A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY141 start with F start with F
The contributors to Fabulous! Divas I (the first in a two-part series) address how Baker’s dual image as sexualized black woman and multicultural mother has been used to question and invert stereotypes, how the diva witches in the Broadway musical Wicked have developed a cult following among adolescent girls, and how fans mix irony and sincerity in their admiration of daytime soap divas. One contributor explores the cultural work of camp, while another considers hair as a fetish item for diva devotees. Among the diva appreciations are a look at the life of the cross-dressing black disco diva Sylvester, a reading of Garland as a lesbian diva par excellence, an examination of Courtney Love as a martyr diva, and a consideration of how loving Julie Andrews can make people queer.
Contributors. Alexander Doty, Brett Farmer, Joshua Gamson, Chuck Jackson, Ramon Lobato, Edward R. O’Neill, Ann Pellegrini, Julie Levine Russo, Nick Salvato, Jeanne Scheper, Edward Baron Turk, Stacy Wolf
The constant bombardment of the super-enlarged, computer-enhanced faces of advertising, the endless 'talking heads' of television and the ever-changing array of film stars' faces have reduced the face to a banal image, while the dream of early film theorists that the 'giant severed heads' of the screen could reveal 'the soul of man' to the masses is long since dead. And yet the end of this dream opens up the possibility for a different view of the face on the screen. The aim of the book is to seize this opportunity to rethink the facial close-up in terms other than subjectivity and identity by shifting the focus to questions of death and recognition.
In doing so, the book proposes a dialectical reversal or about-face. It suggests that we focus our attention on the places in contemporary media where the face becomes unrecognisable, for it is here that the facial close-up expresses the powers of death. Using Walter Benjamin's theory of the dialectical image as a critical tool, the book provides detailed studies of a wide range of media spectacles of faces becoming unrecognisable. It shows how the mode of recognition enabled by these faces is a shock experience that can open our eyes to the underside of the mask of self - the unrecognisable mortal face of self we spend our lives trying not to see. Turning on itself, so to speak, the face exposes the fragile relationship between social recognition and facial recognizability in the images-cultures of contemporary media.
Winner, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017
Americans are living longer and reinventing both work and retirement, but Hollywood movies barely hint at this reality of contemporary society. In many popular films, older characters fade into irrelevance, inactivity, or absurdity, or else they stay in the background as wise elders while younger characters provide the action. Most American films do not attempt to portray the rich variety of experiences or the sensitive aging issues that people confront in the years beyond fifty.
Fade to Gray offers one of the first extended studies of the portrayal of older people in American cinema from the silent era to the present. Writing in an accessible style for both general audiences and scholars, Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie examine social attitudes toward aging through an analysis of hundreds of individual films, including such classics as You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Nebraska (2013). They show how representations of the aging process and depictions of older people embracing or enduring the various experiences of longer lives have evolved over the past century, as well as how film industry practices have both reflected and influenced perceptions of aging in American society. Exposing the social and political motivations for negative cinematic portrayals of the elderly, Fade to Gray also gives visibility to films that provide opportunities for better understanding and appreciation of the aged and the aging process.
In ten essays spanning more than three decades of scholarship, Charles R. Forker, the author of Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, explores the dramatic and poetic styles of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to Elizabethan ideas of space and time, image patterns and aesthetic form in drama, cultural contexts (the family, the state, the individual), and political and religious values.
Forker has divided his essays into three sections. The essays in the first section, "The Stage," explore theatrical self-consciousness; those in "The Green World" examine the use of pastoral and natural settings as significant factors in dramatization; the essays in the final section, "The Family," discuss ideas of dramatic engagement and disengagement in major Elizabethan playwrights other than Shakespeare.
The idea that actors are hypocrites and fakes and therefore dangerous to society was widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fangs of Malice examines the equation between the vice of hypocrisy and the craft of acting as it appears in antitheatrical tracts, in popular and high culture, and especially in plays of the period. Rousseau and others argue that actors, expert at seeming other than they are, pose a threat to society; yet dissembling seems also to be an inevitable consequence of human social intercourse. The “antitheatrical prejudice” offers a unique perspective on the high value that modern western culture places on sincerity, on being true to one's own self.
Taking a cue from the antitheatrical critics themselves, Matthew Wikander structures his book in acts and scenes, each based on a particular slander against actors. A prologue introduces his main issues. Act One deals with the proposition “They Dress Up”: foppish slavery to fashion, cross-dressing, and dressing as clergy. Act Two treats the proposition “They Lie” by focusing on social dissembling and the phenomenon of the self-deceiving hypocrite and the public, princely hypocrite. Act Three, “They Drink,” examines a wide range of antisocial behavior ascribed to actors, such as drinking, gambling, and whoring. An epilogue ties the ancient ideas of possession and the panic that actors inspire to contemporary anxieties about representation not only in theatre but also in the visual and literary arts.
Fangs of Malice will be of great interest to scholars and students of drama as well as to theatre professionals and buffs.
Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ”real” activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.
Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects.
Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.
With interdisciplinary analysis of literature, painting, and film, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! traces how physical fitness had an even broader impact on culture and ideology in the Soviet Union than previously realized. From prerevolutionary writers and painters glorifying popular circus wrestlers to Soviet photographers capturing unprecedented athleticism as a means of satisfying their aesthetic ideals, the nation's artists embraced sports in profound, inventive ways. Though athletics were used for doctrinaire purposes, Tim Harte demonstrates that at their core, they remained playful, joyous physical activities capable of stirring imaginations and transforming everyday realities.
"The films of Pare Lorentz are acknowledged masterpieces of world cinema. They are groundbreaking documentary records of our country in the hard years of the Depression." —William M. Drennen, Jr.In the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Government produced a series of films about the pressing problems facing the nation—drought, flood, poverty, and slums. Starting with a minuscule initial budget of $6,000, Lorentz, a young film critic from New York who had never made a motion picture, was hired to head the project. The first fruit of his labor, The Plow That Broke the Plains, was a moving and dramatic account of the Dust Bowl that met with immediate and critical acclaim. Lorentz followed up his first film with The River, a history of the Mississippi River Basin and the effect of the Tennessee Valley Authority on the area. Both films demonstrated the potential of the documentary as a powerful impetus to social change, prompting widespread discussion not only of the problems they presented but also of the documentary form itself. This book combines the autobiographical history of a creative communicator and pioneer documentary filmmaker with the full scripts of The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River, Ecce Homo, and The Fight for Life.
In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships.
Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.
Federico Fellini as Auteur: Seven Aspects of His Films offers a comprehensive auteurist study of the renowned Italian director. Film scholar John C. Stubbs dispenses with a traditional film-career review of the man, focusing instead on the key elements of the filmmaker’s style, the influence of Carl Jung and dreams, the autobiographical depiction of childhood and adolescence, the portrait of the artist, the filmmaker’s working relationship with his wife, Fellini’s comic strategies, and his adaptation of works by others. Each of the aspects is fully contextualized. This examination of the critical elements in Fellini films offers a better understanding of the artistry that is uniquely Fellini.
How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women
Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.
The book’s main focus is contemporary Christian End-Time performances and how they theatrically construct encounters with future time—not just images or ideas of a future, but viscerally and immediately real experiences of future time. Author Jill Stevenson’s examples are Hell Houses and Judgement Houses; Rapture House, a similarly styled “walk through drama” in North Carolina; Hell’s Gates, an “outdoor reality drama” in Dawsonville, Georgia; Ark Encounter, a full-size recreation of Noah’s Ark; and Tribulation Trail, an immersive thirteen-scene drama ministry based on the Book of Revelation. The book’s coda considers similarities between these Christian performances and secular survivalist prepper events, especially with respect to constructions of and language about time. In doing so, the author situates these performances within a larger tradition that challenges traditional secular/sacred distinctions and illuminates how the End Times has been employed in our current social and political moment.
Revisiting Burke’s 1996 monograph, this revised and updated edition includes a new preface and an additional chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for any Fellini fan or scholar.
When the French actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term "feminism" had not yet entered our national vocabulary. But over the course of the next half-century, a rising generation of daring actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Exploring and exploiting modern fantasies and fears about female roles and gender identity, these performers eschewed theatrical convention and traditional notions of womanly modesty. They created powerful images of themselves as ambitious, independent, and sexually expressive "New Women."
Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women. Ironically, theater also provided an arena in which producers and audiences projected the uncertainties and hostilities that accompanied changing gender relations. From Bernhardt's modern methods of self-promotion to Emma Goldman's political theatrics, from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn shows us how and why theater mattered to women and argues for its pivotal role in the emergence of modern feminism.
For over a dozen years, the Vectors Lab has experimented with digital scholarship through its online publication, Vectors, and through Scalar, a multimedia authoring platform. The history of this software lab intersects a much longer tale about computation in the humanities, as well as tensions about the role of theory in related projects.
Tara McPherson considers debates around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities and addresses Gary Hall’s claim that the goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may be irreconcilable (or at the very least require “far more time and care”). She then asks what it might mean to design—from conception—digital tools and applications that emerge from contextual concerns of cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference. This path leads back to the Vectors Lab and its ongoing efforts at the intersection of theory and praxis.
The Feminist Spectator as Critic broke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new introduction and up-to-the-moment bibliography, detailing the progress to date in gender equity in theater and the arts, and suggesting how far we have yet to go.
This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen. Starting with ethnically exoticized silent film vamps like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, it examines classic film noir femmes fatales like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, as well as postmodern revisions of the archetype in films like Basic Instinct and Memento. Finally, it explores how contemporary film and television creators like Fleabag and Killing Eve’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge have appropriated the femme fatale in sympathetic and surprising ways.
Analyzing not only the films themselves, but also studio press kits and reviews, The Femme Fatale considers how discourses about the pleasures and dangers of female performance are projected onto the figure of the femme fatale. Ultimately, it is a celebration of how “bad girl” roles have provided some of Hollywood’s most talented actresses opportunities to fully express their on-screen charisma.
Fiction, Film and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation
Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.
From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan’s films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray.
The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan’s films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan’s films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. While other filmmakers have tried to discover truth through the cinema, Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking. He shows how Nolan’s insistence on the priority of the fiction aligns his films with Hegel’s philosophy and understands Nolan as a thoroughly Hegelian filmmaker.
The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest political films of all time. With an artistic defiance that matched the boldness of the anticolonial struggles of the time, it was embraced across the political spectrum—from leftist groups like the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization to right-wing juntas in the 1970s and later, the Pentagon in 2003. With a philosophical nod to Frantz Fanon, Sohail Daulatzai demonstrates that tracing the film’s afterlife reveals a larger story about how dreams of freedom were shared and crushed in the fifty years since its release. As the War on Terror expands and the “threat” of the Muslim looms, The Battle of Algiers is more than an artifact of the past—it’s a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
In the spring and summer of 1973, a wave of martial arts movies from Hong Kong—epitomized by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon—smashed box-office records for foreign-language films in America and ignited a “kung fu craze” that swept the world. Fighting without Fighting explores this dramatic phenomenon, and it argues that, more than just a cinematic fad, the West’s sudden fascination with—and moral panic about—the Asian fighting arts left lasting legacies still present today.
The book traces the background of the craze in the longer development of Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema. It discusses the key films in detail, as well as their popular reception and the debates they ignited, where kung fu challenged Western identities and raised anxieties about violence, both on and off-screen. And it examines the proliferation of ideas and images from these films in fields as diverse as popular music, superhero franchises, children’s cartoons, and contemporary art. Illuminating and accessible, Fighting without Fighting draws a vivid bridge between East and West.
The only comprehensive history of figure skating in over forty years
Figure skating, unique in its sublimely beautiful combination of technical precision, musicality, and interpretive elements, has undergone many dramatic developments since the only previous history of the sport was published in 1959. This exciting and information-packed new history by James R. Hines explains skating’s many technical and artistic advances, its important figures, its intrigues and scandals, and the historical high points during its long evolution.
Hines divides his history into three periods separated by the World Wars. In the first section, he follows functional and recreational ice skating through its evolution into national schools, culminating in the establishment of the International Skating Union and the ascendancy of an international style of skating. The second section explains the changes that occurred as the sport expanded into the form we recognize and enjoy today, and the final section shows how skating became increasingly athletic, imaginative, and intense following World War II, as the main focus turns to skaters themselves. The profiles include some 148 World and Olympic Champions as well as others who, in Dick Button’s words, "left the sport better because they were in it."
Beginning with mythological tales from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavians, Hines describes hundreds who have contributed to the sport. They include figure skating’s patron saint Lydwina of Schiedam, whose late-fourteenth-century skating tumble has been documented in a woodcut; Ulrich Salchow and Axel Paulsen, who gave their names to distinctive jumps; Madge Syers, who entered and medaled at the previously all-male World Championships in 1902; and Sonja Henie, who took skating to the silver screen. The history ends with the 2002 skating season, when Maria Butyrskaya and Michelle Kwan commanded the most attention and an unfortunate judging decision rocked the pairs’ competition, resulting in the adoption of a new judging system.
Beyond the contributions of individual skaters, Figure Skating also traces the growth of competitions and show skating (professional and amateur), and discussions of relevant social, political, and ethical concerns that have affected the sport. Along with over seventy magnificent historical pictures spread throughout the book, a very special gallery features the picture of every world and Olympic champion. Figure Skating is an informative and inspiring resource, sure to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever skated recreationally or in competition as well as by the many fans who have this beautiful sport as spectators.
Figures of Resistance brings together the unpublished lectures and little-seen essays of internationally renowned theorist Teresa de Lauretis, spanning over twenty years of her finest work. Thirty years after the height of feminist theory, this collection invites us to reflect on the history of feminism and take a hard look at where it stands today. Selected essays include "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian," "Eccentric Subjects," "Habit Changes," "The Intractability of Desire," and the unpublished article "Figures of Resistance." An introduction from feminist film scholar Patricia White provides an overview of the development of de Lauretis's thought and of feminist theory over past decades.
The “Hip-hop Nation” has been scouted, staked out, and settled by journalists and scholars alike. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. steps into this well-mapped territory with questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualized within the context of hip-hop. What happens, Tiongson asks, to notions of authenticity based on hip-hop’s apparent blackness when Filipino youth make hip-hop their own?
Tiongson draws on interviews with Bay Area–based Filipino American DJs to explore the authenticating strategies they rely on to carve out a niche within DJ culture. He shows how Filipino American youth involvement in DJing reconfigures the normal boundaries of Filipinoness predicated on nostalgia and cultural links with an idealized homeland. Filipinos Represent makes the case that while the engagement of Filipino youth with DJ culture speaks to the broadening racial scope of hip-hop—and of what it means to be Filipino—such involvement is also problematic in that it upholds deracialized accounts of hip-hop and renders difference benign.
Looking at the ways in which Filipino DJs legitimize their place in an expressive form historically associated with African Americans, Tiongson examines what these complex forms of identification reveal about the contours and trajectory of contemporary U.S. racial formations and discourses in the post–civil rights era.
During the 1960s, when cinema first entered the academy as a serious object of study, the primary focus was on auteurism, or on films authorship. Burgeoning cinema studies courses demonstrated how directors were the authors of work that undermined (or succeeded in spite of) all the constraints that Hollywood threw at them. New critical methods were introduced as the field matured, and studies of the author/director, for the most part, were considered obsolete.
Virginia Wright Wexman has pulled together some of the freshest writing available on the topic of film authorship. Spanning approaches including poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, the contributors ask, what does auteurship look like today in light of all these developments? The contents of the volume are divided into three major sections: Theoretical Statements, Historical and Institutional Contexts, and Case Studies. Wexmans comprehensive introduction contextualizes the selections and summarizes the scholarly methods through which auteurism has been addressed in the past; it also provides a sketch of the history of media authorship. An extensive bibliography rounds off the volume.
Film and Genocide brings together scholars of film and of genocide to discuss film representations, both fictional and documentary, of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and genocides in Chile, Australia, Rwanda, and the United States. Since 1955, when Alain Resnais created his experimental documentary Night and Fog about the Nazis’ mass killings of Jews and other ostracized groups, filmmakers have struggled with using this medium to tell such difficult stories, to re-create the sociopolitical contexts of genocide, and to urge awareness and action among viewers. This volume looks at such issues as realism versus fiction, the challenge of depicting atrocities in a manner palatable to spectators and film distributors, the Holocaust film as a model for films about other genocides, and the role of new technologies in disseminating films about genocide.
Film and Genocide also includes interviews with three film directors, who discuss their experiences in working with deeply disturbing images and bringing hidden stories to life: Irek Dobrowolski, director of The Portraitist (2005) a documentary about Wilhelm Brasse, an Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner ordered to take more than 40,000 photos at the camp; Nick Hughes, director of 100 Days (2005) a dramatic film about the Rwandan mass killings; and Greg Barker, director of Ghosts of Rwanda (2004), a television documentary for Frontline.
Film and Nationalism examines the ways in which cinema has been considered an arena of conflict and interaction between nations and nationhood. Each section of this volume explores a crucial aspect of the discussion. Is film an effective form of national propaganda? Are films losing the very notion of nationhood, in favor of a generalized, "global" cinematographic culture? What is films influence over "national character"? In addition, the volume explores the cultural and economic interactions between developed and underdeveloped countries. How have third world nations defined themselves in relation to hegemonic first world cultures, and how have their relations been changed through the dissemination of Western films? Throughout, Alan Williams chooses essays that enhance our understanding of how films help shape our sense of nationhood and self.
In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.
While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.
Movies, stars, auteurs, critics, and the sheer excitement of cinema come together in film festivals as quintessential constellations of art, business, and glamour. Yet, how well do we actually understand the forces and meanings that these events embody?
Film Festivals offers the first comprehensive overview of the history, people, films, and multiple functions of the festival world. From Sundance to Hong Kong, from the glitter of Cannes to edgier festivals that challenge boundaries or foster LGBTQ cultural production, film festivals celebrate art, promote business, bring cinema to diverse audiences, and raise key issues about how we see our world. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong situates festivals within changing global practices of film, including their important ties to both Hollywood and independent cinema. She explores how these events have become central in the construction of cinema knowledge as well as the behind-the-scene mechanics of finance, distribution, and evaluation. By linking general structures and connections to specific films and auteurs, Wong addresses the components and creation of film festivals that continue to reshape filmmaking as art and business.
From reviews of the third edition:
“Film Genre Reader III lives up to the high expectations set by its predecessors, providing an accessible and relatively comprehensive look at genre studies. The anthology’s consideration of the advantages and challenges of genre studies, as well as its inclusion of various film genres and methodological approaches, presents a pedagogically useful overview.” —Scope
Since 1986, Film Genre Reader has been the standard reference and classroom text for the study of genre in film, with more than 25,000 copies sold. Barry Keith Grant has again revised and updated the book to reflect the most recent developments in genre study. This fourth edition adds new essays on genre definition and cycles, action movies, science fiction, and heritage films, along with a comprehensive and updated bibliography. The volume includes more than thirty essays by some of film’s most distinguished critics and scholars of popular cinema, including Charles Ramírez Berg, John G. Cawelti, Celestino Deleyto, David Desser, Thomas Elsaesser, Steve Neale, Thomas Schatz, Paul Schrader, Vivian Sobchack, Janet Staiger, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.
This is the first study to cover cinemas from Iran to Morocco. Nine essays present the region's major national cinemas, devoting special attention to the work of directors who have given image and voice to dissent from political regimes, from patriarchal customs, from fundamentalist movements, and from the West. These country essays are complemented by in-depth discussions of eighteen films that have been selected for both their excellence and their critical engagement with pressing current issues. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of filmmaking throughout the region, including important films produced outside the national cinemas. The long history of Iranian cinema, its international renown, and the politics of directors confronting the state, earns it a special place in this volume. The other major emphasis is on the Israel/Palestine conflict, featuring films by Palestinian directors, Israelis, and an Egyptian working in Syria.
Nineteen authors collaborated on this book, among them Walter Armbrust, Roy Armes, Kevin Dwyer, Eric Egan, Nurith Gertz, Lina Khatib, Florence Martin, and Nadia Yaqub. About half of the contributors are film scholars; the others range across literary studies and the social sciences to two film directors and a novelist. Beyond differences in disciplinary orientation, there is considerable variation among contributors in the perspectives that inform their writing. They offer an illuminating range of approaches to the cinemas of the region.
The book is richly illustrated with posters of the featured films, photos of their directors at work, and stills illustrating critical arguments in the film essays.
Well-conceived, carefully researched and documented, Johnson's study fills a major gap in film studies by tracing the development of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its relationship to the state.
"The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage?'"—Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement
"Modern film theory begins with Metz."—Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura
"Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [Film Language] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."—Stephen Heath, Screen
Hoeckner examines films that reflect directly on memory, whether by featuring an amnesic character, a traumatic event, or a surge of nostalgia. As the history of cinema unfolded, movies even began to recall their own history through quotations, remakes, and stories about how cinema contributed to the soundtrack of people’s lives. Ultimately, Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that music has transformed not only what we remember about the cinematic experience, but also how we relate to memory itself.
Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape.
The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself.
Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.
Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post–World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications.
Illuminating a long-overlooked ‘lowbrow’ medium with a significant social impact, The Film Photonovel studies the history of the format as a hybrid of film novelizations, drawn novels, and nonfilm photonovels. While the field of adaptation studies has tended to focus on literary adaptations, this book explores how the juxtaposition of words and pictures functioned in this format and how page layout and photo cropping could affect reading. Finally, the book follows the film photonovel's brief history in Latin America and the United States. Adding an important dimension to the interactions between filmmakers and their audiences, this work fills a gap in the study of transnational movie culture.
Film Remakes and Franchises examines how remakes and sequels have been central to the film industry from its very inception, yet also considers how the recent trends toward reboots and transmedia franchises depart from those historical precedents. Film scholar Daniel Herbert not only analyzes the film industry’s increasing reliance on recycled product, but also asks why audiences are currently so drawn to such movies. In addition, he explores how contemporary filmmakers have used reboots and franchise movies to inject timely social commentary and diversity into established media properties. A lively and accessible overview that covers everything from You’ve Got Mail to The Force Awakens, Film Remakes and Franchises raises important questions about the intersection of business and creativity in Hollywood today.
The answers to these questions, along with many more little-known facts and insights, can be found in Film Talk, an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking from the 1940s to the present. In eleven intimate and revealing interviews, contemporary film directors speak frankly about their work-their successes and their disappointments, their personal aspirations, struggles, relationships, and the politics that affect the industry.
A medley of directors including those working in pop culture and documentary, as well as feminist filmmakers, social satirists, and Hollywood mavericks recount stories that have never before been published. Among them are Monte Hellman, the auteur of the minimalist masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop; Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David, created some of the most important documentaries of the 1960s, including Salesman and The Beatles: What's Happening?; Robert Downey Sr., whose social satires Putney Swope and Greaser's Palace paved the way for a generation of filmmakers; Bennett Miller, whose film Capote won an Academy Award in 2005; and Jamie Babbit, a lesbian crossover director whose low-budget film But I'm a Cheerleader! became a mainstream hit.
The candid conversations, complimented by more than fifty photographs, including many that are rare, make this book essential reading for aspiring moviemakers, film scholars, and everyone interested in the how movies are made and who the fascinating individuals are who make them.
Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.
Addressing representation and identity in a variety of production styles and genres, including experimental film and documentary, independent and mainstream film, and television drama, Filming Difference poses fundamental questions about the ways in which the art and craft of filmmaking force creative people to confront stereotypes and examine their own identities while representing the complexities of their subjects.
Selections range from C. A. Griffith's "Del Otro Lado: Border Crossings, Disappearing Souls, and Other Transgressions" and Celine Perreñas Shimizu's "Pain and Pleasure in the Flesh of Machiko Saito's Experimental Movies" to Christopher Bradley's "I Saw You Naked: 'Hard' Acting in 'Gay' Movies," along with Kevin Sandler's interview with Paris Barclay, Yuri Makino's interview with Chris Eyre, and many other perspectives on the implications of film production, writing, producing, and acting.
Technical aspects of the craft are considered as well, including how contributors to filmmaking plan and design films and episodic television that feature difference, and how the tools of cinema—such as cinematography and lighting—influence portrayals of gender, race, and sexuality. The struggle between economic pressures and the desire to produce thought-provoking, socially conscious stories forms another core issue raised in Filming Difference. Speaking with critical rigor and creative experience, the contributors to this collection communicate the power of their media.
Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition.
As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.
In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties.
Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies.
Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it.
The history of industrial films - an orphan genre of twentieth-century cinema composed of government-produced and industrially sponsored movies that sought to achieve the goals of their sponsors, rather than the creative artists involved - seems to have left no trace in filmic cultural discourse. At its height the industrial film industry employed thousands, produced several trade journals and festival circuits, engaged with giants of twentieth-century industry like Shell and AT & T, and featured the talents of iconic actors and directors such as Buster Keaton, John Grierson and Alain Resnais. This is the first full-length book, anthology, and annotated bibliography to analyze the industrial film and its remarkable history.
Exploring the potential of the industrial film to uncover renewed and unexplored areas of media studies, this remarkable volume brings together renowned scholars such as Rick Prelinger and Thomas Elsaesser in a discussion of the radical potential and new possibilities in considering the history of this unexplored corporate medium.
Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel, a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film, Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Robert's portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.
Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of "race movies" itself.
From Buddy Holly and the Crickets to the Flatlanders, Terry Allen, and Natalie Maines, Lubbock, Texas, has produced songwriters, musicians, and artists as prolifically as cotton, conservatives, and windstorms. While nobody questions where the conservatives come from in a city that a recent nonpartisan study ranked as America's second most conservative, many people wonder why Lubbock is such fertile ground for creative spirits who want to expand the boundaries of thought in music and art. Is it just that "there's nothing else to do," as some have suggested, or is there something in the character of Lubbock that encourages creativity as much as conservatism?
In this book, Christopher Oglesby interviews twenty-five musicians and artists with ties to Lubbock to discover what it is about this community and West Texas in general that feeds the creative spirit. Their answers are revealing. Some speak of the need to rebel against conventional attitudes that threaten to limit their horizons. Others, such as Joe Ely, praise the freedom of mind they find on the wide open plains. "There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up a pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played," he says. Still others express skepticism about how much Lubbock as a place contributes to the success of its musicians. Jimmie Dale Gilmore says, "I think there is a large measure of this Lubbock phenomenon that is just luck, and that is the part that you cannot explain."
As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely."
On April 5, 1917, Three Plays for a Negro Theater by Ridgely Torrence opened at the Garden Theatre in New York City. This performance was a monumental event in American stage history. Not only was this the first dramatic production to portray African American life beyond the cliché, it was also the first production on Broadway to feature an all-black cast. The morning after the three plays were performed, newspapers were filled with praise for the cast, crew, and playwright. Audience member W. E. B. Du Bois declared the show "epoch making." Despite such early critical acclaim, Three Plays for a Negro Theater closed before the end of the month and received little attention thereafter.
Why was a nation, so fascinated with firsts, able to forget these black actors and this production so quickly? It is this question that Susan Curtis addresses in The First Black Actors on the Great White Way.
Set against the backdrop of transforming theater conventions in the early 1900s and the war in 1917, this important study relates the stories of the actors, stage artists, critics, and many others—black and white—involved in this groundbreaking production. Curtis explores in great depth both the progress in race relations that led to this production and the multifaceted reasons for its quick demise.
Three Plays for a Negro Theater opened on the eve of the United States' entrance into World War I. Curtis attributes the early closure of the three plays to this coincidence, but she does not settle for so simple an explanation. Rather, she investigates the heightened national self-consciousness that followed the United States' entry into the war. America was ready to "make the world safe for democracy," but it was not fully ready to accept democracy and equality in its own culture.
The First Black Actors on the Great White Way is not simply a study of African American theater and its entrance into American culture. By focusing on a single event at a critical moment in history, Curtis offers a unique glimpse into race relations in early-twentieth-century American society. The experience of these pioneering artists reveals an unexplored aspect of the painfully slow evolution of racial equality.
A remarkable story about people who waged an extraordinary campaign against racism, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way will be of special interest to scholars of American studies, race relations, and cultural history, as well as the general reader.
Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, using it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community.
In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing her efforts on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins, Lebow analyzes the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman, and Alan Berliner, among others, also including a discussion of her own first person film Treyf (1998), made with Cynthia Madansky. The filmmakers in this study, Lebow argues, are confronting a desire to both define and reimagine contemporary Jewishness.
Using a multidisciplinary approach to first person films, Lebow shows how this form of self-expression is challenging both autobiography and documentary and, in the process, changing the art of cinema and recording the cultural shifts of our time.
Alisa S. Lebow is a filmmaker and lecturer in film and TV studies at Brunel University.
The Great War played an instrumental role in the development of cinema, so necessary was it to the mobilization efforts of the combatant nations. In turn, after the war, as memory began to fade, cinema continued to shape the war's legacy and eventually to determine the ways in which all warfare is imagined.
The First World War and Popular Cinema provides fresh insight into the role of film as an historical and cultural tool. Through a comparative approach, essays by contributors from Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States enrich our understanding of cinematic depictions of the Great War in particular and combat in general. New historical research on both the uses of propaganda and the development of national cinemas make this collection one of the first to show the ways in which film history can contribute to our study of national histories. The contributors to the volume monitor popular perceptions of the war, the reshaping of the war's legacy, and the evolution of cinematic clichés that are perpetuated in filmmaking through the century. Some of the films they discuss are All Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli, The Grand Illusion, The Big Parade, Battle of the Somme, J'Accuse, Regeneration, and many more. The First World War and Popular Cinema is a vital addition to film studies and history, two fields only recently united in a productive way.
Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active.
Holguín brings forth an important interplay between regional nationalists and image makers actively involved in building a tourist industry. Soon they realized flamenco performances could be turned into a folkloric attraction that could stimulate the economy. Tourists and Spaniards alike began to cultivate flamenco as a representation of the country's national identity. This study reveals not only how Spain designed and promoted its own symbol but also how this cultural form took on a life of its own.
In Flickers of Film, Jason Sperb offers nuanced and unexpected answers to these questions, examining the benefits of certain types of film nostalgia, while also critiquing how Hollywood’s nostalgic representations of old technologies obscure important aspects of their histories. He interprets this affection for the prehistory and infancy of digital technologies in relation to an industry-wide anxiety about how the digital has grown to dominate Hollywood, pushing it into an uncertain creative and economic future. Yet he also suggests that Hollywood’s nostalgia for old technologies ignores the professionals who once employed them, as well as the labor opportunities that have been lost through the computerization and outsourcing of film industry jobs.
Though it deals with nostalgia, Flickers of Film is strikingly cutting-edge, one of the first studies to critically examine Pixar’s role in the film industry, cinematic representations of videogames, and the economic effects of participatory culture. As he takes in everything from Terminator: Salvation to The Lego Movie, Sperb helps us see what’s distinct about this recent wave of self-aware nostalgic films—how Hollywood nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be.
Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while these narratives presented alternative understandings and more opportunities for empathy than TV news, Katrina remained a mediated experience.
In Flood of Images, Bernie Cook offers the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and carefully argued analysis of the mediation and meanings of Katrina. He engages in innovative, close, and comparative visual readings of news coverage on CNN, Fox News, and NBC; documentaries including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, and Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie’s Faubourg Treme; and the HBO drama Treme. Cook examines the production practices that shaped Katrina-as-media-event, exploring how those choices structured the possible memories and meanings of Katrina and how the media’s memory-making has been contested. In Flood of Images, Cook intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina.
In Sean Baker’s award-winning 2017 film The Florida Project, a young girl, her single mother, and her friends live in rundown motels near Disney World, the children’s summer fun contrasting with the grim conditions around them. In this book, J. J. Murphy delves deep into the movie’s development and filming while also examining it within the wider context of Baker’s career.
Using production documents, different versions of the screenplay, and interviews with principal members of the production team, Murphy traces the evolution of The Florida Project from initial idea through its various stages of production. He highlights Baker’s unconventional strategies in making a film about a marginalized subculture, including alternative scripting, guerrilla-like filmmaking, improvisation, and the unorthodox casting of local and first-time actors. Murphy also explores how Baker’s impromptu style sometimes rankled crew members and caused a major crisis on set, revealing the difficulties indie filmmakers can face when working with professional crews on larger films. A lively analysis of this critically acclaimed movie, its director, and its production, The Florida Project also betters our understanding of contemporary independent cinema as a whole.
Contributors
Steve Albini
Ben Austen
Jake Austen
John Battles
Bosco
Ken Burke
Mike Maltese
King Merinuk
Ken Mottet
Jonathan Poletti
James Porter
"Colonel" Dan Sorenson
Jacqueline Stewart
Originally built around interviews with these figures and their close associates, these thirty-nine revised articles yield new information from a variety of sources, much from Bear Family boxed sets as well as counsel, advice, and knowledge shared by other music scholars. Tribe's profiles cover musicians and bands that were bluegrass pickers and singers themselves, as well as some musicians who are often characterized as traditional country musicians. Some led bands for all or part of their careers, while others ranked as noted sidemen or band members. Others composed songs that have become popular, indeed often standard, fare in the bluegrass field.
As part of the Charles K. Wolfe Music Series, formed in honor of the late music scholar, Folk Music in Overdrive succinctly advances traditional music scholarship and Wolfe’s own love of early country and bluegrass.
IVAN TRIBE is emeritus professor of history at the University of Rio Grande in Ohio. He is the author of The Stonemans: An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives, Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia, and Country: A Regional Exploration.
Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.
In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.
Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.
George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood.
From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty.
The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
“Extraordinarily valuable, illuminating, and even entertaining, Forest of Pressure brims with the types of information that only a key insider can get his hands on.” —Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, New York University
Ogawa Productions—known in Asia as Ogawa Pro—was an influential filmmaking collective that started in the 1960s under the direction of Ogawa Shinsuke (1936–1992). Between 1968 and the mid-1970s, Ogawa Pro electrified the Japanese student movement with its Sanrizuka documentary series—eight films chronicling the massive protests over the construction of the Narita airport—which has since become the standard against which documentaries are measured in Japan.
A critical biography of a collective, Forest of Pressure explores the emergence of socially committed documentary filmmaking in postwar Japan. Analyzing Ogawa Pro’s films and works by other Japanese filmmakers, Abé Mark Nornes addresses key issues in documentary theory and practice, including individual and collective cinema production modes and the relationship between subject and object. Benefiting from unprecedented access to Ogawa Pro’s archives and interviews with former members, Forest of Pressure is an innovative look at the fate of political filmmaking in the wake of the movement’s demise.
Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor of screen arts and cultures and Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. He is a coordinator at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the author of Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minnesota, 2003).
With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.
Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams illuminates the environments plundered, the materials seized, and the ears entangled in the making of a sound format. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium, and so explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly.
Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments.
With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.
An updated paperback version of the book heralded as “a new benchmark in Marx scholarship” by the Los Angeles Times
Before film made them international comedy legends, the Marx Brothers developed their comic skills on stage for twenty-five years. In Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Robert S. Bader offers the first comprehensive history of the foursome’s hardscrabble early years honing their act in front of live audiences.
From Groucho’s debut in 1905 to their final live performances of scenes from A Night in Casablanca in 1945, the brothers’ stage career shows how their characters and routines evolved before their arrival in Hollywood. Four of the Three Musketeers draws on an unmatched array of sources, many not referenced elsewhere. Bader’s detailed portrait of the struggling young actors both brings to vivid life a typical night on the road for the Marx Brothers and illuminates the inner workings of the vaudeville business, especially during its peak in the 1920s.
As Bader traces the origins of the characters that would later come to be beloved by filmgoers, he also skillfully scrapes away the accretion of rumors and mythology perpetuated not only by fans and writers but by the Marx Brothers themselves. Revealing, vital, and entertaining, Four of the Three Musketeers has taken its place as an essential reference for this legendary American act. Now, the updated edition adds newly discovered performances—some submitted by readers—and additional information provided by descendants of long-departed vaudevillians mentioned in the book.
July Monarchy plays, which provided affordable entertainment to a broad section of the public, constitute a large, nearly untapped reservoir of commentary on the arrival of the forty-franc press. Vaudevilles and comedies ask whether journalism that benefits from advertisement can be unbiased. Dramas explore whether threatening to spread false news is an acceptable way for journalists to exercise their influence. Hollinshead-Strick uses both plays and novels to show that despite their claims to enlighten their readers, newspapers were often accused of obscuring public access to information. Balzac’s interventions in this media sphere reveal his utopian views on print technology. Nerval’s and Pyat’s demonstrate the nefarious impact that corrupt theater critics could have on authors and on the public alike.
Scholars of press and media studies, French literature, theater, and nineteenth-century literature more generally will find this book a valuable introduction to a cross-genre debate about press publicity that remains surprisingly resonant today.
Through innovative readings of a dozen movies made between 1928 and 2001 in Europe, Japan, and the United States, Orit Kamir shows that in representing “gender crimes,” feature films have constructed a cinematic jurisprudence, training audiences worldwide in patterns of judgment of women (and men) in such situations. Offering a novel formulation of the emerging field of law and film, Kamir combines basic legal concepts—murder, rape, provocation, insanity, and self-defense—with narratology, social science methodologies, and film studies.
Framed not only offers a unique study of law and film but also points toward new directions in feminist thought. Shedding light on central feminist themes such as victimization and agency, multiculturalism, and postmodernism, Kamir outlines a feminist cinematic legal critique, a perspective from which to evaluate the “cinematic legalism” that indoctrinates and disciplines audiences around the world. Bringing an original perspective to feminist analysis, she demonstrates that the distinction between honor and dignity has crucial implications for how societies construct women, their social status, and their legal rights. In Framed, she outlines a dignity-oriented, honor-sensitive feminist approach to law and film.
Challenging the classic horror frame in American film
American filmmakers appropriate the “look” of horror in Holocaust films and often use Nazis and Holocaust imagery to explain evil in the world, say authors Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank. In Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film, Picart and Frank challenge this classic horror frame—the narrative and visual borders used to demarcate monsters and the monstrous. After examining the way in which directors and producers of the most influential American Holocaust movies default to this Gothic frame, they propose that multiple frames are needed to account for evil and genocide.
Using Schindler’s List, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apt Pupil as case studies, the authors provide substantive and critical analyses of these films that transcend the classic horror interpretation. For example, Schindler’s List, say Picart and Frank, has the appearance of a historical docudrama but actually employs the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of the Hollywood horror film. The authors argue that evil has a face: Nazism, which is configured as quintessentially innate, and supernaturally crafty.
Frames of Evil, which is augmented by thirty-six film and publicity stills, also explores the commercial exploitation of suffering in film and offers constructive ways of critically evaluating this exploitation. The authors suggest that audiences will recognize their participation in much larger narrative formulas that place a premium on monstrosity and elide the role of modernity in depriving millions of their lives and dignity, often framing the suffering of others in a manner that allows for merely “documentary” enjoyment.
In this interdisciplinary cultural history that encompasses film, literature, music, and drama, Inez Hedges follows the thread of the Faustian rebel in the major intellectual currents of the last hundred years. She presents Faust and his counterpart Mephistopheles as antagonistic—yet complementary—figures whose productive conflict was integral to such phenomena as the birth of narrative cinema, the rise of modernist avant-gardes before World War II, and feminist critiques of Western cultural traditions.
Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles pursues a dialectical approach to cultural history. Using the probing lens of cultural studies, Hedges shows how claims to the Faustian legacy permeated the struggle against Nazism in the 1930s while infusing not only the search for socialist utopias in Russia, France, and Germany, but also the quest for legitimacy on both sides of the Cold War divide after 1945.
Hedges balances new perspectives on such well-known works as Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus and Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with discussions of previously overlooked twentieth-century expressions of the Faust myth, including American film noir and the Faust films of Stan Brakhage. She evaluates musical compositions—Hanns Eisler’s Faust libretto, the opera Votre Faust by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata—as well as works of fiction and drama in French and German, many of which have heretofore never been discussed outside narrow disciplinary confines.
Enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, Framing Faust provides a fascinating and focused narrative of some of the major cultural struggles of the past century as seen through the Faustian prism, and establishes Faust as an important present-day frame of reference.
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