The official behind-the-scenes art book for Sony Pictures Animation’s feature film The Mitchells vs. The Machines The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a comedy about an everyday family's struggle to relate while technology rises up around the world! When Katie Mitchell, a creative outsider, is accepted into the film school of her dreams, her plans to meet “her people� at college are upended when her nature-loving dad Rick determines the whole family should drive Katie to school together and bond as a family one last time. Katie and Rick are joined by the rest of the family, including Katie’s wildly positive mom Linda, her quirky little brother Aaron, and the family’s delightfully chubby pug Monchi for the ultimate family road trip. Suddenly, the Mitchells’ plans are interrupted by a tech uprising: All around the world, the electronic devices people love—from phones to appliances to an innovative new line of personal robots—decide it’s time to take over. With the help of two friendly malfunctioning robots, the Mitchells will have to get past their problems and work together to save each other and the world! The Art of The Mitchells vs. The Machines gives insight into how the filmmakers were able to bring this fresh, new vision to the screen through concept art, sketches, and early character designs, accompanied by exclusive commentary from director/co-writer Michael Rianda and co-director/co-writer Jeff Rowe, alumni of the team behind Emmy Award–winning Gravity Falls, and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the innovative and creative minds behind The Lego Movie and the Academy Award–winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

The official behind-the-scenes art book for Cartoon Saloon’s stunning new animated fantasy adventure, Wolfwalkers   Cartoon Saloon, the Irish animation studio behind the Academy Award–nominated films The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), and The Breadwinner (2017), returns in 2020 with its latest feature, Wolfwalkers, coproduced with Melusine Productions and directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart. This mythic tale tells the story of a young hunter named Robyn, who, while tracking down a pack of dangerous and wild wolves, is transformed into the very thing she and her father have been seeking to destroy. Filled with exclusive hand-drawn sketches, paintings, interviews, and digital renderings that showcase Cartoon Saloon’s unique artistic style, The Art of Wolfwalkers takes fans behind the scenes of one of animation’s most celebrated studios. Through exclusive commentary and interviews with cast and crew, including directors Moore and Stewart, renowned animation critic and historian Charles Solomon showcases the craft and skill behind some of the most lovingly detailed and imaginative 2-D animation currently being produced.

This is a topical resource that provides a comprehensive look at the most influential women in Hollywood cinema across a wide-range of occupations rarely found together in a single volume. Unlike other anthologies, Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History is a hybrid of film history and industry information with an exclusive focus on prominent women. This reference work includes more commonly discussed categories of important women in Hollywood film history, such as directors and actresses, and reaches beyond them to encompass women working as cinematographers, casting directors, studio heads, musical composers, and visual and special effects supervisors. The wide range of filmmaking crafts covered in the book provides an acute view of the industry and increases the visibility of and quality of representation for women working in Hollywood. By bringing the experience of these influential women to light, Hollywood Heroines joins a growing movement that endeavors to dismantle harmful, long-standing industry myths that perpetuate the systemic underrepresentation of women and the devaluation of women's stories in the Hollywood film industry.

In the 1950s, the gangster movie and film noir crisscrossed to create gangster noir. Robert Miklitsch takes readers into this fascinating subgenre of films focused on crime syndicates, crooked cops, and capers.   With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.

1 in 10 undergraduates in the US will study abroad. Extoled by students as personally transformative and celebrated in academia for fostering cross-cultural understanding, study abroad is also promoted by the US government as a form of cultural diplomacy and a bridge to future participation in the global marketplace. In Documenting the American Student Abroad, Kelly Hankin explores the documentary media cultures that shape these beliefs, drawing our attention to the broad range of stakeholders and documentary modes involved in defining the core values and practices of study abroad. From study abroad video contests and a F.B.I. produced docudrama about student espionage to reality television inspired educational documentaries and docudramas about Amanda Knox, Hankin shows how the institutional values of "global citizenship," "intercultural communication," and "cultural immersion" emerge in contradictory ways through their representation. By bringing study abroad and media studies into conversation with one another, Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education offers a much needed humanist contribution to the field of international education, as well as a unique approach to the growing scholarship on the intersection of media and institutions. As study abroad practitioners and students increase their engagement with moving images and digital environments, the insights of media scholars are essential for helping the field understand how the mediation of study abroad rhetoric shapes rather than reflects the field's central institutional ideals

Widely studied, frequently staged—verbatim theatre is everywhere. In this new book, Mark Wheeller, the author of verbatim hits Too Much Punch for Judy, Hard to Swallow, Missing Dan Nolan and Game Over, and the most performed living playwrights in the UK, takes a personal journey through the form, and demystifies the making process.  For Mark, his verbatim theatre journey all began with a man called Graham Salmon – the world's fastest blind runner.  Verbatim: The Fun of Making Theatre Seriously is a perfect handbook for teachers, educators, students and anyone interested in the creative process.   

Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies. This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how Canada shapes these performances. Naila Keleta-Mae proposes that performance is part of the ontology of female blackness in the public and private spaces that constitute everyday life because people who are female and Black are constantly expected to perform fantasies - be it their own or, far more commonly, those insisted on by dominant culture. By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, the author demonstrates how people who are read as female and Black in private and public settings, are figuratively on stage regardless of the cultural, political, or historical contexts in which they find themselves. Written in poetry, prose and journal-form and drawing from the author's own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal for scholars, educators, and students of race, gender, performance, and Black expressive culture.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton's unprecedented 2016 exhibition brought together 130 masterpieces, among the most iconic of the collection created in Moscow by the great Russian art patron, Sergei Shchukin. From Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1866) by Claude Monet, the Mardi gras (1888-90) by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin's Tahitian odalisque Eh quoi, tu es jalouse? (1892), the luminescent panel L'Atelier du peintre (1911) by Henri Matisse, to conclude with Pablo Picasso's Trois femmes (1908), the magnificence of Shchukin's collection is exhibited here. Extended by a group of some 30 major works from the Russian avant-gardes, including Counter Relief (1916) by Vladimir Tatlin, Green Stripe (1917) by Olga Rozanova, and Kazimir Malevich's monochrome painting, Black Suprematie Square (1929), Icons of Modern Art covers the extreme breadth of this journey through 19th- and 20th-century creation. The presentation of these exceptional works, where our collective gaze comes together, constitutes an exemplary "painting lesson."

Who has not, in a favored moment, 'stolen the limelight', whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display - its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness - are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.

Claude Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter (1878-79), painted during the artist’s first winter in the village, depicts his new home on the Seine, seen from the opposite bank of the river. Monet’s two and a half years in Vétheuil, a small farming community northwest of Paris, saw two severe winters, the inspiration for this impressionist masterpiece, which is the subject of this ninth volume in the Frick Diptych series. Susan Grace Galassi has written an insightful and engaging essay about Monet’s difficult but productive time in Vétheuil, which saw the death of his wife Camille. The Frick's Monet painting, the only work by the artist in the collection is the basis for other significant canvases made during his stay in the village in both winter and summer. Galassi's essay is accompanied by a text and intriguing new work—Colour experiment no. 109—by the artist Olafur Eliasson, created in response to the Monet painting. Eliasson’s work will be shown at the Frick next to the painting that inspired it.

Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and musicians. However, with the introduction of the danseuse (professional concert dancer) in the late 1970s, the role of women as cultural, moral, and economic actors came into public prominence and helped further raise Congolese rumba’s international profile. In Congo’s Dancers, Lesley Nicole Braun uses the prism of the Congolese danseuse to examine the politics of control and the ways in which notions of visibility, virtue, and socio-economic opportunity are interlinked in this urban African context. The work of the danseuse highlights the fact that public visibility is necessary to build the social networks required for economic independence, even as this visibility invites social opprobrium for women. The concert dancer therefore exemplifies many of the challenges that women face in Kinshasa as they navigate the public sphere, and she illustrates the gendered differences of local patronage politics that shape public morality. As an ethnographer, Braun had unusual access to the world she documents, having been invited to participate as a concert dancer herself.

Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader in this field, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. While theories of video have not yet formed an academic discipline comparable to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television, the reader offers a major step toward bridging this “video gap� in media theory, which is remarkable considering today’s omnipresence of the medium through online video portals and social media. Consisting of a selection of eighty-three annotated source texts and twelve chapter introductions written by the editors, this book considers fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following the continuous transformations of what video was, is, and will be.

This book harnesses the theory and practice of dramatic arts for the applied use in communication education. It introduces readers to educational role-play and how to use it, arguing that complete immersion is crucial to successful learning. Educational role-play sprang into life in many places including the medical world in the 1960s. Now, fifty years later, the field has grown exponentially across the world. Heinrich discusses how through role play interactions become more authentic, discussion becomes more focused and people take risks, and grow. Early chapters in Part I focus on theory, show how and why role-play works, and introduce the key performative factors of aesthetic distance, defamiliarization, framing, and focus that produce its dynamism. Chapters in Part II discuss how these ideas inform every aspect of role-play practice, offer practical guidance on designing and running scenarios, how to be more confident and mindful as player or facilitator, and provide a wide array of techniques to handle challenging situations. Most of the examples are drawn from medical communication, but the insights and techniques are equally applicable to other fields such as business, law, policing, and the military. The book will be of interest to educators, workplace trainers and managers, facilitators, role-play actors, and scholars interested in role-play performance.

The first monograph of Rogan Gregory, the artist/designer on the forefront of contemporary organic form-making Rogan Gregory's work pushes boundaries across media and scale from miniature bronze animal forms to towering sculptures and furniture in innovative aggregated materials. Gregory's iterative process and life-long interests in abstract forms, geology, and evolutionary biology allow him to develop an organic aesthetic unlike that of any designer working today. This debut monograph explores Gregory's work through the elemental inspirations that condition his work. Contributions by landscape architect Edwina von Gal, interior designer Pamela Shamshiri, and conservation biologist Tremaine Gregory reflect the synthesis of disciplines Gregory brings to his practice. Co-published with R & Company, this book is an object in its own right, incorporating Gregory's design and materials sensibilities.

There is no shortage of Hollywood films about historical events, but what do the movies actually get right, and why do they get so much wrong? Hollywood loves a story: good guys versus bad guys, heroes winning the day, and the guy gets the girl. But we all know real life isn't exactly like that, and this is even more true when we look at history. Rarely do the just prevail and the three-act story cannot exist over continents and decades of human interaction. So, when Hollywood decides to exploit history for profit, we end up with a wide array of films. Some are comedies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, others are little more than action films playing dress up like Gladiator, and many are Oscar contenders burdened with an enormous sense of self-importance. But very few are historically accurate. From Cleopatra to Da 5 Bloods, the reality is no matter what Hollywood's intentions are, almost all historical films are an exaggeration or distortion of what really happened. Sometimes the alterations are for the sake of brevity, as watching a movie in real time about the Hundred Years War would literally kill you. Other additions may be out of necessity, since nobody thought to write down the everyday conversations between King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, for The Other Boleyn Girl. And some projects twist the facts to suit a more sinister purpose. In Hollywood and History, Jem Duducu takes readers through thousands of years of global history as immortalized and ultimately fictionalized by Hollywood, exploring many facets of the representation of history in movies from the medieval times to the wild west and both World Wars. Along the way, readers will also better understand Hollywood's own history, as it evolved from black and white silent shorts to the multiplex CGI epics of today. As studios and audiences have matured through the years, so too have their representations of history. Armies will clash, leaders will be slain, empires will fall, and a few historical inaccuracies will be pointed out along the way. A must-read for film and history fans alike.

The aim of this series is to make available texts and collections of essays on major moral issues. The present volume is a collection that focuses exclusively on diverse moral issues connected with the arts: censorship and subsidy, authenticity and ownership, and the connections between moral and aesthetic values and evaluative judgments. The collection is not only unique, but timely. It appears in a period when the National Endowment for the Arts is under fire and the government's role in the arts is a hotly debated political issue, when the connection between moral or political content in art and its aesthetic value remains at the forefront of debate in aesthetics, and when ownership and commercialization of artworks continue to exercise the sociology of art.

The Ching Room A pitch-black two-hander set in a toilet cubicle. Rory realises he is out of his depth once he becomes trapped by the terrifying and enigmatic drug-dealer, Darren.  Cast size: 2M. “Has subtle depth as a meditation on drug culture… The character of Darren is a demon for our times.� The Scotsman “Exudes the same sort of self-assurance as Gregory Burke’s debut, Gagarin Way… You can see real talent at work here.� Metro “As tight as a short drama set in a toilet cubicle should be…A curiously compelling little play… A script riddled with priceless back-alley gems.� The Herald “It’s exciting, totally absorbing theatre.� City Life, Manchester Turbo Folk A sharp look at Scottish nationality at home and abroad. Set in the sort of bar you wouldn’t take tourists to, in an unspecified Balkan country, Turbo Folk earned Bissett a nomination for Best New Play at the 2010 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS).  Cast size: 3M. “Tells its story with pace and economy and delivers a real and frightening dramatic punch… The games Bissett plays with language are dazzling.� The Scotsman

Extraordinarily Ordinary offers a critical analysis of the production of a distinct form of twenty-first century celebrity constructed through the exploding coverage of reality television cast members in Us Weekly magazine. Erin A. Meyers connects the economic and industrial forces that helped propel Us Weekly to the top of the celebrity gossip market in the early 2000s with the ways in which reality television cast members fit neatly into the social and cultural norms that shaped the successful gossip formulas of the magazine. Us Weekly’s construction of the “extraordinarily ordinary� celebrity within its gossip narratives is a significant symptom of the broader intensification of discourses of ordinariness and the private in the production of contemporary celebrity, in which fame is paradoxically grounded in “just being yourself� while simultaneously defining what the “right� sort of self is in contemporary culture.   

During the ’30s and ’40s, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. Their female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell names this new genre of American film—“the comedy of remarriage�—and examines seven classic movies for their cinematic techniques and for such varied themes as feminism, liberty, and interdependence. Included are Adam’s Rib, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, and The Philadelphia Story.

On January 10, 1999, a mobster walked into a psychiatrist’s office and changed TV history. By shattering preconceptions about the kinds of stories the medium should tell, The Sopranos launched our current age of prestige television, paving the way for such giants as Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. As TV critics for Tony Soprano’s hometown paper, New Jersey’s The Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz were among the first to write about the series before it became a cultural phenomenon.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show’s debut, Sepinwall and Seitz have reunited to produce The Sopranos Sessions, a collection of recaps, conversations, and critical essays covering every episode. Featuring a series of new long-form interviews with series creator David Chase, as well as selections from the authors’ archival writing on the series, The Sopranos Sessions explores the show’s artistry, themes, and legacy, examining its portrayal of Italian Americans, its graphic depictions of violence, and its deep connections to other cinematic and television classics.

For film buffs and literature lovers alike, Turner Classic Movies presents an essential guide to 52 cinema classics and the literary works that served as their inspiration. "I love that movie!" "But have you read the book?" Within these pages, Turner Classic Movies offers an endlessly fascinating look at 52 beloved screen adaptations and the great reads that inspired them. Some films, like Clueless-Amy Heckerling's interpretation of Jane Austen's Emma-diverge wildly from the original source material, while others, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, shift the point of view to craft a different experience within the same story. Author Kristen Lopez explores just what makes these works classics of both the page and screen, and why each made for an exceptional adaptation-whether faithful to the book or exemplifying cinematic creative license. Other featured works include: Children of Men · The Color Purple · Crazy Rich Asians · Dr. No · Dune · Gentlemen Prefer Blondes · Kiss Me Deadly · The Last Picture Show · Little Women · Passing · The Princess Bride · The Shining · The Thin Man · True Grit · Valley of the Dolls · The Virgin Suicides · Wuthering Heights