Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. Whether designing complex video installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, creating conceptual and performance art, generating guerilla video, or producing works that promote feminism and other social issues, these artists have utilized video technology to express revolutionary ideas. This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-five recent interviews shed new light on these artists--their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world. Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses-audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action. From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin's broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response-both political and judicial-ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.

Adaptation was central to Andre Bazin's lifelong query: What is cinema? Placing films alongside literature allowed him to identify the aesthetic and sociological distinctiveness of each medium. More importantly, it helped him wage his campaign for a modern conception of cinema, one that owed a great deal to developments in the novel. The critical genius of one of the greatest film and cultural critics of the twentieth century is on full display in this collection, in which readers are introduced to Bazin's foundational concepts of the relationship between film and literary adaptation. Expertly curated and with an introduction by celebrated film scholar Dudley Andrew, the book begins with a selection of essays that show Bazin's film theory in action, followed by reviews of films adapted from renowned novels of the day (Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Colette, Sagan, Duras, and others) as well as classic novels of the nineteenth century (Bronte, Melville, Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Stendhal, and more). As a bonus, two hundred and fifty years of French fiction are put into play as Bazin assesses adaptation after adaptation to determine what is at stake for culture, for literature, and especially for cinema. This volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in literary adaptation, authorship, classical film theory, French film history, and Andre Bazin's criticism.

Peter Forgacs, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. "Cinema's Alchemist" offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which Forgacs reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.

Contributors: Whitney Davis, U of California, Berkeley; Laszlo F. Foldenyi, U of Theatre, Film and Television, Budapest; Marsha Kinder, U of Southern California; Tamas Koranyi; Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Roger Odin, U of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle; Catherine Portuges, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan U; Kaja Silverman, U of Pennsylvania; Ernst van Alphen, Leiden U, the Netherlands; Malin Wahlberg, Stockholm U.

238-page narrative on screenwriting composed from two years of discussions with over 30 contributors in a 'private office' hosted by Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope.com virtual studio. Distinctive format offers practical advice along with recognition of unique problems facing writers. An indispensable resource for professional motion picture writers, intermediate and advanced students of screenwriting, film school instructors, producers, and rewrite consultants. The book focuses on five vital components of screenplay art: writing as a career and workplace experience, audience-protagonist bonding, scene cards, story development, and marketing to indie producers. Screenplay Form and Structure provides fresh ideas and genuine dialogue about how stories work and why some are universally hailed as film classics. This tightly edited volume contains dozens of clear, practical tutorials. Subject Index cites 45 classic and recent movies, academic research, and probing Q&A by industry-savvy workshop participants. Many of the participants are working pros, others just starting out, with a few novelists and academics thrown in for spice. "A necessary addition to any screenwriting library, covers all the stuff that the others don't and does it in a witty, conversational style that's great fun to read." - Richard Krevolin, Writer/Director "Unique discussion format makes for an original read... A worthwhile read for serious screenwriting students." - Angela Guess, LA Screenwriter Blog

Catalog of an exhibit of Wally Gilbert's recent abstract graphic work held at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. These images feature strong colors and striking black and white designs.

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. "Brutal Vision" challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films--including such classics as "Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; "and" Bicycle Thieves"--should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability.

In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism's international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how--in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom--these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period's call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism.

These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. "Brutal Vision" interrogates the role of neorealism's famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieu--ideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.

Motion picture audio is one of the least understood parts of filmmaking and is neglected by many film students and filmmakers alike. It's boring, scary, too technical and not considered important by most filmmakers. Until they get into the editing room and realize that by not paying attention to audio earlier they are screwed. Over the years tons of false information has spread through the independent film world, and most students and filmmakers don't want to deal with sound. If they do it is usually done incorrectly through ignorance and at a huge financial expense. This book is intended to shatter the myths and mysteries around film audio and give both students and experienced filmmakers the knowledge and tools so that their films will sound like they have come from the Hollywood studios without huge Hollywood budgets. I have assembled a lineup of some pretty amazing people in all areas of audio production for film and television. This group consists of location recordists, sound designers, picture editors, sound editors, re-recording mixers, and post-production supervisors. This all-star cast has won Oscars and Emmys in addition to awards from various film industries worldwide. In the book's interviews, Gary Rydstrom, Tom Johnson, Jim LeBrecht, Ron Eng, Harry B Miller III, Peter Kurland, Lee Haxall, Ken Karman, David A. Cohen and a host of others discuss their methods and secrets. Sound is an excellent carrier of emotion. And film is about emotion. - Gary Rydstrom, sound designer - Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park (winner of 7 Academy Awards) Sound is NOT the enemy - Lee Haxall, editor Crazy Stupid Love I'm capturing a performance, and that performance is only going to happen one time the way they want it, in the environment, with everybody in the mood. - Peter Kurland, location recordist - No Country For Old Men In my mind, dialog is king, if you can't understand what they're saying then the movie is a waste of time. - David A. Cohen, dialog editor - Lost In Translation A good dialog editor can figure out a way to make nearly every line of dialog usable. Milly Iatrou, dialog editor - Walk The Line I would rather see no music than music used improperly. - Ken Karman, music editor - Forrest Gump We're like the ugly evil stepchildren in the basement. - Jana Vance, foley artist - Toy Story When I look at a film or look at a script I think of what I'm gonna need to make that world. Jane Tattersall - sound effects editor - Naked Lunch I like off beat stuff, weird sounding films and subtle sound tracks as compared to bombastic. - Ron Eng, supervising sound editor - Mulholland Drive Sound is kind of invisible, but when it's wrong we know it immediately. - Jim LeBrecht, sound designer - The Singing Detective Good sound goes unnoticed, bad sound ruins a film. - Dan Olmstead, re-recording mixer - Cecil B. Demented The rule of thumb for good sound is: does it tell or promote the emotional content of the scene, does it support and/or reveal the story. - Tom Johnson, re-recording mixer - Alice In Wonderland (winner of 2 Academy Awards) If you want to see what the future of storytelling looks like then check out Kelley Baker. Brian David Johnson, Futurist, filmmaker, author If you read only one book on sound, this is the one, and, after you've read it, you'll never, ever, ever say, "We'll fix it in post." William M. Akers, author of Your Screenplay Sucks

Little has been written about the Spanish film musical, a genre usually associated with the early Franco dictatorship and dismissed by critics as reactionary, escapist fare. A timely and valuable corrective, White Gypsies shows how the Spanish folkloric musical films of the 1940s and '50s are inextricably tied to anxious concerns about race-especially, but not only, Gypsiness. Focusing on the processes of identity formation in twentieth-century Spain-with multifaceted readings of the cinematic construction of class, gender, and sexuality-Eva Woods Peiro explores how these popular films allowed audiences to negotiate and imaginatively, at times problematically, resolve complex social contradictions. The intricate interweaving of race and modernity is particularly evident in her scrutiny of a striking popular phenomenon: how the musicals progressively whitened their stars, even as their story lines became increasingly Andalusianized and Gypsified. White Gypsies reveals how these imaginary individuals constituted a veritable cultural barometer of how racial thinking was projected and understood across a broad swath of popular Spanish cinema.

disentanglement

despite an infrastructure of concealed rituals
they appear
bats springing out of porcelain bells
two hands
are as vulnerable
as what they wish to save
(by Shabnam Piryaei)
Shabnam Piryaei was born in Iran and raised in the U.S. Her work has been published in several journals including The Florida Review, Runes: A Review of Poetry, Flashquake, and The Furnace Review. She has been awarded the Poets & Writers Amy Award for poetry, as well as an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Currently she is developing three short films based on her writings.

Composer and cellist Kathy McTavish writes about her music and experimental film. This book features sequences of black and white photo images from the film "birdland," photographs of cello performance and includes a long poem, or score, for her unique fusion form. McTavish has received Jerome Foundation, American Composers Forum commissions and several awards from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.

"Taking Place" argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place. Through its unprecedented--and at times even obsessive-- attention to actual places, this volume traces the tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, that inhere in contemporary debates on global cinema, television, art, and media.

Contributors: Rosalind Galt, U of Sussex; Frances Guerin, U of Kent; Ji-hoon Kim; Hugh S. Manon, Clark U; Ara Osterweil, McGill U; Brian Price, U of Toronto; Linda Robinson, U of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Michael Siegel; Noa Steimatsky, U of Chicago; Meghan Sutherland, U of Toronto; Mark W. Turner, Kings College London; Aurora Wallace, New York U; Charles Wolfe, U of California, Santa Barbara.

"Political Matinee: Hollywood s Take on American Politics" is a fresh approach to teaching politics. This anthology presents readings on a broad array of topics related to American politics on film, including film history, film genres, and analysis of film. A guide for students to use when analyzing films for political content, this text covers timely topics such as political ideologies and institutions. Select readings also show readers how to effectively write about films.
With a mix of both contemporary and classic readings, Political Matinee provides a comprehensive selection of highly-relevant source materials. This is an ideal text for courses that examine the ways in which films depict politics in the United States, and it provides invaluable fodder for lively classroom instruction and discussion.
Richard Herrera is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University, who specializes in American politics. He has been teaching American Politics and Film online and in the classroom for many years, as well as other courses in American politics and American political parties."

"The Right to Play Oneself" collects for the first time Thomas Waugh's essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin's and Joris Ivens's manifestos of "committed" documentary from the 19 0s, reflects the book's theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists.
Waugh analyzes an eclectic international selection of films and issues from the 1920s to the present day. The essays provide a transcultural focus, moving from documentaries of the industrialized societies of North America and Europe to those of 1980s India and addressing such canonical directors as Dziga Vertov, Emile de Antonio, Barbara Hammer, Rosa von Praunheim, and Anand Patwardhan. Woven through the volume is the relationship of the documentary with the history of the Left, including discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary, such as Challenge for Change and ACT UP's Women's Collective.
Together with the introduction by the author, Waugh's essays advance a defiantly and persuasively personal point of view on the history and significance of documentary film.

In his signature book, award-winning television producer-director-writer & documentary filmmaker, Craig D. Forrest, provides a wealth of valuable production insights - a field manual of sorts - that include strategies, wisdom, tips and tactics meant to inspire your next digital film or video shoot to be truly professional, organized and effective. Craig's sage advice - both successes and failures - is drawn from a professional career of extensive world travel, diverse media projects and dangerous overseas assignments for leading networks, channels, agencies and groups scattered across the globe. Chapters include Story, Directing, Communication, Planning, Decision-Making, Clients/Talent, Interviewing, Camera, Sound, Lighting, Budget, Editing, Travel, Culture, Teamwork and Taboos. Each chapter also features insider knowledge provided by famous directors, savvy creative talent and notable filmmakers. Whether you're a novice or pro, their practical wisdom alone adds invaluable insight to a filmmaking book designed to be a production benchmark.

An Exhibition at the CJ Gallery, San Diego.

When inventor and movie studio pioneer Thomas Edison wanted to capture western magic on film in 1904, where did he send his crew?

To Oklahoma's 101 Ranch near Ponca City. And when Francis Ford Coppola readied young actors Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon to portray teen class strife in the 1983 movie "The Outsiders," he took cast and crew to Tulsa, the setting of S. E. Hinton's acclaimed novel. From Edison to Coppola and beyond, Oklahoma has served as both backdrop and home base for cinematic productions. The only book to chronicle the history of made-in-Oklahoma films, John Wooley's "Shot in Oklahoma" explores the variety, spunk, and ingenuity of moviemaking in the Sooner State over more than a century.

Wooley's trek through cinematic history, buttressed by meticulous research and interviews, hits the big films readers have heard of--but maybe didn't realize were shot in the state--along with lesser-known offerings. We also get the films' intriguing backstories. For instance, President Theodore Roosevelt's fascination with a man purportedly able to catch a wolf in his hands led to "The Wolf Hunt," shot in the Wichita Mountains and screened in the White House in 1909. Over time, homegrown movies such as "Where the Red Fern Grows" (1974, 2003) have given way to feature films including "The Outsiders" and "Rain Man" (1988). Throughout this tale, Wooley draws attention to unsung aspects of state and cinematic history, including early all-black movies lensed in Oklahoma's African American towns and films starring American Indian leads.

With a nod to more recent Hollywood productions such as "Twister" (1996) and "Elizabethtown" (2005), Wooley ultimately explores how a low-budget slasher movie created in Oklahoma in the 1980s transformed the movie business worldwide. Punctuated with photographs and including a filmography of more than one hundred productions filmed in the state, "Shot in Oklahoma" offers movie lovers and historians alike an engaging ride through untold cinematic history.

The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as "Diary of a Country Priest" (1951), "The Trial of Joan of Arc" (1962), "The Devil, Probably" (1977), and "L'Argent" (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson's work in an altogether different context. Rather than a religious--or spiritual--filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics.
Situating Bresson in radical and aesthetic political contexts, from surrealism to situationism, "Neither God nor Master" shows how his early style was a model for social resistance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France--especially as "failure" is understood in relation to Bresson's chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century.
Restoring Bresson to the radical political culture from which he emerged--and to which he remained faithful--Price offers a major revision of the reputation of one of the most celebrated figures in the history of French film. In doing so, he raises larger philosophical questions about the efficacy of revolutionary practices and questions about interpretation and metaphysical tendencies of film historical research that have, until now, gone largely untested.

This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for Suzanne Buchan's engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays' art-and into the art of independent puppet animation.
Buchan's aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers' artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design and illustration. She also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films' literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate out of their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.
At once a biography of the Quays' artistic trajectory and a detailed examination of one of their best-known films, "Street of Crocodiles," this book goes further and provides interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for the analysis of animation.

This collection offers a fresh re-reading and re-imagining of Italian Americans in film, from actors to directors, from subject to agency. The trans-Atlantic discourse that emerges from these keenly insightful essays offers a guidepost for future analyses. As we come to understand the evolving paradigm of Italian Americans, whose cinematic representation has long been object of discussion and debate, Mediated Ethnicity constitutes a prismatic lens through which the contemporary viewer/reader may re-discover the cultural positioning of Italians in America. - John Tintori Associate Arts Professor and Chair, Graduate Film Program New York University Tisch School of the Arts

Tracing the connections-both visual and philosophical-between new media art and classical Islamic art. In both classical Islamic art and contemporary new media art, one point can unfold to reveal an entire universe. A fourteenth-century dome decorated with geometric complexity and a new media work that shapes a dome from programmed beams of light: both can inspire feelings of immersion and transcendence. In Enfoldment and Infinity, Laura Marks traces the strong similarities, visual and philosophical, between these two kinds of art. Her argument is more than metaphorical; she shows that the "Islamic" quality of modern and new media art is a latent, deeply enfolded, historical inheritance from Islamic art and thought. Marks proposes an aesthetics of unfolding and enfolding in which image, information, and the infinite interact: image is an interface to information, and information (such as computer code or the words of the Qur'an) is an interface to the infinite. After demonstrating historically how Islamic aesthetics traveled into Western art, Marks draws explicit parallels between works of classical Islamic art and new media art, describing texts that burst into image, lines that multiply to form fractal spaces, "nonorganic life" in carpets and algorithms, and other shared concepts and images. Islamic philosophy, she suggests, can offer fruitful ways of understanding contemporary art.

Due to the fast growth in multimedia applications including transport of video over limited bandwidth capacity and error-prone networks (such as the Internet and wireless networks), a high degree of flexibility from video compression systems has become necessary. Scalable video coding is a popular technology for providing an efficient representation of video and a robust method of transmitting video over a heterogeneous environment. However, although several scalable coding algorithms have been proposed in the literature and the international standards over the past decade, these schemes can accommodate relatively limited decoding flexibility at a significant loss in compression efficiency. Therefore, this book aims to address two issues related to scalable video coding. These are: i) how to reduce the bit rate overhead associated with the existing scalable schemes, especially video coding standards, and ii) to develop a highly scalable coding system. To achieve these goals, a new-layered video coding scheme based on MC-DCT pyramid is proposed. The proposed scheme should be especially useful to professionals in the field of Video Coding and Communications.

A catalog of an exhibition at the Khaki Gallery, Boston, MA, consisting of two very large diptychs on canvas, 12 prints, and a series of silk scarves.