This book looks at social representations of romantic love as portrayed in films and interpreted by their audiences, using cinema as a means for analysing the state of romantic love today, and the touchpoints and disconnects between its representation on screen and the lived experiences of film audiences. Through a media sociology lens, the book draws on analysis of five contemporary romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences. Employing both textual analysis and primary interviews, the book contests overly pessimistic perspectives on modern intimacy while acknowledging and exploring some of the challenges, woes and changes that romantic love is experiencing in late capitalism. Concerns and debates over monogamy, the teleology romantic love and the division of labour in relationships percolate in this book’s examination of how audiences’ responses to these films reflect their attitudes and expectations regarding romantic love. This book will have great resonance for scholars and students of not just film studies and media studies, but also audience studies, media sociology, philosophy, gender and sexuality.

In its first ten years, a small Midwestern cinema has attracted some of the most intriguing and groundbreaking filmmakers from around the world, screened the best in arthouse and repertory films, and presented innovative and unique cinematic experiences. Indiana University Cinema tells the story of how the cinema on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington grew into a vibrant, diverse, and thoughtfully curated cinematheque. Detailing its creation of a transformative cinematic experience throughout its inaugural decade, the IU Cinema has arguably become one of the best venues for watching movies in the country. Featuring 17 exclusive interviews with filmmakers and actors, as well as an afterword from Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), Indiana University Cinema, is a lavishly illustrated book that is sure to please everyone from the casual moviegoer to the most passionate cinephile.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic study of cross-class romance films throughout the history of American cinema. It provides vivid discussions of these romantic films, analyses their normative patterns and thematic concerns, traces how they were shaped by inequalities of gender and class in American society, and explains why they were especially popular from World War I through the roaring twenties and the Great Depression. In the vast majority of cross-class romance films the female is poor or from the working class, the male is wealthy or from the upper class, and the romance ends successfully in marriage or the promise of marriage.

Lisa Passerini is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turin. --

This book analyses the romantic drama and the way that passionate love is presented as the central storyline in popular cinema, drawing upon genre studies and sociology. Exploring the passionate love story as a cinematic form, it also contributes, through comparison, to research on the romantic comedy.

Standing apart from celebrated Iranian ideals of war and martyrdom, revolutionary filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was known as a man who praised life and celebrated it in all his works. Creating films for more than 40 years during times of unending war and political turmoil, Kiarostami promoted the Sufi tradition of seeing God as part of nature and the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian ideal of environmental protection. Kiarostami’s self-image as a citizen of the world, his renunciation of war, and his concern for the future of nature cement his importance within the art form of poetic cinema. Addressing Kiarostami’s illumination of humanity’s self-destructive tendencies, author Julian Rice presents a detailed analysis of twelve individual films, from Homework (1989) to Like Someone in Love (2012). Departing from concerns of spectatorship or film in general, Rice’s book portrays the human and spiritual core of Kiarostami. Connected to all other humans and to the earth we all inhabit, Kiarostami’s vision remains a powerful message for film scholars and peaceful people everywhere.

A unique and interdisciplinary collection in which scholars from Philosophy join those from Film Studies, English, and Comparative Literature to explore the nature and limits of love through in-depth reflection on particular works of literature and film.