The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes (Directors' Cuts)

The Cinema of Béla Tarr is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Bela Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. András Bálint Kovács traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a conscious and meticulous recombination of and experimentation with these elements, Tarr arrived at his unique style. The significance of these films is that, beyond their aesthetic and historical value, they provide the most powerful vision of an entire region and its historical situation. Tarr's films express, in their universalistic language, the shared feelings of millions of Eastern Europeans.

The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Short Cuts)

Biographies & Memoirs

Archer, Neil

Arts & Literature

Wallflower Press

Though often seen as one of America's native cinematic genres, the road movie has lent itself to diverse international contexts and inspired a host of filmmakers. As analyzed in this study, from its most familiar origins in Hollywood the road movie has become a global film practice, whether as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between various national contexts and American cinema, as a means of narrating different national and continental histories, or as a form of individual filmmaking expression. Beginning with key films from Depression-era Hollywood and the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and then considering its wider effect on world cinemas, this volume maps the development and adaptability of an enduring genre, studying iconic films along the way.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood looks into the contexts of studio film production in the new century in order to understand what shapes the style and content of present-day cinema. In an era dominated in box-office terms by the franchise and the family film, this book combines close textual readings and industrial analysis, illustrating why these kinds of movies are favored in the contemporary climate by producers and audiences alike. Neil Archer critically explores the narrative and aesthetic strategies at work in Hollywood’s most high-profile films, from Harry Potter, to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, to The Lego Movie. Along the way, the book answers some often unexpected questions: Why is Hollywood nervous about flying saucers? Why might the cinematic auteur be Hollywood’s savior? And why are the most grown-up movies those made for children? As this study shows, like the films themselves, the answers to these questions are often complex and surprising.

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (Short Cuts)

This in-depth study of one of the twenty-first century’s most acclaimed films, The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 considers the contribution of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film to the understanding of ‘youth’ in a contemporary, digital age. 
The book starts by situating The Social Network within the contexts of ‘youth film’, arguing that it challenges and reshapes the boundaries of this genre by rethinking the notion of ‘youth’ itself in the present century. It goes on to consider in detail the aesthetics at work in the film, arguing for its critical and reflexive use of an ‘accelerated’ audio-visual style, in order to capture both the new visual regimes of the personal computer era, and the ethical and intellectual ambiguities of Facebook itself as a creation. Finally, it locates the film within the broader visual styles and fashion codes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century consumer culture that incorporates and commodifies rebellion and dissent: qualities that underpinned Facebook’s emerging, paradoxical identity as at once the epitome of ‘hacker’ culture and also a multi-billion-dollar global company. 
Reframing the meaning of youth cinema, this volume in the Cinema and Youth Culture series is ideal for students, researchers and scholars of cinema studies, youth culture and digital cultures.

The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 (Cinema and Youth Cultures)

Routledge

The Social Network (Cinema and Youth Cultures)

By the power of Greyskull! In their second big-screen collaboration after Shaun of the Dead (2004), with Hot Fuzz (2007) director and co-writer Edgar Wright and co-writer and star Simon Pegg took aim at the conventions of the Hollywood action movie, transplanting gratuitous slo-mo action sequences into the English village supermarket and local pub. In this first critical study of arguably the most influential British film-makers to emerge this century, Neil Archer considers to what extent a modestly funded film such as this can be considered 'British' at all, given its international success and distribution by an American studio, and how far that success depends upon what he calls its 'cultural specificity'. He considers the film as a parody of the action movie genre, and discusses exactly how parody works – not just in relation to the conventions of the action film but also in the depiction of English space. Exactly what and who is Hot Fuzz poking fun at?

Studying Hot Fuzz (Studying Films)

Liverpool University Press

Studying Hot Fuzz

Auteur

Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (Cinema and Society)

Bloomsbury Academic

Neil Archer's original study makes a timely and politically-engaged intervention in debates about national cinema and national identity. Structured around key examples of 'culturally English cinema' in the years up to and following the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Cinema and Brexit looks to make sense of the peculiarities and paradoxes marking this era of filmmaking. At the same time as providing a contextual and analytical reading of 21st century filmmaking in Britain, Archer raises critical questions about popular national cinema, and how Brexit has cast both light and shadow over this body of films. Central to Archer's argument is the idea that Brexit represents not just a critical moment in how we will understand future film production, but also in how we will understand production of the recent past. Using as a point of departure the London Olympics opening ceremony of 2012, Cinema and Brexit considers the tensions inherent in a wide range of films, including Skyfall (2012), Dunkirk (2017), Their Finest (2017), Darkest Hour (2017), The Crown (Netflix, 2016), Paddington (2014), Paddington 2 (2017), Never Let Me Go (2011), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), The Trip (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), The World's End (2013), Sightseers (2012), One Day (2011), Attack the Block (2011), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and The Kid Who Would be King (2019). Archer examines the complex national narratives and representations these films expound, situating his analyses within the broader commercial contexts of film production beyond Hollywood, highlighting the negotiations or contradictions at play between the industrial imperatives of contemporary films and the varied circumstances in which they are made. Considering some of the ways a popular and globally-minded English cinema is finding means to work alongside and through the contexts of Brexit, he questions what are the stakes for, and possibilities of, a global 'culturally English cinema' in 2019 and beyond.

This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively 'modern' genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book shows how film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sport's wider place in modern life.

Sport, Film, and the Modern World (Communication, Sport, and Society)

Peter Lang

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Archer, Neil. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Archer, Neil

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Archer, Neil. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Short Cuts)

The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Short Cuts)

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (Short Cuts)

The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 (Cinema and Youth Cultures)

The Social Network (Cinema and Youth Cultures)

Studying Hot Fuzz (Studying Films)

Studying Hot Fuzz

Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (Cinema and Society)

Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (Cinema and Society)

Sport, Film, and the Modern World (Communication, Sport, and Society)