Contemporary Cinema – serie

In The Cinema of Catherine Breillat, Bélot offers a detailed analysis of Breillat’s past and recent films. Breillat is one of the most internationally renowned French women filmmakers whose notoriety is built on her explicit representation of women’s sexuality. Most of her films rely on a female protagonist’s personal and intimate search of her self, characterised by her sexual journey. Facing censorship and controversy, Breillat’s films do not easily fit classification and place the viewer into an uncomfortable position. This study looks at Breillat as an independent cinema auteur entertaining a close relation with her films by exploring and positing women, from adolescence to adulthood, as sexual beings reflecting her films’ identity emanating from Breillat’s personal or intimate scenes.

Film festivals around the world are in the business of making experiences for audiences, elites, industry, professionals, and even future cultural workers. Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism explains why these non-profit organizations work as they do: by attracting people who work for free, while appealing to businesses and policymakers as a cheap means to illuminate the creative city and draw attention to film art. Ann Vogel’s unprecedented systematic sociological analysis thus provides firm evidence for the ‘festival effect’, which situates the festival as a key intermediary in cinema value chains, yet also demonstrates the impact of such event culture on cultural workers’ lives. By probing the various resources and institutional pillars ensuring that the festivalization of capitalism is here to stay, Vogel urges us to think critically about publicly displayed benevolence in the context of cinema—and beyond.

The film District 9 made waves as an allegory of apartheid on the big screen, but it has not yet been given its rightful place as a landmark depiction within broader visual cultural studies of Johannesburg and cities in the Global South. In this book, Landi Raubenheimer argues that District 9’s portrayal of Johannesburg reverberates within a larger body of representations of the city, collectively shaping a unique visual ‘idiom’ for the post-apartheid city as nostalgic dystopia. Delving deeply into District 9, Raubenheimer brings to light the fascination that images of the city as nostalgic dystopia has held for filmmakers, photographers, viewers, and lovers of Johannesburg alike.

A panoramic history of one of India’s greatest pastimes, Bollywood, through the lens of that nation’s distinct brand of secularism. Sheila Nayar provides readers an accessible overview of the vast, fluid complex that is Bollywood, including the off-screen politics often driving that complex, by chronicling how religious pluralism has been cinematically conceived, negotiated, played into, and politicized.From the silent films of the colonial period to the slick blockbusters in the era of globalization and Hindutva, Nayar exposes the strategies that have gone into reflecting India’s "unity in diversity" and the threats recurrently embattling that constitutionally enshrined principle. If cinema is the barometer of popular attitudes in India, what better to measure the public’s commitment to its characteristic brand of secularism? In this way, the book offers no less a compelling box-office history of Bollywood than a history of modern India through its films.

“The best way of being an artist is not to serve a particular art.” The film critic André Bazin believed artists create without boundaries in mind. Literary criticism should be no different. This book is a unique collection that critically reflects on the complex, non-unidirectional, and organic relationship between cinema, literature, photography, and the other arts.With essays by David Damrosch, Laura Marcus, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Maria Dabija, and Michael Makarovsky among others, this volume establishes a much needed dialogue between the fields of world literature and world cinema.

This is the first book-length study on the relationship between cinema and the classical elements. It centres on earth, fire, water and air to offer new perspectives on the intersection of film and the nonhuman in a time of climate emergency. Mobilising a range of analytical frameworks, including early film theory, Indigenous epistemologies and environmental sciences, the essays in this collection trace the complex agencies of the elements as they intersect with the material properties of the cinematic image across fiction, animation, documentary and experimental film. In doing so, the book positions elemental cinema as a multifaceted process and experience that might encompass attempts to think with, alongside or even ‘like’ the elemental, all the while recognising the limitations of our anthropocentric systems of meaning.

Theorizing Bruce Lee is a unique work, which uses cultural theory to analyse and assess Bruce Lee, and uses Bruce Lee to analyse and assess cultural theory. Lee is shown to be a major ‘event’ in both global film and global popular culture – a figure who’s central to many intercultural encounters, texts, and practices. Many key elements of film and cultural theory are employed to theorize Bruce Lee, and Lee is shown to be a complex – and consequential – multimedia, multidisciplinary and multicultural phenomenon. Theorizing Bruce Lee is essential reading for anyone interested in Bruce Lee in popular culture and as an object of academic study.