The Oxford Handbook Of Silent Cinema

The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema is a collection of new scholarship that investigates the first decades of motion-picture history from diverse perspectives and methodologies. Featuring over thirty essays by leading scholars in the field, the Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of cinema's earliest years while also illuminating how cinema derived strength from competing cultural forms, becoming in the process the most influential mass medium of the early twentieth century.

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.

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.

"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 chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema present a rich, diverse overview of Canadian cinema. Responding to the latest developments in Canadian film studies, this volume takes into account the variety of artistic voices, media technologies, and places which have marked cinema in Canada throughout its history. Drawing on a range of established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume will be useful to teachers, scholars, and to a general readership interested in cinema in Canada. Moving beyond the director-focused approach of much previous scholarship, this book is concerned with communities, institutions, and audiences for Canadian cinema at both national and international levels. The choice of subjects covered ranges from popular, genre cinema to the most experimental of artistic interventions. Canadian cinema is seen in its interaction with other forms of art-making and media production in Canada and at the international level. Particular attention has been paid to the work of Indigenous filmmakers, members of diasporic communities and feminist and LGBTQ artists. The result is a book attentive to the complex social and institutional contexts in which Canadian cinema is made and consumed.

This classic account of the nature of film music aesthetics was first published in 1947. Its value comes from a unique combination of talents and experience enjoyed by the book's authors. Eisler's time at Hollywood gave him a particular insight on the technical questions which arise for composers when music is used in the production of films, while Adorno was able to contribute on wide aesthetic and sociological matters as well as specifically musical questions. Above all, the authors envisaged the book as a contribution to the study of modern, industrialized culture; and, in this respect, it has a particular importance to the whole area of cultural studies. With an introduction by Graham McCann.

The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores the place of cinema in the history of listening. It looks at the ways in which listening to film is situated in textual, spatial, and social practices, and also studies how cinematic modes of listening have extended into other media and everyday experiences. Chapters are structured around six themes. Part I ("Genealogies and Beginnings") considers film sound in light of pre-existing practices such as opera and shadow theatre, and also explores changes in listening taking place at critical junctures in the early history of cinema. Part II ("Locations and Relocations") focuses on specific venues and presentational practices from roadshow movies to contemporary live-score screenings. Part III ("Representations and Re-Presentations") zooms into the formal properties of specific films, analyzing representations of listening on screen as well as the role of sound as a representational surplus. Part IV ("The Listening Body") focuses on the power of cinematic sound to engage the full body sensorium. Part V ("Listening Again") discusses a range of ways in which film sound is encountered and reinterpreted outside the cinema, whether through ancillary materials such as songs and soundtrack albums, or in experimental conditions and pedagogical contexts. Part VI ("Across Media") compares cinema with the listening protocols of TV series and music video, promenade theatre and personal stereos, video games and Virtual Reality.