A ground-breaking comparative analysis of cinematic images of atrocity, combining critical perspectives on contemporary film and human rights.A few days after 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney invoked the need for the USA to work 'the dark side' in its global 'War on Terror'. Cinema of the Dark Side explores how contemporary cinema treats state-sponsored atrocity, evoking multiple landscapes of state terror. Investigating the ethical potential of cinematic atrocity images, this book argues that while films help to create and confirm normative perceptions about atrocities, they can also disrupt those perceptions and build alternative ones. Asserting a crucial distinction between morality and ethics, it proposes a new conceptualisation of human rights cinema, one that repositions human rights morality within an ethical framework that reflects upon the causes and contexts of violence. It builds upon theories of embodied perception to offer a new perspective on the ethics of spectatorship, providing readers with fresh insights into how we respond to atrocity images and the ethical issues at stake.Covering a diverse spectrum of 21st century cinema, this book deals with documentary and fictional representations of atrocity such as state-sanctioned torture, genocide, enforced disappearance, deportation, and apartheid. It features close analysis of contemporary films, including Zero Dark Thirty, Standard Operating Procedure, Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April, Nostalgia for the Light, Chronicle of an Escape, Children of Men, District 9, Waltz With Bashir, and Paradise Now.

Hollywood's representation of blacks has been consistently misleading, promoting an artificially constructed mythology in place of historical fact. But how, James Snead asks, did black skin on screen develop into a complex code for various types of white supremacist discourse? In these essays, completed shortly before his death in 1989, James Snead offers a thoughtful inquiry into the intricate modes of racial coding in Hollywood cinema from 1915 to 1985. Snead presents three major methods through which the racist ideology within film functions: mythification, in which black images are correlated in a larger sceme of semiotic valuation where the dominant I needs the marginal other in order to function effectively; marking, in which the color black is repeatedly over-determined and redundantly marked, as if to force the viewer to register the image's difference from white; and omission--the repetition of black absence from positions of autonomy and importance. White Screens/Black Images offers an array of film texts, drawn from both classical Hollywood cinema and black independent film culture. Individual chapters analyze Birth of a Nation , King Kong , Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel , Mae West in I'm No Angel , Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus , Bette Davis in Jezebel , the racism of Disney's Song of the South , and Taxi Driver . Making skillful use of developments in both structuralist and post-structuralist film theory, Snead's work speaks not only to the centrality of race in Hollywood films, but to its centrality in the formation of modern American culture.

Foster Hirsch's Dark Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.

Foster Hirsch's Dark Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.

Why might interdependence, the idea that we are made up of our relations, be horrifying? Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence argues that philosophy can outline the contours of dark specter of interdependence and that film can shine a light on its shadowy details, together revealing a horror of relations. The contributors interrogate the question of interdependence through analyses of contemporary film, giving voice to new perspectives on its meaning. Conceived before and written during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and through a period of deep social unrest, this volume reveals a reality both perennial and timely.

We are no longer used to critically examining the meaning of “design”, which maintains an unexplored dimension in terms of the Power that can be exercised through the cyclic act of creation, preservation and disruption. This assumption induce us focus on the contrast between the “visible” side of the act that involves all its conceptual and practical manifestations, and a hidden or “dark” side that deals with politics and power play, but that however has an major influence in the process and its hierarchical dynamics. This implies an order on the surface seems to be naturally stirred by the so-called “perceptions” that reflect the preferences of overall public opinions: however, looking deeper, all the production acts involves a carefully controlled disequillibrium influenced by social, ecological, economical and political interests. The power fl ow in the act of “design” takes into consideration the paradoxical contradiction between its potentiality and its preservation of power.

This book brings together various different analyses of the Star Wars movies, each of which approaches the films from a different point of view, such as history, music, advertisement, new media, ideology, economics, politics, and narration. The book will appeal to various audiences, from high school students to academicians, and from university students to fans of the Star Wars franchise.