Television existed for a long time before it became commonplace in American homes. Even as cars, jazz, film, and radio heralded the modern age, television haunted the modern imagination. During the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. television was a topic of conversation and speculation. Was it technically feasible? Could it be commercially viable? What would it look like? How might it serve the public interest? And what was its place in the modern future? These questions were not just asked by the American public, but also posed by the people intimately involved in television’s creation. Their answers may have been self-serving, but they were also statements of aspiration. Idealistic imaginations of the medium and its impact on social relations became a de facto plan for moving beyond film and radio into a new era. In Television in the Age of Radio, Philip W. Sewell offers a unique account of how television came to be—not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. This book provides sustained investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the fervors and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium. Sewell presents a major revision of the history of television, telling us about the nature of new media and how hopes for the future pull together diverse perspectives that shape technologies, industries, and audiences.

Blockbusters: A Reference Guide to Film Genres offers both film specialists and film fans an in-depth look at 12 popular genres of film. With a separate chapter dedicated to each of the 12 commonly acknowledged genres, the text provides readers with a list of defining characteristics for each genre; a focused analysis of the history of the genre with an understanding of the major influences responsible for its evolution, broken down by decades, era, or subgenre; and a bibliography of the major critical and historical sources available for further reading. Special attention is given to subvariations, or subgenres, within the principle categorizations, and the wide variety of cinematic examples cited draws upon the best and some of the most beloved examples of American cinema, with more obscure American and foreign examples also included. In cases where films overlap genres, easy to find chapter titles in boldface within the text indicate cross referencing, and a user-friendly index provides access to discussions of cited films within the text.

• Action/Adventure
• Comedy
• Costume
• Epic
• Film Noir
• Horror
• Musicals
• Science Fiction
• Suspense
• War
• Western
• Woman's Film

The dancers profiled in First Position represent the pinnacle of their art over the last century. Author Toba Singer polled literally hundreds of dance critics, dance teachers and professors, and active and retired professional dancers to create a list that represents the best of the various styles of ballet from the last hundred years. The result is a collective biography that introduces the reader to both dancers with household names and those known mostly to ballet aficionados. Profiled dancers include Carlos Acosta, Alicia Alonso, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Erik Bruhn, Lazaro Carreno, Margot Fonteyn, Carla Fracci, Gelsey Kirkland, Li Cunxin, Muriel Maffre, Natalia Makarova, Arthur Mitchell, Rudolf Nureyev, Anna Pavlova, and Maya Plisetskaya. An introductory chapter addresses the audience for this work: ballet fans, professional dancers, aspiring dance students, and those new to ballet. It also touches on the contributions of dancers who, owing to limits of time and space, are not among the selected, but whose influence has nonetheless been lasting. Each of the fifteen chapters begins with a biographical portrait and includes discussions of the dancer's style and artistic background; associations with noted choreographers, composers, artistic directors, and dance partners; relationship with the audience; and critical reception. The author has utilized published and unpublished interviews and source material from dance archives in San Francisco, New York, Havana, and European cities that have served as centers of the ballet world over the last century. Each chapter features photographs and concludes with a list of works performed.

For more than 50 years, science fiction films have been among the most important and successful products of American cinema, and are worthy of study for that reason alone. On a deeper level, the genre has reflected important themes, concerns and developments in American society, so that a history of science fiction film also serves as a cultural history of America over the past half century. M. Keith Booker has selected fifteen of the most successful and innovative science fiction films of all time, and examined each of them at length—from cultural, technical and cinematic perspectives—to see where they came from and what they meant for the future of cinema and for America at large. From Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Star Wars, from Blade Runner to The Matrix, these landmark films have expressed our fears and dreams, our abilities and our deficiencies. In this deep-seeking investigation, we can all find something of ourselves that we recognize, as well as something that we've never recognized before. The focus on a fairly small number of landmark films allows detailed attention to genuinely original movies, including: Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, The Abyss, Independence Day, and The Matrix. This book is ideal for general readers interested in science fiction and film.

From Game of Thrones to Breaking Bad, the key theories and concepts in criminal justice are explained through the lens of television In Crime TV, Jonathan A. Grubb and Chad Posick bring together an eminent group of scholars to show us the ways in which crime—and the broader criminal justice system—are depicted on television. From Breaking Bad and Westworld to Mr. Robot and Homeland, this volume highlights how popular culture frames our understanding of crime, criminological theory, and the nature of justice through modern entertainment. Featuring leading criminologists, Crime TV makes the key concepts and analytical tools of criminology as engaging as possible for students and interested readers. Contributors tackle an array of exciting topics and shows, taking a fresh look at feminist criminology on The Handmaid’s Tale, psychopathy on The Fall, the importance of social bonds on 13 Reasons Why, radical social change on The Walking Dead, and the politics of punishment on Game of Thrones. Crime TV offers a fresh and exciting approach to understanding the essential concepts in criminology and criminal justice and how theories of crime circulate in popular culture.

The powerfully moving story of the Russian Jewish choreographer who used dance to challenge despotism Everyone has heard of George Balanchine, but few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine’s contemporary and arguably his equal, who remained in Lenin’s Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary work that spoke to the Soviet condition. His ballets were considered so explosive that their impact was described as “like a bomb going off.�   Challenged rather than intimidated by the restrictions imposed by Soviet censors on his ballets, Yakobson offered dancers and audiences an experience quite different from the prevailing Soviet aesthetic. He was unwilling to bow completely to the state’s limitations on his artistic opportunities, so despite his fraught relations with his political overseers, his ballets retained early-twentieth-century movement innovations such as turned-in and parallel-foot positions, oddly angled lifts, and eroticized content, all of which were anathema to prevailing Soviet ballet orthodoxy. For Yakobson, ballet was a form of political discourse, and he was particularly alive to the suppressed identity of Soviet Jews and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. He used dance to celebrate reinvention and self-authorship—the freedom of the individual voice as subject and medium. His ballets challenged the role of the dancing body during some of the most repressive decades of totalitarian rule.   Yakobson’s work unfolded in a totalitarian state, and there was little official effort to preserve his choreographic archive or export knowledge of him to the West—gaps that dance historian Janice Ross seeks to redress in this book. Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson’s work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written study brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the Soviet Union through the story of a brave artist who struggled his entire life against political repression yet continued to offer a vista of hope.

Featuring chronological reviews of more than 300 zombie films—from 1932's White Zombie to the AMC series The Walking Dead—this thorough, uproarious guide traces the evolution of one of horror cinema’s most popular and terrifying creations. Fans will learn exactly what makes a zombie a zombie, go behind the scenes with a chilling production diary from Land of the Dead, peruse a bizarre list of the oddest things ever seen in undead cinema, and immerse themselves in a detailed rundown of the 25 greatest zombie films ever made. Containing an illustrated zombie rating system, ranging from "Highly Recommended" to "Avoid at All Costs" and "So Bad It’s Good," the book also features lengthy interviews with numerous talents from in front of and behind the camera. This updated and expanded second edition contains more than 100 new and rediscovered films, providing plenty of informative and entertaining brain food for movie fans.

An anthology of compelling essays by Marina Warner, one of our pre-eminent writers and critics. Art-writing at its most useful should share the dynamism, fluidity and passions of the objects of its enquiry, argues Marina Warner. In this new anthology of some of her most compelling work, she captures the visual experience of the work of several artists – with a notable focus on the inner lives of women – through an exploration of the range of stories and symbols to which they allude. Metamorphosis features vividly in the imagery, stories and media of the art that Warner has chosen to write about: in connection with animals in the work of Louise Bourgeois, for instance; with the Catholicism of Damien Hirst; and with performance as a medium of memory and resistance in the installations of Joan Jonas. Rather than drawing on connoisseurship, the author’s approach grows principally out of anthropology and mythology. She argues that art and aesthetics increasingly fulfil a magical social function – a principle that runs through these writings to give the collection a quality that is polemical as well as coherent. With an introductory essay and illustrations throughout, Marina Warner investigates how artists noted for their treatment of disturbing, uncanny material have reached beyond the visible, to express interior states. Truly inspiring, her writing unites the imagination of artist, writer and reader, creating a reading experience parallel to the intrinsic pleasure of looking at art.

This retrospective on the career of Academy Award-winning production designer Richard Sylbert takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential films of the past fifty years. The Manchurian Candidate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Dick Tracy. The common factor behind these diverse, visually ground-breaking cinematic masterpieces is the work of legendary production designer Richard Sylbert. Basing the book in part on the late designer's Hollywood memoirs, writer Sylvia Townsend, with the participation of Sylbert's widow, screenwriter Sharmagne Sylbert, has enhanced the production designer's original manuscript with candid interviews from some of his most famous collaborators, including Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and Francis Ford Coppola. The result is a book that takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential and highly acclaimed films of the past fifty years. This is a portrait of a highly driven, sometimes tempestuous visionary who wasn't afraid to fight for the artistic integrity of the worlds he created on screen. Movie lovers will find in-depth discussions of the making of such modern classics as Reds, Carnal Knowledge, Shampoo, and The Cotton Club. More than thirty illustrations capture Sylbert's creative process from early sketches to completed sets and locations.

How do reality television programs shape our view of the world and what we perceive as real and normal? This book explores the bizarre and highly controversial world of reality television, including its early history, wide variety of subject matter, and social implications. In recent decades, reality television shows ranging from Keeping up with the Kardashians to Duck Dynasty have become increasingly popular. Why are these "unscripted" programs irresistible to millions of viewers? And what does the nearly universal success of reality shows say about American culture? This book covers more than 100 major and influential reality programs past and present, discussing the origins and past of reality programming, the contemporary social and economic conditions that led to the rise of reality shows, and the ways in which the most successful shows achieve popularity with both male and female demographics or appeal to specific, targeted niche audiences. The text addresses reality TV within five, easy-to-identify content categories: competition shows, relationship/love-interest shows, real people or alternative lifestyle and culture shows, transformation shows, and international programming. By examining modern reality television, a topic of great interest for a wide variety of readers, this book also discusses cultural and social norms in the United States, including materialism, unrealistic beauty ideals, gender roles and stereotypes in society, dynamics of personal relationships, teenage lifestyles and issues, and the branding of people for financial gain and wider viewership.

Since the first Superman film came to the screen in 1978, films adapted from comics have become increasingly important as a film form. But 1978 was also important because it was the year of release for Will Eisner's A Contract with God, and Other Stories, generally credited as the first long-form comic book to label itself a graphic novel. Since that time, advances in computer-generated special effects have significantly improved the ability of film to capture the style and action of comics, producing such hugely successful films as X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002). Meanwhile, the genre of the graphic novel has greatly evolved as a form—especially through the works of people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore—taking comics in dramatically new and different directions, generally darker and more serious than conventional comics. Graphic novels have also formed the basis for less visually spectacular, but intelligent and thoughtful films such as Ghost World (2001) and American Splendor (2002). Booker surveys this important development in film history, tracking the movement to a more mature style in comics, and then a more mature style in films about comics. He focuses on detailed discussions of 15 major films or franchises, but also considers the general impact of graphic novels on the style and content of American film in general. The Batman franchise, especially in the 1989 film and in 2005's Batman Begins, has provided adaptations of a classic comic-book motif inflected through the Dark Knight graphic novels of Frank Miller. The marriage of new film technology and the development of the genre of the graphic novel has produced a number of important innovations in film, including such breakthrough efforts in visual art as The Crow (1994), and Sin City (2005). Films such as Road to Perdition (2002) and A History of Violence (2005) have provided interesting adaptations of noirish graphic novels that rely somewhat less on visual style to achieve their effects.

The collected essays in this volume focus on the presentation, representation and interpretation of ancient violence – from war to slavery, rape and murder – in the modern visual and performing arts, with special attention to videogames and dance as well as the more usual media of film, literature and theatre. Violence, fury and the dread that they provoke are factors that appear frequently in the ancient sources. The dark side of antiquity, so distant from the ideal of purity and harmony that the classical heritage until recently usually called forth, has repeatedly struck the imagination of artists, writers and scholars across ages and cultures. A global assembly of contributors, from Europe to Brazil and from the US to New Zealand, consider historical and mythical violence in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and the 2010 TV series of the same name, in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, in the work of Lars von Trier, and in Soviet ballet and the choreography of Martha Graham and Anita Berber. Representations of Roman warfare appear in videogames such as Ryse: Son of Rome and Total War, as well as recent comics, and examples from both these media are analysed in the volume. Finally, interviews with two artists offer insight into the ways in which practitioners understand and engage with the complex reception of these themes.

This book offers an examination of the films of Roman Polanski, focusing on the impact that his life as an exile has had upon his work. Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile is a revealing look at this acclaimed filmmaker whose life in exile seems to have made his films all the more personal and powerful. Written by a film critic, this insightful book follows Polanski's story from his childhood in a World War II Jewish ghetto to his early films in Poland; from his American breakout, Rosemary's Baby, to his wife's murder by the Manson family; from the spectacular return of Chinatown, to his exile as a convicted sex criminal, to the monumental career peak, The Pianist. The Holocaust, the oppression of communism, the shattering of the swinging 60s, the decadence of Hollywood, the life of a fugitive—Polanski experienced all of these firsthand, and understanding those experiences provides a fascinating pathway through his work.

The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood focuses on the American science fiction (SF) film during the period 2001-2020, in order to provide a theoretical mapping of the genre in the context of Conglomerate Hollywood. Using a social semiotics approach in a systematic corpus of films, the book argues that the SF film can be delineated by two semiotic squares —the first one centering on the genre’s more-than-human ontologies (SF bodies), and the second one focusing on its imaginative worlds (SF worlds). Based on this theoretical framework, the book examines the genre in six cycles, which are placed in their historical context, and are analyzed in relation to cultural discourses, such as technological embodiment, race, animal-human relations, environmentalism, global capitalism, and the techno-scientific Empire. By considering these cycles —which include superhero films, creature films, space operas, among others—as expressions of the genre’s basic oppositions, the book facilitates the comparison and juxtaposition of films that have rarely been discussed in tandem, offering a new perspective on the multiple articulations of the SF film in the new millennium.

Kenneth Branagh is not only the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, but a major filmmaker as well. Between the release of Henry V in 1989 and Love's Labour's Lost in 2000, Branagh directed eight major films in a wide variety of genres, ranging from film noir to horror to comedy, and continually startled audiences around the world with his audacious and energetic film style. Initially following in the footsteps of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, Branagh has placed himself among the small collection of actors who have transformed themselves into award-winning directors as well. In this, the first comprehensive treatment of Branagh's feature films to appear in the English language, Crowl delves deeply into the work of this bold artist, demonstrating the means by which Branagh manages to produce films that appeal to the general public even while treating texts and themes that are traditionally relegated to the realm of academic institutions and high art. And as with Branagh's own work, readers cannot help but be entertained. After an introduction discussing Branagh's transition from actor to filmmaker, Crowl proceeds to examine all eight of Branagh's major English language films, including: Henry V, Dead Again, Peter's Friends, Much Ado About Nothing, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, A Midwinter's Tale, Hamlet, and Love's Labour's Lost. A chronology and filmography are also provided here, as is a new and exclusive interview with the filmmaker himself. Featuring photos on the sets and behind the scenes of many of Branagh's most popular films, this work is ideal for film lovers, film students, and students and readers of Shakespeare.

This incisive book provides an in-depth critical and biographical study of the artistic range of film director Gus Van Sant. Arranged chronologically, Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema provides a comprehensive overview of the life and art of this talented director, covering his mainstream, commercial, and avant-garde projects. More than a biography, the book examines Van Sant's incredibly diverse body of work, exploring the influence of his open homosexuality; of fine art, literature, and music; and of the range of cinema styles to which he has been exposed. Stressing Van Sant's wide-ranging content, genre, style, and cinematic presentation, author Vincent LoBrutto details the filmmaker's autobiographical tendencies and how he uses the film craft, literature, popular music, and fine arts to create his movies. The book dissects ways in which each of his films reflects Van Sant's sexual orientation, whether the individual film has a gay theme or not. Because of its importance to Van Sant's films, the book also offers a history of gay culture, past and present, covering its influence on art, music, theater, and dance, as well as community, activism, and prejudice.