directorial career in the 1980s with films such as Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Red Dawn (1984). More recently, he was involved in a series of innovative projects such as the creation of the HBO series Rome (2005-2007) and the invention of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
The Authorship of Place is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s. Dennis Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive and disorienting social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises. In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing engaged in location shooting to transform sites of film production into...
This book provides an examination of Big Wednesday as an unconventional film that employs a mythic sensibility in its representation of the loss of youth and young manhood. Critically and commercially unsuccessful on its original release, the coming-of-age, surf drama Big Wednesday (1978), has undergone a significant reappraisal. It is now considered not only an important contribution to youth cinema, but also the most important film that John Milius ever made. Over six chapters, the book considers questions of authorship, commerce, genre, stardom, and myth, and explores how these ideas intersect with the film’s status as a significant youth movie and collectively how these ideas have contributed to its recent critical rehabilitation. In doing so, the book also provides a much-needed reassessment of an important and overlooked entry in the New Hollywood canon. Exploring Big Wednesday’s subsequent resonance and relevance, this unique study will appeal to students and scholars in film studies, popular culture studies, youth studies, sociology, and media studies.
These essays all—in various ways—address the relationship between adaptation, “true events,” and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do we script stories about real events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives contains essays from scholars committed to interrogating historical and current hard-hitting events, traumas, and truths through various media. Each essay goes beyond general discussion of adaptation and media to engage with the specifics of adapting true life events—addressing pertinent and controversial questions around scriptwriting, representation, ethics, memory, forms of history, and methodological interventions. Written for readers interested in how memory works on culture as well as screenwriting choices, the collection offers new perspectives on historical media and commercial media that is currently being produced, as well as on media created by the book’s contributors themselves.
Written from a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective, this collection of new essays explores the semiotics of food in the 20th- and 21st-century crime fiction of authors such as Anthony Bourdain, Arthur Upfield, Sara Paretsky, Andrea Camilleri, Fred Vargas, Ruth Rendell, Stieg Larsson, Leonardo Padura, Georges Simenon, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Donna Leon. The collection covers a range of issues, such as the provision of intra-, peri- or paratextual recipes, the aesthetics and ethics of food, eating rituals as indications of cultural belonging, and regional, national and supranational identities. It also tackles eating disorders and other seemingly abnormal habits as signs of "Otherness." Also mentioned are the television productions of the Inspector Montalbano series (1999-ongoing), the Danish-Swedish Bron/Broen (2011, The Bridge), and its remakes The Tunnel (2013, France/UK) and The Bridge (2013, USA).
This book deploys the concept of 'audiovisual tourism promotion' to account for the promotional functions performed by a vast array of diverse media texts including tourism films, feature films, digital videos conceived for online circulation, video games and TV commercials. From this point of view, this volume fills a major gap in the literature by providing the first comprehensive critical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion as a distinct media field. In this book, the study of audiovisual tourism promotion is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach which combines film studies, media studies, human geography, sociology, tourism studies, history, postcolonial and gender studies...
This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.
This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland. How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations. This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.
This book deploys the concept of ‘audiovisual tourism promotion’ to account for the promotional functions performed by a vast array of diverse media texts including tourism films, feature films, digital videos conceived for online circulation, video games and TV commercials. From this point of view, this volume fills a major gap in the literature by providing the first comprehensive critical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion as a distinct media field. In this book, the study of audiovisual tourism promotion is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach which combines film studies, media studies, human geography, sociology, tourism studies, history, postcolonial and gender studies. This book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars from different disciplines.