Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s (Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.
What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame? Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image. This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.
What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame? Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image. This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.
Performance Anxiety in Media Culture explores the culture of performance anxiety in the media-saturated contemporary world. It uses comparative case studies including film, social media, and popular music to examine the ways that personal concern regarding self-presentation becomes transformed into shared cultural expressions through the use of media technologies. Three initial chapters are dedicated to exploring the work of Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard as critical for a thorough understanding of how implications of a range of recent transformations in the methods for staging social performances are staged and in the ways that they are experienced and interpreted by others. Three subsequent chapters explore diverse case studies in the culture of performance anxiety: the representation of such anxieties in recent French cinema, the appearance of them in the world of fashion-based 'outfit of the day' blogs, and the attempt to refine a more fixed social persona in the nostalgic culture of rockabilly music.
Popular media has become a common means by which students understand both the present and the past. Consequently, more teachers are using various forms of popular culture as pedagogical tools in the history classroom. With their emphasis on issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, sex, race, gender, and violence, social problem films, or “message movies,” offer a compelling look at the eras in which they were made. In order to facilitate the use of social problem films as learning tools, however, teachers of history need a dependable resource. Teaching History with Message Movies is a guide for teaching US history using these films as vivid historical illustrations and tools for student engagement. In addition to covering key themes and concepts, this volume provides an overview of significant issues and related films, a tutorial in using film in historical methodology, user guides for thinking about social problems on screen, and sample exercises and assignments for direct classroom use. Focusing on the issues that plaguing society, the book draws on films such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), The Snake Pit (1948), Silkwood (1983) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), among others. This resource enables teachers to effectively use films to examine key social and cultural issues, concepts, and influences in their historical context. Teaching History with Message Movies will be an invaluable asset to any teacher of history in middle- and secondary school settings, as well as at the undergraduate level.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In The Digital Logic of Death, Steven Pustay skillfully makes visible the immensely important but often overlooked role that moving images play in shaping our understanding of mortality. This relationship, he argues, is made all the more urgent by the technologies of the digital age, which have profoundly altered our ability to represent and contemplate death through moving images, resulting in an entirely new cultural logic of death. To draw out this new logic, Pustay presents accessible readings of otherwise dense and difficult philosophical approaches to death – such as those found in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory – by reading them through the lens of contemporary media. From art-house films like Irréversible and The Fountain to blockbusters like the Matrix trilogy, from television commercials for M&M's to pay-cable dramas like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, from first-person shooters like Bioshock to indie-games like LIMBO, Pustay shows how moving images have shifted our understanding of death in general and our recognition of our own finiteness in particular.
Discusses the aesthetic appeal, production history, philosophical themes, and enduring importance of the groundbreaking 1980s television series. There may be no more iconic image of mid-1980s network television than Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs speeding down Biscayne Boulevard in Crockett's sleek black Ferrari on Miami Vice. With its unprecedented $1.3 million-per-episode budget and executive producer Michael Mann at the helm, Miami Vice brought feature film production values to prime time and redefined the television police drama. In Miami Vice author Steven Sanders argues that the show's themes, narratives, visual realization, and sound design created a new standard of crime television that has its roots in classic film noir and neo-noir. In chapter 1 Sanders describes the social, political, and cultural background that led Anthony Yerkovich, creator of Miami Vice, and Mann to use Miami and its beaches not merely as a backdrop but as a character in its own right. Along with the show's visual aspects, Sanders identifies themes of ambiguity, alienation, personal identity, and irony that came to define the distinctive "TV noir" style of Miami Vice. In chapter 2, Sanders discusses four key episodes to examine the existentialist and postmodern themes that can be found in their story lines and visual style. In chapter 3, Sanders considers questions of authenticity, redemption, and politics in Miami Vice, with reference to episodes that demonstrate the show's attention to the political corruption and intrigue surrounding the war on drugs. In the final chapter, Sanders offers a novel explanation of why Miami Vice matters to film and video scholars. Miami Vice's visual and musical appeal, cultural resonance, and topicality made it absorbing entertainment in its own day; Sanders proves that its exploration of social, moral, political, and philosophical issues make it worth watching twenty-five years later. Fans of the show and scholars of television history and American popular culture will appreciate this illuminating look at Miami Vice.
Citizen Kane • Boogie Nights • Sunset Boulevard • My Fair Lady • Almost Famous • Jaws • A Hard Day's Night • Lord of the Rings • Monsoon Wedding • Apocalypse Now Redux • Moulin Rouge • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid • A Beautiful Mind • Shakespeare in Love THEY'RE NOT JUST MOVIES ANYMORE. THEY'RE DVDs. Supplements...special collector's edition...extras...Words that set the heart pounding of every DVD lover. But how do you decide which DVDs to buy? Where do you begin collecting? Which special features are really special? What commentaries are informative or entertaining? Which disks are worth your time and money? Here at last is the portable, one-of-a-kind DVD buyer's guide -- from veteran film and television critics Steven H. Scheuer and Alida Brill-Scheuer. Director/star/crew audio commentaries • Outtakes • Filmographies and biographies • Alternate takes, music, and endings • Celebrity interviews • Deleted scenes • Trailers • Lost footage • Hidden features and Easter eggs • Animated menus • Production notes • Storyboards • Promotional art • DVD-rom extras • Behind-the-scenes footage • Screenplays • Souvenir booklets • and a special afterword on the best DVDs for kids
Includes profiles of African-American performing artists. Provides brief biographies, subject indexes, further reading suggestions and general index. Part of a 10-volume set--each volume devoted to the contributions of African Americans in a particular cultural field. This text contains profiles of some 190 performing artists from choreographer Alvin Ailey to hip hop producer Dr. Dre (nee Andre Young). Each entry provides a biographical sketch of the artist's career and lists readings and other materials of interest. The contributions of musicians receive comparatively greater coverage than other artistic endeavors.
One of the Best Technology Books of 2020—Financial Times “Levy’s all-access Facebook reflects the reputational swan dive of its subject. . . . The result is evenhanded and devastating.”—San Francisco Chronicle “[Levy’s] evenhanded conclusions are still damning.”—Reason “[He] doesn’t shy from asking the tough questions.”—The Washington Post “Reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley did not have to reach far for its satire.”—NPR.org The definitive history, packed with untold stories, of one of America’s most controversial and powerful companies: Facebook As a college sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from its first, modest iteration. In light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing “fake news” accounts, the handling of its users’ personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO—who has enormous power over what the world sees and says—never has a company been more central to the national conversation. Millions of words have been written about Facebook, but no one has told the complete story, documenting its ascendancy and missteps. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life, or the imperative of this book to document the unchecked power and shocking techniques of the company, from growing at all costs to outmaneuvering its biggest rivals to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram, to developing a platform so addictive even some of its own are now beginning to realize its dangers. Based on hundreds of interviews from inside and outside Facebook, Levy’s sweeping narrative of incredible entrepreneurial success and failure digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.
Examines the work of Michael Mann, Hollywood director through a critical study of his film style and its relationship to genre, film criticism, auteurism, and historical context. This book covers Mann's filmography, from his beginning in television to his film adaptation of the television series "Miami Vice".
Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s (Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.
Success didn't come easily to award-winning Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro. He experienced constant rejections in auditions for roles when he first started to pursue an acting career. It wasn't until he moved to Los Angeles that he started getting parts, starting with small ones in films like Big Top Pee Wee and eventually leading to a breakout role in The Usual Suspects. When he won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role in the movie Traffic, he was only the third Puerto Rican American to win an acting Oscar. Read all about del Toro in this full-color biography.
Biomateriomics is the holistic study of biological material systems. While such systems are undoubtedly complex, we frequently encounter similar components -- universal building blocks and hierarchical structure motifs -- which result in a diverse set of functionalities. Similar to the way music or language arises from a limited set of music notes and words, we exploit the relationships between form and function in a meaningful way by recognizing the similarities between Beethoven and bone, or Shakespeare and silk. Through the investigation of material properties, examining fundamental links between processes, structures, and properties at multiple scales and their interactions, materiomics explains system functionality from the level of building blocks. Biomateriomics specifically focuses the analysis of the role of materials in the context of biological processes, the transfer of biological material principles towards biomimetic and bioinspired applications, and the study of interfaces between living and non-living systems. The challenges of biological materials are vast, but the convergence of biology, mathematics and engineering as well as computational and experimental techniques have resulted in the toolset necessary to describe complex material systems, from nano to macro. Applying biomateriomics can unlock Nature’s secret to high performance materials such as spider silk, bone, and nacre, and elucidate the progression and diagnosis or the treatment of diseases. Similarly, it contributes to develop a de novo understanding of biological material processes and to the potential of exploiting novel concepts in innovation, material synthesis and design.
Tens of thousands of US soldiers and untold millions of Koreans died in this war the first major arena of the East-West conflict. This concise international history of the war offers a new approach to its understanding, tracing its origins and dynamics to the interplay between modern Korean history and twentieth century world history. The narrative also uniquely examines the social history of the conflict, and includes material on the newly racially integrated US fighting forces, war and disease, women and war and life in the Prisoner of War camps. While most surveys stop at 1953, with the signing of the armistice, Steven Hugh Lee carries the story through to the Geneva Conference in the spring of 1954 the last major international effort before recent years to negotiate a permanent peace for the Korean peninsula.
This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.
Drawing on decades of professional practice and teaching experience, Steven L. Cantor's Professional and Practical Considerations for Landscape Design explains the field of landscape architecture, outlining with authority how to turn drawings of designs into creative, purposeful, and striking landscapes and landforms in today's world. This comprehensive guide consists of everything a young professional might encounter from conception through final project archiving, ensuring readers have both the tools necessary to keep up with advancements in the field and the practical business knowledge to build life-long partnerships. Each of the book's concise chapters emphasize a specific aspect of landscape architecture practice, from the administration of designs for contracts, areas of practice, human resources, marketing, construction materials, sustainability and ethics. Each chapter is written in a style that best suits the material. Alongside detailed definitions and practical "do's and don'ts" are 30 complex sample problems ranging in difficulty for both individuals and groups. An array of original photographs and clear examples in both black and white and color articulate standards and inspire future possibilities, featuring the work of Vicky Chan, founder of Avoid Obvious Architects, and Richard Alomar, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers and co-founder of New York Urban Sketchers. By combining the author's unique depth of knowledge with real-world case studies from America, Asia, and Europe, Professional and Practical Considerations for Landscape Design is an up-to-date resource for every level of reader, from students in landscape architecture programs to professionals working in public or private practice, engineering, consulting, or contracting.
From Plato to Freud to ecocriticism, the book illustrates dozens of stimulating-and sometimes notoriously complex-perspectives for approaching literature and film. The book offers authoritative, clear, and easy-to-follow explanations of theories that range from established classics to the controversies of current theory. Each chapter offers a conversational, step-by-step explanation of a single theory, critic, or issue, accompanied by concrete examples for applying the concepts and engaging suggestions for related literary readings. Following a section on the foundations of literary theory, the book is organized thematically, with an eye to the best way to develop a real, working understanding of the various theories. Cross-references are particularly important, since it's through the interaction of examples that readers most effectively advance from basic topics and arguments to some of the more specialized and complicated issues. Each chapter is designed to tell a complete story, yet also to reach out to other chapters for development and debate. Literary theorists are hardly unified in their views, and this book reflects the various traditions, agreements, influences, and squabbles that are a part of the field. Special features include hundreds of references to and quotations from novels, stories, plays, poems, movies, and other media. Online resources could also include video and music clips, as well as high-quality examples of visual art mentioned in the book. The book also includes periodic "running" references to selected key titles (such as Frankenstein) in order to illustrate the effect of different theories on a single work.
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