Jonathan Rayner

Michael Mann is one of the most important American filmmakers of the past forty years. His films exhibit the existential concerns of art cinema, articulated through a conspicuous and recognizable visual style and yet integrated within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Since his beginnings as a screenwriter in the 1970s, Mann has become a key figure within contemporary American popular culture as writer, director, and producer for film and television. This volume offers a detailed study of Mann's feature films, from The Jericho Mile (1979) to Public Enemies (2009), with consideration also being given to parallels in the production, style, and characterization in his television work. It explores Mann's relationship with classical genres, his thematic concentration on issues of morality and masculinity, his film adaptations from literature, and the development and significance of his trademark visual style within modern American cinema.

Vice and Vindication

The Cinema of Michael Mann

The term ‘Gothic’ has been applied to examples of Australian cinema since the 1970s, often in arbitrary and divergent ways. This book examines a wide range of Australian films to trace their Gothic resemblances, characteristics and meanings. Concentrating on the occurrence of Gothic motifs, characters, landscapes and narratives, it argues for the recognition and relevance of a coherent Gothic heritage in Australian film. Considering a plethora of Gothic representatives in relation to four consistent and illuminating continuities (images of the family, ideas of monstrosity, generic hybridity and the occurrence of the sublime), this study investigates the appearance and asserts the significance of Australian Gothic films within their national, cultural, literary and cinematic traditions.

A Cinema of Horrors

Australian Gothic

Jonathan R. Rayner

With The Films of Peter Weir, Jonathan Raynerpresents an examination of the Australian director's short films and feature productions since 1970.

The Films of Peter Weir

This introduction to the new Australian film industry explores prominent directors and stars, themes, styles, and evolving genres in an analysis of key films. The evolution of genres peculiar to Australia and adaptations of conventional Hollywood forms such as the musical and the road movie are examined through readings of landmark films, including Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max trilogy, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The key issue of the revival--the definition, representation, and propagation of a national image--is woven through the analysis.

An Introduction

Contemporary Australian Cinema

Graeme Harper

While the consideration of landscape on film has been growing in currency over the past four to five years, as yet no single publication has attempted to embrace the multitude of nationalities, cinematic examples and critical approaches that Cinema and Landscape encompasses. Written by reputed cinema scholars and academic innovators, this volume both extends the existing field of film studies and stakes claims to overlapping, contested territories in the art and humanities and the social sciences. The notion of landscape is a complex one, but it has been central to the art and artistry of the cinema. After all, what is the French New Wave without Paris? What are the films of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, without New York? Cinema and Landscape frames up contemporary film landscapes across the world, in a concentrated examination and interrogation of screen aesthetics and national ideology, film form and cultural geography, cinematic representation and the human environment.

Film, Nation and Cultural Geography: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography

Cinema and Landscape

This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

Genre, history and national cinema

The naval war film

Graham Harper

This book brings together critical and theoretical essays examining the connections between films and landscapes. It showcases the work of established and emerging academics whose research probes the complex relationships between moving images and the filmed environment, and accounts for the impactful effects of viewing lived spaces and human places on screen. The essays in this collection actively engage with examples of contemporary popular and art cinema, genre films and auteur canon, historical films, propaganda, documentary and animation in their explorations of the meanings with which filmed landscapes are endowed and invested. The breadth of the study is matched by the depth of the interest, with writers here approaching the subject of film landscapes as critics, as film practitioners, and as teachers of film studies and film making. Film Landscapes gives voice to a great many ideas, and includes coverage of a great many films; but it also points forward to ways in which we might revisit discussions of the environments of film and consider ways in which history and creativity, critical understanding and the interaction of human beings and place could be reconsidered and revised to produce new insights.

Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture

Film Landscapes

This fully revised and updated edition of Jonathan Rayner's acclaimed study takes an in-depth look at the career of a filmmaker who has, over the course of 30 years, put together a substantial and much-loved body of work.

Jonathan Rayner

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