Cynthia Lucia – författare

As real women increasingly entered the professions from the 1970s onward, their cinematic counterparts followed suit. Women lawyers, in particular, were the protagonists of many Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era, serving as a kind of shorthand reference any time a script needed a powerful career woman. Yet a close viewing of these films reveals contradictions and anxieties that belie the films' apparent acceptance of women's professional roles. In film after film, the woman lawyer herself effectively ends up "on trial" for violating norms of femininity and patriarchal authority. In this book, Cynthia Lucia offers a sustained analysis of women lawyer films as a genre and as a site where other genres including film noir, maternal melodrama, thrillers, action romance, and romantic comedy intersect. She traces Hollywood representations of female lawyers through close readings of films from the 1949 Adam's Rib through films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jagged Edge, The Accused, and The Client, among others. She also examines several key male lawyer films and two independent films, Lizzie Borden's Love Crimes and Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lucia convincingly demonstrates that making movies about women lawyers and the law provides unusually fertile ground for exploring patriarchy in crisis. This, she argues, is the cultural stimulus that prompts filmmakers to create stories about powerful women that simultaneously question and undermine women's right to wield authority.

From the American underground film to the blockbuster superhero, this authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the core issues and developments in American cinematic history during the second half of the twentieth-century through the present day. Considers essential subjects that have shaped the American film industry—from the impact of television and CGI to the rise of independent and underground film; from the impact of the civil rights, feminist and LGBT movements to that of 9/11.Features a student-friendly structure dividing coverage into the periods 1960-1975, 1976-1990, and 1991 to the present day, each of which opens with an historical overviewBrings together a rich and varied selection of contributions by established film scholars, combining broad historical, social, and political contexts with detailed analysis of individual films, including Midnight Cowboy, Nashville, Cat Ballou, Chicago, Back to the Future, Killer of Sheep, Daughters of the Dust, Nothing But a Man, Ali, Easy Rider, The Conversation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Longtime Companion, The Matrix, The War Tapes, the Batman films, and selected avant-garde and documentary films, among many others.Additional online resources, such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies, for both general and specialized courses, will be available online.May be used alongside American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960 to provide an authoritative study of American cinema from its earliest days through the new millennium

This authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the rich and innovative history of this period in American cinema. Spanning an essential range of subjects from the early 1900s Nickelodeon to the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, it combines a broad historical context with careful readings of individual films. Charts the rise of film in early twentieth-century America from its origins to 1960, exploring mainstream trends and developments, along with topics often relegated to the margins of standard film historiesCovers diverse issues ranging from silent film and its iconic figures such as Charlie Chaplin, to the coming of sound and the rise of film genres, studio moguls, and, later, the Production Code and Cold War BlacklistDesigned with both students and scholars in mind: each section opens with an historical overview and includes chapters that provide close, careful readings of individual films clustered around specific topicsAccessibly structured by historical period, offering valuable cultural, social, and political contextsContains careful, close analysis of key filmmakers and films from the era including D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Scarface, Red Dust, Glorifying the American Girl, Meet Me in St. Louis, Citizen Kane, Bambi, Frank Capra's Why We Fightseries, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Rebel Without a Cause, Force of Evil, and selected American avant-garde and underground films, among many others.Additional online resources such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies for both general specialized courses, will be available online.May be used alongside American Film History: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, to provide an authoritative study of American cinema through the new millennium

Comprising over 90 essays and richly illustrated with over 200 images, the Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film provides a chronological portrait of American film history from its origins to the present day.Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection represent a comprehensive and nuanced overview of American film history from the intersecting perspectives of industry, audiences, aesthetics, culture, politics, issues, and ideology.Unabashedly ambitious, deeply historical, and unprecedented in its multi-faceted examination of film history, this collection offers you: Over 90 original essays written by an international cast of film scholars  Discussions of the industrial and institutional components of film history, including multiple modes of production, distribution, and marketingInvestigations into the political, social, and economic factors that informed industry change and framed the reception of filmsEngaging close readings and in-depth analysis of canonical and non-canonical filmsProfiles of essential industry figures - major directors, stars, and producers - along with important figures outside the industrial mainstreamAn exploration of the history of film criticism and culture, and central issues in American film historiographyThe most authoritative collection of fresh investigations available in one state-of-the-art resourceSelected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized film criticism, programming, and preservation in deeply paradoxical ways. The Internet allows almost everyone to participate in critical discourse, but many print publications and salaried positions for professional film critics have been eliminated. Digital technologies have broadened access to filmmaking capabilities, as well as making thousands of older films available on DVD and electronically. At the same time, however, fewer older films can be viewed in their original celluloid format, and newer, digitally produced films that have no “material” prototype are threatened by ever-changing servers that render them obsolete and inaccessible.Cineaste, one of the oldest and most influential publications focusing on film, has investigated these trends through a series of symposia with the top film critics, programmers, and preservationists in the United States and beyond. This volume compiles several of these symposia: “Film Criticism in America Today” (2000), “International Film Criticism Today” (2005), “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” (2008), “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” (2013), “The Art of Repertory Film Exhibition and Digital Age Challenges” (2010), and “Film Preservation in the Digital Age” (2011). It also includes interviews with the late, celebrated New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and the critic John Bloom (“Joe Bob Briggs”), as well as interviews with the programmers/curators Peter von Bagh and Mark Cousins and with the film preservationist George Feltenstein. This authoritative collection of primary-source documents will be essential reading for scholars, students, and film enthusiasts.