Alexandra Heller-Nicholas – författare

Despite its association with the broadly disparaged rape-revenge category, Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 is today considered one of the most significant feminist cult films of the 1980s. Straddling mainstream, arthouse, and exploitation film contexts, Ms. 45 is a potent case study for cult film analysis. At its heart lies two figures: Ferrara himself, and the movie's star, the iconic Zoe Lund, who would further collaborate with Ferrara on later projects such as Bad Lieutenant. This book explores the entwining histories and contexts that led to Ms. 45's creation and helped establish its enduring legacy, particularly in terms of feminist cult film fandom, and the film's status as one of the most important, influential, and powerful rape-revenge films ever made.

The landscape of contemporary research is characterized by growing interdisciplinarity, and disciplinary boundaries are blurring faster than ever. Yet while interdisciplinary methods, and methodological innovation in general, are often presented as the ‘holy grail’ of research, there are few examples or discussions of their development and ‘behaviour’ in the field. This Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research presents a bold intervention by showcasing a diversity of stimulating approaches. Over 50 experienced researchers illustrate the challenges, but also the rewards of doing and representing interdisciplinary research through their own methodological developments. Featured projects cover a variety of scales and topics, from small art-science collaborations to the ‘big data’ of mass observations. Each section is dedicated to an aspect of data handling, from collection, classification, validation to communication to research audiences. Most importantly, Interdisciplinary Methods presents a distinctive approach through its focus on knowledge as process, defamiliarising and reworking familiar practices such as experimenting, archiving, observing, prototyping or translating.

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies.Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. It examines the diverse prehistory beyond Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), paying attention to the safety films of the 1960s, the snuff-fictions of the 1970s, and to television reality horror hoaxes and mockumentaries during the 1980s and 1990s in particular. It underscores the importance of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007), and considers YouTube's popular rise in sparking the subgenre's recent renaissance.

As one of the most globally recognisable instances of 20th century Eurohorror, Dario Argento's Suspiria (1976) is poetic, chaotic, and intriguing. The cult reputation of Argento's baroque nightmare is reflected in the critical praise it continues to receive almost 40 years after its original release, and it appears regularly on lists of the greatest horror films ever. For fans and critics alike, Suspiria is as mesmerising as it is impenetrable: the impact of Argento's notorious disinterest in matters of plot and characterisation combines with Suspiria's aggressive stylistic hyperactivity to render it a movie that needs to be experienced through the body as much as through emotion or the intellect. For its many fans, Suspiria is synonymous with European horror more broadly, and Argento himself is by far the most famous of all the Italian horror directors. If there was any doubt of his status as one of the great horror auteurs, Argento's international reputation was solidified well beyond the realms of cult fandom in the 1990s with retrospectives at both the American Museum of the Moving Image and the British Film Institute. This book considers the complex ways that Argento weaves together light, sound and cinema history to construct one of the most breathtaking horror movies of all time, a film as fascinating as it is ultimately unfathomable.

The landscape of contemporary research is characterized by growing interdisciplinarity, and disciplinary boundaries are blurring faster than ever. Yet while interdisciplinary methods, and methodological innovation in general, are often presented as the ‘holy grail’ of research, there are few examples or discussions of their development and ‘behaviour’ in the field. This Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research presents a bold intervention by showcasing a diversity of stimulating approaches. Over 50 experienced researchers illustrate the challenges, but also the rewards of doing and representing interdisciplinary research through their own methodological developments. Featured projects cover a variety of scales and topics, from small art-science collaborations to the ‘big data’ of mass observations. Each section is dedicated to an aspect of data handling, from collection, classification, validation to communication to research audiences. Most importantly, Interdisciplinary Methods presents a distinctive approach through its focus on knowledge as process, defamiliarising and reworking familiar practices such as experimenting, archiving, observing, prototyping or translating.

Spanning from obscurity to notoriety, the films of director, screenwriter, actor and comic Elaine May have recently experienced a long-overdue renaissance. Although she made only four films — A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) — and never reached the level of acclaim of her frequent collaborator Mike Nichols, May’s work is as enigmatic, sophisticated and unceasingly fascinating as her own complicated, reluctant star persona. This collection focuses both on the films she has directed, and also emphasises her work with other high profile collaborators such as John Cassavetes, Warren Beatty and Otto Preminger.

Spanning from obscurity to notoriety, the films of director, screenwriter, actor and comic Elaine May have recently experienced a long-overdue renaissance. Although she made only four films — A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) — and never reached the level of acclaim of her frequent collaborator Mike Nichols, May’s work is as enigmatic, sophisticated and unceasingly fascinating as her own complicated, reluctant star persona. This collection focuses both on the films she has directed, and also emphasises her work with other high profile collaborators such as John Cassavetes, Warren Beatty and Otto Preminger.

Beloved among cult horror devotees for its signature excesses of sex and violence, Italian giallo cinema is marked by switchblades, mysterious killers, whisky bottles and poetically overinflated titles. A growing field of English-language giallo studies has focused on aspects of production, distribution and reception. This volume explores an overlooked yet prevalent element in some of the best known gialli--an obsession with art and artists in creative production, with a particular focus on painting. The author explores the appearance and significance of art objects across the masterworks of such filmmakers as Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi, Michele Soavi, Mario Bava and his son Lamberto.

Often considered the lowest depth to which cinema can plummet, the rape-revenge film is broadly dismissed as fundamentally exploitative and sensational, catering only to a demented, regressive demographic. This second edition, ten years after the first, continues the assessment of these films and the discourse they provoke. Included is a new chapter about women-directed rape-revenge films, a phenomenon that--revitalized since #MeToo exploded in late 2017--is a filmmaking tradition with a history that transcends a contemporary context.Featuring both famous and unknown movies, controversial and widely celebrated filmmakers, as well as rape-revenge cinema from around the world, this revised edition demonstrates that diverse and often contradictory treatments of sexual violence exist simultaneously.