|
|
Books > Arts & Architecture
In Hollywood Left and Right, Steven J. Ross tells a story that has
escaped public attention: the emergence of Hollywood as a vital
center of political life and the important role that movie stars
have played in shaping the course of American politics.
Ever since the film industry relocated to Hollywood early in the
twentieth century, it has had an outsized influence on American
politics. Through compelling larger-than-life figures in American
cinema--Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George
Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton
Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger--Hollywood Left
and Right reveals how the film industry's engagement in politics
has been longer, deeper, and more varied than most people would
imagine. As shown in alternating chapters, the Left and the Right
each gained ascendancy in Tinseltown at different times. From
Chaplin, whose movies almost always displayed his leftist
convictions, to Schwarzenegger's nearly seamless transition from
action blockbusters to the California governor's mansion, Steven J.
Ross traces the intersection of Hollywood and political activism
from the early twentieth century to the present.
Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that
Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story,
as Ross shows in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more
complicated. First, Hollywood has a longer history of conservatism
than liberalism. Second, and most surprising, while the Hollywood
Left was usually more vocal and visible, the Right had a greater
impact on American political life, capturing a senate seat
(Murphy), a governorship (Schwarzenegger), and the ultimate
achievement, the Presidency (Reagan).
Aims and Scope Growing social and economic needs exert major
pressures on landscapes, challenging preserved landscape values and
the regional significance of places. As a result, the scope
oflandscape management has broadened and diversifiedin response to
international calls for greater landscape protection, and to
existing and new challenges, such as thoserelating to climate
change adaptation and ecosystem services. Within this context,
landscape impact assessment and more in general landscape planning
have been regarded as effective mechanisms for promoting and, at
the same time, as the basis of sustainable landscape development.
Set within the European context, thisbookaims to provide
acontemporary review of landscape impact assessment theory and
practice, looking at both the project and planning level. It
coversthe overall process, content and scope of landscape impact
assessment, including the main principles for good practice.
Thisbook also provides guidance on a rangeof methods and techniques
for different aspects of landscape impact assessment and public
participation needs; and explains the advantages of close
co-ordination between landscape impact assessment and landscape
planning, especially in land use planning. Finally, a selection of
case studies reviewing different aspects and practices of landscape
impact assessment are reviewed. This book will be of interest to
professionals involved in the day-to-day application of landscape
impact assessment, as well as scholars and teachers working in the
broad area of landscape planning andmanagement. The authors of
thisbook have vast experiencein the research and practice of
environmental assessment and landscape management.
The reality of transnational innovation and dissemination of new
technologies, including digital media, has yet to make a dent in
the deep-seated culturalism that insists on reinscribing a divide
between the West and Japan. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema
aims to counter this trend toward dichotomizing the West and Japan
and to challenge the pervasive culturalism of today's film and
media studies.
Featuring twenty essays, each authored by a leading researcher in
the field, this volume addresses productive debates about where
Japanese cinema is and where Japanese cinema is going at the period
of crisis of national boundary under globalization. It reevaluates
the position of Japanese cinema within the discipline of cinema and
media studies and beyond, and situates Japanese cinema within the
broader fields of transnational film history. Likewise, it examines
the materiality of Japanese cinema, scrutinizes cinema's
relationship to other media, and identifies the specific practices
of film production and reception. As a whole, the volume fosters a
dialogue between Japanese scholars of Japanese cinema, film
scholars of Japanese cinema based in Anglo-American and European
countries, film scholars of non-Japanese cinema, film archivists,
film critics, and filmmakers familiar with film scholarship.
A comprehensive volume that grasps Japanese cinema under the rubric
of the global and also fills the gap between Japanese and
non-Japanese film studies and between theories and practices, The
Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema challenges and responds to the
major developments underfoot in this rapidly changing field.
Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism
by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "the work is the
death mask of its conception." The work in its finished, perfected
state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation. An
opening chapter of this book examines some explosive ideas from the
mind of J. G. Hamann, eccentric figure of the anti-rationalist
Enlightenment, on the place of language at the seat of thought.
These ideas are pursued as an entry into the no less radical mind
of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold idiosyncrasies, like
Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of Enlightenment aesthetics. Bach
is a central player here, his late music the subject of fresh
inquiry. In several chapters on the late music of Beethoven, Bach
reappears, now something of a spiritual alter ego in the search for
a new voice. The improvisatory as a mode of thought figures
prominently here, and then inspires a new hearing of the
envisioning of Chaos at the outset of Haydn's Creation, aligned
with Herder's efforts to come to an understanding of logos at the
origin of thought. The improvisatory is at the heart of a chapter
on Beethoven's brazen cadenzas for the Concerto in D minor by
Mozart, another ghost in Beethoven's machine.
Music seductively unfinished is the topic of other chapters: on
some unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous
quartet movement by Beethoven; on the enigmas set loose in several
remarkable Mozart fragments; and on the romanticizing of fragment
and its bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left
incomplete. In a final coming to terms with the imponderables of
musical intuition, the author returns to Benjamin'sepigraph,
drawing together his foundational essay on Goethe's Elective
Affinities with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and with a draft for
a famous passage in the andantino of Schubert's Sonata in A (1828).
Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy
relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative
traces of the profound labors buried in its past. The book will
have broad appeal to the community of music scholars, theorists and
performers, and to all those for whom music is integral to the
history of ideas.
Queer Virgins examines the creation and theatrical performance of queer puns in Renaissance London. Its argument--that a small theatre known as the Whitefriars was run by a community of playwrights who self-consciously targeted an audience sympathetic to homoerotic desire and to homoerotic puns in particular--revises the current scholarly belief that early modern Londoners did not form self-conscious communities based on erotic desire. This book is for students of the early modern theatre; those who are interested in the history of erotic relations between men, and all who delight in puns and bawdy.
Singers must equip themselves with enough knowledge to clearly
convey specific sensations and difficulties with their instrument.
Understanding of potential dangers and disorders, familiarity with
a variety of medical procedures, and comprehension in various
facets of diagnosis and treatments empower singers to "own," just
like other musicians, their instrument. The Owner's Manual to the
Voice provides singers with the knowledge necessary to communicate
effectively and in intelligent terms about their instrument,
especially when conversing with medical professionals. Beginning
with an overview of the vocal anatomy, lead author Rachel Gates,
and co-authors L. Arrick Forest, M.D. and Kerri Obert, M.A.,
C.C.C/S.L.P, proceed through detailed discussions of caring for the
voice and common causes of vocal changes and problems before
guiding the reader through the process of choosing, talking to, and
working with an ENT. In so doing, they give insights that any
professional voice user - whether singer, actor, broadcaster,
politician, teacher, preacher, lawyer, salesperson or telemarketer
- will find helpful if not essential.
There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and
secular love songs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two
disparate genres-one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the
other vernacular-both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous
woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of
traditional medieval song forms - Marian prayer derived from
earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval
courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two
musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together.
Author David Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success,
producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and
liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative
analysis of this devotional form with the words and music of
secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines
the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within
polyphonic music from c. 1200 to c. 1500. Through case studies of
works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian
devotional and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive
ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of
an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies,
literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide
application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope
and unique, incisive analysis, this book is suited for scholars,
students, and general readers alike. Undergraduate and graduate
students of musicology, Medieval and Renaissance studies,
comparative literature, art history, Western reglious history, and
music history-especially that of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and
sacred music-will find this book a useful and informative resource
on the period. The Flower of Paradise is also of interest to those
with a particular dedication to any of its diverse subject areas.
For individuals involved in religious organizations or those who
frequent Medieval or Renaissance cultural sites and museums, this
book will deepen their knowledge and open up new ways of thinking
about the history and development of secular and sacred music and
the Marian tradition.
Famous for his painstaking attention to detail and for the
craftsmanship and artistry he brought to his work, filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick is by now long established as both the subject of
an entire sub-field of scholarly inquiry, and as the object of all
levels of cinema studies pedagogy. His oeuvre, developed over
nearly 50 years, traverses an immensely broad variety of film
genres and subjects and has long been studied and understood in
terms of its narrative, thematic, and striking visual elements.
However, unique and often startling encounters between music and
the moving image are central trademarks of Kubrick's style; witness
the powerful effects of Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in
2001: A Space Odyssey and of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in A
Clockwork Orange, each excerpt hand-picked by Kubrick himself.
We'll Meet Again argues that some of the most compelling and
understudied aspects of Stanley Kubrick's films are musically
conceived. Author Kate McQuiston illustrates that, for Kubrick,
music is neither post-production afterthought nor background nor
incidental, but rather core to films' themes and meanings. The book
is divided into three sections, the first of which identifies the
building blocks in Kubrick's sonic world and illuminates the ways
in which Kubrick uses them to substantiate his characters and to
define character relationships. The second section delves into the
effects of Kubrick's signature musical techniques, including the
use of texture, recurrence, and inscription to render and reinforce
psychological ideas and particular spectator responses. The third
and final section presents case studies in which the history of the
music Kubrick chooses plays a vital and dynamic role. Throughout
the author's arguments, the book locates Kubrick as a force in
music reception history by examining the relationship between his
musical choices and popular culture.
Its unique ability to sway the masses has led many observers to
consider cinema the artform with the greatest political force. The
images it produces can bolster leaders or contribute to their
undoing. Soviet filmmakers often had to face great obstacles as
they struggled to make art in an authoritarian society that put
them not only under ideological pressure but also imposed rigid
economic constraints on the industry. But while the Brezhnev era of
Soviet filmmaking is often depicted as a period of great
repression, Soviet Art House reveals that the films made at the
prestigious Lenfilm studio in this period were far more imaginative
than is usually suspected. In this pioneering study of a Soviet
film studio, author Catriona Kelly delves into previously
unpublished archival documents and interviews, memoirs, and the
films themselves to illuminate the ideological, economic, and
aesthetic dimensions of filmmaking in the Brezhnev era. She argues
that especially the young filmmakers who joined the studio after
its restructuring in 1961 revitalized its output and helped
establish Leningrad as a leading center of oppositional art. This
unique insight into Soviet film production shows not only the inner
workings of Soviet institutions before the system collapsed but
also traces how filmmakers tirelessly dodged and negotiated
contradictory demands to create sophisticated and highly original
movies.
Exploring films made in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from 1985 to
2009, Suzanne Gauch illustrates how late post-independence and
early twenty-first century North African cinema prefigured many of
the transformations in perception and relation that stunned both
participants and onlookers during the remarkable uprisings of the
2011 Arab Spring. Through multifaceted examinations of key films by
nine filmmakers-Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir,
Nabil Ayouch, Lyes Salem, Nadia El Fani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi
Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi-Gauch delineates the shifting relation
of politics to film in the era of neoliberal globalization. Each
work, she argues, taps the power inherent in cinema to destabilize
patterns of perception and judgment while taking film's role as
popular entertainment in new directions. Highlighting how each film
taps into the mobility at the core of cinema to break through the
boundaries that have long circumscribed filmmaking from North
Africa, Gauch shows how this cinema continues to forge and reflect
unexpected trajectories for itself and its audiences.
Once the center of agricultural prosperity in Alabama, the rich
soil of the Black Belt still features beautiful homes that stand as
a testimony to the region's proud heritage. Join author Jennifer
Hale as she explores the history of seventeen of the finest
plantation homes in Alabama's Black Belt. This book chronicles the
original owners and slaves of the homes and traces their
descendants, who have continued to call these plantations home
throughout the past two centuries. Discover why the families of an
Indian chief and a chief justice feuded for over a century about
the land on which Belvoir stands. Follow Gaineswood's progress as
it grew from a humble log cabin into an opulent mansion. Learn how
the original builder and subsequent owners of the Kirkwood Mansion
are linked by a legacy of exceptional and dedicated preservation.
"Historic Plantations of Alabama's Black Belt" recounts the elegant
past and hopeful future of a well-loved region of the South.
Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several
styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the
western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling,
country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering
these genres and the contexts in which they are performed, author
Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics,
examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of
contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a
central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.
Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal
performances and venues--urban and rural, secular and sacred, large
and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression
of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the
creative extension of indigenous publicness. In examining these
interstitial sites--at once places of intimate interaction and
spaces oriented to imagined audiences--this volume considers how
Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate
and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediation
affords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous
sociability.
Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from
anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and
ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new
ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with
mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal to students
and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory,
anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary
reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and
Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.
In The Positive Pianist: How Flow Can Bring Passion to Practice and
Performance, author Thomas J. Parente applies the concept of flow
to the practice of piano playing, demonstrating how student
musicians can experience enjoyment and confidence from succeeding
at something that challenges them to an engaging level. By using
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow to musical performance,
Parente shows that linking productivity and enjoyment in piano
playing has a positive impact on students, motivating them to
practice more in order to experience flow again; this creates
optimal learning conditions for piano practicing. As the chapters
progress, Parente shows students how to evaluate their own progress
and offers teachers the tools to impart on their students an
optimal practice method: one informed by flow. Parente argues for
an objective, goal-oriented backdrop that will lead piano students
to achieve greater confidence, accuracy, and musicality. The
Positive Pianist draws on the author's forty years of teaching
experience and research to show piano students and their teachers
how to develop a productive, focused mental state when practicing
the piano.
Popular styles of electronic dance music are pervasively mediated
by technology, not only within production but also in performance.
The most familiar performance format in this style, the DJ set, is
created with turntables, headphones, twelve-inch vinyl records, and
a mixing board. Going beyond simply playing other people's records,
DJs select, combine, and manipulate different parts of records to
form new compositions that differ substantially from their source
materials. In recent years, the "laptop set" has become equally
common; in this type of performance, musicians use computers and
specialized software to transform and reconfigure their own
precomposed sounds. Both types of performance are largely
improvised, evolving in response to the demands of a particular
situation through interaction with a dancing audience. Within
performance, musicians make numerous spontaneous decisions about
variables such as which sounds they will play, when they will play
them, and how they will be combined with other sounds. Yet the
elements that constitute these improvisations are also fixed in
certain fundamental ways: performances are fashioned from patterns
or tracks recorded beforehand, and in the case of DJ sets, these
elements are also physical objects (vinyl records). In Playing with
Something that Runs, author Mark J. Butler explores these
improvised performances, revealing the ways in which musicians
utilize seemingly invariable prerecorded elements to create
dynamic, real-time improvisations. Based on extensive interviews
with musicians in their studios, as well as in-depth studies of
particular mediums of performance, including both DJ and laptop
sets, Butler explores the ways in which technologies, both material
and musical, are used in performance and improvisation in order to
make these transformations possible. An illuminating look at the
world of popular electronic-music performance, Playing with
Something that Runs is an indispensable resource for electronic
dance musicians and fans as well as scholars and students of
popular music.
 |
Brecht On Art & Politics
(Hardcover)
Bertolt Brecht; Edited by Steve Giles, Tom Kuhn; Translated by Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, …
|
R1,898
Discovery Miles 18 980
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
The first single-volume anthology of Brecht's writings on both art
and politics This volume contains new translations to extend our
image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and
thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here
are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer
us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in
four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is
designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic
intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural
processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors
introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.
First published in 1984, Gerald Bordman's Oxford Companion to
American Theatre is the standard one-volume source on our national
theatre. Critics have hailed its "wealth of authoritative
information" (Back Stage), its "fascinating picture of the volatile
American stage" (The Guardian), and its "well-chosen, illuminating
facts" (Newsday).
Now thoroughly revised, this distinguished volume once again
provides an up-to-date guide to the American stage from its
beginnings to the present. Completely updated by theater professor
Thomas Hischak, the volume includes playwrights, plays, actors,
directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic
movements, and much more. The book covers not only classic works
(such as Death of a Salesman) but also many commercially successful
plays (such as Getting Gertie's Garter), plus entries on foreign
figures that have influenced our dramatic development (from
Shakespeare to Beckett and Pinter). New entries include recent
plays such as Angels in America and Six Degrees of Separation,
performers such as Eric Bogosian and Bill Irwin, playwrights like
David Henry Hwang and Wendy Wasserstein, and relevant developments
and issues including AIDS in American theatre, theatrical producing
by Disney, and the rise in solo performance.
Accessible and authoritative, this valuable A-Z reference is ideal
not only for students and scholars of theater, but everyone with a
passion for the stage.
Georg Philipp Telemann gave us one of the richest legacies of
instrumental music from the eighteenth century. Though considered a
definitive contribution to the genre during his lifetime, his
concertos, sonatas, and suites were then virtually ignored for
nearly two centuries following his death. Yet these works are now
among the most popular in the baroque repertory. In Music for a
Mixed Taste , Steven Zohn considers Telemann's music from
stylistic, generic, and cultural perspectives. He investigates the
composer's cosmopolitan "mixed taste"-a blending of the French,
Italian, English, and Polish national styles-and his imaginative
expansion of this concept to embrace mixtures of the old (late
baroque) and new (galant) styles. Telemann had an equally
remarkable penchant for generic amalgamation, exemplified by his
pioneering role in developing hybrid types such as the sonata in
concerto style ("Sonate auf Concertenart") and overture-suite with
solo instrument ("Concert en ouverture"). Zohn examines the
extramusical meanings of Telemann's "characteristic"
overture-suites, which bear descriptive texts associating them with
literature, medicine, politics, religion, and the natural world,
and which acted as vehicles for the composer's keen sense of
musical humor. Zohn then explores Telemann's unprecedented
self-publishing enterprise at Hamburg, and sheds light on the
previously unrecognized borrowing by J.S. Bach from a Telemann
concerto. Music for a Mixed Taste further reveals how Telemann's
style polonaise generates musical and social meanings through the
timeless oppositions of Orient-Occident, urban-rural, and
serious-comic.
When the premature death of A.W.N. Pugin (1812-1852) created a huge
vacuum in the realm of Gothic-revival art and design, this was more
than adequately filled by John Hardman Powell (1827-1895). Tutored
personally - and uniquely - by Pugin, Powell now stepped into his
master's shoes as chief designer for the Birmingham firm of John
Hardman & Co. who manufactured metalwork, stained glass, and
other furnishings for Pugin and for architects influenced by him.
More than that, Powell was married to Pugin's eldest daughter, Anne
(1832-1897) who bore him twelve children. Though rigorously trained
by Pugin, Powell had a free-spirited artistic temperament, which,
imbued with Pugin's 'True Principles' of medieval art and design,
led him to apply them in innovative and imaginative ways.
Researched from newly-discovered original sources, this book
examines Powell's rich legacy of stained glass and metalwork which
is still to be enjoyed in cathedrals, churches and great houses
across the United Kingdom and overseas, and the ideas which shaped
it. Powell's loyalty to his late Master extended to the younger
members of Pugin's family, including the love-lorn Agnes and the
hot-tempered Edward, and also to Pugin's widow Jane, whose social
pretensions he mercilessly lampooned. Through his encouragement of
artistic talent within his own family, his training of Hardman
apprentices, his evening lectures in Birmingham, and his written
tributes to his late Master, Powell ensured that the Pugin flame
would continue to burn brightly well into the twentieth century.
 |
Roland Barthes' Cinema
(Hardcover)
Philip Watts; Edited by Dudley Andrew, Yves Citton, Vincent Debaene, Sam Di Iorio
|
R3,736
Discovery Miles 37 360
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s
till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory
rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its
surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an
acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that
spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep
questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily
sensitive human being, he relished the beauty of images and the
community they could bring together.
|
|