- Table View
- List View
City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931
by Daniel P. SchwartzCinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint.In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.
Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film
by S. J. PerelmanGathered for the first time: one of America's great humorists revisits the books and movies from his youth—often with some embarrassment—in this complete, 22-piece collectionFrom October 1948 to October 1953, The New Yorker published humorist S. J. Perelman&’s &“Cloudland Revisited&” series: 22 reviews of once-popular books and silent films whose expiration dates had passed. All but forgotten even at the time, they were nonetheless part of Perelman&’s youth and made an indelible mark on him.In the comic genius&’s biting satire they live once again:Gertrude Atherton&’s sensationalist fantasy Black OxenSax Rohmer&’s supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchuthe &“underwater&” silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the SeaEdgar Rice Burrough&’s 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apesand George Barr McCutcheon&’s 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark—the Game of Thrones of its era—which launched numerous sequels and film adaptations The complete series is collected here for the first time. With self-deprecating humor and frequent embarrassment, Perelman reflects on how rereading and rewatching brings us in contact with how we, like an old book or film, have both changed and remained the same. This paperback includes a tribute to Perelman&’s art by another beloved New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.
Clueless: Totally Delicious Recipes Inspired by the Film
by Kim LaidlawClueless comes to the kitchen with this officially licensed cookbook, featuring 50 totally delicious recipes, iconic movie quotes, full-color images from the film, and much more. Use it to make your &’90s-themed gatherings even more legit, or for meal ideas anytime you&’re feeling a little clueless. Witty, charming, privileged Cher Horowitz leads the pack at her Beverly Hills high school in Amy Heckerling&’s cult classic Clueless. Through the eyes of style-obsessed Cher, we join in the fun of makeovers, the rollercoaster ride of crushes and friendships, and the social hierarchy of high school. Inspired by the snacks, drinks, and meals highlighted throughout the film, the Southern California healthy eating craze, and the best of the 1990s, the recipes in this official cookbook are tribute to the adventures and calamities of Cher, Dionne, Tai, Murray, Josh, Travis, and all the rest of our favorite Clueless characters. From take-it-with-you options like Gnarly Skateboarder&’s Breakfast Sandos to homemade versions of snack foods that litter the lunch tables at Cher&’s school (Off-the-Diet Popcorn, anyone?), the recipes in this cookbook bring the personalities and narrative of Clueless to life. Some of the featured recipes include: Beverly Hills Yogurt Parfaits Party in the Valley Pretzel Bites Family Dinner Rosemary Focaccia Gooey Baked Brie with Crudites Total Betty Turkey &“Bacon Experience&” BLTA So-Lo-Cal Chopped Chicken, Avocado, and Herb Salad Totally Not Buggin&’ Baked Goat Cheese Salad with Herb Vinaigrette and Crostini Chuckleheads Asparagus Quiche Grade-Changing Grilled Spinach Pesto Chicken Breasts Extra Credit Steak Caesar Avocado Wrap Tai Lattice Peach Pie Cute Plaid Lemon Sugar Cookies Full-on Monet Raspberry Vanilla Fro-Yo Not-the-Mall-Food-Court Smoothies Root Beer &“Pool Party&” Floats Perfect for families and fans of the film, Clueless: The Official Cookbook is a celebration of the '90s and a tribute to an enduring comedy. So dive in, eat up, and enjoy!
Collaborative Screenwriting and Story Development: A Global Guide for Writers, Story Teams, and Creative Executives
by Marc HandlerThis is a comprehensive guide to teach writing and story development from a collaborative global perspective. This book teaches writers how to take full advantage of emerging opportunities, both locally and globally. With an increasing number of international co-productions and many screenwriters now working collaboratively in writers rooms and development groups, author Marc Handler explains how to work cooperatively with others to break stories, plan seasons, create characters, and build series. To succeed, readers will learn how to give and receive feedback effectively, adapt to the style and constraints of executives and brands, and contribute to the team building process, all within an increasingly global media industry that is in constant flux. This book will help readers develop a global perspective, ensuring that they are prepared for new opportunities as they arise. Marc Handler provides cultural insight and understanding as he describes the fundamentals as well as advanced story skills. This book is essential reading for students taking classes such as Screenwriting Fundamentals, Writing for Film and TV, Introduction to Television Writing, and Advanced Screenwriting, as well as aspiring and early career screenwriters, showrunners, producers, and creative executives.
Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder (Spin Offs)
by Amelie HastieFor decades, generations of television fans have been enraptured by Lt. Columbo, played by Peter Falk, as he unravels clues to catch killers who believe they are above the law. In her investigation of the 1970s series cocreated by Richard Levinson and William Link, Amelie Hastie explores television history through an emphasis on issues of stardom, authorship, and its interconnections with classical and New Hollywood cinema. Through close textual analysis, attentive to issues of class relations and connections to other work by Falk as well as Levinson and Link, Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder sees American television as an intertextual system, from its origins as a commercial broadcast medium to its iterations within contemporary streaming platforms. Ultimately, Hastie argues, in the titular detective’s constant state of learning about cultural trends and media forms, Columbo offers viewers the opportunity to learn with him and, through his tutelage, to become detectives of television itself.
Commercial Dance: An Essential Guide
by Anthony R. TrahearnThis is an exploration of the vital and rapidly evolving world of Commercial Dance, tracing the evolution and merging of Hip-Hop, Club and Jazz dance styles from the music videos of the early 1980s, to today's huge influence on pop music and dance in a multi-media culture. Chapters including ‘Iconic Moments’ and ‘Main Movers’ contextualise and analyse culturally significant works and choreographers. With direct contributions from an international array of industry leading dancers, choreographers and creatives - including JaQuel Knight (Beyonce’s choreographer), Rich + Tone Talauega (Madonna & Michael Jackson collaborators), Rebbi Rosie (Rihanna’s dancer), Dean Lee (Janet Jackson’s choreographer) and Kiel Tutin (BLACKPINK’s choreographer) - this book shines a light on the creatives in the Commercial Dance industry who have made significant impacts, not just on the world of dance but on popular culture itself. Chapters discussing dance history, copyright law, inclusivity and dance class culture as well as additional contributions from dance scholars enable this book to give credence to Commercial Dance as a legitimate academic area of study. This is a complete and comprehensive textbook for all dance students at any level of study on college, university or conservatory courses.
The Companions of Doctor Who: The Best Of Him (Doctor Who)
by David Bushman"Don't be alone, Doctor," Amy Pond tells the Eleventh Doctor in "The Angels Take Manhattan," and of course the irony is that in one sense the Doctor is always alone--a Gallifreyan whose regenerative powers mean he will outlast nearly everyone near and dear to him -- while at the same time he is rarely without one or more trusted companion by his side. This is a book about those companions--those fortunate few who accompany him on his journeys through space and time on--to quote the Ninth Doctor--"the trip of a lifetime." The editors of The Villains of Doctor Who are back with a new anthology of essays--paeans, really--to Donna Noble, Sarah Jane Smith, Rose Tyler, Wilfred Mott, Chang Lee, Clara Oswald, and more. Did your favorite companion make the cut? You're going to have to read to find out!
Composing for Silent Film
by Jack Curtis DubowskyComposing for Silent Film offers insight, information, and techniques for contemporary composition, arrangement, and live score performance for period silent film. A specialized music composition guide, this book complements existing film scoring and contemporary music composition texts. This book helps today’s composers better understand and correctly interpret period silent film, and to create and perform live scores that align with films’ original intentions, so that audiences notice and grasp fine points of the original film. Composing for Silent Film analyzes period silent film and its conventions – from Delsarte acting gestures to period fascinations and subtexts. As a practical composition text, it weighs varying approaches, including improvisation, through-scoring, "mickey-mousing," handling dialogue, and dividing roles amongst players. It steers composers towards informed understanding of silent film, and encourages them to deploy contemporary styles and techniques in exciting ways.For clarity and concision, examples are limited to nine canonical silents: Metropolis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mark of Zorro, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Black Pirate, Nosferatu, The Phantom Carriage, Daisy Doodad’s Dial, and The Golem.
Con Artists in Cinema: Self-Knowledge, Female Power, and Love (Routledge Focus on Film Studies)
by Joseph H. KupferThis book examines the con artist film as a genre, exploring its main features while also addressing variations within it. The volume explores three diverse themes of the con artist film: edification, self-awareness, and liberation through con games; the femme fatale as con artist; and romantic love as a plot point. Analyzing movies such as Matchstick Men (2003), House of Games (1987), Body Heat (1981), The Last Seduction (1994), Birthday Girl (2001), and The Game (1997), the book also explores their psychological investigation of the con artist figure, the con artist’s mark, and how the dynamic between these roles implicates us as the audience. It also addresses the con artist film genre’s close association with neo-noir, especially through the femme fatale figure, investigating and updating the rich tradition of noir film. Demonstrating the range and flexibility of this understudied genre, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, ethics, and those studying the representation of women in film..
Contemporary Dance Choreography and Spectatorship: Embodied Emotion
by Lucía Piquero ÁlvarezThis book offers an approach which unites choreographic and spectatorial perspectives, and argues for dance itself—its materials, its structures—as a medium of emotional communication. Contemporary dance often seems to contend with issues of understanding, regularly being “read” in “languages” which alienate it. Even if emotion seems a significant part of people’s engagement with dance, its workings are often surrounded by an air of mysticism. Engaging with these issues, this study investigates the experience of emotion in Euro-American contemporary dance theatre. It questions its dependence on the artist’s personal emotions, and the assumption that it is mediated by representational meaning. Instead, this book proposes that the emotional import of dance emerges from an interplay between perceptual properties and symbolic elements in an embodied affective cognitive experience. This experience includes the background of the spectator as well as the context of work, choreographer, performer(s) and other creative agents.
Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage: or, Serious Laughter
by David GramContemporary Farce on the Global Stage provides audiences and practitioners a detailed survey of how the genre of farce has evolved in the 21st century. Often dismissed as frivolous, farce speaks a universal language, with the power to incisively interrogate our world through laughter.Unlike farces of the past, where a successful resolution was a given and we could laugh uproariously at adulterous behaviour, farce no longer guarantees an audience a happy ending where everything works out. Contemporary farce is no longer ‘diverting us’ with laughter. It is reflecting the fractured world around us. With a foreword by award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig, the book introduces readers to the Mechanics of Farce, and the ‘Four Ps,’ which are key elements for understanding, appreciating, and exploring the form. The Five Doors to Contemporary Farce identify five major categories into which farces fall. Behind each door are a wide selection of plays, modern and contemporary examples from all over the world, written by a diverse group of playwrights who traverse gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Supplementing each section are comments, observations, and reflections from award-winning playwrights, directors, actors, designers, dramaturgs, and scholars.Designed specifically to give theatre-makers a rounded understanding that will underpin their own productions, this book will also be of use to theatre and performance studies students.
Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe: Beyond Regime and Refuge (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights)
by Fiona Barclay Beatrice IveyThis book engages with current debates around refugeedom by examining cultural production that represents and interrogates the construction of refugees and the refugee experience on the borders of contemporary Europe. The refugee subject is produced by discursive regimes and border practices inherited from colonial projects that construct the diametrically opposed concepts of citizen and refugee, and their attendant administrative sub-categories. In the early twenty-first century these categories have been strengthened by the politicisation of forced migration and the hardening of ‘Fortress Europe’. While the predominant response to the increasing numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe has been to harden the borders (regime), on the one hand, or to stress the common humanity of those displaced (refuge), on the other, this volume argues that both approaches result in refugees becoming objectified, othered, and abstracted as vectors ofexile. It explores what recent cultural production can achieve in engaging with and representing issues of dispossession, detention and resettlement, and probes the limits of artistic potential to mediate the refugee experience. It examines transnational approaches to cultural production that both occupy and exceed the borders of Europe, with a focus on borderscapes, spaces of detention, and (neo-)colonialism. Bringing together original contributions from an international range of scholars, it analyses contemporary textual and visual representations of forced migration to argue that other forms of solidarity and hospitality towards refugees in Europe and beyond must be possible.
The Content Production Business: Legal, Economic and Creative Basics for Producers
by Steve LevitanThis book goes beyond the technical steps in the process of making film, TV, and media material, examining what it means to be an ongoing supplier of content to the marketplace and how to become one. Steve Levitan brings insights and experience from his lifelong career producing in the content industry, where he has also acted as a professional advisor to content makers, distributors and providers, whilst setting up his own production company. Producing as a Business offers strategic, tactical, financial, legal and marketing insights for the successful establishment of content creation enterprises. Readers will gain insight into how to avoid starting from square one with each project, while also learning how to maintain a meaningful level of ownership and build a revenue stream that can sustain a core operation, helping establish them as a “player” in the industry. This text is aimed at the international production industry, with real examples referred to throughout. Film, television, and media production students who are looking to understandthe business of producing, as well as first-time producers who are already familiar with the basics of the production process, will benefit from an examination of the building blocks that form lasting production companies.
Conversations with Women Showrunners
by Marygrace O'SheaFeaturing over forty interviews with America’s leading showrunners, this book provides unique perspectives and insights into the TV industry, demystifying the craft, backbone, skill, strategies, challenges, and persistence it takes to succeed in Hollywood and internationally. Marygrace O’Shea’s conversations with women showrunners are part master craft lesson, part backstage pass, part career guide from the geniuses who create the best TV. The book shines a light on what it truly means to be a showrunner working in the industry today, and reveals how to navigate a career and a future in the global marketplace. Interviews include Angela Kang (The Walking Dead), Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Barbara Hall (Madam Secretary), Charlotte Brown (Rhoda), Chris Nee (Doc McStuffins), Elizabeth Berger (This is Us), Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time), Ilene Chaiken (The L Word), Liz Meriwether (The New Girl, The Dropout), Liz Tigelaar (Tiny Beautiful Things, Little Fires Everywhere), Marta Kauffman (Friends, Grace and Frankie), Tracy Oliver (Harlem, Awkward Black Girl), Sierra Teller Ornelas (Rutherford Falls), and many more. Ideal for professional and aspiring television writers, as well as students of screenwriting, film and TV, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the art, craft and business of creating television.
Creative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship: Concert Dramaturgy and Project Development for the Performing Arts
by Andreas SonningCreative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship: Concert Dramaturgy and Project Development for the Performing Arts offers a conceptual and applied introduction to the musical and dramaturgical challenges involved in developing and producing concerts. Drawing from over three decades of real-world experience and a range of international case studies, the author explores new models for cooperation between artists, cultural institutions, governments, and businesses, arguing for the importance of rooting the concert production process in artistic and ethical values. The book presents essential knowledge and techniques to meet the demand for music and stage performances across genres, arenas, formats, and distribution channels. Relevant to a wide range of students and professionals in music and the performing arts, Creative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship marries theory with practice, providing a framework for readers to develop the creative entrepreneurial practices essential for success in today’s music industry.
The Creative Economy: Arts, Cultural Value and Society in Practice (Discovering the Creative Industries)
by Amanda J. Ashley Carolyn G. Loh Matilda Rose Bubb Shoshanah B.D. Goldberg-MillerThe creative economy permeates our everyday lives, shaping where we live, what we buy, and how we interact with others. Looking at dimensions of people, place, policy, and market forces, the book offers a comprehensive perspective on arts and culture, in both economic and social life.The book explores the multifaceted components that make up this complex field. Underlying this journey is the throughline of diversity, equity, and inclusion as watchwords of today’s global paradigm. Capital, gentrification, pay disparities, and the hegemonic confines of cultural production are a few of the key issues analyzed. Using case studies and stories of artists and creatives from the worlds of fashion, design, music, and the media arts, the book also delves into gastronomy, literature, architecture, and theatre—presenting a nuanced look at the ways in which the creative sector impacts the world today. Readers will benefit from features such as key takeaways, discussion questions, and activities, throughout the chapters.Students, scholars, policymakers, and the general public will find this a valuable resource. This book offers the reader a chance not only to understand the cultural and creative industries, but to internalize its elements and embrace the creative spirit that imbues the sector.
Creativity in Indian Dance: Uday Shankar's Autumn Years, 1960 – 1977
by Sulakshana SenHeralded as the father of Indian Creative Dance, and India’s cultural ambassador, Uday Shankar (1900–1977) was a dancer and choreographer who created a vibrant new Indian dance form without any ethno-regional centricity. Over time, Shankar’s art evolved from being a representation of the exotic East, to a narrative of modern India. This book provides a detailed study of Shankar’s works in his autumn years (1960–1977), which remain largely un-documented. It discusses the form and content of Shankar’s style, and its basic tenets - something hitherto unexplored. It also analyses Rabindranath Tagore and Uday Shankar as path-breakers of the duality in Indian performing arts traditions. The productions explored in detail are Samanya Kshati (1961), Shankar’s tour of USA, Canada and Europe in 1962, and India’s cultural diplomacy, as well as Prakriti Ananda (1966), Shankar’s last tour of USA (1968), his last masterpiece, Shankarscope (1970, 1971 and 1972), together with Shankar's legacy. This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of dance history, art history, critical theory, artists' biographies, creative arts studies, theatre and Asian performing arts studies as well as students of International Relations theory – primarily those interested in cultural diplomacy and soft power.
Critical Perspectives on the Hallmark Channel: Countdown to Romance
by Carlen LavigneThis multinational, multidisciplinary collection of essays focuses on Hallmark Channel movies and Hallmark’s position in the changing North American media landscape.This book covers the ‘Countdown to Christmas’ offerings, year-round productions, made-for-TV mysteries and romances, Hallmark’s use of specific filming locations, and its relationship to viewer desires. Chapters examine Hallmark’s position in a changing sociopolitical context and the tensions the company must navigate in creating more “progressive” content; they discuss issues of gender, race, sexuality, and place, as well as analyzing the extensive ranges and reactions of social media participants and interrogating the nature of Hallmark’s popularity.Suitable for scholars and students of film and tv and popular culture studies, this is a multifaceted look at both Hallmark and its viewers at a particular moment of Hallmark’s market dominance.
Cultural Leadership in Practice: Beyond Arts Management and Cultural Policy (Discovering the Creative Industries)
by Steven HadleyWhat do cultural leaders really think about the problems they, and the arts and cultural sector, face? This book brings global leaders in the cultural field into dialogue with academics and experts to offer profound insight and perspectives on the complex issues the cultural sector faces in a rapidly accelerating and destabilising twenty-first century context.The book engages directly with leaders in the arts and cultural sector, bridging the gap between academia, policy and practice. Each chapter sheds new light on national cultural policy contexts, offering different perspectives on arts subsidy, audiences, the cultural workforce, heritage, artform development and how cultural leadership functions in a fast-changing local, national and international context. Interviews are conducted by academics and experts with significant knowledge and understanding of the arts management and cultural policy field, who ask critical and probing questions. Featuring interviews with an impressively international range of senior figures from the cultural sector, from the Royal Opera House, BMW, Bloomberg and Onassis Foundation and covering countries including the UK, Germany, Chile, Singapore, Greece, USA, Serbia and Ireland, the book gives a truly global overview of cultural leadership from leaders who are open to question, critique and challenge. Each chapter offers a unique and fascinating insight into the mind of a leader in their field, with their experience ranging from huge participatory events featuring tens of thousands of people to the visual arts, opera, the Turner Prize and the #blacklivesmatter movement.This book will be essential reading for reflective cultural leaders around the world, as well as a useful resource for students and scholars involved with arts and cultural management and policy.
Cultural Policy and Management in Borderlands: Creating on the Edge (ENCATC Advances in Cultural Management and Policy)
by Solène MariéThis book uncovers the processes at play in the development of cultural policies, projects and networks in spaces at the edge of their countries, marked by their proximity with a borderline.On a subject which is studied mainly in North America and Western Europe and based on individual case studies, its originality lies in offering a comparative view on the subject, as well as in comparing a European case – the France-Germany borderlands – to a South American case – the Brazil-Uruguay borderlands. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, the author develops an analysis of the formal and informal processes and networks which sustain this cultural action, looking at the relative contribution of processes led by institutions, cultural agents and the civil society.This book provides theoretical tools for the analysis of the way cultural ecosystems function in borderlands and is valuable reading for scholars of cultural policy, geography and arts management.
The Daily Family Conversation Starter: 365 Ways to Nurture Connection, Inspire Play, and Empower Your Kids
by Katie ClemonsYour stronger family connection starts here with just 5 minutes of conversation each day. The Daily Family Conversation Starter contains 365 easy and imaginative ways to check in with your kids, develop their growth mindset, and get both serious and silly—together! Every interactive activity and open-ended conversation prompt will help you build the family bond you've always dreamed of.Prompts like these will get your family talking—and you may find it hard to get them to stop!Who made you laugh today?What would you do if you had a tail?Why do you think it's important to try new things, even if it means you get knocked down?In addition to engaging conversation starters, you'll find inside:Easy activities for working togetherFill-in-the-blank questions that everyone can answerSpontaneous games that infuse whimsy into your family's daily routineMini essays to help your family discuss difficult topics or new concepts Whether commuting together, sitting at the dinner table, or preparing for bedtime, The Daily Family Conversation Starter invites you to share, discover, and laugh together as you create family memories that last a lifetime.
Dance Production: Design and Technology
by Jeromy HopgoodDance Production: Design and Technology, Second Edition is an introduction to the skills needed to plan, design, and execute the technical aspects of a dance production.Covering a broad range of topics, author Jeromy Hopgood takes the reader through the process of producing dance from start to finish. Part I addresses the collaborative process, business and organizational concerns for dance companies, planning the production, and the relationship between dance and performance spaces/staging methods. In Part II, each unique production area is examined, including production and stage management, sound, costume and makeup, scenery and props, lighting, and projection/video design. Each design area is divided into two chapters – the first introducing key concepts, and the second focusing on the process of creating the design. Part III brings back the popular quick reference guides from the first edition, providing an expanded and revised tool to bridge the language gap between the worlds of theatrical production and dance, and ensure productive communication across the different fields. This second edition features updated information on technology and processes, two new chapters on touring and non-traditional productions, more information on arts management within dance production, a comprehensive look at dance and video (including remote/streaming performances, as well as dance film), and additional chapter projects throughout the book.This unique book approaches the process of staging a dance production from a balanced perspective, making it an essential resource for choreographers, theatre designers, dancers, and management personnel alike, including for use in Dance and Dance Production courses.
Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy
by Halifu Osumare<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Times New Roman",serif">A Black dancer chronicles her career as a scholar writing the stories of global hip-hop and Black culture <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">Dancing the Afrofuture is the story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitioned from performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar. Following the personal journey of her artistic development told in Dancing in Blackness, Halifu Osumare now reflects on how that first career—which began during the 1960s Black Arts Movement—has influenced her growth as an academic, tracing her teaching and research against a political and cultural backdrop that extends to the twenty-first century with Black Lives Matter and a potent speculative Afrofuture. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .5in;line-height:normal">Osumare describes her decision to step away from full-time involvement in dance and community activism to earn a doctorate in American studies from the University of Hawai‘i. She emulated the model of her mentor Katherine Dunham by studying and performing hula, and her research on hip-hop youth culture took her from Hawai‘i to Africa, Europe, and South America as a professor at the University of California, Davis. Throughout her scholarly career, Osumare has illuminated the resilience of African-descendant peoples through a focus on performance and the lens of Afrofuturism. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .5in;line-height:normal">Respected for her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, Osumare shares experiences from her second career that show the potential of scholarship in revealing and documenting underrecognized stories of Black dance and global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields of study while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-present that is transforming into the Afrofuture. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a University of California, Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship Award.
Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice (Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image)
by Mercedes VicenteThe Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.
David Lynch: Sonic Style (Filmmakers and Their Soundtracks)
by Reba WissnerDirector David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on the role of creating the sounds himself. This concise study explores what makes Lynch’s sonic imprint distinct, breaking down three different sound styles that create Lynch’s sound aesthetic across his films. Showing how sound offers new insights into the aesthetic and narrative work of Lynch’s filmmaking, this book highlights new dimensions in the work of a key American auteur and deconstructs the process of building a unique sound world.