From the earliest years of sound film in America, Hollywood studios and independent producers of "race films" for black audiences created stories featuring African American religious practices. In the first book to examine how the movies constructed images of African American religion, Judith Weisenfeld explores these cinematic representations and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity. Drawing on such textual sources as studio production files, censorship records, and discussions and debates about religion and film in the black press, as well as providing close readings of films, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched book brings religious studies and film history together in innovative ways.

The book takes the reader on a cinematic road trip through Hollywood history and Connecticut geography. Illeana Douglas, an actor and film historian from Connecticut, defines how the perception of on-screen Connecticut has shifted more than that of any other New England state over the decades and provides some surprising conclusions about just what it means to be a "Connecticut movie." Filled with behind-the-scenes stories as well as her own personal snapshots of the places where these films were made

"The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein's Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events--most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942--coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein--the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca--was born to write"--

Manny Farber, one of the most important critics in movie history, championed the American action film-the bravado of Howard Hawks, the art brut styling of Samuel Fuller, the crafty, sordid entertainments of Don Siegel-at a time when other critics dismissed the genre. His witty, incisive criticism later worked exacting language into an exploration of the feelings and strategies that went into low-budget and radical films as diverse as Michael Snow's Wavelength, Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Expanded with an in-depth interview and seven essays written with his wife, artist Patricia Patterson, Negative Space gathers Farber's most influential writings, making this an indispensable collection for all lovers of film". --Publisher.

This book showcases the drawings of Ken Adam, the man who has created some of the most iconic and memorable sets in the history of film. Presented chronologically, the book takes us from design sketches for his earliest movies, including Around theWorld in Eighty Days, through his Oscar-winning work with Stanley Kubrick, to production designs for what are probably his most celebrated films - the first seven James Bond movies, including Dr No, Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever and Moonraker. Also included are production drawings for classics such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Sleuth and The Last Emperor. Adam's virtuoso sketches for films and other projects are accompanied by illuminating commentary from the eminent Sir Christopher Frayling, and together present an unrivalled archive of breathtaking and inspirational production design.

"Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, as well as through the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. By selectively revisiting canonical pre-1990 films and amply representing films of the new millennium, Movie-Made Jews illuminates an American Jewish film tradition that includes jazz singers, pawnbrokers, and serious men. It also features those who tremble before G-d, who commit crimes and misdemeanors, who declare Hineini, Here I Am, who do whatever works, who leave and then return to Delancey Street and Liberty Heights. In these pages, those who might be identified as "just Jews" reside alongside those who are traditionally-and sometimes untraditionally-observant. Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis of what appears onscreen as well as what happens behind the scenes during production and how audiences respond to what they view, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews"--

Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein has unquestionably emerged as cinema's most influential theorist and author of some of the most important aesthetic writings of the twentieth century. For the first time in one volume, The Eisenstein Reader presents in concise, chronological form his most significant work--including his famous theories of montage and articles on subjects as diverse as sound, film language, and Russian history. The selections range from early writings on his great silent masterpieces The Strike, October and The Battleship Potemkin, to later works, hatched in the increasingly hostile and paranoid environment of Stalin's Soviet Union. Drawn from the acclaimed four-volume Selected Works, this collection, which includes a new introduction and explanatory notes by Richard Taylor as well as many illustrations, further illuminates the startling originality, diversity, and power of the greatest and most flamboyant of all Russian filmmakers.

Text: English, German (translation)

Reproduces and translates from the Russian two booklets in which the 20-year-old later known in the US as Ayn Rand records her admiration for Hollywood movies and stars. Pola Negri, about her favorite actress, was published without byline in 1925. Hollywood: American City of Movies, her description of early Hollywood, was pirated by a Soviet publisher. They were rediscovered separately during the middle 1990s. Accompanying them is a detailed log of the films she watched and a ranking of her favorite actors. There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Arab theatre and cinema are among the most neglected subjects in the studies of Oriental literature and research into the history of theatre. This book, written by the acclaimed scholar Jacob M. Landau and first published in 1958, is a survey of the development of the Arab theatre and cinema as cultural and social phenomena and goes a long way in shedding some light on these neglected subjects.

Movies are a passion shared by people of all ages and backgrounds. Maurice Rapf, the first director of the Film Studies Program at Dartmouth College, recognizes that most people who profess a love of the movies have not spent much time learning about them. He has written this text as an attempt to fill in some of the information that movie-lovers should have but usually don't. The information contained in the book has been gleaned from courses that he has taught at Dartmouth over the past thirty years. From 30 years of experience, Rapf assembles the essential information every movie lover should know. It begins with a brief history, followed by a description of the movie-making process, broken down into five components-literary, administrative, shooting, editing and post-production, and marketing. Drawing from his own experience as a magazine film critic, Rapf then outlines how critics work and how studios woo their favor. He also touches on some of the forms movies have taken-as animation, documentary, avant-garde, and as promotion and education. Not to be read as an all-inclusive guide, this work can be seen instead as a launching-point for a deeper appreciation of the movies.

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini's government that took as their subjects or settings Italy's African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship."--Publisher's description.

The Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film is a unique, one volume work which illuminates a fascinating variety of cinema which is little known outside its own area. The Encyclopedia is divided into nine chapters, each written by a leading scholar in the field. Each chapter covers the history and major issues of film within that area, as well as providing bibliographies of the leading films, directors and actors. The areas covered are: Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, The Magreb, Palestine, Turkey. This Encyclopedia will be an invaluable reference tool for students and scholars of Film and Media Studies. It contains more than 60 black and white photographs of featured films, includes references and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, and the volume concludes with comprehensive name, film and general indexes.

"In Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating a Life, Ilse Aichinger describes her past and her present largely from the viewpoint of her abiding passion for the cinema, and for still photography. She reflects on her life by discussing directors ranging from Luchino Visconti to Leni Riefenstahl, actors ranging from Orson Welles to Stan Laurel, and photographs by Bill Brandt depicting subjects as diverse as the Brontës’ Haworth Parsonage and London’s East End. Though Aichinger’s recollections are detailed, intriguing and vivid, they are pervaded by her sense of the contingency and fragility of existence – of how the presence of pictures and people in her life presages their disappearance, and of how 'memory shatters easily when you try to master it'" --