In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century examines these performances and the performers behind them, highlighting the Ziegfeld Follies and The Passing Show revues, Salome dancers, Isadora Duncan's Wagner dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's "photographic" danced histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna Pavlova's opera and film projects. By destabilizing the boundaries between various media, genres, and performance spaces, each of these women was able to create performances that negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues: contemporary technological developments and the rise of mass reproduction, new modes of perception, the commodification of art and entertainment, the evolution of fan culture and stardom, changing understandings of the body and the self, and above all, shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

Annie Morrison, creator of the Morrison Bone Prop, abandons the notion that language and thought are mainly processed in the left cerebral hemisphere, and coaches the actor to speak from the heart. Through this method, words acquire physical properties, such as weight, texture, colour and kinetic force. Think about Martin Luther King, Mao Zedong or Malala Yousafzai; potent speech impacts external events. And internally, it forms and shapes the world of the speaker. Seeing articulation as a purely mechanical skill is detrimental to an actor's process: it is crucial to understand what language is doing on a biological level. This workbook is invaluable for actors, both professional and in training, and also for voice and speech teachers.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reine, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.

When we bury our secrets, they always come back to haunt us...Their rise was meteoric. Only a few years before, they had been three friends from Glasgow, just trying to survive tough lives of danger and dysfunction. But on one Hollywood evening in 1993, they were on the world's biggest stage, accepting their Oscar in front of the watching world. That night was the beginning of their careers. But it was also the end of their friendship. Over the next twenty years, Mirren McLean would become one of the most powerful writers in the movie industry. Zander Leith would break box-office records as cinema's most in-demand action hero. And Davie Johnson would rake in millions as producer of some of the biggest shows on TV. For two decades they didn't speak, driven apart by a horrific secret. Until now... Their past is coming back to bite them, and they have to decide whether to run, hide, or fight. Because when you rise to the top, there's always someone who wants to see you fall. An exciting new glam thriller for the fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Liane Moriarty and Jo Spain Previously published in the UK as TAKING HOLLYWOOD by Shari King. 'Brilliant, a white-knuckle ride of a novel. Gripping and wildly glamorous' Tilly Bagshawe 'It's a real slice of Hollywood and a brilliant read' Gerard Butler 'A glam, edgy thriller, just the way I like them' Martina Cole 'Sex, scandal and secrets galore' Jackie Collins 'A high-stakes thriller with a dark, moving story at its core. Page-turning entertainment at its very best' - TJ Emerson 'It's a thriller that's gritty, sexy and a sensational page turner. You won't be able to put it down. I loved it!' Lorraine Kelly 'I loved this Hollywood tale with deep Scottish roots. It's dark, sinful, glittering and thrilling. An absolute adventure from the very first page' Carmen Reid 'The mean streets of Glasgow meet the glitz of Hollywood. A riveting read!' - Evie Hunter