A new reality—a "horror reality”—has taken hold. David Peak’s The Spectacle of the Void examines the boundaries of the irreal and the beyond, exploring horror’s singular ability to communicate the unknown through language and image. It is also a speculative work that gazes unflinchingly at the inevitable extinction of mankind, questioning whether or not the burden of our knowing we will someday cease to exist is a burden after all, or rather the very notion that will set us free.

    He studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself. Hollywood is often criticized for distorting reality and providing escapist fantasies, but in Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; the cult favorite Eraserhead; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.

    My Own Private Idaho charts the pilgrimage of a narcoleptic hustler who is searching for his long-lost mother in a world absent of love.

    At seven levels, from Starter to Advanced, this impressive selection of carefully graded readers offers exciting reading for every student's capabilities. Hiro, a 20-year-old Japanese student, sits next to an old man on a train to Berlin. By mistake they exchange phones and read each other's text messages. Hiro believes that the man's messages show that he is going to Berlin to kill someone. Hiro's first day in the city is a race against time as he tries to warn people of an assassination plot. But is the plot real or does it exist only in Hiro's imagination? Paperback-only version. Also available as a pack with 2 Audio CDs with complete text recordings from the book.

    If you’re struggling to learn English and speak it well in your work, business, teaching or daily life this is the book for you."Master English FAST – An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English", by Dr Julian Northbrook, will get you started on the right track by showing you step-by-step what to do as an intermediate or advanced English learner to speak English as a second language at a very high level.This is Julian's most complete and comprehensive guide on the topic and is the recommended starting point for all of his English improvement books.

    It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

    But how much of what you see on the screen is true? And does it really matter if filmmakers just make it all up? Picking her way through Hollywood's version of events, acclaimed historian Alex von Tunzelmann sorts the fact from the fiction. Along the way, we meet all our favourite historical characters, on screen and in real life: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln, and from Attila the Hun to Nelson Mandela.Based on the long-running column in the Guardian, Reel History takes a comic look at the history of the world as told through the movies - the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.

    This revised edition contains material on GoodFellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and other projects up to Casino.

    For Deleuze, philosophy cannot be a reflection of something else; philosophical concepts are, rather, the images of thought, to be understood on their own terms. Here he puts this view of philosophy to work in understanding the concepts—or images—of film.Cinema, to Deleuze, is not a language that requires probing and interpretation, a search for hidden meanings; it can be understood directly, as a composition of images and signs, pre-verbal in nature. Thus he offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytic and semiological approaches that have dominated film studies.Drawing upon Henri Bergson’s thesis on perception and C. S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs, Deleuze is able to put forth a new theory and taxonomy of the image, which he then applies to concrete examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers—Griffith, Eisenstein, Pasolini, Rohmer, Bresson, Dreyer, Stroheim, Buñuel, and many others. Because he finds movement to be the primary characteristic of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, he devotes this first volume to that aspect of film. In the years since World War II, time has come to dominate film; that shift, and the signs and images associated with it, are addressed in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

    MASS COMMUNICATION THEORY: FOUNDATIONS, FERMENT, AND FUTURE introduces you to both current and classical mass communication theories, and explains the media literacy movement in terms you can understand. Plus, this mass communications textbook helps you develop a better understanding of media theory so you can play a role in the media industry's future. And because itÂ's loaded with study tools, it will help you succeed on exams and in the course.

    With the film-world-savvy and razor-sharp commentary for which he is known, he provides an insider's take on today's movie world as he takes a look at "the big picture" on Hollywood, screenwriting, and the future of American cinema. Paperback.

    This study narrates the film's journey from box-office bemusement through word of mouth success to the recent director's cut of the film, and also discusses fans' reactions to the film's enigmatic conclusion, explaining how "Donnie Darko" gripped the imagination of Generation X teenagers across the world.

    A guide to more than one hundred of the most popular and controversial cult classic films ever made includes coverage of All About Eve, Tarzan and His Mate, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

    #6

    Alexander 'Sandy' Mackendrick directed classic Ealing comedies plus a Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. But after retiring from film-making in 1969, he then spent nearly 25 years teaching his craft at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.Mackendrick produced hundreds of pages of masterly handouts and sketches, designed to guide his students to a finer understanding of how to write a story, and then use those devices peculiar to cinema in order to tell that story as effectively as possible. Gathered and edited in this collection, Mackendrick's teachings reveal that he had the talent not only to make great films, but also to articulate the process with a clarity and insight that will still inspire any aspirant film-maker.