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This volume offers introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde American women filmmakers.
Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on sexually explicit films by Andy Warhol, Barbara Rubin, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Paul Sharits, this book demonstrates how experimental cinema not only transformed American visual culture, but also the lives of those who created it. By situating these films in relation to the civil rights and sexual liberation movements, Flesh Cinema investigates how social politics continue to inform their meaning. Drawing upon unpublished archival materials, this book provides a rich account of the intimate artistic collaborations that inspired these films. Merging close readings with historical and biographical analysis, Flesh Cinema argues that queer forms of friendship were essential to the innovative representations of bodies on-screen. In doing so, it provides a fresh take on avant-garde cinema for film and art scholars and students.
While biographers of Andy Warhol have long recognized his mother as a significant influence on his life and art, Julia Warhola’s story has not yet been told. As an American immigrant who was born in a small Carpatho-Rusyn village in Austria-Hungary in 1891, Julia never had the opportunity to develop her own considerable artistic talents. Instead, she worked and sacrificed so her son could follow his dreams, helping to shape Andy’s art and persona. Julia famously followed him to New York City and lived with him there for almost twenty years, where she remained engaged in his personal and artistic life. She was well known as “Andy Warhol’s mother,” even developing a distinctive signa...
This book presents a collection of academic essays that take a fresh look at content and body transformation in the new media, highlighting how old hierarchies and canons of analysis must be revised. The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has commonly involved high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) being transformed into recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies, and the formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial conditions for ever more lucrative exchang...
The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies is a fan culture volume that deconstructs how and why Showgirls, a 1995 drama with a female lead bent on becoming a famous performer in Las Vegas, became a much-contested cult film despite being a critical failure when it released. The collection orchestrates a conversation between scholarly essay work and archival documentation offering a magnificent representation of the array of responses generated by the film, its makers, its promoters, and its audience. A multifaceted approach to the film, its popularity, and its social relevance results in a new text for understanding normative social hierarchies of sexuality, race, and gender. The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies engages with the figurative and actual place of sex work and feminized affective labor in our society.
Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latte...
Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson’s persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson’s career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.
The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores the intersection between the history of listening and the history of the moving image. Featuring established and emergent scholars from musicology, film studies, and literary studies, ethnomusicology and sound studies, popular music,sociology, media and communications, and psychology, this Handbook offers a wide range of case studies and methodological perspectives on the archaeologies, aesthetics, and extensions of cinematic listening.Chapters are structured around six themes: Part I ("Genealogies and Beginnings") considers film sound in light of pre-existing genres such as opera and shadow theatre, and explores changes in listening taking...
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction. Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres—contemporary narrati...