This collection is a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary British television drama and its representations of social class. Through early studio-set plays, soap operas and period drama, the volume demonstrates how class provides a bridge across multiple genres and traditions of television drama. The authors trace this thematic emphasis into the present day, offering fascinating new insights into the national conversation around class and identity in Britain today. The chapters engage with a range of topics including authorial explorations of Stephen Poliakoff and Jimmy McGovern, case studies of television performers Maxine Peake and Jimmy Nail, and discussions of the sitcom genre and animation form. This book offers new perspectives on popular British television shows such as Goodnight Sweetheart and Footballers' Wives, and analysis of more recent series such as Peaky Blinders and This is England.

The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution. Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment-jokes, bits-to the more complex-caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.

This book engages with Margaret Atwood's work and its adaptations. Atwood has long been appreciated for her ardent defence of Canadian authors and her genre-bending fiction, essays, and poetry. However, a lesser-studied aspect of her work is Atwood's role both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, television, film, or comic books. Recent critically acclaimed television adaptations of the novels The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu) and Alias Grace (Amazon) have rightfully focused attention on these works, but Atwood's fiction has long been a source of inspiration for artists of various media, a seeming corollary to Atwood's own tendency to explore the possibilities of previously undervalued media (graphic novels), genres (science-fiction), and narratives (testimonial and historical modes). This collection hopes to expand on other studies of Atwood's work or on their adaptations to focus on the interplay between the two, providing an interdisciplinary approach that highlights the protean nature of the author and of adaptation.

This book addresses the merits and limitations of femvertising, explores the operations of advertising and commodity feminism in a global context, and presents case studies from Anglo-American, South American and East Asian national contexts. The range of topics include the femvertising of beauty products, contraception, lingerie, breast cancer awareness, financial services and corporate branding. Focusing on the ways in which neoliberalism and postfeminism interact with foundational issues of feminist politics, the chapters in this book situate global femvertising as a complex and exciting advertising strategy which holds the potential for social change amidst an uneasy cohabitation with capitalism and commercial culture.

Life is not always sweet. In this gripping and compelling work of fiction experience the vivid emotional roller coaster through the eyes of a father, lawyer, husband, and man of faith thrown into a situation where his family is held hostage. Fight the insecurities with him as he tries to reconcile why he must suffer at the hands of his captors and survive to find the truth.

This book explores the increasing imperatives to speak up, to speak out, and to 'find one's voice' in contemporary media culture. It considers how, for women in particular, this seems to constitute a radical break with the historical idealization of silence and demureness. However, the author argues that there is a growing and pernicious gap between the seductive promise of voice, and voice as it actually exists. While brutal instruments such as the ducking stool and scold's bridle are no longer in use to punish women's speech, Kay proposes that communicative injustice now operates in much more insidious ways. The wide-ranging chapters explore the mediated 'voices' of women such as Monica Lewinsky, Hannah Gadsby, Diane Abbott, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, as well as the problems and possibilities of gossip, nagging, and the 'traumatised voice' in television talk shows. It critiques the optimistic claims about the 'unleashing' of women's voices post-#MeToo and examines the ways that women's speech continues to be trivialized and devalued. Communicative justice, the author argues, is not about empowering individuals to 'find their voice', but about collectively transforming the whole communicative terrain.

This book is an exploration of closely related aspects of the historically problematic notion of humour. As the study of humour has been dominated by work in psychology, linguistics, sociology and politics, this may be seen as a ground-clearing exercise to encourage more sustained historical analysis, and provide a fresh perspective on humour and its study.In Part 1, the authorexamine the claim that humour is universal with a genealogy of study reaching back to classical antiquity. Chapter 1 provides an alternative history for the formation of a concept of humour and its derivative, a sense of humour. Chapter 2 surveys the alterations in meaning involved in humour becoming a loan word in other languages. It analyses what might be meant by claiming that humour is universal; and it examines the falsifications involved in the standard genealogical approach to the history of humour theory. In the light of its conclusions, the second essay provides a wide-ranging assessment of the difficulties of treating humour with more historical care. The main topics are contextualisation and intentionality, translation and reception. Within this context, the third essay explores satire and its definition over its long history, dealing with dictionary definition, definition by origin and conceptual implication. In Chapter 5 the author discusses definition by forms of semantic relationship and satire as a definable genre. It ends with attention to satiric definition. In the final essay, the author provides a case study of humour in recent history, an analysis of the important and influential Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister BBC television satires. It illustrates how satiric humour can carry modulated theories of politics into popular culture and get taken as reflections of political reality; and how the actual practice of language use in politics is subject to satire in the programs. Throughout the work humour is used to cast light on wider issues that are frequently discussed independently of its potentially complicating presence.

This book explores questions of gender, desire, embodiment, and language in Barker's oeuvre. With The Castle as a focal point, the scope extends considerably beyond this play to incorporate analysis and exploration of the Theatre of Catastrophe; questions of gender, subjectivity and desire; God/religion; aesthetics of the self; autonomy-heteronomy; ethics; and the relation between political and libidinal economy, at stake in 20 other plays by Barker (including Rome, The Power of the Dog, The Bite of the Night, Judith, Possibilities, I Saw Myself, Fence in Its Thousandth Year, The Gaoler's Ache for the Nearly Dead, The Brilliance of the Servant, Golgo, among others).

This book focuses on how the abject spectacle of the 'monstrous feminine' has been reimagined by recent and contemporary screen horrors focused on the desires and subjectivities of female monsters who, as anti-heroic protagonists of revisionist and reflexive texts, exemplify gendered possibility in altered cultures of 21st century screen production and reception. As Barbara Creed notes in a recent interview, the patriarchal stereotype of horror that she named 'the monstrous-feminine' has, decades later, 'embarked on a life of her own'. Focused on this altered and renewed form of female monstrosity, this study engages with an international array of recent and contemporary screen entertainments, from arthouse and indie horror films by emergent female auteurs, to the franchised products of multimedia conglomerates, to 'quality' television horror, to the social media-based creations of horror fans working as 'pro-sumers'. In this way, the monograph in its organisation and scope maps the converged and rapidly changing environment of 21st century screen cultures in order to situate the monstrous female anti-hero as one of its distinctive products.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What's in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bialoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer's is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments-from poetic "sound postcards," to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them - in particular, on Pound's Italian years and Pasolini's use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.

This handbook is an essential creative, critical and practical guide for students and educators of screen production internationally. It covers all aspects of screen production-from conceptualizing ideas and developing them, to realizing and then distributing them-across all forms and formats, including fiction and non-fiction for cinema, television, gallery spaces and the web. With chapters by practitioners, scholars and educators from around the world, the book provides a comprehensive collection of approaches for those studying and teaching the development and production of screen content. With college and university students in mind, the volume purposely combines theory and practice to offer a critically informed and intellectually rich guide to screen production, shaped by the needs of those working in education environments where 'doing' and 'thinking' must co-exist. The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production fills an important gap in creative-critical knowledge of screen production, while also providing practical tools and approaches for future practitioners.

This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman.

This book uses popular culture to highlight the intersections and interplay between ideologies, technological advancement and mobilities as they shape contemporary Irish identities. Marshalling case studies drawn from a wide spectrum of popular culture, including the mediated construction of prominent sporting figures, Troubles-set sitcom Derry Girls, and poignant drama feature Philomena, Anthony P. McIntyre offers a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary Irishness, tracing its entanglement with notions of mobility, regionality and identity. The book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, cultural studies, as well as film and media studies.

For seven seasons, viewers worldwide watched as ad man Don Draper moved from adultery to self-discovery, secretary Peggy Olson became a take-no-prisoners businesswoman, object-of-the-gaze Joan Holloway developed a feminist consciousness, executive Roger Sterling tripped on LSD, and smarmy Pete Campbell became a surprisingly nice guy. Mad Men defined a pivotal moment for television, earning an enduring place in the medium's history. This edited collection examines the enduringly popular television series as Mad Men still captivates audiences and scholars in its nuanced depiction of a complex decade. This is the first book to offer an analysis of Mad Men in its entirety, exploring the cyclical and episodic structure of the long form series and investigating issues of representation, power and social change. The collection establishes the show's legacy in televisual terms, and brings it up to date through an examination of its cultural importance in the Trump era. Aimed at scholars and interested general readers, the book illustrates the ways in which Mad Men has become a cultural marker for reflecting upon contemporary television and politics.

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were "mad." Such portraits demand a "rediagnosing" of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.

- Learn what it takes for editors, cinematographers, directors, producers, lighting technicians, and other filmmakers to work more effectively with visual effects artists on productions, use visual effects as an aid in visual storytelling, reduce production costs, and solve problems created on-set - Achieve a fuller understanding of common types of visual effects and their role in filmmaking; 3D, 2D and 2.5D visual effects; how to support “invisible” visual effects; matchmoving and compositing; the visual effects production timeline; photorealism; and VFX considerations for pre and postproduction - See visual effects concepts brought to life in practical examples drawn from the experiences of industry professionals, and discover how to better integrate visual effects into your own projects

Victor Perez brings together the research and expertise of world-leading color scientists, to create a comprehensive guide for VFX Artists in Color Management. The book explores the latest standards of HDR and ACES workflows, in an easily digestible and widely applicable resource. Its purpose is to make artists confident and familiar with Color Management and its science, to improve the quality of visual effects worldwide. Without assuming any previous knowledge, this self-contained book builds the readers understanding from the ground up, exploring all the elements of the Color Workflow at a scientific level. It covers how to setup a consistent pipeline in relation to other departments, inside and outside visual effects, from camera to screen, so everybody is aligned to the same standards, preserving color qualities, consistency, and maintaining the artistic intent end to end. It also delves into all the integral concepts for color management, ranging from Color Theory to Digital Image Fundamentals, and much more. This book is an invaluable resource for VFX students and professionals who want to be well-informed of the latest HDR and ACES pipelines, as well as those at every level of production, wishing to gain a deeper understanding of managing color in visual effects projects.

This book uses in-depth case studies to explore the significance of the design of the home on screen. The chapters draw widely upon the production designer's professional perspective and particular creative point of view. The case studies employ a methodology Barnwell has pioneered for the analysis of production design called Visual Concept Analysis, which can be used as a key to decode the design of any given film. Through the nurturing warmth of the Browns' home in Paddington, the ambiguous boundaries of secret service agent homes in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the 'singleton' space occupied by Bridget Jones, Barnwell demonstrates that the domestic interior consistently plays a key role. Whether used as a transition space, an ideal, a catalyst for change or a place to return to, these case studies examine the pivotal nature of the home in storytelling and the production designers' significance in its creation. The book benefits from interviews with production designers and artwork that provides insight on the creative process.

This book develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical 'originals' such as Shakespeare's plays. Departing from the current consensus that adaptation is a heightened example of how all texts inform and are informed by other texts, this book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical works extend cinema's inherent mystification and concealment of its own artifice. Film adaptation consistently manipulates and obfuscates its traces of 'original' authorial enunciation, and oscillates between overtly authored articulation and seemingly un-authored unfolding. To analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. The differences between these rival approaches to adaptation are explored in depth in the first part of the book, while the second part constructs a taxonomy of the various ways in which authorial signs are simultaneously foregrounded and concealed in adaptation's anamorphic drama of authorship.

This book is an essential guide to making traditional 16mm and 8mm films, from production to post, using both analog and digital tools. Focusing on low-budget equipment and innovative techniques, this text will provide you with the steps to begin your journey in making lasting work in the legacy medium of great filmmakers from Georges Melies to Steven Spielberg. The discipline of 16mm or 8mm film can initially seem challenging, but through the chapters in this book, you'll learn strategies and insight to develop your craft. You'll discover the right camera for your needs, how to light for film, and the options in planning your digital post-production workflow. The book includes numerous hand-drawn diagrams and illustrations for ease of understanding, as well as recommended films and filmmaking activities to help you build your knowledge of film history, technical and creative skills within each chapter theme. By applying the suggested approaches to production planning, you will see how celluloid filmmaking can be both visually stunning and cost effective. This is an essential book for students and filmmakers who want to produce professional quality 16mm and 8mm films.

Every year, tens of thousands of acting students dip their toes into the world of improve comedy. From Harvard University, the Immediate Gratification Players bring a new way to learn this popular art form. Written from the student's perspective, the book is divided into two sections of six drapers each. The book gives students training with useful drills, important rules to remember and a basic uxorial in building your first improve scene. They will explain what no other book does: how to put your product in front of an audience. From creating a troupe to treating your audience right, this is the only book that can make its readers show-worthy. Sample chapters include: A Scene: The Basic Unit of Improve; Do or Not to Do; Short Form or Long Form: The Eternal Debate; Developing Format; Creating a Troupe; Audition - Being the Best; Publicity: Turning on the Machine; and, the Crowd Goes Wild: A Successful Show. It is full of practical tips and techniques.

When Onegin, a dashing but jaded aristocrat from St. Petersburg, inherits his uncle's estate in the country, his arrival sets hearts afire and stirs the embers of jealousy. Even the reclusive young Tatyana falls hopelessly under the spell of the aloof Onegin and professes her love for him. Will playing with lonely Russian hearts reap heartbreak or romance?