Australian Genre Film interrogates key genres at the core of Australia’s so-called new golden age of genre cinema, establishing the foundation on which more sustained research on film genre in Australian cinema can develop. The book examines what characterises Australian cinema and its output in this new golden age, as contributors ask to what extent Australian genre film draws on widely understood (and largely Hollywood-based) conventions, as compared to culturally specific conventions of genre storytelling. As such, this book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Australian genre film, undertaken through original analyses of 13 significant Australian genres: action, biopics, comedy, crime, horror, musical, road movie, romance, science fiction, teen, thriller, war, and the Western. This book will be a cornerstone work for the burgeoning field of Australian film genre studies and a must-read for academics; researchers; undergraduate students; postgraduate students; and general readers interested in film studies, media studies, cultural studies, Australian studies, and sociology.

Undergraduate Research in Film: A Guide for Students supplies tools for building research skills, with examples of undergraduate research activities and case studies on projects in the various areas in the study of film, film theory, film production, history of film, and interdisciplinary projects. Professors and students can use it as a text and/or a reference book. Essentially, what makes this volume unique is that it brings together examples of film projects and film studies courses within the framework of research skills. Following an overview chapter, the next seven chapters cover research skills including writing literature reviews, choosing topics and formulating questions,working with human subjects, collecting and analyzing data, citing sources and disseminating results. A wide variety of sub-disciplines follow in chapters 9-16 with sample project ideas from each, as well as undergraduate research conference abstracts. The final chapter is an annotated guide to online resources. All chapters begin with inspiring quotations and end with relevant discussion questions.

Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.

Here be Kraken! The Squid Cinema From Hell draws upon writers like Vilem Flusser, Donna J. Haraway, Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker to offer up a critical analysis of cephalopods and other tentacular creatures in contemporary media, while also speculating that digital media might themselves constitute a weird, intelligent alien. If this were not enough to shiver ye timbers, the book engages with contemporary discourses of posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and animal studies to suggest that humans are the products of media rather than media being the products of humans. Including case studies of films by Denis Villeneuve, Park Chan-wook and Celine Sciamma, The Squid Cinema From Hell also provides a daring engagement with various media beyond cinema, including literature, music videos, 4DX, advertising, websites, YouTube, Artificial Intelligence and more. Zounds! This unique and Lovecraftian book will change the way you think about, and with, our contemporary, media-saturated world. For as we contemplate the abyss, the abyss looks back at us - and chthulumedia, or media at the end of human times, begin to emerge.

The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry is a completely revised and updated edition of Anthony Slide's The American Film Industry, originally published in 1986 and recipient of the American Library Association's Outstanding Reference Book award for that year. More than 200 new entries have been added, and all original entries have been updated; each entry is followed by a short bibliography. As its predecessor, the new dictionary is unique in that it is not a who's who of the industry, but rather a what's what: a dictionary of producing and releasing companies, technical innovations, industry terms, studios, genres, color systems, institutions and organizations, etc. More than 800 entries include everything from Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to Zoom Lens, from Astoria Studios to Zoetrope. Outstanding Reference Source - American Library Association

From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.

The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliographic resources available to students and scholars of Japanese cinema. Among the nations of the world, Japan has enjoyed an impressively lively print culture related to cinema. The first film books and periodicals appeared shortly after the birth of cinema, proliferating wildly in the 1910s with only the slightest pause in the dark days of World War II. The numbers of publications match the enormous scale of film production, but with the lack of support for film studies in Japan, much of it remains as uncharted territory, with few maps to negotiate the maze of material. This book is the first comprehensive guide ever published for approaching the complex archive for Japanese cinema. It lists all the libraries and film archives in the world with significant collections of film prints, still photographs, archival records, books, and periodicals. It provides a full annotated bibliography of the core books and magazines for the field. And it supplies hints for how to find and access materials for any research project. Above and beyond that, Nornes and Gerow’s Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies constitutes a comprehensive overview of the impressive dimensions and depth of the print culture surrounding Japanese film, and a guideline for future research in the field. This is an essential book for anyone seriously thinking about Japan and its cinema.