Tired of turning raw video footage into ho-hum productions that make people yawn? Or, worse yet, just putting raw video out there and hoping for the best? If so, this guide is for you. It clearly explains how to research, plan, shoot, assemble, edit, and fine-tune video productions for just about any purpose. Richly illustrated with stills from an example movie, it'll get you on the right track to making movies that'll inform, entertain, and impress your audience.

When the popularity of Western movies faded with the public, it opened the gate for a new sub-genre that blended the classic fundamentals with other elements. In Twistern: 50 Twisted Western Movie Reviews, a sub-genre is not only defined, but celebrated for its creativity, ingenuity and downright bizarreness. Hitch a ride on this wild wagon ride and prepare for the journey of your life

Catalog of an exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, January 6 to January 29, 2011. These are large prints of abstract images based on a series of constructions using geometrical forms. The images explore strong colors and textures.

"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."

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.

Film criticism originally published at the New Ledger. Includes articles on the unexpected brilliance of Michael Bay, Roman Polanski and the necessity of evil, the artistic collapse of Michael Mann, and others.

Catalog of an exhibition in the Gallerie im Einstein, Unter den Linden, in Berlin in 2011.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

An Exhibition at the CJ Gallery, San Diego.

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.

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.