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South Asian Filmscapes

Transregional Encounters

By Elora Halim Chowdhury, Esha Niyogi De

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947...

Circulating the Code

Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China

By Ting Zhang

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could...

Return to the Land of the Head Hunters

Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

By Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

Photographer Edward Curtis’s 1914 orchestrally scored melodrama In the Land of the Head Hunters was one of the first US films to feature an Indigenous cast. This landmark of early silent cinema was an intercultural...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Network Sovereignty

Building the Internet across Indian Country

By Marisa Elena Duarte

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and...

Reporting for China

How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World

By Pál Nyíri

While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence...

Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”

Contemplating the Art of Existence

By Ursula Lindqvist

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The “songs” of...

The Audio Dictionary

By Glenn D. White and Gary J. Louie

The Audio Dictionary is a comprehensive resource, including historical, obsolete, and obscure as well as contemporary terms relating to diverse aspects of audio such as film and TV sound, recording, Hi-Fi, and acoustics.

The Third Edition...

Icons of Danish Modernity

Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen

By Julie K. Allen

Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842-1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early twentieth-century Denmark....

Thai Cinema Uncensored

By Matthew Hunt

In this first full-length study on the topic, Matthew Hunt—with access to rare and controversial films—provides a history of film censorship in Thailand. Hunt outlines its beginnings in the country, when films were censored by...

The Power of Song

Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

By Guntis Smidchens

The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “Singing Revolution.” When attacked by Soviet soldiers in public displays of violent...

Family Revolution

Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture

By Hui Faye Xiao

As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a...

Verse Going Viral

China's New Media Scenes

By Heather Inwood

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel...

Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia

Fiction, Film and Social Change

By Andrew Nestingen

Scandinavian popular novels and films have flourished in the last thirty years. In Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, Andrew Nestingen argues that the growth and visibility of popular culture have been at the heart of...

Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)

By C. Claire Thomson

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (“The Celebration”) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity — no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director,...

Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

Pictures in the Typewriter, Writings on the Screen

By Maaret Koskinen

Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film The Silence was made at a point in his career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable...

Nordic Exposures

Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

By Arne Lunde

Nordic Exposures explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema between and during the two world wars. Scandinavian identities could seem mutable and constructed at moments, while at other times they were...

Dagur Kari's Noi the Albino

By Bjorn Nordfjord

Dagur Kari’s Noi the Albino (Noi albinoi, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and...

Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love

By Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in...

Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners

By Mette Hjort

Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and...