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This book offers a critical account of film performances by nonprofessional actors. Nonprofessional actors — actors without previous acting training or experience — have performed in films since the days of the Lumière brothers. Generally associated with currents such as Early Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism and New Argentine Cinema, nonprofessional actors also feature prominently in the works of celebrated directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson and Joanna Hogg. Since the turn of the century and the rise of digital filmmaking, the performances of nonprofessional actors have remained a staple of independent cinemas from all over the world, including films associated with the loose trend often referred to as Slow Cinema. Despite their enduring presence in acclaimed and widely discussed films, nonprofessional actors have received scant scholarly attention. This book proposes to analyse exemplary nonprofessional performances from across the history of cinema as a means of illuminating their significance and celebrating the performers’ contributions to the films.
This textbook explores practices, first-hand experiences and emerging ideas within organizational ethnography, providing a toolkit that prepares ethnographers for the uncertainties and realities of fieldworking. Students faced with the complexities of qualitative observational techniques and considerations, such as the scope of the research, the personal and professional intertwined life of the qualitative research or the decision of when to leave the field, will find the book an extremely useful, practical guide. A range of experiences from a variety of academics at different stages of their career, to highlight the differences in practices, approaches and encounters, are presented. The the...
Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including indiv...
The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction is a comprehensive overview of the topics, approaches, and trajectories in the anthropological study of human reproduction. The book brings together work from across the discipline of anthropology, with contributions by established and emerging scholars in archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural anthropology. Across these areas of research, consideration is given to the contexts, conditions, and contingencies that mark and shape the experiences of reproduction as always gendered, classed, and racialized. Over 39 chapters, a diverse range of international scholars cover topics including: Reproductive governance, stratif...
This BFI Film Classics study of Tokyo Monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953) reveals the making, meaning and legacy behind Ozu Yasujiro's masterpiece. Ozu's moving family drama is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of post-war Japan. Alastair Phillips provides an in-depth analysis of the film and its key locations - the city of Tokyo, the town of Onomichi and the coastal resort of Atami - with a discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he situates the film within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of Tokyo Story's long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.
Examines disorientation and confusion, and their theoretical implications, in contemporary narrative film.
Provides the first critical overview of acting, stardom, and performance in post-war Italian film (1945-54), with special attention to the figure of the non-professional actor, who looms large in neorealist filmmaking. Italian post-war cinema has been widely celebrated by critics and scholars: films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Paisan (Rossellini, 1946) remain globally influential, particularly for their use of non-professional actors. This period of regeneration of Italian cinema initiated the boom in cinemagoing that made cinema an important vector of national and gender identity for audiences. The book addresses the casting, performance, and labour of non-professional actors, particularly children, their cultural and economic value to cinema, and how their use brought ideas of the ordinary into the discourse of stars as extraordinary. Relatedly, O'Rawe discusses critical and press discourses around acting, performance, and stardom, often focused on the 'crisis' of acting connected to the rise of non-professionals and the girls (like Sophia Loren) who found sudden cinematic fame via beauty contests.
This book examines the Western genre in the period since Westerns ceased to be a regular feature of Hollywood filmmaking. For most of the 20th Century, the Western was a major American genre. The production of Westerns decreased in the 1960s and 1970s; by the 1980s, it was apparent that the genre occupied a less prominent position in popular culture. After an extended period as one of the most prolific Hollywood genres, the Western entered its “afterlife”. What does it now mean for a Hollywood movie to be a Western, and how does this compare to the ways in which the genre has been understood at other points in its history? This book considers the conditions in which the Western has found itself since the 1980s, the latter-day associations that the genre has acquired and the strategies that more recent Westerns have developed in response to their changed context.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Lack of progress in the area of global sustainable development and difficulties in crisis management highlight the need to transform the economy and find new ways of making society more resilient. The social economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of such transformations; it comprises traditional forms of cooperative or solidarity-based organizations alongside new phenomena such as impact investing or social tech ventures that aim to contribute to the public good. Social Economy Science provides the first comprehensive analysis of why and how social economy organizations create superior value for society. The book draws on organizational theory and transition studies to provide a systematic perspective on complex multi-stakeholder forms of action. It discusses the social economy's role in promoting innovation for impact, as well as its role as an agent of societal change and as a partner to businesses, governments, and citizens.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1997 psychological horror, Cure, follows a detective (played by Koji Yakusho) as he investigates a string of gruesome murders in Tokyo, where each victim has an 'X' carved into their neck. Dominic Lash provides an in-depth analysis of Cure's themes, generic conventions, cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, sound, and legacy. In examining the film's aesthetics he highlights the unique way in which it balances meticulous precision with a persistent and purposeful ambiguity. Lash goes on to situate Cure within its various contexts; firstly, as Kurosawa's 'breakthrough' film following a decade of mostly straight-to-video work and then its position in relation to the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through a close reading of Cure's key scenes, particularly its final scene, Lash analyses the motivations behind Kurosawa's resistance to a definitive resolution. He argues that, just like its hypnotist antagonist, Mamiya, Cure unsettles some of our basic psychological assumptions. In doing so, he attempts to understand what it is about the film that lingers so disturbingly, long after the credits have rolled.