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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
In the 1970s, '80s and '90s Britain witnessed what many in the
business saw as the second great age of radio. It was a period when
FM radio blossomed and local stations opened and broadcast across
the land. It was a step away from the output of the national
broadcaster, the BBC, which had held a monopoly on the airways
since its inception. Broadcaster, station manager and regulator for
over forty years David Lloyd was very much a part of this
revolution and is, amongst his peers, well placed to tell that
story. Lloyd describes the period as one of innovation, his aim to
create a timeline of radio of this era through to the present day,
to capture those heady days, the characters, the fun and heartache,
life on the air, life off the air. And to revisit those station
launches, company consolidations, the successes and the failures.
Told with the insight of an insider, with his characteristic wit
and a huge dollop of nostalgia, David Lloyd brings to life a unique
age in broadcasting in this fascinating account.
This is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to
badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their
characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in
Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs,
dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially
marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They
commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative
events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular
contexts, but also moves across borders, including those of nation,
religion, genre, and identity. This collaboratively authored book
draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and
sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and
sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based
dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the
hijrascape. This vital study explores the form's changing status
and analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial
practices, to extend ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans
performance.
During a remarkable lifetime, Andrew Sinclair has bridged the
worlds of university and literature, art and cinema. A child of the
Second World War, he has known many of the leading figures of the
past seventy years - ranging from William Golding to Ted Hughes,
Harold Pinter to Francis Bacon, Robert Lowell to Graham Greene, as
well as publishing such classic screenplays as 'The Blue Angel',
'The Third Man' and 'Stagecoach'. He also directed a number of
films including Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' starring Richard
Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole. This unique
`anti-memoires' of episodes and encounters captures new insights
into many of the leading creative talents and stars of their times.
In his own adventures, Andrew became involved in the revolt against
the Suez invasion and overground nuclear tests, the Cuban
revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the 1968 global
student uprisings and finally in the worldwide digital revolution
in education and the arts. Now in his ninth decade, this author of
some 40 books, including the much-lauded The Breaking of Bumbo and
Gog, Andrew Sinclair in the tradition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives
looks back on a rich life and fond memories of the people he has
studied and known.
More than a century after its emergence, classical Hollywood cinema
remains popular today with cinephiles and scholars alike. Resetting
the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited, edited by Philippa Gates
and Katherine Spring, showcases cutting-edge work by renowned
researchers of Hollywood filmmaking of the studio era and proposes
new directions for classical Hollywood studies in the twenty-first
century. Resetting the Scene includes twenty-six accessible
chapters and an extensive bibliography. In Part 1, Katherine
Spring's introduction and David Bordwell's chapter reflect on the
newest methods, technological resources, and archival discoveries
that have galvanized recent research of studio filmmaking. Part 2
brings together close analyses of film style both visual and sonic
with case studies of shot composition, cinematography, and film
music. Part 3 offers new approaches to genre, specifically the film
musical, the backstudio picture, and the B-film. Part 4 focuses on
industry operations, including the origins of Hollywood,
cross-promotion, production planning, and talent management. Part 5
offers novel perspectives on the representation of race, in regard
to censorship, musicals, film noir, and science fiction. Part 6
illuminates forgotten histories of women's labor in terms of
wartime propaganda, below-the-line work, and the evolution of star
persona. Part 7 explores the demise of the studio system but also
the endurance of classical norms in auteur cinema and screenwriting
in the post-classical era. Part 8 highlights new methods for
studying Hollywood cinema, including digital resources as tools for
writing history and analyzing films, and the intersection of film
studies with emergent fields like media industry studies. Intended
for scholars and students of Hollywood film history, Resetting the
Scene intersects with numerous fields consonant with film studies,
including star studies, media industry studies, and critical race
theory.
Stars and Silhouettes traces the history of the cameo as it emerged
in twentieth-century cinema. Although the cameo has existed in film
culture for over a century, Joceline Andersen explains that this
role cannot be strictly defined because it exists as a
constellation of interactions between duration and recognition,
dependent on who is watching and when. Even audiences of the
twenty-first century who are inundated by the lives of movie stars
and habituated to images of their personal friends on screens
continue to find cameos surprising and engaging. Cameos reveal the
links between our obsession with celebrity and our desire to
participate in the powerful cultural industries within contemporary
society. Chapter 1 begins with the cameo's precedents in visual
culture and the portrait in particular-from the Vitagraph
executives in the 1910s to the emergence of actors as movie stars
shortly after. Chapter 2 explores the fan-centric desire for
behind-the-scenes visions of Hollywood that accounted for the
success of cameo-laden, Hollywood-set films that autocratic studios
used to make their glamorous line-up of stars as visible as
possible. Chapter 3 traces the development of the cameo in comedy,
where cameos began to show not only glimpses of celebrities at
their best but also of celebrities at their worst. Chapter 4
examines how the television guest spot became an important way for
stars and studios to market both their films and stars from other
media in trades that reflected an increasingly integrated
mediascape. In Chapter 5, Andersen examines auteur cameos and the
cameo as a sign of authorship. Director cameos reaffirm the fan's
interest in the film not just as a stage for actors but as a forum
for the visibility of the director. Cameos create a participatory
space for viewers, where recognizing those singled out among extras
and small roles allows fans to demonstrate their knowledge. Stars
and Silhouettes belongs on the shelf of every scholar, student, and
reader interested in film history and star studies.
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