Film & Media

The course of events is predetermined and cannot be changed. Forces beyond our control-or even our comprehension-shape our fates. Such is the deterministic worldview embedded in a wide swath of contemporary cinema, from arthouse experiments to popular genre films, through both thematic concerns and narrative structures. These films, especially the recent spate of "elevated" science fiction and horror, tap into this deep-seated anxiety by focusing on characters who ultimately fail to transcend the patterns and structures that define them.

Thomas M. Puhr identifies and analyzes the ways that cinema has dealt with the tension between fate and free will, from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to Christopher Nolan's Tenet. He examines films that express deterministic ideas, including circular narratives of stasis or confinement and fatalistic portraits of external forces dictating characters' lives. Puhr considers determinism at the levels of the individual, the family, and society, reading films in which characters are trapped by past or alternate selves, the burdens of family histories, or oppressive social structures. He explores how films such as Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, Ari Aster's Hereditary, Jordan Peele's Us, and Lucrecia Martel's Zama confront the limits of human agency. Puhr relates deterministic themes to the nature of moviegoing: In denying characters any ability to choose alternative paths, these films mirror how viewers themselves can only sit and watch.

Recasting the works of some of today's most compelling directors, Fate in Film is an innovative critical account of an unrecognized yet crucial aspect of contemporary cinema.

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars.

The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

Midnight Cowboy - the story of a small-town stud's attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York - is an indisputably iconic film. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of queer cinema. Jon Towlson reclaims Midnight Cowboy as a queer text by addressing John Schlesinger as a gay author and filmmaker and providing a fresh perspective on the film's relationship to the 1965 James Leo Herlihy novel from which it was adapted. Offering a nuanced and personal view of the film's relevance to queer experience and queer friendship, Towlson also considers Midnight Cowboy's production and reception and its place in Schlesinger's filmography. Depictions of sixties New York counterculture and 42nd Street hustlers offer an opportunity for reassessment, particularly in the film's relationship to male prostitution, male relationships, and sexual identity. By shifting the perspective away from previous interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic and problematic, Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and a critical forerunner to films such as My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain.

A film that transcends time, Sally Potter's Orlando follows its titular character through nearly four hundred years of British history. Orlando starts life as a young man in the 1600s and then, mid-film, becomes a woman in the 1800s. Plot, production, and performance have all contributed to the film becoming a touchstone for Tilda Swinton's ethereal and gender-bending mode. A Russian-French-Dutch-American-Italian-British co-production, Orlando was hailed as a monumental work of international art house cinema upon its release in 1992. Some understood Potter's film, a work of ruthless and ingenious adaptation, as moving away from the lesbian content of Virginia Woolf's novel. Russell Sheaffer uses a detailed analysis of screenplay drafts and more than three decades of reception to argue that while the film moves away from a direct investment in same-sex relationships, Orlando's articulations of embodiment, desire, and time have made the film continually more queer in the years since its release. Taking cues from adaptation theory and gender studies, this book meticulously charts the distinct shift from lesbian feminist text to queer film classic, arguing that the film is as much an adaptation of Woolf's A Room of One's Own as it is of its eponymous novel.

Translated by Audie E. Bock.

A first rate book and a joy to read.... It's doubtful that a complete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtained without reading this book.... Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction.
--Variety

For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of must reading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic and absorbing screen entertainments.
--Washington Post Book World