Mark Gallagher – författare

How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh’s career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate.Gallagher investigates Soderbergh’s work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant!, as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh’s role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.

Honourable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS Publication Awards 2022Sheldon Lu's wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu’s analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists' representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.

Honourable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS Publication Awards 2022Sheldon Lu's wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu’s analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists' representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.

Runner-up for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2026 Award for Best First Monograph.Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China explores the dynamic networks of art cinema in China in the 21st century, highlighting the cultural practices of intermediaries such as independent programmers, internet critics, and fan translators.Offering insights gleaned from original ethnographic research, Xiang Fan reveals how these intermediary practitioners think about cinema, negotiate judgement and appreciation, construct a discourse of value and taste, and most importantly, constitute a coordinated and interrelated network for the sharing of art cinema. Fan argues that although their motivation was derived from a cinephilia seeking to forge an alternative mode of distribution and reception, the ‘new’ cinema culture they have produced simultaneously negotiates a subtly complicit relationship with authoritative and market forces. In doing so, she offers an original interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary art cinema culture in Chinese society.

Runner-up for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2026 Award for Best First Monograph.Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China explores the dynamic networks of art cinema in China in the 21st century, highlighting the cultural practices of intermediaries such as independent programmers, internet critics, and fan translators.Offering insights gleaned from original ethnographic research, Xiang Fan reveals how these intermediary practitioners think about cinema, negotiate judgement and appreciation, construct a discourse of value and taste, and most importantly, constitute a coordinated and interrelated network for the sharing of art cinema. Fan argues that although their motivation was derived from a cinephilia seeking to forge an alternative mode of distribution and reception, the ‘new’ cinema culture they have produced simultaneously negotiates a subtly complicit relationship with authoritative and market forces. In doing so, she offers an original interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary art cinema culture in Chinese society.

This study examines the production of popular Chinese reality television, complemented by interviews with a broad range of practitioners including newcomers, contractors, and migrant workers, all of whom form the industry's backbone.Tianyu Zhang draws on first hand experiences across six television productions, providing exclusive insights into institutional dynamics and interpersonal relationships. She examines popular television series like Win the Bill (2013-) and Waiting For Me (2014-), uncovering concealed narratives of precarious production that shape Chinese television.She goes on to examine regulations impacting the broader labour market, including unsupportive national policies, social welfare systems, unhealthy work values, and the absence of trade unions, considering how these impact the television industry. Spanning a spectrum of media landscapes, from state-owned giants like China Central Television (CCTV) to provincial outlets and independent production houses, this comprehensive study captures the essence of Chinese reality TV production.

Have you ever wondered what has made Mercedes the undisputed kings of Formula One? Do you want to know how Lewis Hamilton has managed to exceed legendary driver Michael Schumacher's record of winning races? And most of all, do you want to find out how to inject that winning streak to your business strategy?In this riveting insider's account of nearly 40 years in the Formula One industry, Mark Gallagher explains what it takes to succeed in a competitive business with high technology, high finance and immensely high stakes. Like any global business, Formula One demands the best from its people. To thrive within it requires impeccable leadership and communications skills. You also need to bring in the ability to design, manufacture, develop and launch a constantly improving high-technology product, constantly working to immoveable deadlines with an immense supply chain and tight regulations.The Business of Winning sets out a one-stop management guide for business leaders keen to emulate this high-speed, high-impact approach to business. This entirely revised new edition unveils how Formula One is using new technologies to finesse the most minute of details, whilst reaching new audiences, playing its part in sustainability with the aim of being carbon neutral by 2030 and showing the way to diversity and inclusion.

Have you ever wondered what has made Mercedes the undisputed kings of Formula One? Do you want to know how Lewis Hamilton has managed to exceed legendary driver Michael Schumacher's record of winning races? And most of all, do you want to find out how to inject that winning streak to your business strategy?In this riveting insider's account of nearly 40 years in the Formula One industry, Mark Gallagher explains what it takes to succeed in a competitive business with high technology, high finance and immensely high stakes. Like any global business, Formula One demands the best from its people. To thrive within it requires impeccable leadership and communications skills. You also need to bring in the ability to design, manufacture, develop and launch a constantly improving high-technology product, constantly working to immoveable deadlines with an immense supply chain and tight regulations.The Business of Winning sets out a one-stop management guide for business leaders keen to emulate this high-speed, high-impact approach to business. This entirely revised new edition unveils how Formula One is using new technologies to finesse the most minute of details, whilst reaching new audiences, playing its part in sustainability with the aim of being carbon neutral by 2030 and showing the way to diversity and inclusion.

An examination of male screen sex appeal and the ways that race, ethnicity, and national origin combine with performance tools and film and television style to aid or inhibit actors’ circulation on an increasingly global stage.Sex appeal is complicated, especially for screen actors. Looking good is not enough. Charisma and charm have to register when the camera rolls. And sexiness has to travel. Today’s heartthrobs are expected to raise temperatures all around the world. Cosmosexuals theorizes male sex appeal as a form of capital in an age of international stardom. Screen scholar Mark Gallagher assembles a diverse cast - Idris Elba, Pedro Pascal, Simu Liu, Ryan Gosling, and more-analyzing how each actor uses his appearance, voice, and movement to perform in ways that viewers across cultural divides register as sexually appealing. Cosmosexuals also explores the intersection of global sex appeal and exoticism in historical and contemporary contexts-from the malleable racial identities of Omar Sharif and Conrad Veidt to Mads Mikkelsen’s “accented whiteness”-and assesses the barriers that confine nonwhite actors, in spite of their talent or celebrity. Far more than handsome faces and chiseled abs, male sex symbols emerge as laborers subject to disciplinary regimes steeped in patriarchy, racism, and structural inequity. As such, they have much to tell us about the economies of taste at work in the construction of screen masculinity and the terms of human desire.

Film noir has been understood as a genre exclusive to Hollywood. But classical US noir’s downbeat sensibility also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and greater China (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan that have both participated in and been excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic, past and present. Noir is a form of generic expression, an international filmic sensibility and a discourse loosely joining innumerable texts and a range of production and reception phenomena. However defined and categorized, the genre offers a compelling frame through which to view individual works, looming political and cultural contexts, film industry and reception activity, and wider circuits and frictions of global screen-media flow. This anthology looks at a range of East Asian films from the 1950s to the present – including The Crimson Kimono, Brother, Ghost in the Shell, Nowhere to Hide, Duelist­ and Rebels of the Neon God - that have been explicitly framed as film noir or East Asian noir, or that acquire legibility as noir texts through reception discourse and other critical activity. Contributors look at historical and contemporary cases to understand the terms on which national, regional and transnational cinemas conceive artistic expression. Their conceptualization and articulation of an internationally situated ‘East Asian film noir’ helps raise questions around the politics of representation, authorial activity, generic and modal positioning and local and cross-cultural reception.

Film noir has been understood as a genre exclusive to Hollywood. But classical US noir's downbeat sensibility also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and China (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan, that have both participated in and been excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic, past and present. East Asian Film Noir is the first book to explore these films and the filmmakers who made them. Looking at a range of examples from the 1950s to the present - including The Crimson Kimono, Brother, Ghost in the Shell, Nowhere to Hide, Duelist- and Rebels of the Neon God - this work conceptualizes and articulates an internationally situated 'East Asian film noir'. In doing so, it raises fascinating questions around the politics of representation, authorial activity, genre and local and cross-cultural reception.