Böcker i Topics and Issues in National Cinema-serien

By analyzing cinema in terms of Imperialism and Colonialism, Divine Work directly contributes to the understanding of cinema produced during Japan s colonial period and its lingering legacies."

The Settled Screen: Landscape and National Identity in New Zealand Cinema is the first title to explore the relationship between the representation of landscape and the development of both a national cinema and a national identity. Through the early years of New Zealand's cinema, prior to any formalized governmental support, those few feature length narrative films repeated wholesale the modes of representing the landscape and its inhabitants, while the developing documentary and travelogue industries would construct the fantasy of 'Maoriland' with New Zealand becoming internationally known as a green paradise, a Pacific idyll with an exotic, tamed, indigenous population. This precursor of the now contemporary 'Brand New Zealand' - itself a modern, politically-corrected version of these earlier narratives - would be adjusted and amended over time, especially with the formation of the New Zealand Film Commission in the late 1970s, but never entirely discarded. Beginning with a discussion on films in which landscape - and particularly the colonial or settler landscapes - have been represented in other Western cinemas, like The Searchers and Thelma & Louise, Wilson compares in indigenous films like Whale Rider, To Love a Maori and The Piano to exemplify the simultaneous strands of New Zealand cinema: a way of marketing the country based on the success of such spectacular films as Peter Jackson's Tolkien epics, and the simultaneous attempts by Maori, immigrant and minority filmmakers to find a way to represent other stories in this land without recourse to the tropes of a by-now dominant national industry.

Taking its cue from Deleuze''s definition of minor cinema as one which engages in a creative act of becoming, this collection explores the multifarious ways that music has been used in the cinemas of various countries in Australasia, Africa, Latin America and even in Europe that have hitherto received little attention. The authors consider such film music with a focus on the role it has played creating, problematizing, and sometimes contesting, the nation.Film Music in ''Minor'' National Cinemas addresses the relationships between film music and the national cinemas beyond Hollywood and the European countries that comprise most of the literature in the field. Broad in scope, it includes chapters that analyze the contribution of specific composers and songwriters to their national cinemas, and the way music works in films dealing with national narratives or issues; the role of music in the shaping of national stars and specific use of genres; audience reception of films on national music traditions; and the use of music in emerging digital video industries.

Challenges the traditional socio-political rhetoric of national cinema by providing an ecocritical examination of Nordic cinema.