Kirjahaku

This is the first book on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the popular and critically acclaimed director of films such as Amélie, Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement, Alien Resurrection, and City of Lost Children. Jeunet's work exemplifies Europe's engagement with Hollywood, while at the same time making him a figurehead of the critically overlooked, specifically French tradition of the cinema of the fantastic.Having garnered both commercial success and critical esteem in genres such as science fiction, fantasy, romantic comedy, and the war epic, Jeunet's work nevertheless engages with key aspects of French history and contemporary French culture. This study analyzes the director's major films, including those he made with Marc Caro, and his early short works. Elizabeth Ezra brings a new perspective to the study of Jeunet's work, uncovering instances of repressed historical trauma involving France's role in Algeria and the Second World War. The book includes a commentary by Jeunet himself on his career and corpus of films.

Before the turn of the twentieth century, before the nickelodeon, even before the first cinemas, Georges Méliès began making movies.. Directing, editing, producing, designing, and starring in over 500 films between 1896 to 1912, Méliès was also the first cinematic auteur.. This is the first study of Méliès's films to appear in English in over twenty years and the only book to interpret his work using the tools of modern film analysis.. Locates the roots of modern narrative cinema in Méliès's work, identifying techniques of editing and mise-en-scène previously thought to have originated with D. W. Griffith.

France between the two World Wars was pervaded by representations of its own colonial power, expressed forcefully in the human displays at the expositions coloniales, films starring Josephine Baker, and the short stories of Paul Morand, and more subtly in the avant-garde writings of René Crevel and Raymond Roussel. In her lively book, Elizabeth Ezra interprets a fascinating array of cultural products to uncover what she terms the "colonial unconscious" of the Jazz Age—the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of exoticism and the double bind of a colonial discourse that foreclosed the possibility of the very assimilation it invited.Ezra situates the apotheosis of French colonialism in relation to both the internal tensions of the colonial project and the competing imperialisms of Great Britain and the United States. Examining both the uses and the limits of psychoanalytic theories of empire, she proposes a reading of French colonialism which, while historically specific, also contributes to our understanding of contemporary culture. The enduring legacy of empire is felt to this day, as Ezra demonstrates in a provocative epilogue on the remarkable similarities between the rhetoric of colonial France and accounts of the French victory in the 1998 World Cup.

This book explores the border zones between life and non-life as represented in cinema from the end of the nineteenth century, when France led the global film industry, to the first decades of the twenty-first century, when world film markets are dominated by Hollywood. Informed by both the Internet of Things and the Parliament of Things, The Cinema of Things examines cinematic depictions of the ways in which human beings are prosthetically engaged with life beyond the self in the global age: by hyperconsumption; by structures of racial and sexual objectification that reduce people designated as “others” to objects of fascination, sexual gratification, warfare, or labor; and by information technology that replaces human agency with encoding. Consumer culture, a key feature of globalization, posits that we must supplement ourselves with commodities without which we would otherwise be incomplete: but these prostheses, rather than enhancing us, end up creating the insufficiencies they were meant to overcome. We are engulfed by objects, to the extent that we ourselves are becoming objectified. At the same time, objects, especially technological objects, are becoming increasingly autonomous, assuming roles that were once the preserve of human agency. We are becoming the objects of globalization, and cinema imaginatively represents this transformation, but it also offers us the possibility of retaining our humanity in the process.

This book explores the border zones between life and non-life as represented in cinema from the end of the nineteenth century, when France led the global film industry, to the first decades of the twenty-first century, when world film markets are dominated by Hollywood. Informed by both the Internet of Things and the Parliament of Things, The Cinema of Things examines cinematic depictions of the ways in which human beings are prosthetically engaged with life beyond the self in the global age: by hyperconsumption; by structures of racial and sexual objectification that reduce people designated as “others” to objects of fascination, sexual gratification, warfare, or labor; and by information technology that replaces human agency with encoding. Consumer culture, a key feature of globalization, posits that we must supplement ourselves with commodities without which we would otherwise be incomplete: but these prostheses, rather than enhancing us, end up creating the insufficiencies they were meant to overcome. We are engulfed by objects, to the extent that we ourselves are becoming objectified. At the same time, objects, especially technological objects, are becoming increasingly autonomous, assuming roles that were once the preserve of human agency. We are becoming the objects of globalization, and cinema imaginatively represents this transformation, but it also offers us the possibility of retaining our humanity in the process.

Ruby McCracken's life is OVER. Her parents have forced her to move to the Ordinary World and that means -- new home, new school and worst of all, no magic! Seriously?! A witch without magic? That's LITERALLY tragic. Ruby has to leave behind her broomstick (and walk everywhere -- YUCK!) and her friends (no more watching Hex Factor together on a Saturday night). She's absolutely STARVING with no snack spell, and there's no way to get revenge on the mean girls at her boring new school without a good curse.Despite her best witching efforts, the Ordinary World remains tragically magic-deprived, until Ruby receives a mysterious hext that seems to offer an answer. That is, if she can figure out what it means and, more importantly, who sent it.Packed with great humour, loveable characters and witty banter, Ruby McCracken: Tragic Without Magic is perfect for fans of Witchworld and The Worst Witch.