Michelle Devereaux explores the underlying philosophical and aesthetic Romantic connections between a selection of seven films from four popular filmmakers: Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.

The relationship between Romanticism and film remains one of the most neglected topics in film theory and history, with analysis often focusing on the proto-cinematic significance of Richard Wagner's music-dramas. One new and interesting way of examining this relationship is by looking beyond Wagner, and developing a concept of audio-visual explanation rooted in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, and employing it in the analysis of film discourse and representation. Using this concept of audio-visual explanation, the cultural image of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, a contemporary of Wagner and another significant practitioner of Romantic audio-visual aesthetics, is examined in reference to specific case studies, including the rarely-explored films Song Without End (1960) and Lisztomania (1975). This multifaceted study of film discourse and representation employs Liszt as a guiding-thread, structuring a general exploration of the concept of Romanticism and its relationship with film more generally. This exploration is supported by new theories of representation based on schematic cognition, the philosophy of explanation, and the recently-developed film theory of Jacques Rancière. Individual chapters address the historical background of audio-visual explanation in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, Liszt's role in the historical discourses of film and film music, and various filmic representations of Liszt and his compositions. Throughout these investigations, Will Kitchen explores the various ways that films explain, or 'make sense' of things, through a 'Romantic' aesthetic combination of sound and vision.

Romantic Comedy offers an introduction to the analysis of a popular but overlooked film genre. The book provides an overview of Hollywood's romantic comedy conventions, examining iconography, narrative patterns, and ideology. Chapters discuss important subgroupings within the genre: screwball sex comedy and the radical romantic comedy of the 1970s. A final chapter traces the lasting influence of these earlier forms within current romantic comedies. Films include: Pillow Talk (1959), Annie Hall (1977), and You've Got Mail (1998).

Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them--tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations--Projections of Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form.

The Long Century’s Long Shadow approaches German Romanticism and Weimar cinema as continuous developments, enlisting both in a narrative of reciprocal illumination. The author investigates different moments and media as connected phenomena, situated at alternate ends of the "long nineteenth century" but joined by their mutual rejection of the neo-classical aesthetic standard of placid and weightless poise in numerous media, including film, painting, sculpture, prose, poetry, and dance. Connecting Weimar filmmaking to Romantic thought and practice, Kenneth S. Calhoon offers a non-technological, aesthetic genealogy of cinema. He focuses on well-known literary and artistic works, including films such as Nosferatu, Metropolis, Frankenstein, and Fantasia; the writings of Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, and Novalis; and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, one of the leading artists of German Romanticism. With an eye to the modernism of which Weimar filmmaking was a part, The Long Century’s Long Shadow employs the Romantic landscape in poetry and painting as a mirror in which to regard cinema.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

Romantic comedy is an enduringly popular genre which has maintained its appeal by constantly evolving, from the screwball comedy to the recent emergence of the bromance. Romantic Comedy examines the history of the genre, considering the social and cultural context for key developments in new genre cycles. It studies the key themes and issues at work within romantic comedy films, focusing in particular on the representation of gender and how the genre acts as a barometer for gender politics in the course of the twentieth century. Claire Mortimer provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the genre, tracing its development, enduring appeal, stars and the nature of its comedy. Mortimer discusses both British and Hollywood classic and contemporary romantic comedies, ranging from canonical films to more recent examples which have taken the genre in new directions. In-depth case studies span a wide variety of films, including: It Happened One Night Bringing Up Baby Annie Hall Four Weddings and a Funeral Bridget Jones’s Diary Wimbledon Knocked Up Sex and the City This book is the perfect introduction to the romantic comedy genre and will be particularly useful for all those investigating this area within film, media or women's studies.