This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China's rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.

This comprehensive manual shows the who, what, when, why and how of comedy improvisation. It is a complete improv curriculum program divided into twenty-four class-length units. The book is divided into four parts including: Introduction explains what improv is and how to create an improv team. Improv Skills shows some basic rules, physicalization, characterization, teamwork, use of suggestion. Structuring describes who, what and how to make improv structures. Strategies gives hints and tips for evaluating performance and putting on a show. Unlike other improv books, this book provides the tools to start an improv team or club at your school. Includes a lesson plan and a unique section that shows how to structure and create your own new improv games. Also includes appendices with many games and exercises. Sample chapters: What is improv?, Creating an improv Team, Improv Foundations, Rules of the Stage, Physicalization, Characterization, Teamwork, Use of Suggestion, Games, and many more.

This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz' durational sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking studies of African-American working people.

In 'Pom-Poms Up , From Puberty to the Pythons and beyond, the British born, American raised and RADA trained actress reveals her life, loves and laughs as the 'Glamorous PYTHON GIRL' who famously kept her cool and a straight face in the heat of the humour generated by Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and the late Chapman, The 'MONTY' Pythons.