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Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time
by Susan DelsonIn the 1940s, folks at bars and restaurants would gather around a Panoram movie machine to watch three-minute films called Soundies, precursors to today's music videos. This history was all but forgotten until the digital era brought Soundies to phones and computer screens—including a YouTube clip starring a 102-year-old Harlem dancer watching her younger self perform in Soundies. In Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time, Susan Delson takes a deeper look at these fascinating films by focusing on the role of Black performers in this little-known genre. She highlights the women performers, like Dorothy Dandridge, who helped shape Soundies, while offering an intimate look at icons of the age, such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. Using previously unknown archival materials—including letters, corporate memos, and courtroom testimony—to trace the precarious path of Soundies, Delson presents an incisive pop-culture snapshot of race relations during and just after World War II.Perfect for readers interested in film, American history, the World War II era, and Black entertainment history, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen and its companion video website (susandelson.com) bring the important contributions of these Black artists into the spotlight once again.
Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon
by Alexander StefaniakWell before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music.Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager.By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.
Show Me Small-Town Missouri
by Jake McCandlessWhere was Mark Twain born? What city has claim to a president who was only president for a day? Who has the best paddling trips in the Ozarks? What about the World's Largest Gift Store? Find these answers and more in Show Me Small-Town Missouri. Award-winning author Jake McCandless, a lover of small towns and adventures, traveled the state in search of amazing local experiences to share this treasure trove of what you can find in often-overlooked towns across Missouri. Featured are 90 sparkling gems found in all four of the state's geographical regions—the Northern Prairie, the Southwest Osage Plain, the Ozarks, and the Bootheel Lowlands. The must-see attractions, activities, restaurants, sweet shops, specialty shops, and unique vacation spots are showcased in full-color images with an easy-to-follow index to help you plan your trip.From galleries to hiking trails, candy factories to wineries, lakeside attractions to the best fireworks displays, Show Me Small-Town Missouri has everything you need to know for a day, weekend, or week full of fun.
Treasury of Ironwork Designs: 469 Examples from Historical Sources (Dover Pictorial Archive)
by Carol Belanger GraftonThe history of Western decorative arts is filled with splendid examples of ornamental ironwork — elaborately wrought designs for gates and fences, finials and posts, banisters, window grilles, signs and marquees, cathedral screens, and a host of other architectural and decorative features. This practical archive brings together nearly 500 outstanding examples of the ironmaker's art. Meticulously rendered in fine black-and-white line art, the designs have been reprinted from rare European and American catalogs and periodicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including L'Art Pour Tous, Art Journal, The Illustrated London News, Harper's Monthly, and others.The designs illustrated here date from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, encompassing the ornate figuration of the Renaissance, the exuberant innovations of Baroque and Rococo artists, and the sinuous designs of nineteenth-century ironworkers inspired by the Art Nouveau aesthetic. Artists, architects, designers, and craftspersons will find this volume an ideal sourcebook of beautiful designs — all royalty-free — from a great tradition in the decorative arts.
Illinois Across the Land
by Lee Mandrell DeeDee Niederhouse-MandrellWhether you find beauty in a remote forest or a sparkling nighttime cityscape, Illinois offers jaw-dropping scenery and opportunities for adventure with stunning landscapes, natural wonders, small town charms, and big city thrills. Join photographers Lee Mandrell and DeeDee Niederhouse-Mandrell on a visual journey across the Prairie state, as they travel from the beaches of Lake Michigan over rolling forested hills and picturesque farmland, through covered bridges, past historic barns and windmills, and up to the edge of the awe-inspiring rocky cliffs of the Garden of the Gods.Featuring more than 140 gorgeous photos, Illinois Across the Land inspires travelers to explore the state and discover historic landmarks at the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historical Site, rushing waterfalls in Starved Rock State Park, native wildlife in Crab Orchard Wildlife Refuge, breathtaking sunsets at Carlyle Lake, and so much more!
Globalizing Music Education: A Framework (Counterpoints: Music and Education)
by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelHow do globalization and internationalization impact music education around the world? By acknowledging different cultural values and priorities, Alexandra Kertz-Welzel's vision challenges the current state of international music education and higher education, which has been dominated by English-language scholarship. Her framework utilizes an interdisciplinary approach and emphasizes the need for developing a pluralistic mode of thinking, while underlining shared foundations and goals. She explores issues of educational transfer, differences in academic discourses worldwide, and the concept of the global mindset to help facilitate much-needed transformations in global music education. This thinking and research, she argues, provides a means for better understanding global transfers of knowledge and ways to avoid culturally and linguistically hegemonic standards. Globalizing Music Education: A Framework is a timely call to action for a more conscious internationalization of music education in which everyone can play a part.
Provenance and Early Cinema (Early Cinema in Review: Proceedings of Domitor)
by Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams and Joshua YumibeRemnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?" This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.
Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures
by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-GutiérrezFor too long, the field of amateur cinema has focused on North America and Europe. In Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, however, editors Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez fill the literature gap by extending that focus and increasing inclusivity. Through carefully curated essays, Salazkina and Fibla-Gutiérrez bring wider meaning and significance to the discipline through their study of alternative cinema in new territories, fueled by different historical and political circumstances, innovative technologies, and ambitious practitioners. The essays in this volume work to realize the radical societal democratization that shows up in amateur cinema around the world. In particular, diverse contributors highlight the significance of amateur filmmaking, the exhibition of amateur films, the uses and availability of film technologies, and the inventive and creative approaches of filmmakers and advocates of amateur film. Together, these essays shed new light on alternative cinema in a wide range of cities and countries where amateur films thrive in the shadow of commercial and conventional film industries.
Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia
by Carrie HertzDress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe. By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sámi communities—artificially divided by national borders and long resisting colonial control—rose up in protests that demanded political recognition and sparked cultural renewal. Within this context of European nation-building, colonial expansion, and Indigenous activism, traditional dress took on special meaning as folk, national, or ethnic minority costumes—complex categories that deserve reexamination today. Through lavishly illustrated and richly detailed case studies, Dressing with Purpose introduces readers to individuals who adapt and revitalize dress traditions to articulate who they are, proclaim personal values and group allegiances, strive for sartorial excellence, reflect critically on the past, and ultimately, reshape the societies they live in.
Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters
by Akin AdesokanEverything Is Sampled examines the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms since the 1980s, focusing on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. Drawing on works of cinema, literature, music, and visual art, Akin Adesokan. addresses two main questions. First, given the various changes that the institutions producing African arts and letters have undergone in the past four decades, how have the representational impulses in these forms fared in comparison with those at work in pervasively digital cultures? Second, how might a long view of these artistic forms across media and in different settings affect our understanding of what counts as art, as text, as authorship? Immersed in digital culture, African artists today are acutely aware of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work and actively bridge them by making ethical choices to shape those circumstances. Through an innovative development and analysis of five modes of creative practice—curation, composition, adaptation, platform, and remix—Everything Is Sampled offers an absorbingly complex yet nuanced approach to appreciating the work of several generations of African writers, directors, and artists. No longer content to just fill a spot in the relay between the conception and distribution of a work, these artists are now also quick to view and reconfigure their works through different modes of creative practice.
The Rite of Spring at 100 (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)
by John ReefWhen Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching influence on world music, performance, and culture. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory.
Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar
by Julia TulkeFlash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people's history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image.This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlights many facets of the "Flaherty experience." The memories of the seminarians reveal how this independent film and media seminar has created a lively and sometimes cantankerous community within and beyond the institutionalized realm of American media culture. Editors Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann have curated a collective polyphonic account that moves freely between funny anecdotes, poetic impressions, critical considerations, poignant recollections, scholarly observations, and artistic insights. Together, the contributors to Flash Flaherty exemplify how the Flaherty Seminar propels shared insights, challenging debates, and actual change in the world of independent media.
The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (Early Cinema In Review: Proceedings Of Domitor Ser.)
by Scott Curtis Joshua Yumibe Tom Gunning Philippe GauthierIn The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.
Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Public Cultures Of The Middle East And North Africa Ser.)
by Kirsten L. ScheidIn Lebanon, the study of modern art—rather than power or hierarchy—has compelled citizens to confront how they define themselves as a postcolonial nation.In Fantasmic Objects, Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship. Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon.
Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943
by Jacqueline Reich and Piero GarofaloWhen Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.
Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian
by Michael WittOriginally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.
Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora)
by Michael T. Martin, David C. Wall and Marilyn YaquintoIvan Dixon's 1973 film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, captures the intensity of social and political upheaval during a volatile period in American history. Based on Sam Greenlee's novel by the same name, the film is a searing portrayal of an American Black underclass brought to the brink of revolution. This series of critical essays situates the film in its social, political, and cinematic contexts and presents a wealth of related materials, including an extensive interview with Sam Greenlee, the original United Artists' press kit, numerous stills from the film, and the original screenplay. This fascinating examination of a revolutionary work foregrounds issues of race, class, and social inequality that continue to incite protests and drive political debate.
The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom
by Alfred L. Martin Jr.Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes.Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness.By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.
The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market
by Colin BurnettChallenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.
Missouri: Where the Rivers Run
by Robert E. HulseyKnown for its scenic rivers, reowned state parks and beautiful vistas, Missouri offers enjoyment for anyone seeking a variety landscapes, natural wonders, charming small towns, and cosmopolitan urban Known for its scenic rivers, renowned state parks and beautiful vistas, Missouri offers enjoyment for anyone seeking a variety of landscapes, natural wonders, charming small towns, and cosmopolitan urban adventures. In Missouri: Where the Rivers Run, follow photographer Robert E. Hulsey on a visual journey across the Show-Me State as he travels from the rolling plains in the northern part of the state to the Ozark Mountains in the south, showcasing the natural heritage along the way. Through these 175 stunning photographs, visit the lush hiking trails at Graham Cave State Park, experience a float trip down the Black River, witness a celebration in Mark Twain's hometown, and get the perfect view of the Cathedral Basilica's painted ceiling. Through the lens of his camera, Robert captures the many wonders of the state and the people who call it home.A beautiful coffee-table book, Missouri: Where the Rivers Run will inspire travelers to explore the splendor and the history of this picturesque Midwest state.
The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television
by Maria San FilippoOften disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism. San Filippo's work moves beyond the subject of heteronormativity and responds to "compulsory monosexuality," where it's not necessarily a couple's gender that is at issue, but rather that an individual chooses one or the other. The B Word transcends dominant relational formation (gay, straight, or otherwise) and brings a discursive voice to the field of queer and film studies.
The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre (Irish Culture, Memory, Place)
by Emilie PineWhat happens when cultural memory becomes a commodity? Who owns the memory? In The Memory Marketplace, Emilie Pine explores how memory is performed both in Ireland and abroad by considering the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history. Analyzing examples from this realm of theatre, Pine focuses on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience. Whose memories are observed in these transactions, and how and why do performances prioritize some memories over others? What does it mean to create, rehearse, perform, and purchase the theatricalization of memory? The Memory Marketplace shows this transaction to be particularly fraught in the theatricalization of traumatic moments of cultural upheaval, such as the child sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. In these performances, the role of empathy becomes key within the marketplace dynamic, and Pine argues that this empathy shapes the kinds of witnesses created. The complexities and nuances of this exchange—subject and witness, spectator and performer, consumer and commodified—provide a deeper understanding of the crucial role theatre plays in shaping public understanding of trauma, memory, and history.
Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
by John Kander Fred EbbThe autobiography, in dialogue, of the composer and lyricist of Chicago and Cabaret as well as a wise and witty memoir of forty years of American musicals.Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb are the longest-running composer-lyricist team in Broadway history, having first joined forces in 1962. The creators of such groundbreaking musicals as Chicago, Cabaret, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, Kander and Ebb have helped to push American musical theater in a more daring direction, both musically and dramatically. Their impact on individual performers has been great as well, starting with the handpicked star of their first musical: an untested nineteen-year-old named Liza Minnelli (who writes of this experience in her introduction).Colored Lights covers the major shows of Kander and Ebb's partnership, from Flora, The Red Menace (starring a then-unknown Liza) to The Visit, due to open on Broadway in 2004. The pages and musicals in between reveal what has made theirs such a long-lived musical partnership--and one so valued by the artists they have worked with. In recounting the genesis and controversies of Cabaret, reflecting on the superstar mentality of such artist as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, and recalling their work with Bob Fosse on Chicago (as well as their views on the blockbuster 2002 film), John Kander and Fred Ebb provide a history not only of their own lives but also of the American musical theater of the late twentieth century.
Up Till Now: The Autobiography
by William Shatner David FisherAfter almost sixty years as an actor, William Shatner has become one of the most beloved entertainers in the world. And it seems as if Shatner is everywhere. In Up Till Now, Shatner sits down with readers and offers the remarkable, full story of his life and explains how he got to be, well, everywhere. It was the original Star Trek series, and later its films, that made Shatner instantly recognizable, called by name---or at least by Captain Kirk's name---across the globe. But Shatner neither began nor has ended his career with that role. From the very start, he took his skills as an actor and put them to use wherever he could. He straddled the classic world of the theater and the new world of television, whether stepping in for Christopher Plummer in Shakespeare's Henry V or staring at "something on the wing" in a classic episode of The Twilight Zone. And since then, he's gone on to star in numerous successful shows, such as T.J. Hooker,Rescue 911, and Boston Legal. William Shatner has always been willing to take risks for his art. What other actor would star in history's first---and probably only---all-Esperanto-language film? Who else would share the screen with thousands of tarantulas, release an album called Has Been, or film a racially incendiary film in the Deep South during the height of the civil rights era? And who else would willingly paramotor into a field of waiting fans armed with paintball guns, all waiting for a chance to stun Captain...er, Shatner?In this touching and very funny autobiography, William Shatner's Up Till Now reveals the man behind these unforgettable moments, and how he's become the worldwide star and experienced actor he is today."It is now Bill Shatner's universe---we just live in it."---New York Daily News
The Worlds of John Wick: The Year's Work at the Continental Hotel (The Year's Work)
by Caitlin G. Watt and Stephen WattEach John Wick film has earned more money and recognition than its predecessor, defying the conventional wisdom about the box office's action movie landscape, normally dominated by superhero movies and science fiction epics.As The Worlds of John Wickexplores, the worldbuilding of John Wick offers thrills that you simply can't find anywhere else. The franchise's plot combines familiar elements of the revenge thriller and crime film with seamlessly coordinated action. One of its most distinctive appeals, however, is the detailed and multifaceted fictional world—or rather, worlds—it constructs. The contributors to this volume consider everything from fight sequences, action aesthetics, and stunts to grief, cinematic space and time, and gender performance to map these worlds and explore how their range and depth make John Wick a hit. A deep dive into this popular neo-noir franchise, The Worlds of John Wickcelebrates and complicates the cult phenomenon that is John Wick.