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This volume brings together leading scholars from a number of disciplines - film studies, literature, philosophy - in order to focus on some of the key historical and conceptual issues associated with Dogme 95's original formulation.

The core volume in the Traditions in World Cinema series, this book brings together a colourful and wide-ranging collection of world cinematic traditions - national, regional and global - all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi.

Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer’s physical response and more with generating information flow, awe, disorientation, and the disintegration of spatial boundaries. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time. Films discussed include Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), The Matrix (1999), and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film The Celebration (1998).

They obsess over the nuances of a Douglas Sirk or Ingmar Bergman film; they revel in books such as François Truffaut's Hitchcock; they happily subscribe to the Sundance Channel—they are the rare breed known as cinephiles. Though much has been made of the classic era of cinephilia from the 1950s to the 1970s, Cinephilia documents the latest generation of cinephiles and their use of new technologies. With the advent of home theaters, digital recording devices, online film communities, cinephiles today pursue their dedication to film outside of institutional settings. A radical new history of film culture, Cinephilia breaks new ground for students and scholars alike.

Scandinavia's foremost living auteur and the catalyst of the Dogme95 movement, Lars von Trier is arguably world cinema's most confrontational and polarizing figure. Willfully devastating audiences, he takes risks few filmmakers would conceive, mounting projects that somehow transcend the grand follies they narrowly miss becoming. Challenging conventional limitations and imposing his own rules, he restlessly reinvents the film language. The Danish director has therefore cultivated an insistently transnational cinema, taking inspiration from sources that range from the European avant-garde to American genre films. This volume provides a stimulating overview of Trier's career while focusing on the more recent work, including his controversial Gold Heart Trilogy (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark), the as-yet unfinished USA Trilogy (Dogville and Manderlay), and individual projects such as the comedy The Boss of It All and the incendiary horror psychodrama Antichrist. Closely analyzing the films and their contexts, Linda Badley draws on a range of cultural references and critical approaches, including genre, gender, and cultural studies, performance theory, and trauma culture. Two revealing interviews that Trier granted during crucial stages of Antichrist's development are also included.

Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's The Idiots to Michael Haneke's Caché, Asbjørn Grønstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics, and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.