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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

An Exhibition at the CJ Gallery, San Diego.

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.

The 1961 film The Misfits saw the collaboration of director John Huston with playwright Arthur Miller and brought together on screen Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in what would be their final roles. Adding to the production's luster, the elite photo agency Magnum was hired to do the on-set photography. The photographs of this landmark film represent the end of an era of Hollywood stardom and the emergence of a new vision of the actor's craft. In Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves, George Kouvaros offers a multilayered study of the Magnum photographs that illuminates larger changes in Hollywood acting during the postwar period. Just as the industrial context of film production evolved dramatically in the decades after the war, Kouvaros asserts, so too did the iconography associated with the figure of the actor. Photographs of Hollywood stars such as Monroe, Gable, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Humphrey Bogart form the basis of an evocative analysis of the way photography gave shape to fundamental shifts in the nature of screen acting, perceptions of celebrity, and the relationship between actor and audience. By closely scrutinizing the images produced on the set of one of America's most haunting and least understood films, Kouvaros presents a new recognition of the connection between the power of star culture, art photography, and the film industry during a time of rapid social transformation.

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.

Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country's origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups. In this revised and expanded edition of "Film Nation," Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11--one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, Burgoyne argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans ("The New World"), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York ("Gangs of New York"), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination ("Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima") and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity ("United 93" and "World Trade Center"). "Film Nation" provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.

Lucia Grossberger Morales weaves together her bicultural roots using the personal computer. She was born in Bolivia in 1952, emigrated to the United States when she was three and returned for a visit at sixteen. Since that visit, Bolivia has been her inspiration. Lucia is a pioneer in computer art. In 1979, she bought her first computer, the Apple II. For the next seven years, she collaborated on several software packages, including The Designers Toolkit, published by Apple Inc. In 1987, she began telling her stories of Bolivia, emigrating, and issues of identity in her multimedia installations and CD-ROMs. Her interactive installations and CD-ROMs have been shown in galleries and museums around the world.

Recoded considers digital media from day to day experiences to wider political frameworks in their legal, military and economic aspects. The exhibition and series of events explored digital data, the relationship of embodied experience and digital media, and the scope and significance of surveillance technologies. Recoded features works by Alexander Egger, Anna Jermolaewa, Caleb Larsen, Manu Luksch, David Valentine/MediaShed, Trevor Paglen, plan b, RYbN, skuta and Jens Strandberg, and films by Rebecca Baron, Harun Farocki, Peter Galison and Robb Moss, and Manu Luksch. Presented by Peacock Visual Arts in collaboration with the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen in conjunction with their conference .

Art integration and display of visual, audio and kinaesthetic data.

This "blook" preserves the musings on media and memory that Elayne Zalis posted on her blog, VirtualDayz, from June 27, 2005, to July 15, 2006 (see http: //www.virtualdayz. blogspot.com/). Both private and public archives inspire her reflections, which explore media in transition, a range that encompasses film, video, print, digital arts, and the Web. She is interested in what artists and writers are doing and in what critics and scholars are saying.

An illustrated study of performance and video artist Joan Jonas's 1974 video, an elliptical narrative that moves between the countryside of Nova Scotia and the artists's New York City studio. Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since 1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the archetypal authority of objects and gestures. With her influential 1976 work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) Jonas nimbly structures an elliptical narrative that unmistakably establishes her voice and visual lexicon. I Want to Live in the Country features two locations-the untamed landscape of Nova Scotia and an artist's studio in New York City-as it examines themes of loss, displacement, time, and memory through still life compositions and Super-8 footage. Jonas creates a meditation of frames within frames, monitors within monitors, overlaid with poetic musings-a murmured story of the unconscious. Jonas's influences have included the writing of Samuel Beckett, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Japanese Noh theater, and the work of John Cage. Stripped down to intimate, indelible gestures, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) explores a Beckettian dilemma: "I am both the observer and the object that I observe. Which of the two is the real 'I'?" In this richly illustrated Afterall book, Susan Morgan examines the emergence of Jonas's original work from this synthesis of influences and ideas.