In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country s second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation."

This collection of essays by biblical scholars is the first book-length treatment of the 2014 film Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky. The film has proved to be of great interest to scholars working on the interface between the Bible and popular culture, not only because it was heralded as the first of a new generation of biblical blockbusters, but also because of its bold, provocative, and yet unusually nuanced approach to the interpretation and use of the Noah tradition, in both its biblical and extra-biblical forms. The book's chapters, written by both well-established and up-and-coming scholars, engage with and analyze a broad range of issues raised by the film, including: its employment and interpretation of the ancient Noah traditions; its engagement with contemporary environmental themes and representation of non-human animals; its place within the history of cinematic depictions of the flood, status as an 'epic', and associated relationship to spectacle; the theological implications of its representation of a hidden and silent Creator and responses to perceived revelation; the controversies surrounding its reception among religious audiences, especially in the Muslim world; and the nature and implications of its convoluted racial and gender politics. Noah as Antihero will be of considerable interest to scholars conducting research in the areas of religion and film, contemporary hermeneutics, reception history, religion and popular culture, feminist criticism, and ecological ethics.

This volume collects twenty original essays on the philosophy of film. It uniquely brings together scholars working across a range of philosophical traditions and academic disciplines to broaden and advance debates on film and philosophy. The book includes contributions from a number of prominent philosophers of film including Noel Carroll, Chris Falzon, Deborah Knight, Paisley Livingston, Robert Sinnerbrink, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg. While the topics explored by the contributors are diverse, there are a number of thematic threads that connect them. Overall, the book seeks to bridge analytic and continental approaches to philosophy of film in fruitful ways. Moving to the individual essays, the first two sections offer novel takes on the philosophical value and the nature of film. The next section focuses on the film-as-philosophy debate. Section IV covers cinematic experience, while Section V includes interpretations of individual films that touch on questions of artificial intelligence, race and film, and cinema's biopolitical potential. Finally, the last section proposes new avenues for future research on the moving image beyond film. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars working in film studies, theory, and philosophy.

Today the media arts not only address the great themes of our times, they inhabit the very media of which they speak. The contemporary is global, but only because of the media that enable globalisation. Those media are almost nowhere apparent in the mainstream practice of art that we see in biennials from Venice to Sao Paolo. The media arts reflect back to us our present condition, and in the archive present us with the ghosts of what we were, and what we failed to become. This book brings the reader into the centre of these strange encounters, introducing us to the rich legacies and futures of the most important arts of the last hundred years. It also looks ahead to the future and asks what happens to the condition of being human within the new constellation into which we are entering?

A riveting chronicle of Communist Party efforts to propagate Communism in the United States, concurrent with Hollywood's "Golden Age" of creativity that came to define classical Hollywood cinema. From the Great Depression through World War II, the American Communist Party tried to take control of the motion picture industry. This comprehensive and chronological account of Communist influence in Hollywood surveys the topic from the Popular Front's fight against Fascism during the 1930s to the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the late 1940s. Birdnow, an established historian and chronicler of domestic Communism, outlines Communist International's organizational efforts promoting international communism, focusing on the work of Communist political activists such as Willi Munzenberg, a media mogul with an international network; Gerhart Eisler, patron of a Hollywood composer; and Otto Katz, a high-profile publicist of the party line involved in movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The book explores the covert ways in which Hollywood Communists and Soviet sympathizers attempted to tailor movie scripts to suit the Soviet agenda and discusses Communist front groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in great detail. Final chapters offer convincing proof that the directors, producers, and screenwriters blacklisted by studios for their possible Communist affiliations, known as the Hollywood Ten, were members of the Communist Party. Gives readers insight into how the Communist Party used the creative explosion in the movie industry to actively establish a foothold in the United States Draws a parallel between the rise of the Community Party and the rise of the motion picture industry in the United States Profiles Communist Party USA leaders close to Hollywood Takes a closer look at the "Hollywood Ten," detailing who each of the blacklisted individuals were and how their names came to be on the list

Juan Ortiz turns his unique eye for poster design to the classic sci-fi series Lost In Space. Each episode is lovingly reimagined as a visually striking poster, creating a one of a kind collection to accompany one of the most influential and celebrated sci-fi series of all time. Each poster has a different aesthetic, taking inspiration from 60s movie posters, comic books, pulp novel covers and blacklight posters.

Model, texture and animate with Cinema 4D 11 using the techniques and tips provided in Cinema 4D 11 Workshop. Starting with all of the basic concepts, functions, and tools - follow along to the workshop tutorials that deliver a hands-on knowledge of the new R11 toolset as well as the returning advanced features. The companion website provides all of the required tutorial media from the projects in the book so that you create your own working models and animations.

In Instructional Cinema and African Audiences in Colonial Kenya, 1926-1963, the author argues against the colonial logic instigating that films made for African audiences in Kenya influenced them to embrace certain elements of western civilization but Africans had nothing to offer in return. The author frames this logic as unidirectional approach purporting that Africans were passive recipients of colonial programs. Contrary to this understanding, the author insists that African viewers were active participants in the discourse of cinema in Kenya. Employing unorthodox means to protest mediocre films devoid of basic elements of film production, African spectators forced the colonial government to reconsider the way it produced films. The author frames the reconsideration as bidirectional approach. Instructional cinema first emerged as a tool to "educate" and "modernize" Africans, but it transformed into a contestable space of cultural and political power, a space that both sides appropriated to negotiate power and actualize their abstract ideas.

Creating Professional Characters: Develop Spectacular Designs from Basic Concepts is an inspiring and informative exploration of how popular professional character designers take the basic concept of a character in a production brief and develop these ideas into an original, high-quality design. Suitable for student and professional character designers alike, this book focuses on how to approach your character designs in ways that ensure the target audience and production needs are met while still creating fun, imaginative characters. This visually appealing book includes twenty thorough tutorials guiding you through the design and decision making processes used to create awesome characters. Replicating the processes used in professional practice today, this book demonstrates the types of brief a professional designer might receive, the iterative design process used to explore the brief, the influence of production feedback on the final design, and how final designs are presented to clients. This detailed, enlightening book is an excellent guide to creating incredible imaginative characters suitable for your future professional projects.

From gaming consoles to smartphones, video games are everywhere today, including those set in historical times and particularly in the ancient world. This volume explores the varied depictions of the ancient world in video games and demonstrates the potential challenges of games for scholars as well as the applications of game engines for educational and academic purposes. With successful series such as "Assassin's Creed" or "Civilization" selling millions of copies, video games rival even television and cinema in their role in shaping younger audiences' perceptions of the past. Yet classical scholarship, though embracing other popular media as areas of research, has so far largely ignored video games as a vehicle of classical reception. This collection of essays fills this gap with a dedicated study of receptions, remediations and representations of Classical Antiquity across all electronic gaming platforms and genres. It presents cutting-edge research in classics and classical receptions, game studies and archaeogaming, adopting different perspectives and combining papers from scholars, gamers, game developers and historical consultants. In doing so, it delivers the first state-of-the-art account of both the wide array of 'ancient' video games, as well as the challenges and rewards of this new and exciting field.

In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning-which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming-provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnes Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.

"Mary Reid Kelley" celebrates the first museum exhibition devoted to the finely crafted and researched costumes, objects, and drawings that Mary Reid Kelley creates for her visually and intellectually stimulating videos. An essay by curator Daniel Belasco analyzes the sources and significance of the working objects in how they promote the unreality effect of Mary Reid Kelley s videos, which combine both the analog and digital and the personal and historical. A conversation between Corinna Ripps Schaming and Mary Reid Kelley and her long-time collaborator Patrick Kelley reveals insights into their working process. For the first time, the full range of the artist s costumes, props, drawings, furniture, and accessories are photographed and presented as unique works of art."

Is art created with computers really art? This book answers 'yes.' Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art's historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.

Forty-five of Japan's leading manga artists illustrate Star Wars! Explore the galaxy through the beautiful artwork of 45 outstanding Japanese manga artists and illustrators, including Akira Himekawa, Kamome Shirahama, and Taiyo Matsumoto. Celebrating the universal appeal of these iconic characters and their timeless stories, this collection presents each artist's unique tribute to the Star Wars universe and is a must-have for fans of Star Wars and manga alike!

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1960s and onwards challenged the concept of art - hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures - manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history's most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices. By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

Digital Currents explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator.

Margot Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making - video, computer, the internet - in this richly illustrated book. She provides a context for the works of major artists in each media, describes their projects, and discusses the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field.
Digital Currents fills a major gap in our understanding of the relationship between art and technology, and the exciting new cultural conditions we are experiencing. It will be ideal reading for students taking courses in digital art, and also for anyone seeking to understand these new creative forms.

Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In "Recording Reality, Desiring the Real," Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating.
Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, she asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, Cowie examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," John Huston's "Let There Be Light," and Milica Tomic's "Portrait of My Mother.""
Recording Reality, Desiring the Real "stakes documentary's central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement, which together create a new understanding of spectatorship.