Henry Willson was one of the quintessential power brokers in Hollywood during the late 1940s and 1950s when he launched the careers of Rock Hudson, Lana Turner, Tab Hunter, Natalie Wood, and many others. He was also a true casting couch agent, brokering sex for opportunity on the silver screen. While this practice was rampant across Hollywood, for gay actors and film professionals the casting couch was a dangerous cliff: a public revelation could and would ruin a career. "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson" is an incredible biography as well as a harrowing look into Hollywood at a time of great sexual oppression, roaming vice squads searching for gay and/or communist activity, and the impossibilities for gay actors of the era.

From the silent era to the present, film productions have shaped the way the public views campus life. Collaborations between universities and Hollywood entities have disseminated influential ideas of race, gender, class, and sexual difference. Even more directly, Hollywood has drawn writers, actors, and other talent from ranks of professors and students while also promoting the industry in classrooms, curricula, and film studies programs. In addition to founding film schools, university administrators have offered campuses as filming locations. In University Babylon, Curtis Marez argues that cinema has been central to the uneven incorporation and exclusion of different kinds of students, professors, and knowledge. Working together, Marez argues, film and educational institutions have produced a powerful ideology that links respectability to academic merit in order to marginalize and manage people of color. Combining concepts and methods from critical university studies, ethnic studies, native studies, and film studies, University Babylon analyzes the symbolic and institutional collaborations between Hollywood filmmakers and university administrators over the representation of students and, by extension, college life more broadly.

In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil's early film culture helped to project a new image of the country.

The curator who founded MoMA's video program recounts the artists and events that defined the medium's first 50 years Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. In this book, curator Barbara London traces the history of video art as it transformed into the broader field of media art - from analog to digital, small TV monitors to wall-scale projections, and clunky hardware to user-friendly software. In doing so, she reveals how video evolved from fringe status to be seen as one of the foremost art forms of today.

Seeing new media art as an entry point for better understanding of technology and worldmaking futures In this challenging work, a leading authority on new media art examines that curatorial and aesthetic landscape to explore how art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. How do inventive combinations of artistic and theoretical improvisation counter the extent to which media art remains at risk, not just from the quarantines of a global pandemic but also from the very viral and material conditions of technology? How does global media art speak back to the corporate closures of digital euphoria as clothed in strategies of digital surveillance, ecological deprivation, and planned obsolescence? In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray asks these questions and more. At the intersection of global media art, curatorial practice, tactical media, and philosophy, Murray reads a wide range of creative performances and critical texts that envelop artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. From video to net art and interactive performance, he considers both canonical and unheralded examples of activist technics that disturb the hegemony of biopolitical/digital networks by staging the very touch of the unsettling discourse erupting from within. In the process, critical dialogues emerge between a wide range of artists and theorists, from Hito Steyerl, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shadi Nazarian to Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Erin Manning, Achille Mbembe, and Samuel Weber. Brilliantly conceived and argued and eloquently written, Technics Improvised points the way to how artistic and theoretical practice can seize on the improvisational accidents of technics to activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.

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.

Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture's stories, its memory. MOMENTS OF PERCEPTION is a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde film across the country from the 1950s to the present day, including its contradictions and complexities. Experimental film is political in its very existence, critical of the status quo by definition. In Canada, some of the country's best-known artists took up the moving image as a form of artistic expression, allowing them to explore explicitly political themes. Mike Hoolboom's exposure of the horror of AIDS, Josephine Massarella's concern for the environment, and Joyce Wieland's satiric look at US patriotism are just a few examples of work that contributed to social movements and provided a means to explore issues of race and gender and 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous identities. Featuring a major essay on the history of the movement by Michael Zryd and profiles of key filmmakers by Stephen Broomer and editors Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception offers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving history of Canada's experimental film and moving image media arts.

Between 2014 and 2017, the artistic research project "TransCoding - From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture" encouraged creative participation in multimedia art via social media. Based on the artworks that emerged from the project, Barbara Luneburg investigates authorship, authority, motivational factors, and aesthetics in participatory art created with the help of web 2.0 technology. The interdisciplinary approach includes perspectives from sociology, cultural and media studies, and offers an exclusive view and analysis from the inside through the method of artistic research. In addition, the study documents selected community projects and the creation processes of the artworks Slices of Life and Read me.

We live in an era of abundant photography. Is it then counterintuitive to study photographs that disappear or are difficult to discern? Kate Palmer Albers argues that it is precisely this current cultural moment that allows us to recognize what has always been a basic and foundational, yet unseen, condition of photography: its ephemerality. Through a series of case studies spanning the history of photography, The Night Albums takes up the provocations of artists who collectively redefine how we experience visibility. From the protracted hesitancies of photography's origins, to conceptual and performative art that has emerged since the 1960s, to the waves of technological experimentation flourishing today, Albers foregrounds artists who offer fleeting, hidden, conditional, and future modes of visibility. By unveiling how ephemerality shapes the photographic experience, she ultimately proposes an expanded framework for the medium.

Seeing the Apocalypse: Essays on Bird Box is the first volume to explore Josh Malerman's best-selling novel and its recent film adaptation, which broke streaming records and became a cultural touchstone, emerging as a staple in the genre of contemporary horror. The essays in this collection offer an interdisciplinary approach to Bird Box, one that draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, and disability studies. The contributors examine how Bird Box provokes questions about a range of issues including the human body and its existence in the world, the ethical obligations that shape community, and the anxieties arising from technological development. Taken together, the essays of this volume show how a critical examination of Bird Box offers readers a guide for thinking through human experience in our own troubled, apocalyptic times.

The ubiquity of digital images has profoundly changed the responsibilities and capabilities of anyone and everyone who uses them. Thanks to a range of innovations, from the convergence of moving and still image in the latest DSLR cameras to the growing potential of interactive and online photographic work, the lens and screen have emerged as central tools for many artists. Vision Anew brings together a diverse selection of texts by practitioners, critics, and scholars to explore the evolving nature of the lens-based arts. Presenting essays on photography and the moving image alongside engaging interviews with artists and filmmakers, Vision Anew offers an inspired assessment of the medium's ongoing importance in the digital era. Contributors include: Ai Weiwei, Gerry Badger, David Campany, Lev Manovich, Christian Marclay, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Murch, Trevor Paglen, Pipilotti Rist, Shelly Silver, Rebecca Solnit, and Alec Soth, among others. This vital collection is essential reading for artists, educators, scholars, critics and curators, and anyone who is passionate about the lens-based arts.

Hans P. Bacher is acknowledged as one of the greats of production design for animation, He has been given access to Disney's archives to uncover eye-popping examples of both his own work and that of his colleagues. Featured are illustrations from 'Bambi', 'Mulan', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'Brother Bear' and many more.

Acoustic signals, voice, sound, articulation, music and spatial networking are dispositifs of radiophonic transmission which have brought forth a great number of artistic practices. Up to and into the digital present radio has been and is employed and explored as an apparatus-based structure as well as an expanded model for performance and perception. This volume investigates a broad range of aesthetic experiments with the broadcasting technology of radio, and the use of radio as a means of disseminating artistic concepts. With exemplary case studies, its contributions link conceptual, recipient-response-related, and sociocultural issues to matters of relevance to radio art's mediation.

Based on the omnipresent term 'Industry 4.0', the publication #material4.0 reflects the interplay between the virtual world and the physical-real space. As part of the exhibition at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, 13 international artists, mostly 'digital natives', examine how computer dependent automation and digitalisation are reflected in an art context. How does art output change from production to the aesthetic? How is this kind of media used in posing artistic questions? The positions of digital art pioneers fill us in. The publication documents the exhibition with numerous illustrations of works and a collection of complementary texts. Artists: Christian von Borries, Kate Cooper, JAK, Kanta Kimura, Mathilde Lavenne, Jung Lee, Florian Model, Manfred Mohr, Marco Schmitt, Lidia Sigle, Adam Slowik, Ivar Veermae, Ryszard Winiarski. With contributions by Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake and Peter Weibel. Exhibition at the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen (DE), 6 October 2018 - 3 March 2019. Text in English and German.

Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen, showing a master still at work - even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage.

In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh's Ta'abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cisse's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

The first analysis of the relationship between art and video games, from the sixties until today. Art and play: how many forms does this relationship take? Duchamp used to say that art was a game and that games were art. When video games joined the dance of the muses this relationship was further enriched. Video games are an art and in recent years they have had a crucial influence on other arts: cinema, literature, music and visual arts. They stand at the crossroads between very diverse forms of culture and product, and it is precisely the anomaly inherent in this encounter/clash that makes them so terribly interesting. Neoludica is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between art and video games, and it underlines how the video game (an interactive multimedia work) is an art form that has yet to be understood by the world of culture. The interactive dimension is a facet that has attracted art since the advent of environmental installations during the sixties, and it is a dimension that has since been developed in digital art through video installations. The video game/art contamination occurs not only on the aesthetic level, but also through those elements of language which can be defined as conceptual, such as interactivity mentioned above. Naturally, it acquires an artistic dimension when its aims go beyond mere technical prowess and explore the world of fantasy.

Perhaps best known for Rebel without a Cause, American filmmaker Nicholas Ray directed dozens of movies in the film noir genre, including In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and They Live by Night. Born in Galesville, Wisconsin, in 1911, Ray was an iconoclastic figure in film-an alcoholic, depressive, and compulsive gambler-who found himself increasingly blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1960s only to be heralded as the spiritual father to American cinema's New Wave and one of America's greatest rebel auteurs. From Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch, Ray's influence can be seen throughout the work of some of the twentieth century's greatest directors. In this authoritative biography, Bernard Eisenschitz leaves no stone unturned.

Media screens--film, video, and computer screens--have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. "Screens" addresses this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, Kate Mondloch traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today's digital culture. Mondloch identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject's field of vision. As a result she proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.