This series delves into the intricate relationship between cinema and societal structures. Each volume explores how films reflect, shape, and critique our world. It offers profound insights into the ways visual media influences our understanding of history, culture, and identity. This is essential reading for anyone interested in film studies and the social sciences.
This is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Nazi film propaganda in its political, social, and economic contexts, from the pre-war cinema as it fell under the control of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, through to the end of the Second World War. David Welch studies more than one hundred films of all types, identifying those aspects of Nazi ideology that were concealed in the framework of popular entertainment.
Over 400 Spaghetti Westerns were produced during the 1960s and 1970s peak period. This book deals with several interesting examples, not to mention French, German, and Russian Westerns along the way.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a range of films, from The Spy in Black and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. This book looks at these classic films to explore their complex relationship to national identity, and their interest in exile, borderlands, utopias, escapism, art and fantasy.
At the outbreak of the WWII, all cinemas in Britain were closed. Ten days later, they were opened again as a way of boosting morale. Over the next six years, some 300 feature films and thousands of short films were produced in what is seen as British cinema's 'finest hour'. This work charts this period through the eyes of thirteen key films.
The Hollywood family film is one of the most popular, commercially-successful and culturally significant forms of mass entertainment. This book provides the history of the Hollywood family film, tracing its development from its beginnings in the 1930s to its global box-office dominance today.
Follows Bond from the 1962 'Dr No', through the subsequent Bond films, exploring them within the culture and politics of the times, as well as within film culture itself. This work provides coverage of Brosnan as Bond in The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day; and includes a chapter on Casino Royale and Daniel Craig's new-look Bond.
Focusing on the 1950s when Hollywood's interest in the past was at its peak, this book reconstructs how filmmakers understood their treatment of the past, suggesting why many of them saw their work as superior to that of professional historians. It explains how and why Hollywood blurs the boundaries between fiction and historical reality.
Looking closely at the issues that they present, from gender, class and ethnicity to militarism and imperialism, he also discusses controversies over historical accuracy, and the ways in which devices such as voice overs, title captions, and visual references to photographs and paintings assert a sense of historical.