This handbook examines film and new media in the light of their convergence. It draws on leading scholars in the field to discuss traditional areas of history and theory of film and digital media. Its focus, however, is on the cycle of technologically driven arts. Film was born of a number of experiments in reproducing motion, all of which culminated in the nineteenth-century projection of short films. The creation of digital media resulted from experiments in alternative forms of representation in the early 1960s. John Whitney began creating avant-garde films from digital graphics around 1960 (and some of his ideas and methods were incorporated by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). By the early 1990s, commercial filmmakers began to employ digital effects in their work. By the late nineties, digital arts had come fully into their own, both in the form of stand-alone or interactive artworks and films created with and for the computer. At the same time, digital effects had completely overtaken optical printing and matte painting in film. From special effects to creating "realistic" backgrounds and crowds, the digital is infiltrating all aspects of filmmaking. The infiltration is about to become a takeover, as celluloid is replaced by high definition digital recording and projection processes. Many aspects of film will change as this latest convergence takes place. Already, cultural response to film has changed as viewers begin to teach themselves about film through supplementary material on DVDs and to make their own films on home computers. But this handbook is not a technical history or manual. Quite the contrary, it is a scholarly work discussing the aesthetics, economics, and cultural results of these changes and convergences. The book balances traditional scholarship and analysis with essays addressing technological change and the concurrent changes in cultural responses to these changes, responses already acknowledged by the profession.

"Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. While many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich, the "new queer cinema") in the United States, films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms. Cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance: at some points, for example in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing "history" not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as a uneven story of struggle, writers on queer cinema in this volume stress how that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but describes currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, instead foregrounding indigenous genders and sexualities, or those forged in the global South, or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, while "cinema" is in our title, many scholars in this collection see that term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as "queer cinema" shifts into new configurations"--

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies gathers two dozen original essays that chart the history and current state of interdisciplinary scholarship on music in audiovisual media, focusing on four areas: history, genre and medium, analysis and criticism, and interpretation.

This book provides a multifaceted single-volume account of Japanese cinema. It addresses productive debates about what Japanese cinema is, where Japanese cinema is, as well as what and where Japanese cinema studies is, at the so-called period of crisis of national boundary under globalization and the so-called period of crisis of cinema under digitalization.

With engaging new contributions from the major figures in the fields of the media and public opinion The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media is a key point of reference for anyone working in American politics today.

Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, this collection narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus and Perception; Audiovisuality; How Close is Close Reading?; and The Turn to Experience.

Media forms and genres are proliferating as never before, from movies, computer games and iPods to video games and wireless phones. This essay collection by recognized scholars, practitioners and non-academic writers opens discussion in exciting new directions.