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Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.

This book is devoted to the multifaceted career of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), who is regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the history of film and radio. It examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theatre, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. It details how Roxy built an influential and prolific career as a film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theatre manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. It relates key aspects of his career: how he helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and movie going become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The book highlights how showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the movie-going experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theatre into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. It explains how Roxy's interest in media convergence also reflected a larger movement in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises and exploit them through content release “events”.

This book provides an in-depth understanding of Bruce Lee and examines the artist from both a cultural and historical perspective. The work begins by contextualizing Lee, examining his films and martial arts work, and his changing cultural status within different times and places. It then examines Bruce Lee's films and philosophy in relation to the popular culture and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s. It also addresses the resurgence of his popularity in Hong Kong and China in the twenty-first century. The study also explores Lee's ongoing legacy and influence in the West, considers his function as a shifting symbol of ethnic politics and examines the ways in which he continues to inform film-fight choreography in Hollywood. Ultimately the book argues that Lee is best understood in terms of “cultural translation” and that his interventions and importance are ongoing.

This book offers a series of case studies that throw light on the type of films that are collectively known as bio-pics. It asks whether the bio-pic is a genre in its own right, or whether such films are merely footnotes to other more traditional genres such as western or costume dramas. It shows how bio-pics, unlike other genre forms, seem to share no familiar iconography, codes, or conventions. They can be set anywhere and at any time. It argues that what links them is, quite simply, the fact that the films depict the life of an “important” person. Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked (English-language) bio-pics released since 1990, this book explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, narrative structure and production. It also looks at the issue of subject representation or misrepresentation in bio-pics and the critical response these type of films have engendered. The films under discussion are grouped around a number of professions (writers, singers, politicians, sportsmen, criminals, artists). This allows for comparisons to be drawn about the way in which similar subject matter is approached.

This book analyzes the role of popular blockbuster films made by Bollywood in the making, unmaking and remaking of modern India. It explains that Bollywood films are India’s most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. It argues that Bollywood’s blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation’s dispersed anxieties and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes “India.” The book provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. It covers themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community, and shows how these capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. It reveals the cinema’s social impact across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-star genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. It includes studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009). Overall it conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film’s psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media’s sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public’s understanding of the modern prison.

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This book considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs and Documenteur (1980–1981), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.

Aki Kaurismäki is an enigma, an eminent auteur who claims his films are a joke. Since 1983, Kaurismäki has produced classically styled films filled with cinephilic references to film history. He has earned an international art-house audience and many prizes, influencing such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Yet Kaurismäki is often depicted as the loneliest, most nostalgic of Finns (except when he promotes his films, makes political statements, and runs his many businesses). He is also depicted as a bohemian known for outlandish actions and statements. This book is a first English-language study of this eccentric director. Drawing on revisionist approaches to film authorship, the text links the filmmaker and his films to the stories and issues animating film aesthetics and history, nostalgia, late modernity, politics, commerce, film festivals, and national cinema.

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and also identifies in them a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity, alongside a pattern of tensions and paradoxes. This book offers new keys to understand the lasting and ever-renewed appeal of the Russian director's Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema—a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.

Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability to work with complete artistic freedom whether inside or outside of Hollywood, and two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has won astounding critical acclaim for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which transformed the status of martial arts films across the globe, Brokeback Mountain (2005), which challenged the reception and presentation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema, and Life of Pi (2012), Lee's first use of groundbreaking 3D technology and his first foray into complex spiritual themes. This book analyzes all of his career to date: Lee's early Chinese trilogy films (including The Wedding Banquet, 1993, and Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), blockbusters (Hulk, 2003), and intimate portraits of wartime psychology, from the Confederate side of the Civil War (Ride with the Devil, 1999) to Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust/Caution, 2007). It examines Lee's favored themes such as father–son relationships and intergenerational conflict in The Ice Storm (1997) and Taking Woodstock (2007). By looking at the beginnings of Lee's career, the book positions the filmmaker's work within the roots of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, as well as the larger context of world cinema.

This book is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Béla Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. The book traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a conscious and meticulous recombination of and experimentation with these elements, Tarr arrived at his unique style. The significance of these films is that, beyond their aesthetic and historical value, they provide the most powerful vision of an entire region and its historical situation. Tarr's films express, in their universalistic language, the shared feelings of millions of Eastern Europeans.

He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. Measured by longevity, productivity, and profits, Clint Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. This book examines the major elements of his career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but also exploring the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz, and the political views—sometimes hotly controversial—reflected in his films and public statements. Especially fascinating is the pivotal question that divides critics and moviegoers to this day: is Eastwood a capable director with a photogenic face, a modest acting talent, and a flair for marketing his image? Or is he a true cinematic auteur with a distinctive vision of America's history, traditions, and values? From A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby and beyond, this book takes a close-up look at one of the screen's most influential and charismatic stars.

In placing George A. Romero's oeuvre in the context of literary naturalism, this book explores the relevance of the director's films within American cultural traditions and thus explains the potency of such work beyond “splatter movie” models. The book explores the roots of naturalism in the work of Emile Zola and traces this through to the EC Comics of the 1950s and on to the work of Stephen King. In so doing, the book illuminates the importance of seminal Romero texts such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Creepshow (1982), Monkey Shines (1988), and The Dark Half (1992). This study also includes full coverage of Romero's latest feature, Bruiser (2000), as well as his screenplays and teleplays.

István Szabó is one of Hungary's most celebrated and best-known film directors, and the only Hungarian to have won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for Mephisto (1981). In a career spanning over five decades Szabó has relentlessly examined the place of the individual in European history, particularly those caught up in the turbulent events of Central Europe and his own native Hungary. His protagonists struggle to find a place for themselves, some meaning in their lives, security and a sense of being, against a background of two world wars (Colonel Redl, Confidence), the Holocaust (Sunshine), the Hungarian Uprising and the Cold War (Father, 25 Fireman's Street, Taking Sides). This is the first English-language study of all his feature films and uses material from interviews with Szabó and his collaborators. Also included are chapters on his formative years, including his time at the famous Budapest Film Academy and the relationship of the state to the film industry in Hungary.

This book explores the massively popular cinema of writer-director James Cameron. It couches Cameron's films within the evolving generic traditions of science fiction, melodrama, and the cinema of spectacle. The book also considers Cameron's engagement with the aesthetic of visual effects and the ‘now’ technology of performance-capture which is arguably moving a certain kind of event-movie cinema from photography to something more akin to painting. The book is explicit in presenting Cameron as an authentic auteur, and each chapter is dedicated to a single film in his body of work, from The Terminator to Avatar. Space is also given to discussion of Strange Days as well as his short films and documentary works.

Michael Mann is one of the most important American filmmakers of the past forty years. His films exhibit the existential concerns of art cinema, articulated through a conspicuous and recognizable visual style and yet integrated within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Since his beginnings as a screenwriter in the 1970s, Mann has become a key figure within contemporary American popular culture as writer, director, and producer for film and television. This book offers a detailed study of Mann's feature films, from The Jericho Mile (1979) to Public Enemies (2009), with consideration also being given to parallels in the production, style, and characterization in his television work. It explores Mann's relationship with classical genres, his thematic concentration on issues of morality and masculinity, his film adaptations from literature, and the development and significance of his trademark visual style within modern American cinema.

This study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. It undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centred on Winterbottom’s collaborative working practices, political and cultural contexts, and critical reception. Arguing that his work delineates a ‘cinema of borders’, the book examines Winterbottom’s treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and national and international politics, as well as his quest to adequately narrate inequality, injustice, and violence.

Raúl Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work. This book sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget “European” costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work—with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources—as a type of “impossible” cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.

From Slacker (1991) to The School of Rock (2003), from Before Sunrise (1995) to Before Sunset (2004), from the walking and talking of his no/low-budget American independent films to conversing with the philosophical traditions of the European art house, Richard Linklater's films are some of the most critical, political, and spiritual achievements of contemporary world cinema. Examinations of Linklater's collaborative working practices and deployment of rotoscoping and innovative distribution strategies all feature in this book, which aspires to walk and talk with the filmmaker and his films. Informed by a series of original interviews with the artist, in both his hometown and frequent film location of Austin, Texas, this study of the director who made Dazed and Confused (1993), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Bernie (2011) explores the theoretical, practical, contextual, and metaphysical elements of these works along with his documentaries and side-projects and finds fanciful lives and lucid dreams have as much to do with his work as generally alternative notions of America, contemporary society, cinema, and time.

The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme D'Or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This book considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analysing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.