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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced research. Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, New Media Futures captures the spirit and contributions of twenty-two women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. The editors and contributors give voice as creators integral to the development of these new media and place their works at the forefront of social change and artistic inquiry. What emerges is the dramatic story of how these Midwestern explorations in the digital arts produced a web of fascinating relationships. These fruitful collaborations helped usher in the digital age that propelled social media. Contributors: Carolina Cruz-Niera, Colleen Bushell, Nan Goggin, Mary Rasmussen, Dana Plepys, Maxine Brown, Martyl Langsdorf, Joan Truckenbrod, Barbara Sykes, Abina Manning, Annette Barbier, Margaret Dolinsky, Tiffany Holmes, Claudia Hart, Brenda Laurel, Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder, Sally Rosenthal, Lucy Petrovic, Donna J. Cox, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron.

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.

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.

Using collage and montage as a medium and always in connection with his own biography, Marcel Odenbach investigates politically and culturally relevant topics of his time, such as for example the process of coming to terms with Nazi crimes, remembrance culture, the effects and after-effects of European colonialism in Africa, racism and time and time again the relationship between the individual and society. The artist Marcel Odenbach (*1953) lives in Cologne, Berlin and intermittently in Ghana. Since 1976 he has worked with video. His filmic collages and installations have contributed to the fact that today video art is a central medium in contemporary international art. Parallel to this he has created a wide-ranging graphic oeuvre. In the joint consideration of his video and paper works it becomes clear that Odenbach regards art and culture under a socio-political perspective and at the same time relies on the strength of the sensuous-aesthetical experience of images.

In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing all won the Turner Prize (in 2004, 1996, 1999 and 1997, respectively) for work made on video. This fin-de-siecle explosion of activity represents the culmination of a long history of work by less well-known artists and experimental filmmakers.
Ever since the invention of film in the 1890s, artists have been attracted to the possibilities of working with moving images, whether in pursuit of visual poetry, the exploration of the art form's technical challenges, the hope of political impact, or the desire to reinvigorate such time-honored subjects as portraiture and landscape. Their work represents an alternative history to that of commercial cinema in Britain--a tradition that has been only intermittently written about until now.
This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart.
Written by the leading authority in the field, "A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004" brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organizations that have supported the art form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of "British cinema" and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history.

In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing all won the Turner Prize (in 2004, 1996, 1999 and 1997, respectively) for work made on video. This fin-de-siecle explosion of activity represents the culmination of a long history of work by less well-known artists and experimental filmmakers.
Ever since the invention of film in the 1890s, artists have been attracted to the possibilities of working with moving images, whether in pursuit of visual poetry, the exploration of the art form's technical challenges, the hope of political impact, or the desire to reinvigorate such time-honored subjects as portraiture and landscape. Their work represents an alternative history to that of commercial cinema in Britain--a tradition that has been only intermittently written about until now.
This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart.
Written by the leading authority in the field, "A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004" brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organizations that have supported the art form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of "British cinema" and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history.

The experience of digital art and how it is relevant to information technology. In Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala argue that, contrary to Donald Norman's famous dictum, we do not always want our computers to be invisible "information appliances." They say that a computer does not feel like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner; it feels like a medium that is now taking its place beside other media like printing, film, radio, and television. The computer as medium creates new forms and genres for artists and designers; Bolter and Gromala want to show what digital art has to offer to Web designers, education technologists, graphic artists, interface designers, HCI experts, and, for that matter, anyone interested in the cultural implications of the digital revolution. In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web began to shift from purely verbal representation to an experience for the user in which form and content were thoroughly integrated. Designers brought their skills and sensibilities to the Web, as well as a belief that a message was communicated through interplay of words and images. Bolter and Gromala argue that invisibility or transparency is only half the story; the goal of digital design is to establish a rhythm between transparency-made possible by mastery of techniques-and reflection-as the medium itself helps us understand our experience of it. The book examines recent works of digital art from the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2000. These works, and their inclusion in an important computer conference, show that digital art is relevant to technologists. In fact, digital art can be considered the purest form of experimental design; the examples in this book show that design need not deliver information and then erase itself from our consciousness but can engage us in an interactive experience of form and content.

Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of "handmade cinema" from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema's shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.

In On Stage, Mathilde Roman explores the resonances that fields of theatre - stage, decor, space, gaze and more - have in the practice of video arts. Using these notions of theatre both as points of reference and as a prism through which video installation can be approached, Roman concentrates on questions often overlooked by art historians, theorists and critics. These include questions of exhibition architecture, display, viewer experience, temporality and the importance of the gaze. Each chapter is articulated around analyses of video installations created by artists, from Michael Snow to Maider Fortune, and Dan Graham to Laurent Grasso. With a preface by Mieke Bal, On Stage is an important contribution to the fields of art, history and film studies.