Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Anna Young

Carolyn Condon Jacobs

This edited volume engages with Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) through the lens of the “Barbenheimer” fad, a phenomenon that celebrated the counterprogramming of these two divergent films. Through a variety of approaches and perspectives, Barbenheimer Syndrome reveals why these movies struck such a cultural nerve.

The Creation of Cultural Spectacle at the Box Office

Barbenheimer Syndrome

Janis Goldie

The Handmaid's Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance across Disciplines and Borders offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, as well as its film and television adaptations, can be employed across different academic fields in high school, college and university classrooms. Scholars from a variety of disciplines and cultural contexts contribute to wide-ranging analytical strategies, ranging from religion and science to the role of journalism in democracy, while still embracing gender studies in a broader methodological and theoretical framework. The volume examines both the formal and stylistic ways in which Atwood's classic work and its adaptations can be brought to life in the classroom through different lenses and pedagogies.

Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders

The Handmaid's Tale

This collection analyzes how their disciplines can add unique depth and context to many of the themes that are being mobilized in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and its screen adaptations. Contributors address how these themes apply to social issues and specific topics such as science and religion to the role of journalism in a democratic society.

Jeremi Szaniawski

Dijana Metlić

This volume features a set of thought-provoking and long overdue approaches to situating Stanley Kubrick’s films in contemporary debates around gender, race, and age – with a focus on women’s representations. Offering new historical and critical perspectives on Kubrick’s cinema, the book asks how his work should be viewed bearing in mind issues of gender equality, sexual harassment, and abuse. The authors tackle issues such as Kubrick’s at times questionable relationships with his actresses and former wives, the dynamics of power, misogyny and miscegenation in his films, and auteur ‘apologism’, among others. The selection delineates these complex contours of Kubrick’s work by drawing on archival sources, engaging in close readings of specific films, and exploring Kubrick through unorthodox venture points. With an interdisciplinary scope and social justice-centered focus, this book offers new perspectives on a well-established area of study. It will appeal to scholars and upper-level students of film studies, media studies, gender studies, and visual culture, as well as to fans of the director interested in revisiting his work with a new perspective.

Gender, Power, and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick

In diesem Buch wird Michael Hanekes Darstellung der Medien-Gewalt kontrastiert mit dem Werk anderer international anerkannter Filmemacher, die, so wie er, die Fernseh-Medien und das Video als zentrales, die Erzählung vorantreibendes Element, in ihren Filmen verwenden. Das verbindende Element dieser Filme ist die latente und offene Gewalt in der Gesellschaft. Folgende Filme werden behandelt: Michael Haneke: Der siebte Kontinent (1988), Benny's Video (1992), Cache (2005); Atom Egoyan: Family Viewing (1987); Alejandro Amenábar: Tesis (1997); David Cronenberg: Videodrome (1982); Darren Aronofsky: Requiem for a Dream (2000); Gore Verbinski: The Ring (2002).

Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film

Screen Nightmares

Katherine A. Hermes

Sex and sexuality are topics that have defined feminism since its inception. What has changed is that there is now a generation of feminists and scholars who are comfortable not only to write in their own disciplines but who incorporate feminist ideas in their research. This book assembles a variety of essays, most of which were written especially for this collection, that negotiate sex and sexuality in historical contexts as well as in contemporary times. There is a common ground of history and (popular) culture among the articles. While different theories of feminism operate in these essays, feminist lenses have allowed the reevaluation of familiar topics from early religious practices to medieval literature to current films and advertising. The authors represented in this collection range from established feminist and gender scholars to those who employ feminist theoretical frameworks in their respective disciplines.

Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World

Filmic constructions of war heroism have a profound impact on public perceptions of conflicts. Here, contributors examine the ways motifs of gender and heroism in war films are used to justify ideological positions, shape the understanding of the military conflicts, support political agendas and institutions, and influence collective memory.

Heroism and Gender in War Films

Karen Randell

Elena Caoduro

Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century offers new interpretations of figures emerging from representations of terrorism and counterterrorism: the male hero, female agent, religious leader, victim/perpetrator, and survivor. This collection of essays by a broad array of international scholars reflects the altered image-making processes that have developed from George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” Building on current literature on media and terrorism, this volume analyzes the most recent technological developments that have impacted the way we experience terrorism: online videos, social media, cartoons, media feeds, and drones. The authors address different time periods, different terrorist groups, and explore the way filmmakers and television producers from the USA, Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East are documenting modern wars in popular culture.

Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century

Clémentine Tholas

Janis L. Goldie

New Perspectives on the War Film addresses the gap in the representation of many forgotten faces of war in mainstream movies and global mass media. The authors concentrate on the untold narratives of those who fought in combat and were affected by its brutal consequences. Chapters discuss the historically under-represented stories of individuals including women, African-American and Indigenous Soldiers. Issues of homosexuality and gender relations in the military, colonial subjects and child soldiers, as well as the changing nature of war via terrorism and bioterrorism are closely analyzed. The contributors demonstrate how these viewpoints have been consistently ignored in mainstream, blockbuster war sagas and strive to re-integrate these lost perspectives into current and future narratives.

New Perspectives on the War Film

Renée T. White

This book examines Black Panther not only as a film grounded in Afro-futurism, but also as an invitation for viewers to think about relevant real-world social questions about identity, liberation, and racial justice, ultimately posing the question of how Black Panther invites a reimagining of Blackness.

Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness

Afrofuturism in Black Panther

How can love be understood globally as a problematic transgression rather than the narrative of "happy endings" that Hollywood has offered? The contributors utilize varying methodologies of textual analysis, psychoanalytic models, and cultural critique and engage with a broad range of films to explore issues of gender identity and spectatorship.

From Euro-Horror to American Cinema

Screening the Dark Side of Love

Gender, Identity, and the Re-making of Blackness

Clémentine Tholas-Disset

Humor and entertainment were vital to the war effort during World War I. While entertainment provided relief to soldiers in the trenches, it also built up support for the war effort on the home front. This book looks at transnational war culture by examining seemingly light-hearted discourses on the Great War.

Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I

Cynthia J. Miller

Jakub Kazecki

This book offers an overview of global cinema that addresses borders as spaces of hybridity and change. In this collection of essays, contributors examine how cinema portrays conceptions of borderlands informed by knowledge, politics, art, memory, and lived experience, and how these constructions contribute to a changing global community. These essays analyze a variety of international feature films and documentaries that focus on the lives, cultures, and politics of borderlands. The essays discuss the ways in which conflicts and their resolutions occur in borderlands and how they are portrayed on film. The volume pays special attention to contemporary Europe, where the topic of shifting border identities is one of the main driving forces in processes of European unification.

Identity and Diaspora in Film

Border Visions

Catriona McAvoy

The volume explores contemporary and historical films about “marked women” in various national cinema traditions. The essays focus on the depictions of prostitution and promiscuity in visual media from Silent Film in America to Weimar Cinema in Germany, the Golden Years in Hollywood, to the present. The book also touches on the Western genre, exploitation film, pornography, independent, and exploitation movies.

From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn

Selling Sex on Screen

This collection analyzes how their disciplines can add unique depth and context to many of the themes that are being mobilized in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its screen adaptations. Contributors address how these themes apply to social issues and specific topics such as science and religion to the role of journalism in a democratic society.

Karen A. Ritzenhoff

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