You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
When it comes to fashion, few metropolitan areas are more synonymous with style than New York, London, Paris and Milan. But the couture capitals of tomorrow may be located in less likely locales. Addressing the interplay between the development of fashion centres across the world and their relationship to consumption and street style in both local and global contexts, the books in the Street Style series aim to record emerging fashion capitals and their relationship to the physical landscapes of the street. By examining how particular ecologies of fashion are connected to the formation of gender, class and generational identities, this series establishes a new methodology for recording and understanding identity and its connection to style. Havana Street Style is the first book that explores and reveals the relationship between culture, city and street fashion in Cuba’s capital. Matching visual ethnography with critical analysis, the book documents a unique street style few in the United States have yet experienced.
Rome is a city rich in history and culture and imbued with a realism and romanticism that has captured the imaginations of filmmakers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With over two and a half thousand years of continuing history, Rome has served as the setting for countless memorable films, creating a backdrop that spans all genres and emotions. World Film Locations: Rome takes the reader on a cinematic journey through the city with stops at key locations that include the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Via Veneto, Piazza del Popolo, Sant’Angelo Bridge and, of course, the Trevi Fountain, made famous world-wide in its appearances in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in the Fountain. A carefully selected compilation of forty-five key films set in Rome, including The Belly of an Architect, The Facts of Murder, The Bicycle Thief, Roman Holiday and The Great Beauty, is complemented by essays that further examine the relationship between the city and cinema to provide an engaging, colourful and insightful page-turning journey for both travellers and film buffs alike.
Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality. It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.
As France’s oldest city, Marseilles has a significant cinematic culture, dating back to the 1890s when the Lumière brothers shot many films there. Due to its prolific film industry in the 1920s, Marseilles was referred to as “the French Los Angeles.” World Film Locations: Marseilles examines the representations of this port city in cinema, through essays and film scene reviews devoted to an exploration of its topography as depicted by Jean Epstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Renoir, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and many others. This volume showcases Marseilles’s diversity as articulated onscreen: from the winding streets of the Panier to the Old Port’s noisy markets, fro...
An extraordinarily beautiful city that has been celebrated, criticized, and studied in many films, San Francisco is both fragile and robust, at once a site of devastation caused by 1906 earthquake but also a symbol of indomitability in its effort to rebuild afterwards. Its beauty, both natural and manmade, has provided filmmakers with an iconic backdrop since the 1890s, and this guidebook offers an exciting tour through the film scenes and film locations that have made San Francisco irresistible to audiences and auteurs alike. Gathering more than forty short pieces on specific scenes from San Franciscan films, this book includes essays on topics that dominate the history of filmmaking in the...
Prague, the 'Hollywood of the East', has played an important role in the history of cinema and World Film Locations: Prague traverses the city’s topography to examine an internationally diverse range of movies made in the Czech capital: landmark early films such as Ecstasy, controversial due to the female nudity that catapulted Hedy Lamarr into stardom in the United States; Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Kafka, starring Jeremy Irons; adaptations of Kafka’s literary works such as The Trial, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Anthony Hopkins; and action blockbusters like Mission Impossible, The Bourne Identity and Casino Royale. Exploring legendary Prague landmarks as they appea...
Malta has served as a beautiful backdrop for films for nearly as long as there has been a film industry. This entry in the World Film Locations series traces the history of Malta on screen, from bigbudget blockbusters to modest indie pictures. The locations Malta offers range widely, from grand fortified harbours and stunning cliffs to quaint villages and Baroque palaces. That diversity has enabled the island to double for countless locations, including ancient Troy and Alexandria, as well as Greece, Israel, and other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, while its well-known water tanks have proved to be perfect for shooting ocean scenes. Packed with illustrations, World Film Locations: Malta examines a number of films made in Malta, and will be a must-read for tourists, film buffs and scholars alike.
Style is predominantly an individual matter – the way people put themselves together creates a sense of individual identity – but collectively it creates a sense of common culture in a community, a city or a country. Geographically isolated from the fashion hubs of Paris and New York, Australia may not yet be synonymous with style. But as it moves away from the beach look that it is usually associated with and adopts haute couture, Australia is emerging as a shining star in the Southern Hemisphere. Though not the political capital of the country, Sydney is nevertheless Australia’s cultural capital, and the style hub and epicentre of the country’s fashion evolution. Sydney Street Style depicts the style of this less-explored fashion capital. Beautifully assembled and packed with full-colour photos of the stylish and eclectic residents of Sydney, this book will be a welcome addition to the library of any fashionista or armchair traveller.
Florence, with its rich history, privileged place in the canon of Western art, and long-standing relationship with the moving image, is a cinematic city equal to Venice or Rome. World Film Locations: Florence explores the city as it is manifested in the minds of filmmakers and filmgoers. Contributors to the collection consider a wide range of topics, including the tourist’s perception of Florence, representations of art and artists on screen, the camera-friendly Tuscan countryside and mouthwatering local cuisine and filmic adaptations of canonical Italian literature. Through scene reviews of films, including Bobby Deerfield, A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini and Under the Tuscan Sun, World Film Locations: Florence delves deeper into the makeup of the city, looking at both familiar and unfamiliar locations through the lens of such filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, Mario Monicelli, Brian DePalma and Ridley Scott.
A filmic guidebook of the Greek capital, World Film Locations: Athens takes readers to film locations in the central historical district with excursions to the periphery of Athens – popular neighbourhoods, poor suburbs and slums often represented in postwar neorealist films – and then on to garden cities and upper class suburbs, especially those preferred by the auteurs of the 1970s. Of course, no Grecian vacation would be complete without a visit to the sea, and summer resorts, hotels and beaches near Athens are frequent backdrops for international productions. However, more recent economic strife has emptied city neighbourhoods, created urban violence and caused an increase in riots in the Mediterranean city, and representations of this on film are juxtaposed with images of the eternal and idyllic city. Featuring both Greek and foreign productions from various genres and historical periods, World Film Locations: Athens ultimately works to establish connections between the various aesthetics of dominant representations of Athens.