Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film Eve's Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons's mission has been to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve's Bayou, her first feature film, Lemmons (b. 1961) accomplished the rare feat of creating a film that was critically successful and one of the highest-grossing independent films of the year. Moreover, the cultural impact of Eve's Bayou endures, and in 2018 the film was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film. Lemmons's directing credits also include The Caveman's Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and, most recently, Harriet, making Lemmons one of the most prolific and long-standing women directors in Hollywood. As a black woman filmmaker and a self-proclaimed black feminist, Lemmons breaks the mold of what is expected of a filmmaker in Hollywood. She began her career in Hollywood as an actor, with roles in numerous television series and high-profile films, including Spike Lee's School Daze and Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs. This volume collects fifteen interviews that illuminate Lemmons's distinctive ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art through film, intimately linked to her mission to protest culturally and structurally imposed limitations and push the boundaries imposed by Hollywood.

Israeli television, currently celebrating fifty years of broadcasting, has become one of the most important content sources on the international TV drama market, when serials such as Homeland, Hostages, Fauda, Zaguory Empire and In Treatment were bought by international networks, HBO included. Offering both a textual reading and discourse analysis of contemporary Israeli television dramas, Itay Harlap adopts a case study approach in order to address production, reception and technological developments in its accounts. His premise is that the meeting point between social trends within Israeli society (primarily the rise of opposition groups to the hegemony of the Zionist-Jewish-masculine-Ashkenazi ideologies) and major changes in the medium in Israel (which are comparable to international changes that have been titled "post-TV"), led to the creation of television dramas characterized by controversial themes and complex narratives, which present identities in ways never seen before on television or in other Israeli mediums.

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts to have erupted since the end of the Second World War. But although the war occurred in 'Europe's backyard' and received significant media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to cultural representations of the conflict. Stephen Harper analyses how the war has been depicted in global cinema and television over the past quarter of a century. Focusing on the representation of some of the war's major themes, including humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide, rape and ethnic cleansing, Harper explores the role of popular media culture in reflecting, reinforcing -- and sometimes contesting -- nationalist ideologies.

In The Cinema of Catherine Breillat, Belot offers a detailed analysis of Breillat's past and recent films. Breillat is one of the most internationally renowned French women filmmakers whose notoriety is built on her explicit representation of women's sexuality. Most of her films rely on a female protagonist's personal and intimate search of her self, characterised by her sexual journey. Facing censorship and controversy, Breillat's films do not easily fit classification and place the viewer into an uncomfortable position. This study looks at Breillat as an independent cinema auteur entertaining a close relation with her films by exploring and positing women, from adolescence to adulthood, as sexual beings reflecting her films' identity emanating from Breillat's personal or intimate scenes.

Authenticity is one of the major values of our time. It is visible everywhere, from clothing to food to self-help books. While it is such a prevalent phenomenon, it is also very evasive. This study analyses the 'culture of authenticity' as it relates to theatre and establishes a theoretical framework for analysis. Daniel Schulz argues that authenticity is sought out and marked by the individual and springs from a culture that is perceived as inherently fake and lacking depth. The study examines three types of performances that exemplify this structure of feeling: intimate theatre seen in Forced Entertainment productions such as Quizoola! (1996, 2015), as well as one-on-one performances, such as Oentroerend Goed's Internal (2009); immersive theatres as illustrated by Punchdrunk's shows The Masque of the Red Death (2007) and The Drowned Man (2013) which provide a visceral, sensate understanding for audiences; finally, the study scrutinises the popular category of documentary theatre through various examples such as Robin Soan's Talking to Terrorists (2005), David Hare's Stuff Happens (2004), Edmund Burke's Black Watch (2007) and Dennis Kelly's pseudo-documentary play Taking Care of Baby (2007). It is specifically the value of the document that lends such performances their truth-value and consequently their authenticity. The study analyses how the success of these disparate categories of performance can be explained through a common concern with notions of truth and authenticity. It argues that this hunger for authentic, unmediated experience is characteristic of a structure of feeling that has superseded postmodernism and that actively seeks to resignify artistic and cultural practices of the everyday.

New Orleans is known for its bounce music and culture. This book is about bounce music and the artists that kept it alive for 25 yrs. The edition is " The Beginning" and there's more to come. Read how it all got started.

While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.

Lincoln Prize Finalist It was the measure of Shakespeare's poetic greatness, an early commentator remarked, that he thoroughly blended the ideal with the practical or realistic. "If this be so," Walt Whitman wrote, "I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life." Whitman was only one of many to note the affinity between these two iconic figures. Novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have frequently shown Lincoln quoting Shakespeare. In Lincoln and Shakespeare, Michael Anderegg for the first time examines in detail Lincoln's fascination with and knowledge of Shakespeare's plays. Separated by centuries and extraordinary circumstances, the two men clearly shared a belief in the power of language and both at times held a fatalistic view of human nature. While citations from Shakespeare are few in his writings and speeches, Lincoln read deeply and quoted often from the Bard's work in company, a habit well documented in diaries, letters, and newspapers. Anderegg discusses Lincoln's particular interest in Macbeth and Hamlet and in Shakespeare's historical plays, where we see themes that resonated deeply with the president-the dangers of inordinate ambition, the horrors of civil war, and the corruptions of illegitimate rule. Anderegg winnows confirmed evidence from myth to explore how Lincoln came to know Shakespeare, which editions he read, and which plays he would have seen before he became president. Once in the White House, Lincoln had the opportunity of seeing the best Shakespearean actors in America. Anderegg details Lincoln's unexpected relationship with James H. Hackett, one of the most popular comic actors in America at the time: his letter to Hackett reveals his considerable enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Lincoln managed, in the midst of overwhelming matters of state, to see the actor's Falstaff on several occasions and to engage with him in discussions of how Shakespeare's plays should be performed, a topic on which he had decided views. Hackett's productions were only a few of those Lincoln enjoyed as president, and Anderegg documents his larger theatergoing experience, recreating the Shakespearean performances of Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Forrest, and others, as Lincoln saw them.