Film Research: Global Cinema

The Oxford History of World Cinema traces the history of its development, stars, studios, and cultural impact. The book celebrates and chronicles over a century of cinematic achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the Avant-Garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong.

Film: An International History of the Medium, now in its second edition, presents the entire history of motion pictures, from pre-cinema to the present. Providing a complete analysis of the principal films, directors, and national cinemas, it supplies a thorough grounding in the social, economic, and political circumstances critical to an understanding of film as both art and industry. With emphasis on the international relationships among film communities, chapters are devoted to such critical nodes of film history as early cinema, Soviet silent cinema, Hollywood genres, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave. Substantial sections are also devoted to the films of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, China, Africa, the Middle East, and India.

Despite being shut down by two world wars, having its martial arts films dismissed as "chopsocky," and operating on shoestring budgets, the industry of filmmaking in Hong Kong has been praised and imitated around the world. From its beginning in 1909 with the silent short Stealing the Roast Duck to the martial arts classic Enter the Dragon (1973) to Peter Chan's Perhaps Love (2005), a reinvention of Chinese musicals via Hollywood, the vast cinema of Hong Kong has continually reinvented itself. Stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li have become household names; while actors Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chiau, Michelle Yeoh, and Chow Yun-fat continue to gain worldwide fame, and the impact of directors like Ang Lee, Tsui Hark, Wong Kar-wai, and John Woo can be seen throughout Hollywood.

Leading scholars take up issues and topics covering the entire range of Chinese cinema. Their cross-cultural engagements with individual films, accomplished with an acute sense of chronology and history, tackle questions of issues related to historiography, poetics, aesthetics, genres, and directorial styles

This book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mamá También, and Nine Queens.

In this accessible introduction to the extraordinary cinematic output of the colony, Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes review the directors and films that have established Hong Kong cinema internationally: John Woo's martial arts flicks, Tsui Hark's wire-worked fantasies, Ann Hui's exile melodramas, Stanley Kwan's limpid romances, and Wong Kar-wai's stylish art films.

German film is diverse and multi-faceted; its history includes five distinct German governments (Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic), two national industries (Germany and Austria), and a myriad of styles and production methods.

Tracing critical positions, personnel, and institutions across this formative period, Noel King, Constantine Verevis, and Deane Williams offer important insights about the origins of Australian film theory and its relationship to such related disciplines as English, and cultural studies.

India is home to Bollywood - the largest film industry in the world. Movie theaters are said to be the "temples of modern India," with Bombay producing nearly 800 films per year that are viewed by roughly 11 million people per day.

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes of the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the official promotion of Main Melody films and the emergence and growth of popular cinema.

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Film, one of the first ever encyclopedias in this area, provides alphabetically organized entries on directors, genres, themes, and actors and actresses from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as 300 film synopses.

In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ten scholars from across the globe come together to consider whether we are witnessing the extinction of serious film criticism or seeing the start of its rebirth in a new form.

Offering profiles of principal stars such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Brigitte Bardot as well as reviews and analysis of all the major films in the movement, this is the perfect primer to the group of French filmmakers who have become synonymous with effortless style and urban cool.

The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques.

Examining Hong Kong cinema from its inception in 1913 to the end of the colonial era, this work explains the key areas of production, market, film products and critical traditions.

In recent years, with the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Archive and growing scholarly interest in the history of Hong Kong cinema, previously neglected historical documents and difficult-to-access films have offered new research materials. Hong Kong's connection with Hollywood involves ties that bring together art cinema and popular genres as well as film festivals and the media marketplace with popular transnational genres.

Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinizing Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography.

The Oxford History of World Cinema chronicles over one hundred years of diverse achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the Avant-Garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong, with an international team of distinguished film historians telling the story of the major inventions and developments in the cinema business, its institutions, genres, and personnel.

Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pianmelodrama, Japanese horror, new Hollywood cinema and global found footage cinema.

This book is an investigation into the transnational nature of OCyfilm cultureOCO, taking the film culture of one country - New Zealand - as a case study to investigate the dynamics of such a culture.