Film and Media Studies - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Cinematic Hamlet

Wed, 03 Aug 2011

Cinematic Hamlet (2011)
The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda

By Patrick J. Cook

Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.

Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.

Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cinematic+Hamlet.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Screening Morocco

Thu, 05 May 2011

Screening Morocco (2011)
Contemporary Film in a Changing Society

By Valérie K. Orlando

Since 1999 and the death of King Hassan II, Morocco has experienced a dramatic social transformation. Encouraged by the more openly democratic climate fostered by young King Mohammed VI, filmmakers have begun to explore the sociocultural and political debates of their country while also seeking to document the untold stories of a dark past. Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society focuses on Moroccan films produced and distributed from 1999 to the present.

Moroccan cinema serves as an all-inclusive medium that provides a sounding board for a society that is remaking itself. Male and female directors present the face of an engaged, multiethnic and multilingual society. Their cinematography promotes a country that is dynamic and connected to the global sociocultural economy of the twenty-first century. At the same time, they seek to represent the closed, obscure past of a nation’s history that has rarely been told, drawing on themes such as human rights abuse, the former incarceration of thousands during the Lead Years, women’s emancipation, poverty, and claims for social justice.

Screening Morocco will introduce American readers to the richness in theme and scope of the cinematic production of Morocco.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Screening+Morocco.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

Tue, 05 Oct 2010

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century (2010)
Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution

Edited by Mahir Şaul and Ralph A. Austen

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema.

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Viewing+African+Cinema+in+the+Twenty-first+Century.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Law of the Looking Glass

Mon, 01 Sep 2008

The Law of the Looking Glass (2008)
Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939

By Sheila Skaff

The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 reveals the complex relationship between nationhood, national language, and national cinema in Europe before World War II. Author Sheila Skaff describes how the major issues facing the region before World War I, from the relatively slow pace of modernization to the desire for national sovereignty, shaped local practices in film production, exhibition, and criticism. She goes on to analyze local film production, practices of spectatorship in large cities and small towns, clashes over language choice in intertitles, and controversy surrounding the first synchronized sound experiments before World War I. Skaff depicts the creation of a national film industry in the newly independent country, the golden years of the silent cinema, the transition from silent to sound film—and debates in the press over this transition—as well as the first Polish and Yiddish “talkies.” She places particular importance on conflicts in majority-minority relations in the region and the types of collaboration that led to important films such as The Dybbuk and The Ghosts.

The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 is the first comprehensive history of the country’s film industry before World War II. This history is characterized by alternating periods of multilingual, multiethnic production, on the one hand, and rejection of such inclusiveness, on the other. Through it all, however, runs a single unifying thread: an appreciation for visual imagery.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Law+of+the+Looking+Glass.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Black and White in Colour

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Black and White in Colour (2007)
African History on Screen

Edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn

Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa. Themes include the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they include Out of Africa, Hotel Rwanda, Breaker Morant, Cry Freedom, The Battle of Algiers, and Chocolat.

This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African historiography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of “film and history.” It will appeal to those interested in African history and the ways in which films use the past to raise questions about the present.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Black+and+White+in+Colour.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001

Thu, 30 Dec 2004

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001 (2004)

By Vibert C. Cambridge

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts. Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States, 1990—2001 is a contribution to our understanding of the web of relationships that existed at the intersection of immigration, race, ethnicity, and broadcasting in America during this period.

Professor Vibert C. Cambridge investigates and questions how broadcasting in the United States responded to the changing racial and ethnic composition of the society. What patterns could be drawn from these responses? What roles were served? What roles are currently being served? What stimulated the changing of roles?

Ultimately, Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States evaluates the performance of the American broadcasting industry. The answers to this book's core questions provide insights into how the American broadcasting industry responded to freedom, equality, diversity, information quality, social order, and solidarity at century’s end.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Immigration%2C+Diversity%2C+and+Broadcasting+in+the+United+States+1990%E2%80%942001.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Shakespeare at the Cineplex

Mon, 22 Sep 2003

Shakespeare at the Cineplex (2003)
The Kenneth Branagh Era

By Samuel Crowl

Samuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989). Crowl presents the rich variety of these films in the “long decade: between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.” The productions range from Hollywood-saturated films such as Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream to more modest, experimental offerings, such as Christine Edzard's As You Like It. Now available in paperback, Shakespeare at the Cineplex will be welcome reading for fans, students, and scholars of Shakespeare in performance.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Shakespeare+at+the+Cineplex.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Flickering Shadows

Mon, 15 Apr 2002

Flickering Shadows (2002)
Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe

By J. M. Burns

Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Flickering Shadows is the first book to explore this little-known world of colonial cinema.

J. M. Burns pieces together the history of the cinema in Rhodesia, examining film production, audience reception, and state censorship, to reconstruct the story of how Africans in one nation became consumers of motion pictures. Movies were a valued “tool of empire” designed to assimilate Africans into a new colonial order. Inspired by an inflated confidence in the medium, Rhodesian government offcials created an African Film industry that was unprecedented in its size and scope.

Transforming the lives of their subjects through cinema proved more complicated than white officials had anticipated. Although Africans embraced the medium with enthusiasm, they expressed critical opinions and demonstrated decided tastes that left colonial officials puzzled and alarmed.

Flickering Shadows tells the fascinating story of how motion pictures were introduced and negotiated in a colonial setting. In doing so, it casts light on the history of the globalization of the cinema. This work is based on interviews with white and black filmmakers and African audience members, extensive archival research in Africa and England, and viewings of scores of colonial films.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Flickering+Shadows.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia

Wed, 15 Nov 2000

Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia (2000)

By Philip Kitley

The culture of television in Indonesia began with its establishment in 1962 as a public broadcasting service. From that time, through the deregulation of television broadcasting in 1990 and the establishment of commercial channels, television can be understood, Philip Kitley argues, as a part of the New Order's national culture project, designed to legitimate an idealized Indonesian national cultural identity. But Professor Kitley suggests that it also has become a site for the contestation of elements of the New Order's cultural policies. Based on his studies, he further speculates on the increasingly significant role that television is destined to play as a site of cultural and political struggle.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Television%2C+Nation%2C+and+Culture+in+Indonesia.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Nigerian Video Films

Wed, 30 Aug 2000

Nigerian Video Films (2000)
Revised and Expanded Edition

Edited by Jonathan Haynes

Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.

The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video's materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Nigerian+Video+Films.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.