Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where over a thousand-year history Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history an argument that informs the shape of the whole.

The book is divided into two sections. The first ‘Islamicate Histories’ charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow the traditions of miniature painting poetry song and their performance and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section ‘Cinematic Forms’ discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’ as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’.

Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim especially in contemporary Bollywood.

This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry dance song performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents.

The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use.

It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history cultural studies women's studies visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India. 

How have nuclear issues been covered in documentary since the end of the Cold War? This original new book explores how the sometimes elusive sometimes dramatic effects of uranium products on the landscape on architecture and on social organisation continue to show up on-screen maintaining a record of moving images that goes back to the early twentieth century.

It is the first book to analyse independent documentary films about nuclear energy - it suggests an approach to documentary films as agents of change. 

Each chapter of this book focuses on one of ten different documentary films made in Europe and North America since 1989.  Each of these films works the material and the ideological heritage of the nuclear power industry into visions of the future. Dealing with the legacy of how ignorance and neglect led to accidents and failures the films offer different ways of understanding and moving on from the past. The documentary form itself can be understood as a collective means for the discovery of creative solutions and the communication of new narratives. In the case of these films the concepts of radioactivity and deep time in particular are used to bring together narrative and formal aesthetics in the process of reimagining the relationships between people and their environments.

Focusing on the representation of radioactive spaces in documentary and experimental art films the study shows how moving images do more than communicate the risks and opportunities and the tumultuous history associated with atomic energy. They embody the effects of Cold War technologies as they persist into the present acting as a reminder that the story is not over yet.

Primary readership will be academics and students working in environmental communication and in environmental humanities more broadly. For students of independent film or documentary it will also provide a clear picture of contemporary themes and creative practice.

The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has to date written and directed nine films winning an Oscar a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013.  In 2016 he created and directed his first TV series The Young Pope which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films.

This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film.

International contributors from the UK Italy France The Netherlands Australia Israel Canada and the United States Italy Israel France UK Australia Canada offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work.   They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory nostalgia ageing love thirst for fulfilment search for the self identity crisis human estrangement marginality irony and power. In so doing they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion challenging established assumptions and interpretations.  Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino’s highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture. 

While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian none

of these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership.  This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker.

The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions.

Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS – The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019.  The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field.   

Primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies.  Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates.

Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses

Given the subject there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership but this is primarily a scholarly text.

The first in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy this volume explores a transdisciplinary notion of media and technology exploring media as technology with special attention to its material historical and ecological ramifications. The authors reconceptualize media from environmental ecological and systems approaches drawing not only on media and communication studies but also philosophy sociology political science biology art computer science information studies and other disciplines.

Featuring a group of internationally known scholars this collection explores evolving definitions of media and how media technologies are transforming theory and practice. As the current media includes a wider and wider range of concepts products services and institutions the definition of media continues to be in a state of flux. What are media today? How is media studies evolving? How have technologies transformed communication and media theory and informed praxis? What are some of the futures of media?

The collection challenges traditional notions of media as well as concepts such as freedom of expression audience empowerment and participatory media and explores emergent media including transmedia virtual reality online games metatechnology remediation and makerspaces.  

The book’s primary readership will be academics scholars and students in media and communication studies including a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in media studies communication studies and new media. Suitable for classroom use in the areas of philosophy of communication and media media theory media ecology cultural studies media archaeology feminist studies and political economy of communications and media.

Analysing a variety of international films and ultimately placing them in dialogue with video art photographic narratives and emerging digital image-based technologies the contributions explore the expanding range of ‘mediated’ narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. Each chapter presents an interesting critical approach to the diversity of topics with clear explanation of the contextual framework and methodology and a consistent depth of analysis. 

In the three sections of the book authors underline the continual role of film and media in creating moving image narratives of the city identifying how it creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture re-presenting familiar cities modes of seeing cultures and social questions in unfamiliar ways. This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media which illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture. 

In making this shift from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption the book not only reveals new techniques of representation mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers; its emphasis on ‘narrative’ offers insights into critical societal issues. These include cultural identity diversity memory and spatial politics as they are both informed by and represented in various media.

The focus for the book is on how films can produce mediation of urban life and culture by connecting the notions of identity diversity and memory. Both the subject and the approach are gaining in popularity in recent years. This book's main feature is its dual perspective involving both practical and theoretical stances – and it is this approach that makes it a particularly relevant and original contribution.

Primary readership will be academics scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners interested in architecture and media in general film moving images urban studies in particular. Also of relevance to sociologists and those interested in cultural theory.   The inclusion of chapters on urban photography and art installations may also be of interest to students and designers in these areas.

The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. This book offers a unique and layered account of the complex dynamics in the modern moment of social change drawing together critical social and cultural theory as well as empirical research which includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses.

This original new study puts forward a much-needed analysis of twenty-first century television and lesbian visibility. Books addressing the representation of lesbians have tended to focus on film; analysis of queer characters on television has usually focused on representations of gay males.  Other recent books have attempted to address lesbian gay and trans representation together with the result that none are examined in sufficient detail – here the exclusive focus on lesbian representation allows a fuller discussion. Until now much of the research on lesbian and gay representation has tended to employ only textual analysis. The combination of audience research with analysis in this book brings a new angle to the debates as does the critical review of the tropes of lesbian representation. The earlier stereotypes of pathological monsters and predators are discussed alongside the more recent trends of ‘lesbian chic’ and ‘lesbianism as a phase’. 

Perhaps no current filmmaker has made more provocative films about American history than Oliver Stone. In this book Carl Freedman gives a detailed and nuanced account of the presidencies of John F. Kennedy Richard Nixon and George W. Bush as fictionalized in Stone’s biographical films JFK Nixon and W.

Offering detailed historical perspectives alongside careful aesthetic criticism Freedman explores how Stone uses melodrama tragedy and farce to transform politics into national mythology. Synthesizing film criticism with political and historical analysis the book transcends the limitations of formalism and empiricism reflecting on both Stone’s achievements as a filmmaker and American politics of the past sixty years. 

Oliver Stone’s importance among filmmakers as the major chronicler of recent US history is the starting point for the analysis of his three ‘presidential’ films: JFK Nixon and W. While not claiming equal artistic merit for Stone’s films Freedman makes some comparison with Shakespeare’s history plays and draws on T.S. Eliot’s notion of ‘essential history’ to transcend the barren dichotomy of formalism versus empiricism – that is treating historical fiction as either only pure fiction with nothing to say about real history or judging it as non-fiction by the extent to which it adheres to superficial historical detail. Instead the focus is on the capacity of Stone’s films to illuminate the structural workings of history contemporary and general.

Freedman is thoroughly familiar with his subject and his meticulous attention to historical accuracy and critical attention to the films is impeccable. This book has a powerfully original focus and makes a significant contribution to the field through offering these detailed historical perspectives alongside much more careful aesthetic criticism of the films. It has the potential to become not only a great source on its subject but a model of how to approach historical fiction in general.

This is an academic study but is written in such an accessible style that it will have genuine appeal to the general reader – to anyone with an interest in cinema politics and recent history. Wide-ranging accessible and highly original American Presidents combines erudition and complex analysis with jargon-free writing and is sure to engage anyone interested in the intersection of American politics and cinema.

The academic readership will be among humanities scholars and students of film popular culture media politics political history and modern history. It will be highly relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying film or modern American history and culture.

Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade including films plays TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries sketchbooks correspondence unpublished screenplays and more Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen showing a master still at work – even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage. 

The Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave hitting its stride with Trainspotting and going global with The Full Monty Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Human Traffic Sexy Beast Shaun of the Dead and This Is England Britpop cinema pushed boundaries paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe.

Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg Irvine Welsh Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.

From Méliès to New Media contributes to a dynamic stream of film history that is just beginning to understand that new media forms are not only indebted to but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Adopting a media archaeology this book will present a comparative examination of cinema including early film experiments with light and contemporary music videos silent film and their digital restorations German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake Alfred Hitchcock’s films exhibited in the gallery post medium films as abstracted light forms and interactive digital screens revising experiments in precinema. Media archaeology is an approach that uncovers the potential of intermedial research as a fluid form of history. It envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalised contributions to history. It is also an approach that has been championed by influential new historicists like Thomas Elsaesser as providing the most vibrant and productive new histories (2014).