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In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs., Bij veel mensen en vooral filmliefhebbers is het geweld in Amerikaanse cinema er met de paplepel ingegoten: van Anthony Perkins die Janet Leigh aan stukken rijt in een van de meest beruchte douchescenes, via de meesterwerken uit de jaren zeventig van Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah en Francis Ford Coppola, tot de hedendaagse verbeeldingen van de algehele vernietiging van de wereld door terrorisme, oorlog of wraakzuchtige aliens. Transfigurations geeft een geheel nieuwe kijk op de manier waarop wij omgaan met fictieve vormen van geweld. Asbjørn Grønstad stelt in zijn studie orthodoxe opvattingen en hedendaagse paradigma's over onderzoek naar filmgeweld op de proef. Het verandert onze kijk op de methodiek waarmee we geweld in films analyseren en de betekenis ervan; niet als een opzichzelfstaand iets, maar als een gevolg van onze eigen ideeën over culturele ideologieën en overtuigingen.

This first critical overview of the European film avant-garde ushers in a new approach and creates its own subject. Arguing that a European perspective is the only way to understand the film avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Hagener provides a much-needed summary of the theory and practice of the movement. This incisive study also pioneers a new approach to the alternative cinema network that sustained the avant-garde, paying particular attention to the emergence of screening clubs, film festivals, and archives.

This first book-length study shows how Germany tried to reconcile the horrendous experiences of the FirstWorld War through the films made in 1919-1933. Drawing on the analysis of twenty-five such films, and covering a wide range of documentaries as well as feature films on the reasons for the outbreak of the war, life at the front,war at sea and the home front, the author sketches out the historical and cultural context, including reviews and censors' reports, in which these films were made and viewed.

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe's national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of "world cinema" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.

Ton de Leeuw (1926-96) is probably one of the most influential composers at the crossroads between Eastern philosophy and Western technique. A one-time pupil of Olivier Messiaen's in Paris, throughout the latter years of his musical career he concentrated on the marriage of Western emphasis on action and tension, and the ethical function of music in Eastern traditions. The musical world of the twentieth century is a divided one. Numerous histories of it have been written, but few of the exceptional quality of de Leeuw's, who brought into his writing a lifetime of experience as a composer and scholar of music. His work is a lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles and terminologies in modern music that can be regarded as most innovatory. This book is an excellent guide for anyone wishing to gain knowledge of the compositional technique and mentality, particularly university and conservatory students.

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination presents for the first time a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s; based on a wealth of designers' drawings, film stills and archival documents, the book offers a new insight into the development and significance of trans-national artistic collaboration during this period. European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns.

The first book-length account of the symbolic chains that link remakes and explain their disguises, Film Remakes as Rituals and Disguise is also the first book to explore how and why these stories are told. The author focuses on contemporary retellings of three particular tales - Joan of Arc, Carmen, and Psycho - to reveal what she calls the remake's "rituals of disguise." Joan of Arc, the author demonstrates, later appears as the tough, androgynous Ripley in the blockbuster Alien III film and the God-ridden Bess in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves. Ultimately, these remake chains offer evidence of the archetypes of our own age, cultural "fingerprints" that are reflective of society's own preferences and politics. Underneath the redundancy of the remake, the author shows, lies our collective social memory. Indeed, at its core the lowly remake represents a primal attempt to gain immortality, to triumph over death-playing at movie theatres seven days a week, 365 days a year. Addressing the wider theoretical implications of her argument with sections on contemporary film issues such as trauma, jouissance, and censorship, the author offers an insightful addition to current debates in film theory and cinema history.

Since 1957 the Film Museum in Amsterdam has been in possession of the Desmet Collection which contains the estate of the Dutch cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956). The collection comprises almost nine hundred European and American films in all genres, a collection of publicity material and a dauntingly large business archive. These three sources form the basis of this first comprehensive reconstruction of Desmet's career: from his nomadic beginnings as a traveling showman, working the seasonal fairgrounds of the Netherlands and Belgium, to his successful switch to permanent cinema operation and film distribution. The history of Desmet's career offers not simply an abstract of an individual character and his personal ambitions and motivations, but also epitomizes transformations in the world of cinema as an industry. Between 1907 and 1916 the world of cinema experienced radical structural change which Desmet not only witnessed but also helped to bring about. Given the insufficiencies of Dutch film production, Desmet became a link between film production abroad and film exhibition in the Netherlands. Desmet is not merely representative of the rise of the permanent movie house and the coming of the film distributor. This book shows how his fortunes also encapsulate a series of structural changes within the new culture of permanent cinema and film distribution. In film distribution these changes embraced the introduction of film rental, the advent of the long feature film, the introduction of the monopoly distribution system and the periodic transformation of the products on offer. In the business of cinema operation change involved specialization, the creation of fixed theater venues, the development of a theater hierarchy, expansions of scale, the introduction of trade journals and the gradual legitimization of cinema as a popular cultural institution. These transformations were not confined to the Netherlands but were also taking place in the re