Martin Barker

Julian Petley

The influence of the media is a contentious issue. Every time a particularly high-profile crime of violence is committed, there are those who blame the effects of the media. The familiar culprits of cinema, television, video and rock music, have now been joined, particularly in the wake of the massacre at Columbine High, by the Internet and the World Wide Web. Yet, any real evidence that the media do actually have such negative effects remains as elusive as ever and, consequently, the debate about effects frequently ends up as being little more than strident and rhetorical appeals to common sense. This text argues that the question of media influence needs to be debated by those with a clearer understanding of how audiences and media interact with one another. Analyzing the failure of the effects approach to understand both the modern media and their audiences, this new edition examines the influence of the effects tradition in America, the United Kingdom, Australia and Europe as well as the role of the British Board of Film Classification.

The Media/violence Debate

Ill Effects

Freedom and Censorship in the Media

The Video Nasties

Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe

The New Racism

The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign

A Haunt of Fears

Thomas Austin

Taking account of the major developments in the field of star studies, this book explores the political economy of stardom, questions of performance, the effect on stardom of convergence between the film industry and other leisure industries, and the role of audiences. The book combines a review of current trends with case studies of individual stars enabling students and researchers to widen their knowledge of the field and explore new ways of approaching the star phenomenon.

Contemporary Hollywood Stardom

Roger Sabin

How media versions of Cooper's classic frontier novel have perpetuated the myth of "America."

History of an American Myth

The Lasting of the Mohicans

This book offers a reappraisal of star studies in light of the arrival of the internet and the explosion in materials such as glossy magazines and merchandise meaning that stars are visible as never before. It explores the political economy of stardom, questions of performance, the effect on stardom of convergence between the film industry and other leisure industries, and the role of audiences.

Everybody analyses films. Ordinary viewers, chatting on the way home afterwards. Reviewers, telling us just enough to tempt or put off. Critics, ‘situating’ films for us. Moralists, hunting for the (harmful) message. So what exactly is it that film academics do that’s different?Martin Barker and Thomas Austin provide a jargon-free, accessible and student-friendly introduction to film analysis. They begin with a discussion about audience and a detailed case-study on four conflicting analyses of Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The authors examine a range of popular Hollywood films in a variety of genres, including Titanic, Deep Impact, Sleepless in Seattle, The Lion King, Starship Troopers and The Usual Suspects, and provide vivid demonstrations of what can and can’t be achieved with close textual analysis. The book ends by proposing a list of measures for assessing the adequacy of film analyses: measures intended to lay the basis of a way of doing film analysis which goes beyond theoretically-predetermined and often obscurantist assertions.Explicitly rejecting much of the theoretical baggage that dogs contemporary film analysis, Barker and Austin strip the subject down to its bare essentials. The result is a provocative and timely reexamination of many of the basic tenets in film theory and analysis.

Reinventing Film Analysis

From Antz To Titanic

Ideology, Power, and the Critics

Comics

Why does this book that everyone knows but that few have read continue to be perennially attractive for the media? In answer to this question, this study throws a new light on the idea of frontier and on the meaning of the American Dream.

Anne Beezer

"Reading Into Cultural Studies" revisits a selection of key texts central to the formation of cultural studies as a discipline and as a project. These texts address questions of power, ideology and the possibilities and limits of resistance. Each of the eleven essays in the collection renews an early study in one area of cultural investigation, bringing such seminal texts as "Subculture" by Dick Hebdige, "Loving With a Vengeance" by Tania Modleski and "Bond and Beyond" by Tony Bennett back to the centre of attention, However the essays are not purely celebratory. Each study is critically examined in a number of ways - for its research strategy, its implicit theories of power and ideology, for the empirical evidence it draws on and its conceptual framework. Together, the essays provide an introduction to some of the central debates and issues in cultural studies.

Reading Into Cultural Studies

Ramaswami Harindranath

Jane Arthurs

Between 1996-97 an almost unprecedented campaign was mounted in the British press against on one film: David Cronenberg's Crash. What motivated this campaign? What can it tell us about British film culture? What impact did the campaign have on general audiences? This book, which draws on a year-long investigation supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, offers a series of important and challenging findings and is a major contribution to our understanding of censorship campaigns, how audiences respond to films, and the strategies employed in engaging with such texts.

Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception

The Crash Controversy

Feona Attwood

Clarissa Smith

How did audiences across the world engage with the blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones? This book presents the findings of a major research project that gathered the responses of more than 10,000 people. Its findings challenge many conventional approaches and open up new ways of thinking about the value of contemporary 'fantasy'.

How Audiences Engage with Dark Television

Watching Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones was an international sensation, and has been looked at from many different angles. But to date there has been little research into its audiences: who they were, how they engaged with and responded to it. This book presents the findings of a major international research project that garnered more than 10,000 responses to an innovative 'qualiquantitative' questionnaire. Among its findings are: a new way of understanding the place and role of favourite characters in audiences’ responses; new insights into the role of fantasy in encouraging thinking about our own world; and an account of two combined emotions – relish and anguish – which structure audiences’ reactions to controversial elements in the series.

Martin Barker

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