In The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz recalls Hollywood's Golden Age from the 1920s until the dawn of television in the late 1940s, when quality films were produced swiftly and cost efficiently thanks to the intricate design of the system. Schatz takes us through the rise and fall of individual careers and the making-and unmaking-of movies such as Frankenstein, Casablanca, and Hitchcock's Notorious. Through detailed analysis of major Hollywood moviemakers including Universal, Warner Bros., and MGM, he reminds us of a time when studios had distinct personalities and the relationship between contracts and creativity was not mutually exclusive.

"Movies are our way of telling God what we think about this world and our place in it. . . . Movies can be many things: escapist experiences, historical artifacts, business ventures, and artistic expressions, to name a few. I'd like to suggest that they can also be prayers." Movies do more than tell a good story. They are expressions of raw emotion, naked vulnerability, and unbridled rage. They often function in the same way as prayers, communicating our deepest longings and joys to a God who hears each and every one. In this captivating book, Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen brings a critic's unique perspective to how movies function as expressions to God of lament, praise, joy, confession, and more. His clear expertise and passion for the art of film, along with his thoughtful reflections on the nature of prayer, will bring you a better understanding of both. God's omnipresence means that you can find him whether you're sitting on your sofa at home or in the seats at the theater. You can talk to him wherever movies are shown. And when words fail, the perfect film might be just what you need to jump-start your conversations with the Almighty.

From Snow White to Moana, from Pinocchio to Frozen, the animated films of Walt Disney Studios have moved and entertained millions. But few fans know that behind these groundbreaking features was an incredibly influential group of women who fought for respect in an often ruthless male-dominated industry and who have slipped under the radar for decades. In The Queens of Animation, bestselling author Nathalia Holt tells their dramatic stories for the first time, showing how these women infiltrated the boys' club of Disney's story and animation departments and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and unforgettable narratives that have become part of the American canon. As the influence of Walt Disney Studios grew---and while battling sexism, domestic abuse, and workplace intimidation---these women also fought to transform the way female characters are depicted to young audiences. With gripping storytelling, and based on extensive interviews and exclusive access to archival and personal documents, The Queens of Animation reveals the vital contributions these women made to Disney's Golden Age and their continued impact on animated filmmaking, culminating in the record-shattering Frozen, Disney's first female-directed full-length feature film.

"Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane" considers the works of two pioneers of performance art. Jonas (born 1936) and Pane (1939-1990) lived and worked in the United States and France respectively. Each artist worked multidisciplinarily, producing sculpture, drawings, installations, film and video in addition to live actions. Notably, Jonas and Pane have been lauded for their foundational work in performance, a field in which both of these artists blazed trails. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, "Parallel Practices" explores the trajectory of these artists' practices to reveal shared and complementary aspects, as well as to highlight the significant divergences and differences that characterize each artist's work. It includes texts by curator Dean Daderko, Elisabeth Lebovici and Anne Tronche and Barbara Clausen.

Webtoons-a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form-are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world. The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling-the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games-and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture. Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people's shifting media consumption.

Behind the beloved animated films of Walt Disney Studios, which have moved and entertained millions of viewers, was an incredibly influential group of women who have slipped under the radar for decades. For the first time, bestselling author Nathalia Holt recounts their dramatic stories, showing how these women infiltrated the all-male domain of Disney's story and animation departments and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and unforgettable story lines that have become part of the American canon. Over the decades---while battling sexism, domestic abuse, and workplace intimidation---these women also fought to transform the way female characters are depicted to young audiences. Based on extensive interviews and exclusive access to archival and personal documents, The Queens of Animation reveals the vital contributions these women made to Disney's Golden Age and their continued impact on animated film making, culminating in the record-shattering Frozen, Disney's first female-directed full-length feature film.

Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art. Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a postcinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the "black box" of the movie theater and the "white cube" of the art gallery. Packed with one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.

Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida opened in Orlando at the dawn of the Disney Renaissance. As a member of the crew, Mary E. Lescher witnessed the small studio's rise and fall during a transformative era in company and movie history. Her in-depth interviews with fellow artists, administrators, and support personnel reveal the human dimension of a technological revolution: the dramatic shift from hand-drawn cel animation to the digital format that eclipsed it in less than a decade. She also traces the Florida Studio's parallel existence as a part of The Magic of Disney Animation, a living theme park attraction where Lescher and her colleagues worked in full view of Walt Disney World guests eager to experience the magic of the company's legendary animation process. A ground-level look at the entertainment giant, The Disney Animation Renaissance profiles the people and purpose behind a little-known studio during a historic era.

With the aim to help teachers design and deliver instruction around world films featuring child protagonists, Cultivating Creativity through World Films guides readers to understand the importance of fostering creativity in the lives of youth. It is expected that by teaching students about world films through the eyes of characters that resemble them, they will gain insight into cultures that might be otherwise unknown to them and learn to analyze what they see. Teachers can use these films to examine and reflect on differences and commonalities rooted in culture, social class, gender, language, religion, etc., through guided questions for class discussion. The framework of this book is conceived to help teachers develop students' ability to evaluate, analyze, synthesize and interpret. The proposed activities seek to incite reflection and creativity in students, and can be used as a model for teachers in designing future lessons on other films.

What happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of "drone art" but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.

In the 1990s, Shirin Neshat's startling black-and-white videos of Iranian women won enormous praise for their poetic reflections on post-revolutionary life in her native country. Writing in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl called her multi-screen video meditations on the culture of the chador in Islamic Iran "the first undoubtable masterpieces of video installation." Over the next twenty-five years Neshat's work has continued its passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, extending its reach to the universal experience of living in exile and the human impact of political revolution. This book connects Neshat's early video and photographic works-including haunting films such as Rapture, 1999 and Tooba, 2002-to her current projects which focus on the relation of home to exile and dreams such as The Home of My Eyes, 2015, and a new, never-before-seen project, Land of Dreams, 2019. It includes numerous stills from her series, Dreamers, in which she documents the lives of outsiders and exiles in the United States. This volume also includes essays by prominent Iranian cultural figures as well as an interview with the artist. Neshat has always been a voice for those whose individual freedoms are under attack. With this monograph, her audience will gain a deeper understanding of Neshat's own emotional, psychological, and political identities, and how they have helped her create compassionate portraits of the fraught and delicate spaces between attachment and alienation.

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture. -- .

Traditional narrative structure hit a wall--or rather it hit the glass of a kaleidoscope--in the 1990s, when art began to function as a kind of editing table on which daily reality could be remixed and recreated. Narrativity considers the importance of new narrative modes, looking not only at the visual arts but at contemporary literature and film, and the mutual influences between them. It tackles the question of narration--its ruptures and mutations--in an age of media culture and video games, where the ludic and interactive principle is an important element. Through reflections on time, duration and temporal protocols, which have taken on major aesthetic stakes, it seeks to reaffirm that the work of art is an "event" before being a monument or a mere testimony--an event which constitutes an experience. And, not least, it considers the artistic games and gambles allowed and forced by all this change.

Unbecoming Cinema explores the notion of cinema as a living, active agent, capable of unsettling and reconfiguring a person's thoughts, senses, and ethics. Film, according to David H. Fleming, is a dynamic force, arming audiences with the ability to see and make a difference in the world. Drawing heavily on Deleuze's philosophical insights, as well as those of Guattari and Badiou, the book critically examines unsettling and taboo footage, from suicide documentaries to art therapy films, from portrayals of mental health and autism to torture porn. In investigating the effect of film on the mind and body, Fleming's shrewd analysis unites transgressive cinema with metaphysical concepts of the body and mind. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, Unbecoming Cinema. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.

British artist Gillian Wearing, winner of the 1997 Turner Prize, uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Borrowing from popular culture, her work is disturbing and confessional. In 1992 she began the acclaimed series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants them to say', in which random passers-by are photographed holding messages they've written, such as the mild-mannered young businessman whose sign unexpectedly reads 'I'm Desperate'. Wearing's work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to produce direct, revealing records of deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting the methods of television documentaries for her 'fly-on-the-wall' view of people's lives. Her videos can be alarming, as in Confess All ... in which masked individuals confess their darkest secrets, or humorous, as in (Slight) Reprise - a sampler of adults playing 'air guitar' in the fantasy rock stadium of their bedrooms. Her art can be disconcerting or uplifting: an honest portrait of the many sides to contemporary life. With exhibitions in Britain, the US, Europe and Japan, Wearing is among the best-known and most internationally recognized of the recent generation of British artists. This is the first publication ever to survey this remarkable young artist's gripping work in its entirety. Russell Ferguson of UCLA's Hammer Museum contextualizes Wearing's work in relation to historical precedents in painting, photography and video art. Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art Donna De Salvo discusses with the artist her collaborative approach towards her work and its subjects. London-based critic John Slyce focuses on Wearing's work 10-16, a remarkable video installation that charts our transition from childhood to adolescence. The artist has selected transcripts from director Michael Apted's acclaimed British television documentary series Seven Up, an important influence on the process Wearing uses in her own work. Published here for the first time in full are the transcripts of the artist's video works.

Though in existence for only a few decades, video games are now firmly established in mainstream culture all around the planet. Every year new games are produced, and every year new favorites emerge. But certain characters have become so iconic that they withstand both time and the shifting interests of players. Such creations permeate other elements of popular culture-from graphic novels to film-and are known not only to dedicated gamers but to the general public as well. In 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, readers can learn about some of the most popular and influential figures that have leapt from computer monitors and television screens and into the public consciousness. The entries in this volume provide general facts about the characters as well as explore their cultural significance. The entries include the following information: *Game developer *Year character was established *Video game franchise In addition, the book examines the commonalities of various video game characters to help readers better understand their popularity and how they operate within the video games and the industry itself. Whether casually looking up information on video game characters or researching what these icons says about society, readers will enjoy this entertaining and informative volume. Comprehensive and engaging, 100 Greatest Video Game Characters will appeal to fans and scholars alike.

What is the subject of video? Charlotte Klink traces the development of electromagnetism in the pursuit of "Electric Seeing" that emerged in the 19th century as well as its curious relation to psychoanalysis and the contemporary discovery of the structure of the human psyche. In doing so, she exposes how this development laid the foundation of what we know today as "video". This comprehensive theory of video entails a discussion of the technological, historical, and etymological roots, the media-theoretical concepts of medium and index, the philosophical and art-theoretical environment in which video emerged in the 1960s, the psychoanalytic concept of the phantasm, and artworks by artists such as Yael Bartana and Hito Steyerl.