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In 2001, yet another adaptation of the Superman comic book came to television. Lasting 10 seasons, Smallville took the traditional Superman story and turned it into an American teen action drama about Clark Kent's life at high school—before he donned the famous blue tights and red cape. Instead of depicting Superman's clashes with criminals in Metropolis, the show focused on how Clark first developed his powers and learned to cope with girls, school, and teenage angst. Although largely overlooked bycritics and derided by Superman fans who regarded it as too far a departure from the comic book canon, Smallville nonetheless endeared a whole new generation of viewers. The setting, style, narr...
During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.
The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and cross linguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect cross-linguistically is crucial for progess in understanding how the semantics of aspect and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect, the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types, the flexibility of lexical classes, and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the phenomenon of cinematic remaking. Drawing upon recent theories of genre and intertextuality, Film Remakes describes remaking as both an elastic concept and a complex situation, one enabled and limited by the interrelated roles and practices of industry, critics, and audiences. This approach to remaking is developed across three broad sections: the first deals with issues of production, including commerce and authors; the second considers genre, plots, and structures; and the third investigates issues of reception, including audiences and institutions.
The first part of a planned three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 provides an overview of the period between 1975 and 1990, during which the discipline first became established in the academy. Tracing critical positions, personnel, and institutions across this formative period, Noel King, Constantine Verevis, and Deane Williams examine a multitude of books and journal articles published in Australia and distributed internationally though such processes as publication in overseas journals, translation, and reprinting. At the same time, they offer important insights about the origins of Australian film theory and its relationship to such related disciplines as English, and cultural studies. Ultimately, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 delineates the historical implications—and reveals the future possibilities—of establishing new directions of inquiry for film studies in Australia and internationally.
"Behind-the-scenes" stories of ranting directors, stingy producers, temperamental actors, and the like have fascinated us since the beginnings of film and television. Today, magazines, websites, television programs, and DVDs are devoted to telling tales of trade lore—from on-set antics to labor disputes. The production of media has become as storied and mythologized as the content of the films and TV shows themselves. Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and politic...
This book describes the dubbing process of English-language animated films produced by US companies in the 21st century, exploring how linguistic variation and multilingualism are used to create characters and identities and examining how Italian dubbing professionals deal with this linguistic characterisation. The analysis carried out relies on a diverse range of research tools: text analysis, corpus study and personal communications with dubbing practitioners. The book describes the dubbing workflow and dubbing strategies in Italy and seeks to identify recurrent patterns and therefore norms, as well as stereotypes or creativity in the way multilingualism and linguistic variation are tackled. It will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, linguistic variation, film and media.
Go beyond Kurosawa and discover an up-to-date and rigorous examination of historical and modern Japanese cinema In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, distinguished cinematic researcher David Desser delivers insightful new material on a fascinating subject, ranging from the introduction and exploration of under-appreciated directors, like Uchida Tomu and Yoshimura Kozaburo, to an appreciation of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema from the point of view of little-known stars and genres of the 1950s. This Companion includes new resources that deal in-depth with the issue of gender in Japanese cinema, including a sustained analysis of Kawase Naomi, arguably the most important female director in Japa...
A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a r...