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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
"Over the Rainbow" exploded into worldwide fame upon its
performance by Judy Garland in the MGM film musical The Wizard of
Oz (1939). Voted the greatest song of the twentieth century in a
2000 survey, it is a masterful, delicate balance of sophistication
and child-like simplicity in which composer Harold Arlen and
lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg poignantly captured the hope and
anxiety harbored by Dorothy's character. In Arlen and Harburg's
Over the Rainbow, author Walter Frisch traces the history of this
song from its inception during the development of The Wizard of
Oz's screenplay, to its various reinterpretations over the course
of the twentieth century. Through analysis of the song's music and
lyrics, this Oxford Keynotes volume provides a close reading of the
piece while examining the evolution of its meaning as it traversed
widely varying cultural contexts. From its adoption as a jazz
standard by generations of pianists, to its contribution to Judy
Garland's role as a gay icon, to its reemergence as a chart-topping
recording by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, "Over the
Rainbow" continues to engage audiences and performers alike in
surprising ways. Featuring a companion website with audio and video
supplements, this book leaves no path unexplored as it succeeds in
capturing the extent of this song's impact on the world.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed
their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony,
the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar
years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type
of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic
stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the
Hollywood film. Britain's fraught transition from formidable empire
to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary
scholars. However, the dawn of the "American century " is the
period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of
Americanization-from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood
films-helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture
that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus
brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study
of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting
that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American
entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national
culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about
American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain's imperial
scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its
treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the
book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its
ideas of America, and how Britain's literary modernism developed
and changed through this reinvention.
Outside the Lettered City traces how middle-class Indians responded
to the rise of the cinema as a popular form of mass entertainment
in early 20th century India, focusing on their preoccupation with
the mass public made visible by the cinema and with the cinema's
role as a public sphere and a mass medium of modernity. It draws on
archival research to uncover aspirations and anxieties about the
new medium, which opened up tantalizing possibilities for
nationalist mobilization on the one hand, and troubling challenges
to the cultural authority of Indian elites on the other. Using
case-studies drawn from the film cultures of Bombay and Kolkata, it
demonstrates how discourses about the cinematic public dovetailed
into discourses about a national public, giving rise to
considerable excitement about cinema's potential to democratize the
public sphere beyond the limits of print-literate culture, as well
as to deepening anxieties about cultural degeneration. The
case-studies also reveal that early twentieth century discourses
about the cinema contain traces of a formative tension in Indian
public culture, between visions of a deliberative public and
spectres of the unruly masses.
What is the relationship between past and present in performance,
given that the performing body is tangibly present in the here and
now? What is the relationship between performance and authenticity?
Between live, apparently 'confessional' performance and supposedly
'reality' television? Autobiography in Performance will provide a
broad overview of the key concepts pertaining to 'autobiography' in
the field of performance. Heddon's engaging style seamlessly blends
the theoretical and the personal, raising and pursuing provactive
questions around issues of 'truth', 'identity', personal history
and political agency, confession, voyeurism and ethics. The book
provides case studies of key international practitioners, including
Tim Miller, Lisa Kron, Bobby Baker and Curious.
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.
The past twenty years have seen an extraordinary and exciting
growth in Canadian theater. Today, 200 professional theater
companies span the country and more than 10,000 published plays
appear in bibliographies. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre
is the first reference book to document the growth and development
of Canadian drama and theater in English and French--from its
beginnings to the present day. The book offers 680 entries written
by 155 contributors that provide biographies of actors,
playwrights, directors, and designers; major theaters, including
19th-century theaters, and companies; major plays; and numerous
miscellaneous subjects such as collective theater, design,
directing, ethnic theater, musical theater, radio and television
drama, and local theater. The result of almost four years'
research, this authoritative reference offers a wealth of
fascinating and important information, as well as over 200
beautiful illustrations.
Hollywood film music is often mocked as a disreputably 'applied'
branch of the art of composition that lacks both the seriousness
and the quality of the classical or late-romantic concert and
operatic music from which it derives. Its composers in the 1930s
and '40s were themselves often scornful of it and aspired to
produce more 'serious' works that would enhance their artistic
reputation.
In fact the criticism of film music as slavishly descriptive or
manipulatively over-emotional has a history that is older than film
- it had even been directed at the relatively popular operatic and
concert music written by some of the emigre Hollywood composers
themselves before they had left Europe. There, as subsequently in
America, such criticism was promoted by the developing project of
Modernism, whose often high-minded opposition to mass culture used
polarizing language that drew, intentionally or not, upon that of
gender difference. Regressive, late-romantic music, the old
argument ran, was -- as women were believed to be -- emotional,
irrational, and lacking in logic.
This book seeks to level the critical playing field between film
music and "serious music," reflecting upon gender-related ideas
about music and modernism as much as about film. Peter Franklin
broaches the possibility of a history of twentieth-century music
that would include, rather than marginalize, film music -- and,
indeed, the scores of a number of the major Hollywood movies
discussed here, like The Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong, Rebecca,
Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane and Psycho. In doing so, he brings
more detailed music-historical knowledge to bear upon cinema music,
often discussed as a unique and special product of film, and also
offers conclusions about the problematic aspects of musical
modernism and some arguably liberating aspects of
"late-romanticism."
Choreographing Copyright provides a historical and cultural
analysis of U.S.-based dance-makers' investment in intellectual
property rights. Although federal copyright law in the U.S. did not
recognize choreography as a protectable class prior to the 1976
Copyright Act, efforts to win copyright protection for dance began
eight decades earlier. In a series of case studies stretching from
the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book
reconstructs those efforts and teases out their raced and gendered
politics. Rather than chart a narrative of progress, the book shows
how dancers working in a range of genres have embraced intellectual
property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial
and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in
Choreographing Copyright are well-known white figures in the
history of American dance, including modern dancers Loie Fuller,
Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, and ballet artists Agnes de Mille
and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of
marginalized figures - from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail,
to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African
American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer
Faith Dane - who were equally interested in positioning themselves
as subjects rather than objects of property, as possessive
individuals rather than exchangeable commodities. Choreographic
copyright, the book argues, has been a site for the reinforcement
of gendered white privilege as well as for challenges to it.
Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural
studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight
into such issues as: the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern
the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent
relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black
bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension
between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.
Philip J. Lang, Jonathan Tunick - are names well known to musical
theatre fans, but few people understand precisely what the
orchestrator does. The Sound of Broadway Music is the first book
ever written about these unsung stars of the Broadway musical whose
work is so vital to each show's success. The book examines the
careers of Broadway's major orchestrators and follows the song as
it travels from the composer's piano to the orchestra pit. Steven
Suskin has meticulously tracked down thousands of original
orchestral scores, piecing together enigmatic notes and notations
with long-forgotten documents and current interviews with dozens of
composers, producers, conductors and arrangers. The information is
separated into three main parts: a biographical section which gives
a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre
orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another
thirty arrangers and conductors; a lively discussion of the art of
orchestration, written for musical theatre enthusiasts (including
those who do not read music); a biographical section which gives a
sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators,
as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty
arrangers and conductors; and an impressive show-by-show listing of
more than six hundred musicals, in many cases including a
song-by-song listing of precisely who orchestrated what along with
relevant comments from people involved with the productions.
Stocked with intriguing facts and juicy anecdotes, many of which
have never before appeared in print, The Sound of Broadway Music
brings fascinating and often surprising new insight into the world
of musical theatre.
Based on new research, and informed by recent developments in
literary and historical studies, The Theatres of War reveals the
importance of the theatre in the shaping of response to the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793-1815). Gillian Russell
explores the roles of the military and navy as both actors and
audiences, and shows their performances to be crucial to their
self-perception as actors fighting on behalf of an often distant
domestic audience. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of
1793-1815 had profound consequences for British society, politics,
and culture. In this, the first in-depth study of the cultural
dimension of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Gillian Russell
examines an important dimension of the experience of these wars -
theatricality. Through this study, the theatre emerges as a place
where battles were celebrated in the form of spectacular
reenactments, and where the tensions of mobilization on an hitherto
unprecedented scale were played out in the form of riots and
disturbances. This book is intended for scholars, postgraduates,
and undergraduates studying theatre and theatre history, cultural
studies, Romanticism, social and political (British)
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.
Featuring the input of highly experienced teachers and examiners in
Media Studies, this exciting new textbook explores key concepts and
develops students' analytical, research and production skills. A
series of industry case studies focus particularly on television
shows, film, computer games, advertising, magazines and newspapers.
A Welsh adaptation of Exploring the Media. Ysgrifennwyd y gwerslyfr
newydd, cyffrous, 16+ hwn gan athrawon ac arholwyr hynod brofiadol
ym maes Astudio'r Cyfryngau. Mae'n archwilio cysyniadau allweddol,
creiddiol, y pwnc a'i nod yw datblygu sgiliau dadansoddi, ymchwilio
a chynhyrchu disgyblion. Cyfres o astudiaethau achos yn
canolbwyntio ar deledu, ffilm, gemau cyfrifiadur, hysbysebu a
chylchgronau.
This study of Feng Xiaogang also explores Chinese film history
since the early 1990s in terms of changes of party film policy,
industry reforms, the party's promotion of Main Melody films and
the emergence and growth of popular cinema. Feng emerges as a
filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a
post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a
personal socio-political agenda. Rui Zhang is a research fellow at
Tsinghua University, PRC.
This study of Feng Xiaogang also explores Chinese film history
since the early 1990s in terms of changes of party film policy,
industry reforms, the party's promotion of Main Melody films and
the emergence and growth of popular cinema. Feng emerges as a
filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a
post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a
personal socio-political agenda. Rui Zhang is a research fellow at
Tsinghua University, PRC.
Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full
story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in
Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and
including much new information from early draft scripts and scores,
this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created
Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the
show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as
Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the
book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later
directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the
twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered,
as are five important London productions and four Hollywood
versions.
Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power
of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative audiences
for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals, Show Boat
put black and white performers side by side. This book is the first
to take Show Boat's innovative interracial cast as the defining
feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the
talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of
white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and
white onto the same stage--revealing the mixed-race roots of
musical comedy--Show Boat stimulated creative artists and
performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the
American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show Boat to
enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway history.
Show Boat's voyage through the twentieth century offers a vantage
point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a complex
tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music and dance
on the national stage during a century of profound transformations.
Special Sound traces the fascinating creation and legacy of the
BBC's electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in the
context of other studios in Europe and America. The BBC built a
studio to provide its own avant-garde dramatic productions with
experimental sounds "neither music nor sound effect." Quickly,
however, a popular kind of electronic music emerged in the form of
quirky jingles, signature tunes such as Doctor Who, and incidental
music for hundreds of programs. These influential sounds and
styles, heard by millions of listeners over decades of operation on
television and radio, have served as a primary inspiration for the
use of electronic instruments in popular music.
Using in-depth research in the studio's archives and papers, this
book tells the history of the many engineers, composers, directors,
and producers behind the studio to trace the shifting perception
towards electronic music in Britain. Combining historical
discussion of the people and instruments in the workshop with
analysis of specific works, Louis Niebur creates a new model for
understanding how the Radiophonic Workshop fits into the larger
history of electronic music.
The editors of Ethics at the Cinema invited a diverse group of
moral philosophers and philosophers of film to engage with ethical
issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single
film of each contributor's choice. The result is a unique
collection of considerable breadth. Discussions focus on both
classic and modern films, and topics range from problems of
traditional concern to philosophers (e.g. virtue, justice, and
ideals) to problems of traditional concern to filmmakers (e.g.
sexuality, social belonging, and cultural identity).
First published in 2007, "Oklahoma!": The Making of an American
Musical tells the full story of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein
musical. Author Tim Carter examines archival materials,
manuscripts, and journalism, and the lofty aspirations and
mythmaking that surrounded the musical from its very inception. The
book made for a watershed moment in the study of the American
musical: the first well-researched, serious musical analysis of
this landmark show by a musicologist, it was also one of the first
biographies of a musical, transforming a field that had previously
tended to orient itself around creators rather than creations. In
this new and fully revised edition, Carter draws further on
recently released sources, including the Rouben Mamoulian Papers at
the Library of Congress, with additional correspondence, contracts,
and even new versions of the working script used - and annotated -
throughout the show's rehearsal process. Carter also focuses on the
key players and concepts behind the musical, including the original
play on which it was based (Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs) and
the Theatre Guild's Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, who
fatefully brought Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first
collaboration. The crucial new perspectives these revisions and
additions provide make this edition of Carter's seminal work a
compulsory purchase for all teachers, students, and lovers of
musical theater.
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My Mother Laughs
(Paperback)
Chantal Akerman; Introduction by Eileen Myles; Translated by Danielle Shreir; Afterword by Frances Morgan
1
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R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
Save R39 (9%)
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Here is a fascinating collection of 20 wide-ranging interviews with
the preeminent opera singers, conductors, directors, and designers
working on and behind the stage today. In Living Opera, Joshua
Jampol invites opera-lovers to listen in as performers such as
Renee Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Rolando Villazon and Placido Domingo
speak in exceptionally frank terms about their strengths and
weaknesses and address such hard-hitting topics as how they deal
with critics, vocal troubles, and balancing their career and family
lives. We hear conductors such as James Conlon, Esa-Pekka Salonen,
and Kent Nagano discuss their likes and dislikes about the state of
contemporary opera, their own inspirations, whom they hope to
inspire, and how opera can remain relevant today. World-class
directors such as Robert Carsen and Patrice Chereau discuss the
complexities involved in staging a successful opera. Jampol has
unprecedented access to all the major singers, conductors, and
directors, and the table of contents reads like a "who's who" of
the global opera world. Each interview highlights a distinctive
voice speaking about his or her career path, first break,
colleagues, major influences, audiences, critics and all the
diverse professions making up the emotional and extravagant world
of the lyric arts. Jampol brings immense knowledge and a wonderful
flair to these conversations, allowing his subjects to follow their
thoughts wherever they lead and revealing in the process a more
intimate, reflective side of such stars as Pierre Boulez, William
Christie, Joyce DiDonato, Seiji Ozawa, Samuel Ramey, and many
others. For anyone wanting to know more about the people behind the
performances-what they think, how they feel, and who they really
are-Living Opera is full of delights and surprises.
Movies have never been the same since MTV. While the classic
symphonic film score promised direct insight into a character's
mind, the expanded role of popular music has made more ambiguous
the question of when, if ever, we are allowed to see or share a
character's emotions. As a result, the potential for irony and
ambiguity has multiplied exponentially, and characterization and
narrative capacities have fragmented. At the most basic level, this
new aesthetic has required filmgoers to renegotiate some of their
most basic instinctual connections with the human voice and with
any sense of a filmmaking self. Music videos widened the creative
vocabulary of filmmaking: they increased speeds of event in cinema
and deflecting filmmakers from narrative, characterization, and
storytelling toward a concentration on situation, feeling, mood,
and time. Popular Music and the New Auteur charts the impact of
music videos on seven visionary directors: Martin Scorsese, Sofia
Coppola, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen brothers, Quentin
Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Ashby and his contributors define
these filmmakers' relation to the soundtrack as their key authorial
gesture. These filmmakers demonstrate a fresh kind of cinematic
musicality by writing against music rather than against script, and
allowing pop songs a determining role in narrative and imagery.
Featuring important new theoretical work by some of the most
stimulating and provocative writers in the area today, Popular
Music and the New Auteur will be required reading for all who study
film music and sound. It will also be particularly relevant for
readers in popular music studies, and its intervention in the
ongoing debate on auteurism will make it necessary reading in film
studies.
Continuing on from the success of the first four Necronomicon
books, Necronomicon Book Five again seeks out controversial and
transgressive cinema from around the globe. Tease away the skin
from the dark underbelly of this tome to reveal yet more perverse
delights within the cult, horror and erotic cinema which is
explored.
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."
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