We are delighted to inform you that we will be attending the 58th Annual Conference of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies in Chicago, IL on March 22 – 26, 2017. Please stop by our stand to meet the editor, browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices and pick up free journal samples. For more information on the conference program please visit SCMS webpage.
If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Film & Media Studies titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code SCMS18. Browse our newly published interactive online Film & Media Studies 2017 Catalog or use the new enhanced subject searching features for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.
NEW
Paperback Original
THE MAN FROM THE THIRD ROW
Hasse Ekman, Swedish Cinema and the Long Shadow of Ingmar Bergman
Fredrik Gustafsson
Until his early retirement at age 50, Hasse Ekman was one of the leading lights of Swedish cinema, an actor, writer, and director of prodigious talents. Yet today his work is virtually unknown outside of Sweden, eclipsed by the filmography of his occasional collaborator (and frequent rival) Ingmar Bergman. This comprehensive introduction—the first ever in English—follows Ekman’s career from his early days as a film journalist, through landmark films such as Girl with Hyacinths (1950), to his retirement amid exhaustion and disillusionment. Combining historical context with insightful analyses of Ekman’s styles and themes, this long overdue study considerably enriches our understanding of Swedish film history.
Paperback Original
RE-IMAGINING DEFA
East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts
Edited by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
“Berghahn is known for its publication of excellent books on German Cinema within its catalog. This recent work proves no exception to the rule. Including fifteen essays by well known scholars in the field aware of the changing complexities of subject matter and well versed in necessary archive research, [it] presents a fine collection exploring a cinema that is very little known to most Western viewers…a sterling example of what a scholarly academic anthology should be, an excellent model in its own right that should stimulate others to investigate this former national cinema and not consign it to oblivion.” · Film International
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”
Read Introduction: Re-Imagining East German Cinema
STARS AND STARDOM IN BRAZILIAN CINEMA
Edited by Tim Bergfelder, Lisa Shaw and João Luiz Vieira
Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in “star studies,” Brazilian film has received comparatively little attention. As this volume demonstrates, however, the richness of Brazilian stardom extends well beyond the ubiquitous Carmen Miranda. Among the studies assembled here are fascinating explorations of figures such as Eliane Lage (the star attraction of São Paulo’s Vera Cruz studios), cult horror movie auteur Coffin Joe, and Lázaro Ramos, the most visible Afro-Brazilian actor today. At the same time, contributors interrogate the inner workings of the star system in Brazil, from the pioneering efforts of silent-era actresses to the recent advent of the non-professional movie star.
Read Introduction
NEW USES OF BOURDIEU IN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES
Edited by Guy Austin
Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu’s theories are, however, they have only intermittently been used to study some of the most important forms of cultural production today: cinema and new media. With topics ranging from film festivals and photography to constantly evolving mobile technologies, this collection demonstrates the enormous relevance that Bourdieu’s key concepts hold for the field of media studies, deploying them as powerful tools of analysis and forging new avenues of inquiry in the process.
Read Introduction: Bourdieu on Media and Film
NARRATIVES IN MOTION
Journalism and Modernist Events in 1920s Portugal
Luís Trindade
Volume 15, Remapping Cultural History
Interwar Portugal was in many ways a microcosm of Europe’s encounter with modernity: reshaped by industrialization, urban growth, and the antagonism between liberalism and authoritarianism, it also witnessed new forms of media and mass culture that transformed daily life. This fascinating study of newspapers in 1920s Portugal explores how the new “modernist reportage” embodied the spirit of the era while mediating some of its most spectacular episodes, from political upheavals to lurid crimes of passion. In the process, Luís Trindade illuminates the twofold nature of that journalism—both historical account and material object, it epitomized a distinctly modern entanglement of narrative and event.
Read Chapter 1. Newspapers and Modernist Events
RELUCTANT SKEPTIC
Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture
Harry T. Craver
Volume 14, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association
The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.
Read Introduction: Kracauer on and in Weimar Modernity
German cinema is normally seen as a distinct form, but this series emphasizes connections, influences, and exchanges of German cinema across national borders, as well as its links with other media and art forms. Individual titles present traditional historical research (archival work, industry studies) as well as new critical approaches in film and media studies (theories of the transnational), with a special emphasis on the continuities associated with popular traditions and local perspectives.
Volume 19
GERMAN TELEVISION
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Edited by Larson Powell and Robert R. Shandley
Long overlooked by scholars and critics, the history and aesthetics of German television have only recently begun to attract serious, sustained attention, and then largely within Germany. This ambitious volume, the first in English on the subject, provides a much-needed corrective in the form of penetrating essays on the distinctive theories, practices, and social-historical contexts that have defined television in Germany. Encompassing developments from the dawn of the medium through the Cold War and post-reunification, this is an essential introduction to a rich and varied media tradition.
Read Introduction
Volume 17 New in Paperback
IMPERIAL PROJECTIONS
Screening the German Colonies
Wolfgang Fuhrmann
The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.
Read Introduction
Volume 16 New in Paperback
2014 PREMIO LIMINA PRIZE FOR BEST FILM STUDIES BOOK (IN A LANGUAGE OTHER THAN ITALIAN)
THE EMERGENCE OF FILM CULTURE
Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945
Edited by Malte Hagener
Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.
Read Introduction: The Emergence of Film Culture
NEW IN PAPERBACK
BODIES IN PAIN
Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky
Tarja Laine
“Laine’s evocative, near-poetic style is refreshing after the former domination of strenuous cognitivist theory in the study of film emotion, and she offers plenty of empirical evidence to back up her claims. Surely such a sensory art form as cinema deserves to be seen (or felt) through an affective lens, and Laine makes an engaging and accessible yet thoroughly rigorous argument for doing so through her study of Aronofsky’s work. Bodies in Pain is recommended for those interested in film phenomenology as well as the intersections of aestheticism, emotion, and philosophy in the cinema.” · Film-Philosophy
The films of Darren Aronofsky invite emotional engagement by means of affective resonance between the film and the spectator’s lived body. Aronofsky’s films, which include a rich range of production from Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan, are often considered “cerebral” because they explore topics like mathematics, madness, hallucinations, obsessions, social anxiety, addiction, psychosis, schizophrenia, and neuroscience. Yet this interest in intelligence and mental processes is deeply embedded in the operations of the body, shared with the spectator by means of a distinctively corporeal audiovisual style. Bodies in Pain looks at how Aronofsky’s films engage the spectator in an affective form of viewing that involves all the senses, ultimately engendering a process of (self) reflection through their emotional dynamics.
Read Introduction: Aronofsky, Auteurship, Aesthetics
TELEVISION’S MOMENT
Sitcom Audiences and the Sixties Cultural Revolution
Christina von Hodenberg
“Television scholars of all stripes will find much that is interesting in this book. Hodenberg blends thorough industrial history, textual analysis, and audience research in her examination of three iterations of a single television show…This book operates at the methodological intersection of cultural studies, social science, and television history, and the research is the better for it. This is a thoughtful work of television scholarship written in an accessible style…Highly recommended.” · Choice
Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.
Read Introduction: Negotiating the Sixties
SILENCE, SCREEN, AND SPECTACLE
Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information
Edited by Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell
Volume 14, Remapping Cultural History
In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now “spectacle” can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time.
Read Introduction
SOUNDS OF MODERN HISTORY
Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe
Edited by Daniel Morat
“The decentring of music from the privileged site at which questions about listening are asked makes room for broader questions about the relationship between sound and culture. By thinking about sonic practices as a means of answering larger historical and cultural questions the volume challenges the narrower theoretical approaches to sound often taken in the field of sound studies.” · Contemporary European History
Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.
Read Introduction
Berghahn Journals
Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
The Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society explores perceptions of society as constituted and conveyed in processes of learning and educational media. The focus is on various types of texts (such as textbooks, museums, memorials, films) and their institutional, political, social, economic, and cultural contexts. The construction of collective memory and conceptions of space, the production of meaning, image formation, forms of representation, and perceptions of the “self” and the “other,” as well as processes of identity construction (ethnic, national, regional, religious, institutional, gender) are of particular interest. Special importance is given to the significance of educational media for social cohesion and conflict. The journal is international and interdisciplinary and welcomes empirically based contributions from the humanities and the social sciences as well as theoretical and methodological studies.
Projections
The Journal for Movies and Mind
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that explores the way in which the mind experiences, understands, and interprets the audio-visual and narrative structures of cinema and other visual media. Recognizing cinema as an art form, the journal aims to integrate established traditions of analyzing media aesthetics with current research into perception, cognition and emotion, according to frameworks supplied by psychology, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive and neurosciences. Submissions are welcomed from a variety of scholarly methods within the humanities and the sciences, from aesthetic to empirical, theoretical, and historical approaches. The journal seeks to facilitate a dialogue between scholars in these disciplines and bring the study of moving image media to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate.
Screen Bodies
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display
Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It is a forum promoting research on various aspects of embodiment on and in front of screens through articles, reviews, and interviews. The journal considers moving and still images, whether from the entertainment industry, information technologies, or news and media outlets, including cinema, television, the internet, and gallery spaces. It investigates the private experiences of portable and personal devices and the institutional ones of medical and surveillance imaging. Screen Bodies addresses the portrayal, function, and reception of bodies on and in front of screens from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, feminism and masculinity, trans* studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.