Great e-Books on British and American cinema, and film theory and history

Image from Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) [Read Paul Grainge's wonderful essay 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' linked to below]

Film Studies For Free today sings the praises of the very marvellous Manchester University Press. MUP has an excellent record in Open Access publishing, and especially in Film Studies OA journal publishing, as previously reported by FSFF. But it is also in the process of making some of its full-length film books freely accessible. 

So far, there are two books available, one on British cinema and one on memory and popular cinema. Direct links to the PDF files of both books and full tables of their contents and contributors are given below. These links have also been added to FSFF's  permanent, and frequently updated, listing of Open Access film and moving image studies e-books, which now links to 90 free, scholarly tomes.

• Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

'Memory and popular film' uses memory as a specific framework for the cultural study of film. Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, 'Memory and popular film' establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory IN film and of film AS memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown. 'Memory and popular film' provides a wide-ranging analysis that will benefit both students and critics of popular culture, film studies and the past. [Rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]

Table of Contents:

• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 'Introduction: memory and popular film' by Paul Grainge

Part 1: Public history, popular memory

• 'A white man’s country: Yale’s Chronicles of America' by Roberta E. Pearson
• 'Civic pageantry and public memory in the silent era commemorative film: The Pony Express at the Diamond Jubilee' by Heidi Kenaga
• ‘Look behind you!’: memories of cinema-going in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood' by Sarah Stubbings
• 'Raiding the archive: film festivals and the revival of Classic Hollywood' by Julian Stringer

Part 2: The politics of memory

• 'The articulation of memory and desire: from Vietnam to the war in the Persian Gulf' by John Storey
• 'The movie-made Movement: civil rites of passage' by Sharon Monteith
• 'Prosthetic memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture' by Alison Landsberg
• ‘"Forget the Alamo": history, legend and memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star' by Neil Campbell    

Part 3: 'Mediating memory

• '‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema' by Philip Drake
• 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' by Paul Grainge
• 'Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film' by Robert Burgoyne
• 'Postcinema/Postmemory' by Jeffrey Pence

• Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British Cinema in the 1950s: A celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgements 
• A 1950s timeline
• 'Celebrating British cinema of the 1950s' by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard

Critics 

• 'Raymond Durgnat and A Mirror for England' by Robert Murphy
• 'Lindsay Anderson: Sequence and the rise of auteurism in 1950s Britain' by Erik Hedling

Mirroring England

• 'National snapshots: fixing the past in English war films' by Fred Inglis
• 'Film and the Festival of Britain' by Sarah Easen
• 'The national health: Pat Jackson’s White Corridors' by Charles Barr
• 'The long shadow: Robert Hamer after Ealing' by Philip Kemp
• ‘"If they want culture, they pay": consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies' by Dave Rolinson
• 'Boys, ballet and begonias: The Spanish Gardener and its analogues' by Alison Platt
• 'Intimate stranger: the early British films of Joseph Losey' by Neil Sinyard

Painfully squalid?

• 'Women of Twilight' by Kerry Kidd
• 'Yield to the Night' by Melanie Williams
• 'From script to screen: Serious Charge and film censorship' by Tony Aldgate
• 'Housewife’s choice: Woman in a Dressing Gown' by Melanie Williams

Adaptability

• 'Too theatrical by half? The Admirable Crichton and Look Back in Anger' by Stephen Lacey
• 'A Tale of Two Cities and the Cold War' by Robert Giddings
• 'Value for money: Baker and Berman, and Tempean Films' by Brian McFarlane
• 'Adaptable Terence Rattigan: Separate Tables, separate entities?' by Dominic Shellard

Personal views

• 'Archiving the 1950s' by Bryony Dixon
• 'Being a film reviewer in the 1950s' by Isabel Quigly
• 'Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank’s Tale' by Corin Redgrave