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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
After 45 years, Steven Spielberg's Jaws remains the definitive
summer blockbuster, a cultural phenomenon with a fierce and
dedicated fan base. The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic
Summer Blockbuster is an exciting illustrated collection of new
critical essays that offers the first detailed and comprehensive
overview of the film's significant place in cinema history.
Bringing together established and young scholars, the book includes
contributions from leading international writers on popular cinema
including Murray Pomerance, Peter Kramer, Sheldon Hall, Nigel
Morris and Linda Ruth Williams, and covers such diverse topics as
the film's release, reception and canonicity; its representation of
masculinity and children; the use of landscape and the ocean; its
status as a western; sequels and fan-edits; and its galvanizing
impact on the horror film, action movie and contemporary Hollywood
itself.
British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical
re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight
and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why,
presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped
the work that followed. Rebecca D'Monte examines how the emphasis
upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the
neglect of much of the century's earlier drama, positioning the
book as part of the current debate about the relationship between
war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography. In a
comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers: - the
Edwardian theatre; - the theatre of the First World War, including
propaganda and musicals; -the interwar years, the rise of
commercial theatre and influence of Modernism; - the theatre of the
Second World War and post-war period. Essays from leading scholars
Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further
critical perspectives on the period's theatre and demonstrate its
relevance to the drama of today. For anyone studying 20th-century
British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.
This thought-provoking work examines the dehumanizing depictions of
black males in the movies since 1910, analyzing images that were
once imposed on black men and are now appropriated and manipulated
by them. Moving through cinematic history decade by decade since
1910, this important volume explores the appropriation,
exploitation, and agency of black performers in Hollywood by
looking at the black actors, directors, and producers who have
shaped the image of African American males in film. To determine
how these archetypes differentiate African American males in the
public's subconscious, the book asks probing questions-for example,
whether these images are a reflection of society's fears or
realistic depictions of a pluralistic America. Even as the work
acknowledges the controversial history of black representation in
film, it also celebrates the success stories of blacks in the
industry. It shows how blacks in Hollywood manipulate degrading
stereotypes, gain control, advance their careers, and earn money
while making social statements or bringing about changes in
culture. It discusses how social activist performers-such as Paul
Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Spike Lee-reflect
political and social movements in their movies, and it reviews the
interactions between black actors and their white counterparts to
analyze how black males express their heritage, individual
identity, and social issues through film. Discusses the social,
historical, and literary evolution of African American male roles
in the cinema Analyzes the various black images presented each
decade from blackface, Sambo, and Mandingo stereotypes to
archetypal figures such as God, superheroes, and the president
Shows how African American actors, directors, and producers
manipulate negative and positive images to advance their careers,
profit financially, and make social statements to create change
Demonstrates the correlation between political and social movements
and their impact on the cultural transformation of African American
male images on screen over the past 100 years Includes figures that
demonstrate the correlation between political and social movements
and their impact on cultural transformation and African American
male images on screen
`The Plea on Oath' is a story of a bright and gifted boy.... will
have you gripped, inspiring, powerful, intensive story as you read
about how the boy grew up to become a Doctor, a thriller of his own
hard work but not so much to show for it as he struggled and
battled his notorious addiction to gambling with adverse
consequences leaving a vacuum...........the author keeps you in
suspense as the intriguing story unfolds...... Segun lived his life
like a `Candle in the Wind' with his struggle and fight back from
the edge of death, his recovery and then back to the unavoidable
end....... Doctors are human......and so are we all.
While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on
Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still
frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant
on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even
those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially
optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an
alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his
films--even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy
answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and
narrative resolution--are significantly darker and more emotionally
and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for.
"Darkness in the Bliss-Out" demonstrates, through close analysis of
a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on
the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes
contradictory view of the human condition.
Traumagenic events-episodes that have caused or are likely to cause
trauma-color the experiences of K-12 students and the social
studies curriculum they encounter in U.S. schools. At the same time
that the global COVID-19 pandemic has heightened educators'
awareness of collective trauma, the racial reckoning of 2020 has
drawn important attention to historical and transgenerational
trauma. At a time when social studies educators can simply no
longer ignore "difficult" knowledge, instruction that acknowledges
trauma in social studies classrooms is essential. Through employing
relational pedagogies and foregrounding voices that are too often
silenced, the lessons in Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based
Strategy for Using Film to Acknowledge Trauma in Social Studies
engage students in examining the role of traumatic or traumagenic
events in social studies curriculum. The 20 Hollywood or History?
lessons are organized by themes such as political trauma and war
and genocide. Each lesson presents film clips, instructional
strategies, and primary and secondary sources targeted to the
identified K-12 grade levels. As a collection, they provide
ready-to-teach resources that are perfect for teachers who are
committed to acknowledging trauma in their social studies
instruction.
If you've ever wondered what it's like to soar through space like a
leaf on the wind in a Firefly spaceship, this is the manual for
you. The Firefly-class transport ship was originally created by the
Allied Spacecraft Corporation, but since the Browncoats'
Independence War, it has become a favourite among smugglers on the
Rim worlds. The aircraft's many nooks, crannies, and hidden
compartments give it an incredible cargo capacity, and its speed
and small size make it the perfect getaway vehicle. The many
secrets of Serenity are revealed in this fascinating crew-created
owner's manual, which features in-depth technical specifications
and insightful commentary from the entire crew. Designed as an
in-world crew-made manual for the ship, this book will allow fans
of Firefly and Serenity to explore the iconic Firefly-class Series
3 ship in a whole new way.
This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively
remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance
classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on
television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories
are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday's
steps to today's concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned
scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary
perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in
diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are
Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are
popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at
stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular
dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings
or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural
processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to
pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.
Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of
History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its
relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and
performance as mediums through which politically innovative
temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the
future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal
concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as
developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri
respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes
play texts by Aime Cesaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from
Ni'Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and
African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment
to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages
with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and
performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's
logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a
significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in
Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to
what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields.
Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting,
repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and
performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and
thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.
The Female Gaze in Documentary Film - an International Perspective
makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the
status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary
screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and
participation of female documentary directors globally. The central
preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a
'female gaze', an inquiry that has had a long history in
filmmaking, film theory and women's art. It fills a gap in the
literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of
female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and
the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on
documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or
television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is
based on interviews with significant female documentarians from
Europe, Asia and North America.
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