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  • Save 17%
    - Selected Writings and Interviews
    by Alfred Hitchcock
    £24.99

    Gathered here for the first time are Alfred Hitchcock's reflections on his own life and work. In this ample selection of largely unknown and formerly inaccessible interviews and essays, Hitchcock provides an enlivening commentary on a career that spanned decades and transformed the history of the cinema. Bringing the same exuberance and originality to his writing as he did to his films, he ranges from accounts of his own life and experiences to techniques of filmmaking and ideas about cinema in general. Wry, thoughtful, witty, and humorous-as well as brilliantly informative-this selection reveals another side of the most renowned filmmaker of our time. Sidney Gottlieb not only presents some of Hitchcock's most important pieces, but also places them in their historical context and in the context of Hitchcock's development as a director. He reflects on Hitchcock's complicated, often troubled, and continually evolving relationships with women, both on and off the set. Some of the topics Hitchcock touches upon are the differences between English and American attitudes toward murder, the importance of comedy in film, and the uses and techniques of lighting. There are also many anecdotes of life among the stars, reminiscences from the sets of some of the most successful and innovative films of this century, and incisive insights into working method, film history, and the role of film in society. Unlike some of the complex critical commentary that has emerged on his life and work, the director's own writing style is refreshingly straightforward and accessible. Throughout the collection, Hitchcock reveals a delight and curiosity about his medium that bring all his subjects to life.

  • Save 20%
    by Christopher Alan Reynolds
    £43.99

    In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann. During 1845-46 the compositional styles of Schumann and Wagner changed in a common direction, toward a style that was more contrapuntal, more densely motivic, and engaged in processes of thematic transformation. Reynolds shows that the stylistic advances that both composers made in Dresden in 1845-46 stemmed from a deepened understanding of Beethoven's techniques and strategies in the Ninth Symphony. The evidence provided by their compositions from this pivotal year and the surrounding years suggests that they discussed Beethoven's Ninth with each other in the months leading up to the performance of this work, which Wagner conducted on Palm Sunday in 1846. Two primary aspects that appear to have interested them both are Beethoven's use of counterpoint involving contrary motion and his gradual development of the "e;Ode to Joy"e; melody through the preceding movements. Combining a novel examination of the historical record with careful readings of the music, Reynolds adds further layers to this argument, speculating that Wagner and Schumann may not have come to these discoveries entirely independently of each other. The trail of influences that Reynolds explores extends back to the music of Bach and ahead to Tristan and Isolde, as well as to Brahms's First Symphony.

  • Save 16%
    - Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire
    by Lynne Haney
    £20.99

    Offending Women is an eye-opening journey into the lived reality of prison for women in the United States today. Lynne Haney looks at incarcerated mothers, housed together with their children, who are serving terms in alternative, community-based prisons-a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread. Incorporating vivid, sometimes shocking observations of daily life, she probes the dynamics of power over women's minds and bodies that play out in two such institutions in California. She finds that these "e;alternative"e; prisons, contrary to their aims, often end up disempowering women, transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies, and pushing them into a state of disentitlement. Uncovering the complex gendered underpinning of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system today, Offending Women links that system to broader discussions on contemporary government and state power, asks why these strategies have arisen at this particular moment in time, and considers what forms of citizenship they have given rise to.

  • Save 16%
    - Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene
    by Nat Hentoff
    £20.99

    Nat Hentoff, renowned jazz critic, civil liberties activist, and fearless contrarian-"e;I'm a Jewish atheist civil-libertarian pro-lifer"e;-has lived through much of jazz's history and has known many of jazz's most important figures, often as friend and confidant. Hentoff has been a tireless advocate for the neglected parts of jazz history, including forgotten sidemen and -women. This volume includes his best recent work-short essays, long interviews, and personal recollections. From Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman and Quincy Jones, Hentoff brings the jazz greats to life and traces their art to gospel, blues, and many other forms of American music. At the Jazz Band Ball also includes Hentoff's keen, cosmopolitan observations on a wide range of issues. The book shows how jazz and education are a vital partnership, how free expression is the essence of liberty, and how social justice issues like health care and strong civil rights and liberties keep all the arts-and all members of society-strong.

  • Save 17%
    - Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap
    by Jason Throop
    £24.99 - 62.99

    Suffering and Sentiment examines the cultural and personal experiences of chronic and acute pain sufferers in a richly described account of everyday beliefs, values, and practices on the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. C. Jason Throop provides a vivid sense of Yapese life as he explores the local systems of knowledge, morality, and practice that pertain to experiencing and expressing pain. In so doing, Throop investigates the ways in which sensory experiences like pain can be given meaningful coherence in the context of an individual's culturally constituted existence. In addition to examining the extent to which local understandings of pain's characteristics are personalized by individual sufferers, the book sheds important new light on how pain is implicated in the fashioning of particular Yapese understandings of ethical subjectivity and right action.

  • Save 17%
    - A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity at a University Fraternity
    by Laurie A. Wilkie
    £24.99 - 43.99

    The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi takes us inside the secret, amusing, and sometimes mundane world of a California fraternity around 1900. Gleaning history from recent archaeological excavations and from such intriguing sources as oral histories, architecture, and photographs, Laurie A. Wilkie uncovers details of everyday life in the first fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, and sets this story into the rich social and historical context of West Coast America at the turn of the last century. In particular, Wilkie examines men's coming-of-age experiences in a period when gender roles and relations were undergoing dramatic changes. Her innovative study illuminates shifting notions of masculinity and at the same time reveals new insights about the inner workings of fraternal orders and their role in American society.

  • Save 17%
    - Making Sense of Pediatric Pain
    by Mara Buchbinder
    £24.99 - 62.99

    Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending another's internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head offers an entirely fresh perspective that considers how pain may be configured, managed, explained, and even experienced in deeply relational ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pediatric pain clinic in California, Mara Buchbinder explores how clinicians, adolescent patients, and their families make sense of puzzling symptoms and work to alleviate pain. Through careful attention to the language of pain-including narratives, conversations, models, and metaphors-and detailed analysis of how young pain sufferers make meaning through interactions with others, her book reveals that however private pain may be, making sense of it is profoundly social.

  • Save 16%
    - Negotiating an Ecology of Place
    by Michael Vincent McGinnis
    £20.99

    If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well.Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater ';trans-scientific' awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.

  • Save 17%
    - Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata
    by Dr. Fabricio Prado
    £24.99 - 62.99

    In the first decades of the 1800s, after almost three centuries of Iberian rule, former Spanish territories fragmented into more than a dozen new polities. Edge of Empire analyzes the emergence of Montevideo as a hot spot of Atlantic trade and regional center of power, often opposing Buenos Aires. By focusing on commercial and social networks in the Rio de la Plata region, the book examines how Montevideo merchant elites used transimperial connections to expand their influence and how their trade offered crucial support to Montevideo's autonomist projects. These transimperial networks offered different political, social, and economic options to local societies and shaped the politics that emerged in the region, including the formation of Uruguay. Connecting South America to the broader Atlantic World, this book provides an excellent case study for examining the significance of cross-border interactions in shaping independence processes and political identities.

  • Save 21%
    - Religion, Science, and Conflict in American Public Life
    by Michael S. Evans
    £62.99

    Why do religion and science often appear in conflict in America's public sphere? InSeeking Good Debate, Michael S. Evans examines the results from the first-ever study to combine large-scale empirical analysis of some of our foremost religion and science debates with in-depth research into what Americans actually want in the public sphere. The surprising finding is that apparent conflicts involving religion and science reflect a more fundamental conflict between media elites and ordinary Americans over what is good debate. For elite representatives, good debate advances an agenda, but, as Evans shows, for many Americans it is defined by engagement and deliberation. This hidden conflict over what constitutes debate's proper role diminishes the possibility for science and religion to be discussed meaningfully in public life. Challenging our understanding of science, religion, and conflict, Seeking Good Debate raises profound questions about the future of the public sphere and American democracy.

  • Save 16%
    - Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
    by Alexandra Minna Stern
    £20.99

    First edition, Winner of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize, American Public Health Association With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details demonstrating that eugenics continues to inform institutional and reproductive injustice. Alexandra Minna Stern draws on recently uncovered historical records to reveal patterns of racial bias in California's sterilization program and documents compelling individual experiences. With the addition of radically new and relevant research, this edition connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies.

  • Save 16%
    - Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work
    by Kimberly Kay Hoang
    £20.99

    This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam's sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia's rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City's sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

  • Save 18%
    - Old World Recipes for the Modern Home
    by Joyce Goldstein
    £27.99

    For thousands of years, the people of the Jewish Diaspora have carried their culinary traditions and kosher laws throughout the world. In the United States, this has resulted primarily in an Ashkenazi table of matzo ball soup and knishes, brisket and gefilte fish. But Joyce Goldstein is now expanding that menu with this comprehensive collection of over four hundred recipes from the kitchens of three Mediterranean Jewish cultures: the Sephardic, the Maghrebi, and the Mizrahi. The New Mediterranean Jewish Table is an authoritative guide to Jewish home cooking from North Africa, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and the Middle East. It is a treasury filled with vibrant, seasonal recipesboth classic and updatedthat embrace fresh fruits and vegetables; grains and legumes; small portions of meat, poultry, and fish; and a healthy mix of herbs and spices. It is also the story of how Jewish cooks successfully brought the local ingredients, techniques, and traditions of their new homelands into their kitchens. With this varied and appealing selection of Mediterranean Jewish recipes, Joyce Goldstein promises to inspire new generations of Jewish and non-Jewish home cooks alike with dishes for everyday meals and holiday celebrations.

  • Save 17%
    - Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War
    by Cynthia Enloe
    £24.99

    Nimo, Maha, Safah, Shatha, Emma, Danielle, Kim, Charlene. In a book that once again blends her distinctive flair for capturing the texture of everyday life with shrewd political insights, Cynthia Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight ordinary women, four Iraqis and four Americans, during the Iraq War. Among others, Enloe profiles a Baghdad beauty parlor owner, a teenage girl who survived a massacre, an elected member of Parliament, the young wife of an Army sergeant, and an African American woman soldier. Each chapter begins with a close-up look at one woman's experiences and widens into a dazzling examination of the larger canvas of war's gendered dimensions. Bringing to light hidden and unexpected theaters of operation-prostitution, sexual assault, marriage, ethnic politics, sexist economies-these stories are a brilliant entryway into an eye-opening exploration of the actual causes, costs, and long-range consequences of war. This unique comparison of American and Iraqi women's diverse and complex experiences sheds a powerful light on the different realities that together we call, perhaps too easily, "e;the Iraq war."e;

  • Save 16%
    - Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands
    by Deborah Gewertz & Frederick Errington
    £20.99 - 62.99

    Cheap Meat follows the controversial trade in inexpensive fatty cuts of lamb or mutton, called "e;flaps,"e; from the farms of New Zealand and Australia to their primary markets in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Fiji. Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington address the evolution of the meat trade itself along with the changing practices of exchange in Papua New Guinea. They show that flaps-which are taken from the animals' bellies and are often 50 percent fat-are not mere market transactions but evidence of the social nature of nutrition policies, illustrating and reinforcing Pacific Islanders' presumed second-class status relative to the white populations of Australia and New Zealand.

  • Save 17%
    - The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s
    by Daniel Burton-Rose
    £24.99 - 62.99

    "e;We are cozy cuddly/armed and dangerous/and we will/raze the fucking prisons/to the ground."e; In an attempt to deliver on this promise, the George Jackson Brigade launched a violent three-year campaign in the mid-1970s against corporate and state institutions in the Pacific Northwest. This campaign, conceived by a group of blacks and whites, both straight and gay, claimed fourteen bombings, as many bank robberies, and a jailbreak. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George Jackson Brigade, Guerrilla USA provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s, revealing the whole era in a new and more complex light. It is also a compelling exploration of the true nature of crime and a provocative meditation on the tension between self-restraint and anger in the process of social change.

  • Save 19%
    - From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University
    by Neil J. Smelser
    £36.49

    These invaluable essays offer an insider's perspective on three decades at a major American university during a time of political turmoil. Neil J. Smelser, who spent thirty-six years as a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, sheds new light on a full range of the issues that dominated virtually all institutions of higher learning during the second half of the twentieth century. Smelser considers student activism-in particular the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley-political surprises, affirmative action, multiculturalism and the culture wars, and much more. As one of the leading sociologists of his generation, Smelser is uniquely qualified to convey and analyze the complexities of administrating a first-rate and very large university as it encounters a highly politicized environment.

  • Save 16%
    by Edward R.B. McCabe & Linda L. McCabe
    £20.99

    This new edition of How to Succeed in Academics provides up-to-date mentoring on all aspects of a successful academic career, particularly a career in the sciences. Linda L. McCabe and Edward R. B. McCabe bring decades of expertise and experience to such topics as marketing your ideas through posters, talks, manuscripts, and grant proposals; developing strategies for applying, interviewing, and negotiating for training programs and jobs; establishing professional networks and seeking leadership opportunities; improving your teaching, speaking, and writing skills; and setting goals and creating schedules to achieve them.

  • Save 16%
    - Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration
    by Jerry Flores
    £20.99

    From home, to school, to juvenile detention center, and back again. Follow the lives of fifty Latina girls living forty miles outside of Los Angeles, California, as they are inadvertently caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Their experiences in the connected programs between ';El Valle' Juvenile Detention Center and ';Legacy' Community School reveal the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. The girls participate in well-intentioned wraparound services designed to provide them with support at home, at school, and in the detention center. But these services may more closely resemble the phenomenon ofwraparound incarceration, in which students, despite leaving the actual detention center, cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention, and are thereby slowly pushed away from traditional schooling and a productive life course.

  • Save 21%
    - The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States
    by Rafael Alarcon, Luis Escala & Olga Odgers
    £62.99

    Making Los Angeles Home examines the different integration strategies implemented by Mexican immigrants in the Los Angeles region. Relying on statistical data and ethnographic information, the authors analyze four different dimensions of the immigrant integration process (economic, social, cultural, and political) and show that there is no single path for its achievement, but instead an array of strategies that yield different results. However, their analysis also shows that immigrants successful integration essentially depends upon their legal status and long residence in the region. The book shows that, despite this finding, immigrants nevertheless decide to settle in Los Angeles, the place where they have made their homes.

  • Save 17%
    - The Moral Economy of Peru's Migrant Remittances
    by Karsten Paerregaard
    £24.99

    Return to Sender is an anthropological account of how Peruvian emigrants raise and remit money and what that activity means for themselves and for their home communities. The book draws on first-hand ethnographic data from North and South America, Europe, and Japan to describe how Peruvians remit to relatives at home, collectively raise money to organize development projects in their regions of origin, and invest savings in business and other activities.Karsten Paerregaard challenges unqualified approval of remittances as beneficial resources of development for home communities and important income for home countries. He finds a more complex situation in which remittances can also create dependency and deprivation.

  • Save 14%
    - Candid Histories
    by Bruce David Forbes
    £17.99

    America's Favorite Holidays explores how five of America's culturally important holidaysChristmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgivingcame to be what they are today, seasonal and religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture. Deftly distilling information from a wide range of sources, Bruce David Forbes reveals often-surprising answers to questions about each holiday's traditions. Was Christmas always as commercialized as it is today? Is Thanksgiving a religious or secular holiday? When did we begin trick-or-treating on Halloween? Appealing and insightful, America's Favorite Holidays satisfies our curiosity about the origins of our holidays and the fascinating ways in which religion and culture mix.

  • Save 16%
    - The Ambient Humanities
    by John Mowitt
    £20.99 - 62.99

    This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we "e;audit"e; sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "e;sound studies."e; To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound-including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence-to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.

  • Save 17%
    - Selected Writings and Interviews
    by Alfred Hitchcock
    £24.99 - 46.99

    This second volume of Alfred Hitchcock's reflections on his life and work and the art of cinema contains material long out of print, not easily accessible, and in some cases forgotten or unknown. Edited by Sidney Gottlieb, this new collection of interviews, articles with the great director's byline, and "e;as-told-to"e; pieces provides an enlivening perspective on a career that spanned seven decades and transformed the history of cinema. In writings and interviews imbued with the same exuberance and originality that he brought to his films, Hitchcock ranges from accounts of his own life and experiences to provocative comments on filmmaking techniques and cinema in general. Wry, thoughtful, witty, and humorous-as well as brilliantly informative and insightful-this volume contains much valuable material that adds to our understanding and appreciation of a titan who decades after his death remains one of the most renowned and influential of all filmmakers. Francois Truffaut once said that Hitchcock "e;had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues."e; This profound contemplation of his art is superbly captured in the pieces from all periods of Hitchcock's career gathered in this volume, which reveal fascinating details about how he envisioned and attempted to create a "e;pure cinema"e; that was entertaining, commercially successful, and artistically ambitious and innovative in an environment that did not always support this lofty goal.

  • Save 17%
    by Keya Ganguly
    £24.99 - 62.99

    Although revered as one of the world's great filmmakers, the Indian director Satyajit Ray is described either in narrowly nationalistic terms or as an artist whose critique of modernity is largely derived from European ideas. Rarely is he seen as an influential modernist in his own right whose contributions to world cinema remain unsurpassed. In this benchmark study, Keya Ganguly situates Ray's work within the internationalist spirit of the twentieth century, arguing that his film experiments revive the category of political or "e;committed"e; art. She suggests that in their depictions of Indian life, Ray's films intimate the sense of a radical future and document the capacity of the image to conceptualize a different world glimpsed in the remnants of a disappearing past.

  • Save 17%
    by Barbara Johnson
    £24.99

    Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multicultural of all foundation narratives. Weaving together various texts-biblical passages, philosophy, poems, novels, opera, and movies-Barbara Johnson explores how the story of Moses has been appropriated, reimagined, and transmitted across cultures and historical moments. But she finds that already in the Bible, the story of Moses is a multicultural story, the story of someone who functions well in a world to which he, unbeknownst to the casual observer, does not belong. Using the Moses story as a lens through which to view questions at the heart of contemporary literary, philosophical, and ethical debates, Johnson shows how, through a close analysis of this figure's recurrence through time, we might understand something of the paradoxes, if not the impasses of contemporary multiculturalism.

  • Save 16%
    - Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity
    by Tomas Jimenez
    £20.99

    Unlike the wave of immigration that came through Ellis Island and then subsided, immigration to the United States from Mexico has been virtually uninterrupted for one hundred years. In this vividly detailed book, Tomas R. Jimenez takes us into the lives of later-generation descendents of Mexican immigrants, asking for the first time how this constant influx of immigrants from their ethnic homeland has shaped their assimilation. His nuanced investigation of this complex and little-studied phenomenon finds that continuous immigration has resulted in a vibrant ethnicity that later-generation Mexican Americans describe as both costly and beneficial. Replenished Ethnicity sheds new light on America's largest ethnic group, making it must reading for anyone interested in how immigration is changing the United States.

  • Save 21%
    - A Year with Five Latino Students and the Program That Helped Them Aim for College
    by Barbara Davenport
    £62.99

    Grit and Hopetells the story of five inner-city Hispanic students who start their college applications in the midst of the country's worst recession and of Reality Changers, the program that aims to help them become the first in their families to go college. This year they must keep up their grades in AP courses, write compelling essays for their applications, and find scholarships to fund their dreams. One lives in a garage and struggles to get enough to eat. Two are academic standouts, but are undocumented, ineligible for state and federal financial assistance. One tries to keep his balance as his mother gets a life-threatening diagnosis; another bonds with her sister when their parents are sidelined by substance abuse. The book also follows Christopher Yanov, the program's youthful, charismatic founder in a year that's as critical for Reality Changers' future as it is for the seniors. Yanov wants to grow Reality Changers into national visibility. He's doubled the program's size, and hired new employees, but he hasn't anticipated that growing means he'll have to surrender some control, and trust his new staff. It's the story of a highly successful, yet flawed organization that must change in order to grow. Told with deep affection and without sentimentality, the students stories show that although poverty and cultural deprivation seriously complicate youths' efforts to launch into young adulthood, the support of a strong program makes a critical difference.

  • Save 17%
    by Shelley Stamp
    £24.99 - 62.99

    Among early Hollywood's most renowned filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era's "e;three great minds"e; alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber's remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing cinema's power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work grappled with the profound changes in women's lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on-screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood's bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry's history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women's contributions to American culture.

  • Save 17%
    - Technology, Music, and Performance
    by Lea Jacobs
    £24.99 - 62.99

    The seemingly effortless integration of sound, movement, and editing in films of the late 1930s stands in vivid contrast to the awkwardness of the first talkies. Film Rhythm after Sound analyzes this evolution via close examination of important prototypes of early sound filmmaking, as well as contemporary discussions of rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Jacobs looks at the rhythmic dimensions of performance and sound in a diverse set of case studies: the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration Ivan the Terrible, Disney's Silly Symphonies and early Mickey Mouse cartoons, musicals by Lubitsch and Mamoulian, and the impeccably timed dialogue in Hawks's films. Jacobs argues that the new range of sound technologies made possible a much tighter synchronization of music, speech, and movement than had been the norm with the live accompaniment of silent films. Filmmakers in the early years of the transition to sound experimented with different technical means of achieving synchronization and employed a variety of formal strategies for creating rhythmically unified scenes and sequences. Music often served as a blueprint for rhythm and pacing, as was the case in mickey mousing, the close integration of music and movement in animation. However, by the mid-1930s, filmmakers had also gained enough control over dialogue recording and editing to utilize dialogue to pace scenes independently of the music track. Jacobs's highly original study of early sound-film practices provides significant new contributions to the fields of film music and sound studies.

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