In Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema, Hyon Joo Yoo argues that East Asian experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism call for a different conceptualization of postcoloniality, subjectivity, and the nation. Through its analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas, this engaging study of cinema and culture charts the ways in which national cinemas visualize colonial and postcolonial conditions that derive from the history of Japanese colonialism and the post-war alliance between Japan and the United States. What does it mean to rethink postcolonial studies through East Asian cinema and experience? Yoo pursues this question by bringing an East Asian postcolonial framework, the notion of film as a manifestation of national culture, and the methodology of psychoanalysis to bear on a failed hegemonic subject. Cinema at the Crossroads is a profound look into how cinema and national culture intertwine with hegemony and power.

Awarded the Tudor Vianu Prize for Literary and Cultural Theory by the National Museum of Romanian Literature. Over the past 30 years, the fields of world literature and world cinema have developed on parallel but largely separate tracks, with little recognition of their underlying similarities and the ways that each can learn from the other. Time Regained does not move from literature to cinema, but exists simultaneously in both fields. The 7 filmmakers selected here, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Raúl Ruíz, Wong Kar Wai, Stephen Daldry, and Paolo Sorrentino, are themselves also writers or people with literary training, and they produce a new type of world cinema thanks to their understanding of the world simultaneously through literature and film. In the process, their films produce new readings of literary texts that world literature studies wouldn't have been able to achieve with its own instruments. Time Regained examines how filmmakers build on literature to reconfigure the world as a landscape of dreams and how they use film to reinvent the narrative techniques of the authors on whom they draw. The selected filmmakers draw inspiration from French surrealists, modernists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Marguerite Yourcenar, and predecessors such as Dante and Cao Xueqin. In the process, these filmmakers cross the borders between film and literature, nation and world, dream and reality.

Best known for his 1979 film David, Peter Lilienthal was an unusual figure within postwar filmmaking circles. A child refugee from Nazi Germany who grew up in Uruguay, he was uniquely situated at the crossroads of German, Jewish, and Latin American cultures: while his work emerged from West German auteur filmmaking, his films bore the unmistakable imprints of Jewish thought and the militant character of New Latin American cinema. Peter Lilienthal is the first comprehensive study of Lilienthal’s life and career, highlighting the distinctively cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of his oeuvre, and exploring his role as an early exemplar of a more vibrant, inclusive European film culture.

How did the US South contribute to the development of film? And how did film shape the modern South? In Fade In, Crossroads, Robert Jackson tells the story of the relationships between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era through the golden age of Hollywood. Jackson reveals the profound consequences of the coincidence of the rise and fall of the American film industry with the rise and fall of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation. He considers southern historical legacies on film, from popular Civil War films and comparably popular lynching films emerging in a time of prolific lynching in the South, to the resilient race film industry whose African American filmmakers forged an independent cinematic movement in defiance of the racial restrictions of both the South and Hollywood. He also traces the influence of film on future participants in the Civil Rights Movement, from prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall to film-industry veterans like Lena Horne and Paul Robeson to the millions of ordinary people, black and white, who found themselves caught up in the struggle for racial equality in the modern United States.

The original Movies and Methods volume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity—from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture. Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.