"Hybrid Documentary and Beyond focusses on the theories, production techniques, ethical implications and impact of hybrid documentaries. Challenging the common conceptualisation of hybrid documentary as a simple combination of fact and fiction, the author explores not just what hybrid documentaries are but why and how they are made, and what real world consequences they have on the subjects, on practitioners and on audiences. Through a combination of theoretical analysis and practical case studies she demonstrates that making and researching hybrid documentaries can be creatively liberating for all involved from theorists, filmmakers, crews, participants to audiences, and that their production, appeal and impact are growing globally. Offering a fresh and bold perspective on hybrid documentary filmmaking, this book will be an essential resource to scholars, practitioners and students working in the areas of media arts and production, film studies and documentary"--

Hybrid Documentary and Beyond explores the theories, production techniques, ethics, and impact of hybrid documentaries. Often described as simply a blend of fact and fiction, the author challenges this definition of hybrid documentary through an interrogative examination of not only why and how they are made, but also of their real-world impact upon subjects, filmmakers and audiences. Combining theoretical analysis withe real-world case studies and interviews with luminaries in the field she effectively demonstrates that hybrid documentaries can be creatively liberating for all involved and why their appeal and impact are growing globally. Offering a fresh and bold perspective on hybrid documentary filmmaking that goes far beyond the existing canon on the subject, this book will be an essential resource for practitioners, scholars and students working in the areas of media arts and production, film studies and documentary.

'He wanted to move in and out of the various signature styles of all these genres_Western, melodrama, thriller, horror, ' said cinematographer Robert Richardson of Quentin Tarantino's goals in making Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2. Through close readings of work by major U.S. filmmakers such as Tarantino, David Lynch, Errol Morris, Todd Haynes, and Joel and Ethan Coen, Hollywood Hybrids studies provocative, disorienting strategies of genre mixing in contemporary cinema. The book also investigates foreign parallels to U.S. hybrid cinema in films by such directors as Pedro Almod-var (Spain) and Stephen Chow (Hong Kong). Rather than explore genre primarily from the standpoint of movie critics, producers, marketers, and spectators, Hollywood Hybrids focuses on genre mixing as a key creative interest motivating celebrated filmmakers. The book thus relates genre to auteur theory. Hollywood Hybrids also links recent hybrid cinema to earlier instances of hybrid form in film and other arts, including painting, music, literature, and architecture. The book concludes that hybrid films allude not only to multiple films and genres, but also to hybrid features of consciousness and identity that increasingly heighten as well as complicate human experience.

This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.

Biopics and other movies and television shows based on real events are increasingly appearing at the multiplex and on streaming platforms alongside blockbuster franchises and adaptations. The appeal of movies and television shows based on true stories is that they claim to tell us what really happened, with the public and private versions of events packaged into one coherent narrative. But how do they do it, and what makes this version of events so appealing? The Biopic and Beyond investigates the process that turns the distant public figures that populate news and entertainment into screen characters that we can engage with and try to understand a little better. Even though they aren't the real thing, our engagement with fictionalized versions of public figures can, for better or worse, color the way we understand the real person behind them. Screen engagement with the fake person behind the real person doesn't only happen in biopics and docudramas, with media as varied as sketch comedy, fan fiction and the celebrity cameo contributing to the ways we understand public figures. Using case studies such as Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network, Sarah Palin and Saturday Night Live, and Louis C.K. and Louie, The Biopic and Beyond will make you think about the way you see the world through a fictionalized version of it.

Beyond Safety argues that concerns about the ethical impossibility of individual safety in the face of risks with increasingly obvious global consequences alters representations of neoliberal contemporary life. As the climate crises in the Caribbean and Australia, ongoing European refugee and American border crises, and, most recently, anxieties about Coronavirus illustrate, contemporary life is characterized by global connections that produce and reflect precarious outcomes and dangers. The ability to ignore risk or shift it to others underscores the fact that it is mitigable for particular segments of society while inescapable for others. Emily Johansen investigates depictions of global danger and safety in contemporary transnational fictional and popular texts-those characterized by a narrative or representational emphasis on border crossing and global interdependences. She demonstrates how these texts use risk to question and re-imagine the norms and practices of contemporary global citizenship. Beyond Safety thus brings together three of the central keywords of contemporary literary criticism of the last ten years (cosmopolitanism, precarity, neoliberalism) and shows how their intersection allows for a fuller conception of contemporary life and imagines a new global future.

In 1955 a brand new television series, "Dixon of Dock Green", came to Britain's screens, whose eponymous hero had featured in "The Blue Lamp" (1950). Although it has traditionally been assumed that the uniform police series begins with the Ealing film, this book, based on original archive research, challenges this assumption, proposing that in fact these series were shaped by changes in television's social role from the relaying of news to the replaying of stories. Susan Sydney-Smith demonstrates how the development of the British television police drama - and indeed British television in general - was more complex than accepted accounts allow. She traces numerous lineages, from inter-war public service films, live studio crime reconstructions and story documentaries such as 1942's "Target for Tonight" through to the mix of public service and entertainment values embodied by the BBC Television Light Entertainment's "Dixon of Dock Green". Showing how the genre mapped new social and regional geographies, from Dixon's metropolitan policeman to the gritty northern realism of "Jacks and Knaves" and "Z Cars" with its irascible "Barlow", the author follows the increasing commercialization of television in the sixties, investigating how the BBC set about restoring the values of southern England in the 1966 "Z Cars" spin-off "Softly, Softly", with its more palatable protagonist. The book also offers insights not only into the relationship between early British television and its cinematic forebears but also early radio.