The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

New communication technologies have reshaped media and politics. But who are the new power players? The Hybrid Media System is a sweeping new theory of how political communication now works. Politics is increasingly defined by organizations, groups, and individuals who are best able to blend older and newer media logics, in what Andrew Chadwick terms a hybrid system. Power is wielded by those who create, tap, and steer information flows to suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, and disable the power of others, across and between a range of older and newer media. By examining this system in flow, Chadwick reveals its complex balance of power. From American presidential campaigns to WikiLeaks, from live prime ministerial debates to hotly-contested political scandals, from the daily practices of journalists, campaign workers, and bloggers to the struggles of new activist organizations, the clash of media logics causes chaos and disintegration but also surprising new patterns of order and integration. With a new preface and chapter, the fully updated second edition applies the conceptual framework of the hybrid system to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the rise of Donald Trump, illustrating the ways individuals blend new and old media systems to obtain political power.

America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" - representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties-like Klute and The Parallax View-novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s. Breaking from the dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or the rise of postmodernism, Back to the Fifties reveals how Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988 was utilized by a range of audiences for diverse and often competing agendas. Films from American Graffiti to Hairspray and popular music from Sha Na Na to Michael Jackson shaped-and was shaped by-the complex social, political and cultural conditions of the Reagan Era. By closely examining the ways that "the Fifties" were remade and recalled, Back to the Fifties explores how cultural memory is shaped for a generation of teenagers trained by popular culture to rewind, record, recycle and replay.

William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the composer as his "last card," explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career, and offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar manuscript sources, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works. Fresh analytic perspectives are revealed, casting the dramatic meaning of Parsifal in a new light. Much debated aspects of the work, such as Kundry's death at the conclusion, are discussed in the context of its stage history. Path-breaking as well is Kinderman's analysis of the religious and ideological context of Parsifal. During the half-century after the composer's death, the Wagner family and the so-called Bayreuth circle sought to exploit Wagner's work for political purposes, thereby promoting racial nationalism and anti-Semitism. Hitherto unnoticed connections between Hitler and Wagner's legacy at Bayreuth are explored here, while differences between the composer's politics as an 1849 revolutionary and the later response of his family to National Socialism are weighed in a nuanced account. Kinderman combines new historical research, sensitive aesthetic criticism, and probing philosophical reflection in this most intensive examination of Wagner's culminating music drama.

Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies is the first book to focus on the genre that best defined the American director's career: the war film. It draws on previously unexplored archival materials, such as Fuller's Federal Bureau of Investigation files and WWII-era amateur films, to explore the director's lifelong interest in making challenging, thought-provoking, and often politically dangerous movies about war. After establishing the roots of Fuller's cinematographic schooling in the trenches during World War II, including careful consideration of his 16mm footage of a Nazi camp at the end of that war, Film is Like a Battleground explores Fuller's first forays into hot war representation in Hollywood with the pioneering Korean conflict films The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951). This pair of films introduced Fuller to his first run-ins with the American political machine when they triggered both FBI and Department of Defense investigations into his political sympathies and affiliations. Fuller's cold war films Pickup on South Street (1953) and, though it veers into hot war territory, Hell and High Water (1954) are Fuller's responses to the political pressures he had now personally experienced and resented. A chapter on Fuller's representation of pre-American-invasion Vietnam in China Gate (1957) alongside his unrealized Vietnam war screenplay, The Rifle (ca. late 1960s), illustrates the degree to which Fuller's representation of war and nation shifted even as he continued to probe war's impossible contradictions. Film is Like a Battleground would be incomplete without a thorough exploration of the films depicting the war Fuller personally experienced and spent a lifetime contemplating, WWII. Verboten! (1959), Merrill's Marauder's (1962), and The Big Red One (1980) demonstrate Fuller's representation of a morally justifiable war. Fuller's 1959 CBS television pilot-Dogface-offers a glimpse at one of Fuller's failed attempts to bring his WWII story into American living rooms. The book concludes with a chapter about a documentary film made late in the director's life that returns Fuller to the actual site of the Nazi's Falkenau camp, at which he discusses his experiences there and that powerful, unforgettable footage he shot in the spring of 1945.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, as Film Studies crystallized into an academic discipline, psychological realism became linked to both classical Hollywood and continuity editing. The style was derided as theatrical, or worse, bourgeois, a product of a capitalism that valorized individual personality. This view persists, though often tacitly. However, we must attribute some degree of mindedness to any figure that we might call a character, even if that psyche is established not by a performer but by another aspect of the film, such as editing. Through the study of performer and director Mike Nichols, Kyle Stevens questions the aesthetic-ideological stance against psychological realism. He argues that characters' actions are not just filmed concepts but can be film concepts whose forms resonate politically. Nichols' oeuvre centers on moments when words and gestures cease to mean, or to mean in typical ways. In doing so, he exposes the pretense of tropes that constitute conventionally realist characters, and participates in changes in U.S. cultural attitudes toward language, subjectivity, embodiment, and the social, particularly with regard to sexual politics. This book thus sheds light on Hollywood history, historicizes Film Studies' turn away from humanism, and reassesses paradigms that hold psychological realism to be "transparent"-thereby blinding us to potentially subtle and subversive uses of this aesthetic choice.

The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.
Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website.
Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford Handbook of The AmericanMusical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)

Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence. In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices.

Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense today, a century ago opera was an integral part of American popular music culture, and familiarity with opera was still a part of American "cultural literacy." During the Ragtime era, hundreds of humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjects-either directly quoting operas or alluding to operatic characters and vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the moment when popular music in America transitioned away from its European operatic heritage, and when the distinction between low- and high-brow "popular" musical forms was free to develop, with all its attendant cultural snobbery and rebellion.
Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century.

Music and the Broadcast Experience explores the complex ways in which music and broadcasting have developed together throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. It brings into dialogue researchers working in media and music studies; explores and develops crucial points of contact between studies of music in radio and music in television; and investigates the limits, persistence, and extensions of music broadcasting in the Internet era. The book presents a series of case studies that address key moments and concerns in music broadcasting, past and present, written by leading scholars in the field, who hail from both media and music studies. Unified by attentiveness both to musical sound and meaning and to broadcasting structures, practices, audiences, and discourses, the chapters in this collection address the following topics: the role of live orchestral concerts and opera in the early development of radio and their relation to ideologies of musical uplift; the relation between production culture, music, and television genre; the function of music in sponsored radio during the 1930s; the fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition on television; questions of music format and political economy in the development of online radio; and the negotiation of space, community, and participation among audiences, online and offline, in the early twenty-first century. The collection's ultimate aim is to explore the usefulness and limitations of broadcasting as a concept for understanding music and its cultural role, both historically and today.

Grief is all around us. At the heart of the brightly coloured, vividly characterised, joyful films of Studio Ghibli, they are wracked with loss - of innocence, of love, of the connection to our world and of that world itself. Now Go enters these emotional waters to interrogate not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief so well, but how that informs our own understanding of grief's manifold faces.

Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike."

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

In Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before Balanchine, Jessica Zeller introduces the first few decades of the twentieth century as an often overlooked, yet critical period for ballet's growth in America. While George Balanchine is often considered the sole creator of American ballet, numerous European and Russian emigres had been working for decades to build a national ballet with an American identity. These pedagogues and others like them played critical yet largely unacknowledged roles in American ballet's development. Despite their prestigious ballet pedigrees, the dance field's exhaustive focus on Balanchine has led to the neglect of their work during the first few decades of the century, and in this light, this book offers a new perspective on American ballet during the period immediately prior to Balanchine's arrival. Zeller uses hundreds of rare archival documents to illuminate the pedagogies of several significant European and Russian teachers who worked in New York City. Bringing these contributions into the broader history of American ballet recasts American ballet's identity as diverse-comprised of numerous Euro-Russian and American elements, as opposed to the work of one individual. This new account of early twentieth century American ballet is situated against a bustling New York City backdrop, where mass immigration through Ellis Island brought the ballet from European and Russian opera houses into contact with a variety of American forms and sensibilities. Ballet from celebrated Euro-Russian lineages was performed in vaudeville and blended with American popular dance styles, and it developed new characteristics as it responded to the American economy. Shapes of American Ballet delves into ballet's struggle to define itself during this rich early twentieth century period, and it sheds new light on ballet's development of an American identity before Balanchine.

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship and social audience as several lenses of both 'mutual understanding' and 'galvanizing extension' in ways of seeing this object of 'real-sex cinema'. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This is a book which substantively, methodologically and theoretically is embracing and engaging in its consideration of the images, ethics, 'double standards' and embodiments of brutal cinema. Written in a style free of jargon, and crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics as well as general and professional audiences.

Since the advent of the cinema, Jesus has frequently appeared in our movie houses and on our television screens. Indeed, it may well be that more people worldwide know about Jesus and his life story from the movies than from any other medium. Indeed, Jesus' story has been adapted dozens of times throughout the history of commercial cinema, from the 1912 silent From the Manger to the Cross to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. No doubt there are more to come.
Drawing on a broad range of movies, biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz traces the way in which Jesus of Nazareth has become Jesus of Hollywood. She argues that Jesus films both reflect and influence cultural perceptions of Jesus and the other figures in his story. She focuses on the cinematic interpretation of Jesus' relationships with the key people in his life: his family, his friends, and his foes. She examines how these films address theological issues, such as Jesus' identity as both human and divine, political issues, such as the role of the individual in society and the possibility of freedom under political oppression, social issues, such as gender roles and hierarchies, and personal issues, such as the nature of friendship and human sexuality.
Reinhartz's study of Jesus' celluloid incarnations shows how Jesus movies reshape the past in the image of the present. Despite society's profound interest in Jesus as a religious and historical figure, Jesus movies are fascinating not as history but as mirrors of the concerns, anxieties, and values of our own era. As the story of Jesus continues to capture the imagination of filmmakers and moviegoers, he remains as significant a cultural figure today as he was 2000years ago.

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants, Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the first insider's perspective on the phenomenon.

Devices of Curiosity excavates a largely unknown genre of early cinema, the popular-science film. Primarily a work of cinema history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science. Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about scientific topics for general audiences, inspired by a vision of cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era, from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around 1910. Devices of Curiosity also considers how popular-science films exemplify the circulation of knowledge. These films initially relied upon previous traditions such as the magic-lantern lecture for their representational strategies, and they continually had recourse to established visual iconography, but they also created novel visual paradigms and led to the creation of ambitious new film collections. Finally, the book discerns a transit between nonfictional and fictional modes, seeing affinities between popular-science films and certain aspects of fiction films, particularly Louis Feuillade's crime melodramas. This kind of circulation is important for an understanding of the wider relevance of early popular-science films, which impacted the formation of the documentary, educational, and avant-garde cinemas.

Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity. In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants such as "Miss Pride" and "Best Bodies on Campus" as well as why websites such as "Campus Chic" and campus-based etiquette and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and, sometimes, racial and political agendas to resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting terrain of class, race, religion, sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of education, feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity, class, and popular culture have on students, idealized masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself.