Black And White Bioscope recovers a neglected chapter in the histories of world cinema and Africa. It tells the story of movie production in Africa that long predated francophone African films and Nollywood that are the focus of most histories of this industry.

At the same time as Hollywood was starting, a film industry in Southern Africa was surging ahead in integrating production, distribution, and exhibition. African Film Productions Limited made silent movies using technical and acting talent from Britain, the United States, and Australia, as well as from Africa. These included not only the original “long trek movie” and the prototype for the movies Zulu and Zulu Dawn but also the first King Solomon's Mines and the original Blue Lagoon, featuring African actors such as Goba, Tom Zulu, and Msoga Mwana, who starred as the black revolutionary in Prester John.

In this lavishly illustrated book, fifty movies are reconstructed with graphic photographs and plot synopses—plus quotations from reviews—so that readers can rediscover this long-lost treasure trove of silent cinema.

A 3-D masterpiece celebrating Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from New York Times best-selling pop-up engineer Matthew Reinhart.

Harry Potter: A Pop-Up Guide To Hogwarts is an exhilarating, interactive guide to the iconic school of witchcraft and wizardry. This book features spectacular pop-up re-creations of key locations inside and outside Hogwarts castle, and it opens flat to form a pop-up map of the castle and its grounds—including the Quidditch pitch, the Forbidden Forest, and beyond. In addition to large pops on each spread, numerous mini-pops will bring to life beloved elements from the Harry Potter films, such as the Marauder's Map and the Flying Ford Anglia.

Each pop will include insightful text about Hogwarts as seen in the films, making for a must-have collectible for fans of the wizarding world.

In 1913, a secretive American millionaire, who lived on the top floor of the famous Carlton Hotel, had a crazy idea: to make movies in Johannesburg. And not just any movies but the biggest in the world, huge spectacles with elaborate sets, thousands of extras and epic story lines.

Isidore Schlesinger – better known as ‘IW’ – built a studio on a farm called Killarney, where he set out to challenge a place in America that was in its infancy: Hollywood.

The glamour, gossip and high drama of IW’s studio fit perfectly into a city experiencing an intoxicating golden age. There was as much action on the movie sets as there was on screen: from political intrigue and the clashing of massive egos to public outbursts, fiery judicial inquiries, disaster and death.

Behind this mad enterprise was a maverick, a tycoon, a recluse, a friend of the famed and the connected. IW could have held his own in California but he chose as his base the City of Gold. This is the never-been-told-before story of the rise and fall of the strangest and most unique movie empire ever.

Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited first work of fiction - at once hilarious, delicious, and brutal - is the always surprising, sometimes shocking new novel based on his Academy Award-winning film.

RICK DALTON - Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick's a washed-up villain-of-the week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it?

CLIFF BOOTH - Rick's stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he's the only one there who might have gotten away with murder . . .

SHARON TATE - She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream, and found it. Sharon's salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills.

CHARLES MANSON - The ex-con's got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he's their spiritual leader, but he'd trade it all to be a rock 'n' roll star.

HOLLYWOOD 1969 - YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE

Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig...

Cavorting naked through the countryside painted green...

Acting opposite a child with a pumpkin on his head...

These are just a few of the things Dame Judi Dench has done in the name of Shakespeare.

For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra.

Here she reveals her behind the scenes secrets; inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans, all brightened by her mischievous sense of humour and striking honesty.

Witty, provocative and inspiring, this is ultimately Judi's love letter to Shakespeare, or rather, The Man Who Pays The Rent.

Marvel Entertainment was a struggling toymaker not even twenty years ago. Today, Marvel Studios is the dominant player both in Hollywood and in global pop culture. But what accounts for its stunning rise?

In MCU, beloved culture writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards draw on more than a hundred interviews with actors, producers, directors, and writers to present the definitive chronicle of Marvel Studios and its sole, ongoing production, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As they delve into the studio’s key moments – from the contentious hiring of Robert Downey Jr. for Iron Man to the negotiations over Disney’s acquisition of Marvel to studio head Kevin Feige’s embrace of streaming TV – the authors demonstrate that the genius of Marvel was its resurrection and modification of Hollywood’s old studio system.

Dishy and authoritative, MCU is the first book to tell the Marvel Studios story in full – and an essential, effervescent account of popular culture.

The behind-the-scenes story of the action heroes who ruled 1980s and 90s Hollywood and the beloved films – from Die Hard to The Terminator – that made them stars.

This wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie charts Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Revealing fascinating untold stories of the colourful characters who ascended in their wake – high-kickers Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan, glowering tough guys Dolph Lundgren and Steven Seagal, and quipping troublemakers Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis – it tells the story of how the era of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day began to fade. And how, when Jurassic Park trounced Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero in 1993, the glory days of these macho men – and the vision of masculinity they celebrated – were officially over.

Drawing on candid interviews with the action stars themselves, plus their collaborators, friends and foes, The Last Action Heroes is a no-holds-barred account of a period in Hollywood history when there were no limits to the heights of fame these men achieved, or to the mayhem they wrought, on-screen and off.

Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka "home movies"), and military and civil defense films featuring "tests" of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives-namely, "land of the free"/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart; offering convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic-including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films-and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only America's past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future.

Making quality moving pictures has never been easier or more affordable, and the proliferation and ease of access to digital recording devices has prompted scores of amateurs to record and post videos to YouTube and the like. Paradoxically, however, scoring and arranging music for motion pictures is, in many ways, more complicated now than ever before, requiring extensive knowledge of notation, arranging, recording, and mixing software and multi-component DAW workstations. In Composing for Moving Pictures: The Essential Guide, author Jason Gaines offers practical tools with which to navigate the increasingly complex environment of movie music composition. He addresses both the principles of composition for moving pictures and the technologies which drive music composition, performance, and recording in an integrated and comprehensive fashion. The guide takes readers from square one - how technology can facilitate, rather than hinder, creativity in scoring - and then moves into the basics of working with MIDI files and on to more advanced concepts such as arranging, mixing, and integrating surround sound. Gaines illustrates each step of the process with screen shots and explanations in the form of program tutorials. Later chapters offer tips on budgeting out studio sessions, hiring music copyists, and presenting one's work to (and negotiating contracts with) clients. A section of appendices includes a glossary, a guide to keyboard shortcuts, and references to official software program documentation, as well as interviews with industry veterans. Composing for Moving Pictures fills a hole in literature on film scoring in the digital age and will prove to be an invaluable resource for music educators at the university and secondary level. Amateur composers will also delight in this easy-to-use guidebook.

Sidney Poitier remains one of the most recognizable black men in the world. Widely celebrated but at times criticized for the roles he played during a career that spanned 60 years, there can be no comprehensive discussion of black men in American film, and no serious analysis of 20th century American film history that excludes him. Poitier Revisited offers a fresh interrogation of the social, cultural and political significance of the Poitier oeuvre. The contributions explore the broad spectrum of critical issues summoned up by Poitier's iconic work as actor, director and filmmaker. Despite his stature, Poitier has actually been under-examined in film criticism generally. This work reconsiders his pivotal role in film and American race relations, by arguing persuasively, that even in this supposedly 'post-racial' moment of Barack Obama, the struggles, aspirations, anxieties, and tensions Poitier's films explored are every bit as relevant today as when they were first made.

The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

As our world becomes more globalized, documentary film and television tell more cosmopolitan stories of the world's social, political, and cultural situation. Ib Bondebjerg examines how global challenges are reflected and represented in documentaries from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia after 2001. The documentaries deal with the war on terror, the globalization of politics, migration, the multicultural challenge, and climate change.
"Engaging with Reality" is framed by theories of globalization and delves into the development of a new global media culture. It also deals with theories of documentary genres and their social and cultural functions. It discusses cosmopolitanism and the role and forms of documentary in a new digital and global media culture. It will be essential reading for those looking to better understand documentary and the new transnational approach to modern media culture.

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

In Hollywood Left and Right, Steven J. Ross tells a story that has escaped public attention: the emergence of Hollywood as a vital center of political life and the important role that movie stars have played in shaping the course of American politics.
Ever since the film industry relocated to Hollywood early in the twentieth century, it has had an outsized influence on American politics. Through compelling larger-than-life figures in American cinema--Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger--Hollywood Left and Right reveals how the film industry's engagement in politics has been longer, deeper, and more varied than most people would imagine. As shown in alternating chapters, the Left and the Right each gained ascendancy in Tinseltown at different times. From Chaplin, whose movies almost always displayed his leftist convictions, to Schwarzenegger's nearly seamless transition from action blockbusters to the California governor's mansion, Steven J. Ross traces the intersection of Hollywood and political activism from the early twentieth century to the present.
Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story, as Ross shows in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more complicated. First, Hollywood has a longer history of conservatism than liberalism. Second, and most surprising, while the Hollywood Left was usually more vocal and visible, the Right had a greater impact on American political life, capturing a senate seat (Murphy), a governorship (Schwarzenegger), and the ultimate achievement, the Presidency (Reagan).

Vienna appears in cinema as, among other things, a historical crossroads, a source of great music, and a site of world-famous architecture ranging from gothic cathedrals and baroque palaces to landmark modern structures. A panorama that encompasses all these perspectives, "World Film Locations: Vienna" sheds new light on the movies shot in the former imperial capital--and on the city itself.The first English-language book to explore Vienna's relationship with film beyond the waltz fantasies once shot in studios around the world, this volume shows how specific urban sites contribute to films that, in turn, play a role in our changing ideas about the city. In addition to reviews of key scenes from forty-six films from the silent era to the present, contributors explore such wide-ranging topics as the Austro-Hungarian Empire as cinematic myth; the Viennese film and Golden Age Hollywood; Jewish filmmakers and their take on lost cultural imagery; postwar nation building through film: and the startling "other Vienna" in the New Wave films of Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, Ulrich Seidl, and Gotz Spielmann. Illuminating the rich multicultural cinematic history that eventually gave rise to the new Austrian films that began to capture international attention more than a decade ago, "World Film Locations: Vienna" will fascinate readers interested in film, art, architecture, literature, music, Jewish studies, or Central European history.

Through popular movies starring Bruce Lee and songs like the disco hit "Kung Fu Fighting," martial arts have found a central place in the Western cultural imagination. But what would 'martial arts' be without the explosion of media texts and images that brought it to a wide audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s? In this examination of the media history of what we now call martial arts, author Paul Bowman makes the bold case that the phenomenon of martial arts is chiefly an invention of media representations. Rather than passively taking up a preexisting history of martial arts practices-some of which, of course, predated the martial arts boom in popular culture-media images and narratives actively constructed martial arts. Grounded in a historical survey of the British media history of martial arts such as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, tai chi, and MMA across a range of media, this book thoroughly recasts our understanding of the history of martial arts. By interweaving theories of key thinkers on historiography, such as Foucault and Hobsbawm, and Said's ideas on Orientalism with analyses of both mainstream and marginal media texts, Bowman arrives at the surprising insight that media representations created martial arts rather than the other way around. In this way, he not only deepens our understanding of martial arts but also demonstrates the productive power of media discourses.

To dramatize a story using moving images, a director must have a full understanding of the meaning and emotional effect of all the various types of shots and cuts that are available to advance the story. Drawing upon his extensive experience as a storyboard artist who has worked with over 200 directors and cinematographers on television series and movies, author Kelly Gordon Brine provides a practical and accessible introduction to the design of shots, cuts, and transitions for film, television, animation, video, and game design. With hundreds of illustrations and diagrams, concise explanations of essential storytelling concepts, and vivid examples, The Art of Cinematic Storytelling demystifies the visual design choices that are fundamental to directing and editing. The author delves deeply into the techniques that visual storytellers use to captivate their audience, including blocking, camera positioning, transitions, and planning shots with continuity editing in mind. Practical advice on how to clarify time, space, and motion in many common situations - such as dialogue, pursuits, and driving sequences - makes this book an invaluable guide for all aspiring filmmakers.

Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American popular culture scene. Jane Iwamura examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Encounters with monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions provided initial engagements with Asian spiritual traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon: the Oriental Monk. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of translation''--a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable-psychologically, socially, and politically--for popular culture consumption. Iwamura's insightful study shows that though popular engagement with Asian religions in the United States has increased, the fact that much of this has taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of "the spiritual East" obdurate and especially difficult to challenge.

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed film music author Kevin Donnelly offers the first sustained theorization of synchronization in sound film. Donnelly addresses the manner in which the lock of the audio and the visual exerts a perceptible synergy, an aesthetic he dubs occult: a secret and esoteric effect that can dissipate in the face of an awareness of its existence. Drawing upon theories of sound from Sergei Eisenstein to Pierre Schaeffer to Michel Chion, the book investigates points of synchronization as something like repose, providing moments of comfort in a potentially threatening environment that can be fraught with sound and image stimuli. Correspondingly, lack of synchrony between sound and images is characterized as potentially disturbing for the viewer, a discomfort that signals moments of danger. From this perspective, the interplay between the two becomes the central dynamic of audio-visual culture more generally, which, as Donnelly argues, provides a starting point for a new understanding of audio/visual interactions. This fresh approach to the topic is discussed in theoretical and historical terms as well as elaborated through analysis of and reference to a broad selection of films and their soundtracks including, among others, Singin' in the Rain, Saw, Shanghai Express, and Assault on Precinct 13.

In the past two decades, several U.S. states have explored ways to mainstream media literacy in school curriculum. However one of the best and most accessible places to learn this necessary skill has not been the traditional classroom but rather the library. In an increasing number of school, public, and academic libraries, shared media experiences such as film screening, learning to computer animate, and video editing promote community and a sense of civic engagement. The Library Screen Scene reveals five core practices used by librarians who work with film and media: viewing, creating, learning, collecting, and connecting. With examples from more than 170 libraries throughout the United States, the book shows how film and media literacy education programs, library services, and media collections teach patrons to critically analyze moving image media, uniting generations, cultures, and communities in the process.

Beyond Bias offers the first scholarly study of contemporary right-wing documentary film and video. Drawing from contemporary work in political theory and psychoanalytic theory, the book identifies what author Scott Krzych describes as the hysterical discourse prolific in conservative documentary in particular, and right-wing media more generally. In its hysterical mode, conservative media emphasizes form over content, relies on the spectacle of debate to avoid substantive dialogue, mimics the aesthetic devices of its opponents, reduces complex political issues to moral dichotomies, and relies on excessive displays of opinion to produce so much mediated "noise" as to drown out alternative perspectives or viewpoints. Though often derided for its reliance on nonsense or hyperbole, conservative media marshals incoherence as its prized aesthetic and rhetorical weapon, a means to bolster the political status quo precisely by confusing those audiences who come into its orbit. As a work of documentary studies, Beyond Bias also places conservative non-fiction films in conversation with their more conventional counterparts, drawing insight from the manner by which conservative media hystericizes such issues as the archive, observational methods, directorial participation, and the often moral imperatives by which documentary filmmakers attempt to offer insight into their subjects.

Until recently, most scholars neglected the power of hearing cinema as well as seeing it. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory breaks new ground by redirecting the arguments of foundational texts within film theory to film sound tracks. The book includes sustained analyses of particular films according to a range of theoretical approaches: psychoanalysis, feminism, genre studies, post-colonialism, and queer theory. The films come from disparate temporal and industrial contexts: from Classical Hollywood Gothic melodrama (Rebecca (1940)), to contemporary, critically-acclaimed science fiction (Gravity (2013)). Along with sound tracks from canonical American films, such as The Searchers (1956) and To Have and Have Not (1944), Walker analyzes independent Australasian films: examples include Heavenly Creatures (1994), a New Zealand film that uses music to empower its queer female protagonists; and Ten Canoes (2006), the first Australian feature film with a script entirely in Aboriginal languages. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory thus not only calls new attention to the significance of sound tracks-it also focuses on the sonic power of characters representing those whose voices have all too often been drowned out. Dominant studies of film music tend to be written for those who are already musically trained. Similarly, studies of film sound tend to be jargon-heavy. By contrast, Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory is both rigorous and accessible to all scholars with a basic grasp of cinematic and musical structures. Moreover, the book brings together film studies, musicology, history, politics, and culture. Therefore, Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory will resonate for scholars across the liberal arts, and for anyone interested in challenging the so-called "hegemony of the visual."