Pedric Killeen, a media scholar, arts journalist and lecturer on film and digital cultures from Ireland, brings some fresh ideas to the field of film noir research. His basic idea here is to approach the individual/main protagonist and read him and his actions in terms of a certain paralysis or state of shock he experiences […]
You are browsing archives for
Tag: Film Studies
Watching the World Die. Nuclear Threat Films of the 1980s by Mike Bogue (2023)
Already in the 1950s, apart from science-fiction movies following aliens from outer space invasion plots, disaster films or creature horror, another genre was equally prominent in the list of sensational productions: the nuclear threat films. Those were a familiar feature of popular culture, and audiences could watch new movies of the kind until roughly the […]
The Soundies: A History and Catalog of Jukebox Film Shorts of the 1940s by Mark Cantor (2023)
The small-screen world of the short musical film, a form of media presentation usually associated with coin-operated cinematic machines of the 1940s and later decades, keeps fascinating historians, media researchers, music experts and sociologists. Even if nowadays media, video clips, music in all variations and formats, and modes of presentation are easily available on a […]
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky by George Melnyk (2023)
Few other artists connected with auteur cinema have left such a record of often disturbing, mythical, surreal, and sometimes more or less incomprehensible movies as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean director extraordinaire, born in 1929. If the label “cult director” can be applied to just a few artists, he definitely is in that league. “Jodorowsky has invested […]
Film Noir and Los Angeles: Urban History and the Dark Imaginary by Sean W. Maher (2022)
Movies of the film noir genre, shot in the US, usually had two favorite locations when it came to large cities and a setting that would breathe the air of crime, provide sinister plots, gunmen and desperate main characters: the pictures were either set in New York City or Los Angeles. As with Los Angeles, […]
Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema by William Carroll (2022)
When in 1968 Japanese low-budget director Seijun Suzuki was fired by the Nikkatsu production company, it seemed to be the end of a so far fantastic career in the movies. Between 1956 and 1967 Suzuki made forty films there; some of these were quite successful. While for Nikkatsu Studios, it obviously was just another personnel […]
The Women of Hammer Horror: A Biographical Dictionary and Filmography by Robert Michael Cotter (2021...
No matter how a casting for British Hammer Film Productions – Europe’s epicenter of crude horror and gothic films between the 1950s and 1970s – ended, to be invited in the first place, as an actress, you had to be extremely beautiful with a bosomy figure to remember. And even if those women on the […]
Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World by Ross Melnick
To understand the impact movies and in particular the American movie industry had since the 1920s, not just the messages, directors or entertaining subjects of the films were important, but also the manner how the product film was presented all over the world. For that purpose, the well-known website Cinema Treasures has collected data and […]
The Science of Sci-Fi Cinema: Essays on the Art and Principles of Ten Films by Vincent Piturro (ed.)...
Originally conceived in 2010 as a short-lived project to pair a film enthusiast with the respective scientific expert on the film’s subject after presenting a science fiction movie, the idea of dialogue and curiosity, in cooperation with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, still is around today. And with each film presentation hosted by […]