logo for Intellect Books
Transition & Development in Algeria
Economic, Social and Cultural Challenges
Mohammed Saad
Intellect Books, 2013

logo for Intellect Books
African Theatre for Development
Kamal Salhi
Intellect Books, 1998
African Theatre for Development acts as a forum for investigating how African Theatre works and what its place is in this postmodern society. It provides the subject with a degree of detail unmatched in previous books, reflecting a new approach to the study of the performing arts in this region. The collection:

• reveals the dynamic position of the arts and culture in post-independent countries as well as changes in influences and audiences,
• shows African theatre to be about aesthetics and rituals, the sociological and the political, the anthropological and the historical,
• examines theatre's role as a performing art throughout the continent, representing ethnic identities and defining intercultural relationships,
• investigates African theatre's capacity to combine contemporary cultural issues into the whole artistic fabric of performing arts, and
• considers the variety of voices, forms and practices through which contemporary African intellectual circles are negotiating the forces of tradition and modernity.

The book provides an opportunity to discover contemporary material from experts, critics and artists from across the world. The contributions are in a language and style that allow them to be read either as aids to formal study or as elements of discussion to interest the general reader.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Historical Comedy on Screen
Hannu Salmi
Intellect Books, 2011

In 1893 Friedrich Engels branded history “the cruelest goddess of all.” This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination, and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a somber manner. 

Historical Comedy on Screen
examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes most difficult to laugh at and exploring the place where comical and historical storytelling intersect. The book emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov
Laughing Matters
Rimgaila Salys
Intellect Books, 2009

Grigorii Aleksandrov’s musical comedy films, created with composer Isaak Dunaevskii, were the most popular Russian cinema of the 1930s and ’40s. Drawing on studio documents, press materials, and interviews with surviving film crew members, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov presents the untold production history of the films. Salys explores how Aleksandrov’s cinema preserved the paradigms of the American musical, including its comedic tradition, using both to inscribe the foundation myths of the Stalin era in the national consciousness. As the first major study to situate these films in the cultural context of the era, this book will be essential to courses on Russian cinema and Soviet culture.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Mumbai
Helio San Miguel
Intellect Books, 2012
 
Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, is a megalopolis of dramatic diversity and heartbreaking extremes, with wealthy areas located just steps away from the searing poverty of its huge slums. The home of Bollywood, Mumbai is also the epicenter of India’s film industry and its foremost film location. Through the lens of Mumbai’s manifold cinematic representations, World Film Locations: Mumbai explores the sheer complexity of this incomparable city.
 
This volume comprises insightful essays and beautifully illustrated scene analyses by leading scholars and film critics who explore the ways filmmakers from India and abroad have represented Mumbai’s astonishing urban and human landscape. Taken together, these contributions show how movies have created in the imaginations of billions of spectators the vivid image of a city that constantly tempts people to escape their dreary existence and offers them chances to fulfill their dreams. The first book to focus on cinematic representations of what is perhaps the world’s most-filmed city, World Film Locations: Mumbai will be necessary reading for scholars and film buffs alike.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Europe in Black and White
Immigration, Race, and Identity in the ‘Old Continent'
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
Intellect Books, 2011

The essays in Europe in Black and White offer new critical perspectives on race, immigration, and identity on the Old Continent. In reconsidering the various forms of encounters with difference, such as multiculturalism and hybridity, the contributors address a number of issues, including the cartography of postcolonial Europe, its relation to the production of "difference" and "race," and national and identity politics and their dependence on linguistic practices inherited from imperial times. Featuring scholars from a wide variety of nationalities and disciplinary areas, this collection will speak to an equally wide readership.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde
A History of the Future
Toni Sant
Intellect Books, 2011

Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York–based artsorganization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists—particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. Over more than thirty years, Franklin Furnace has exhibited works by hundreds of avant-garde artists, some of whom—Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jenny Holzer, and the Blue Man Group, to name a few—are now established names in contemporary art.

Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive history of this remarkable organization from its conception to the present. Organized around the major art genres that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, this book intersperses first-person narratives with readings by artists and scholars on issues critical to the organization's success as well as Franklin Furnace's many contributions to avant-garde art.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Narrating the Catastrophe
An Artist's Dialogue with Deleuze and Ricoeur
Jac Saorsa
Intellect Books, 2011

An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary art and critical discourse, Narrating the Catastrophe guides readers through unfamiliar textual landscapes where “being” is defined as an act rather than a form. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of intersubjective narrative identity as well as the catastrophe theory of Gilles Deleuze, Jac Saorsa establishes an alternative perspective from which to interpret and engage with the world around us. A highly original—and visually appealing—take on a high-profile issue in contemporary critical debate, this book will appeal to all those interested in visual arts and philosophy.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Copenhagen Chic
A Locational History of Copenhagen Fashion
Katrina Sark
Intellect Books, 2023
A comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of Copenhagen fashion.

Copenhagen has long been celebrated for its unique fashion, design, innovation, and sustainability practices, yet there has never been a comprehensive history of Copenhagen fashion and its current innovation and sustainability drive. This book fills that gap, assembling a multidisciplinary roster of contributors to examine all aspects of Copenhagen fashion and culture. Grounded in a broad context of Danish culture, industry, media, technology, sustainability, and innovation practices within the wider cultural and economic fields of fashion, the book helps us understand what makes Copenhagen unique.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Montréal Chic
A Locational History of Montréal Fashion
Katrina Sark
Intellect Books, 2016
Montréal is à la mode. A fashionable city in its own right, it also boasts fashion schools, an industry packed with local designers and manufacturers, and a dynamic scene that exhibits local and international collections. With its vibrant cultural life and affordable cost of living, designers and artists flock from all over to be a part of Montréal’s hip fashion community. MontréalChic is the first book to document this scene and how it connects with the city’s design, film, music, and cultural history. Scholars Katrina Sark and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud are intimately acquainted with Montréal and use their firsthand knowledge of the city’s fashion to explore urban culture, music, institutions, scenes, and subcultures, along the way uncovering many untold stories of Montréal’s fashion scene.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
By Accident or Design
Challenges and Coincidences in My Life
Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books, 2018
In this reflective autobiography, Rosemary Sassoon, a leading expert on handwriting and typography, looks back on her long and varied career, paying special attention to her unorthodox progression through a variety of fields. She details the route that took her from design to the educational and medical aspects of handwriting problems, then on to research and a PhD, and finally to working in the area of legibility in type design. In telling the story of an unusual and unusually successful life, Sassoon takes up a number of philosophical questions about what it is that comes together to form our characters, and what role chance and coincidence play in our lives.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Designer
Half a Century of Change in Image, Training, and Technique
Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books, 2008
Design is one of the most rapidly changing fields in the art world, as professionals, students, and teachers must reckon with new technologies before the older versions have much time to collect dust. In The Designer, Rosemary Sassoon surveys fifty years of change in the world of design, evaluating the skills that have been lost, how new techniques affect everyday work, and how training methods prepare students for employment. This indispensable volume reveals how design is both an art and a skill—one with a rich past and momentous relevance for the future.
Along the way, Sassoon traces the fascinating trajectory of her own career, from its beginning at art school and an early apprenticeship to her work as an established professional, with advice for designers at every stage of their own development. Weaving together biography and career advice, theory and practice, The Designer provides a unique history of the art form and looks ahead to an age of ever-changing attitudes to drawing, aesthetics, and artistic practice.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Handwriting of the Twentieth Century
Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books, 2007
As letter-writing has fallen by the wayside, the art of lavish yet legible handwriting is no longer being taught to schoolchildren or employed in daily life—much to the dismay of those who receive hastily scrawled love notes or try to decipher a doctor’s prescription. In an age when script manuals for students are disappearing at a rapid rate and writing samples are ephemeral, Rosemary Sassoon’s Handwriting of the Twentieth Century provides the first historical record of teaching the skill of writing in the last 100 years.

In addition to illustrating the techniques used by handwriting instructors and documenting the ever-changing views of script stylists, this volume probes the development and manufacture of writing equipment as well as useful examples for today’s teachers of writing. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century is a delightful, comprehensive account of our constant quest for fluent and clear handwritten script.
 
“...excellent and comprehensive illustrated book—which takes us through not only what happened in the United Kingdom, but brings in information about other English speaking countries such as America and Australia as well as European scripts, providing samples and explanations that are valuable as a reference. . . . The book's well-written Epilogue merits a section being printed—It couldn't be put better by a graphologist!”—Elaine Quigley, Graphologist
 
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Marion Richardson
Her Life and Her Contribution to Handwriting
Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books, 2012
In Marion Richardson: Her Life and Contribution to Handwriting, Rosemary Sassoon looks at Richardson’s life and work through the artist and educator’s own writings as well as letters and personal recollections from those who knew and worked with her. The driving force behind a momentous shift in the way art is taught to children, Richardson is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking contribution to penmanship, devising two schemes based on her observations of the natural movements of young children’s hands. The result of extensive original archival research, this book includes many illustrations that depict Richardson’s inventive approach.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity
Namrata Rele Sathe
Intellect Books, 2024
An exploration of the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture.

The neoliberal self, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, is replete with contradictions and oppositions. This study of the unstable neoliberal identity lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.

This analysis draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examines a variety of peripheral subjects and texts, including the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Applied Drama
A Facilitator’s Handbook for Working in Community
Juliana Saxton
Intellect Books, 2013
A companion to Intellect’s award-winning Applied Theatre: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice, Applied Drama fulfills the need for an introductory handbook for facilitators and teaching artists working in community settings through dramatic process, drawing on the best practices to transfer into the diverse settings within which applied drama projects occur. Crafted for use in schools, classrooms, community groups, healthcare organizations, and all manner of social institutions, this book aids practitioners to develop and hone the skills needed to best serve the needs of these diverse communities.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Applied Theatre
International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice - Second Edition
Juliana Saxton
Intellect Books, 2016
Six years after its initial publication, Applied Theatre returns with a second edition. As the first book to assist practitioners and students to develop critical frameworks for implementing their own theatrical projects, it served as a vital addition to this area of growing international interest, winning the Distinguished Book of the Year award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education.

Editors Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton have updated the book to reflect shifts in practice over the last few years in the world of applied theater. With their background in drama education and pedagogy, the contributors offer introductory chapters and dozens of case studies on applied theater projects around the globe. This new edition of Applied Theatre will encourage students and practitioners to acquire a deeper, more concrete understanding of the field and its best practice.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Heavy Metal Music in Argentina
In Black We Are Seen
Emiliano Scaricaciottoli
Intellect Books, 2020

The first collection of essays on Argentine metal music.

This is an interdisciplinary study of Argentina’s heavy metal subculture between 1983 and 2002, a period in which metal music withstood the onslaught of military dictatorship and survived the neoliberal policies of bourgeois democracy.

Edited by leading researchers in the field, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics, and intertexts, allowing readers to rethink the genre’s place within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina, exploring heavy metal music as a catalyst for social change and a site for engaging political reflection. This is a fascinating work of scholarship and a groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of global metal studies.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Cross-Cultural Design for Healthy Ageing
Lisa Scharoun
Intellect Books, 2020

This book examines some of the challenges associated with ageing in multicultural societies. Worldwide, ageing presents a profound potential shift in design for society. The impact of the change in population balance challenges designers, planners, and health care professionals to develop solutions to better meet the needs of older citizens. Different disciplinary and cultural perspectives allow for new approaches to issues of housing, community interaction and cooperation, health and well-being, and the integration of new technologies.

Drawing from case studies, interviews with key practitioners in design and health, and practical pedagogical experience, the authors provide a framework for engaging designers, planners, and health professionals in the process of creating new design solutions for the growing global ageing population.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Contemporary Design Education in Australia
Creating Transdisciplinary Futures
Lisa Scharoun
Intellect Books, 2023
New essays on education for the future of the design industry.

This book offers a range of approaches to teaching higher education design students to learn to design collaboratively and creatively, through transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary learning experiences. It highlights that the premise of traditional disciplinary silos does little to advance the competencies needed for contemporary design and non-linear career paths and emphasizes the importance of higher education being responsive to changes in society, including fluctuating market demands, economic variations, uncertainties, and globalization. Chapters highlight approaches that address this changing landscape, to meet student, industry, and societal needs and reflect a range of design education contexts in which the authors have taught, with a focus on experiences at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, but also including collaborations and comparative discussions elsewhere in Australia and globally, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Drawing in the Design Process
Characterising Industrial and Educational Practice
Pamela Schenk
Intellect Books, 2016
In the early days of the digital revolution in graphic design, many designers and teachers of design were convinced that the era of drawing on paper was over—that there would soon no longer be a place for craft-based drawing at any stage of the design process.
            It soon became apparent, however, that technological progress had not obviated the inherent value of drawing, and that, in fact, it opened up new avenues for convergent and hybrid drawing practices. This book traces the evolution of design-based drawing through analysis of a series of research projects from the 1980s to recent years that have sought to characterize the changing practices of design within various industries. Built on more than three hundred  interviews with designers, academics, and design students, and an exhaustive analysis of thousands of drawings, it aims to generate discussion around historical and contemporary models of the design process.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Cinema Makers
Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in South-Eastern and Central Europe since the 1960s
Anna Schober
Intellect Books, 2013

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in southeastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema "events," writing about film, and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture—and cinema’s role in that development—in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist, and post-socialist traditions.

 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Independence of the Media and its Regulatory Agencies
Shedding New Light on Formal and Actual Independence against the National Context
Wolfgang Schulz
Intellect Books, 2013
Media independence is vital for media democracies, and so is the independence of the regulatory bodies governing it. The Independence of the Media and its Regulatory Agencies explores the complex relationship between media governance and independence of media regulatory authorities within media systems within Europe, which form part of the wider framework in which media’s independence may flourish or fade. Based on research in more than forty countries, the contributions analyze the independence of regulators from different perspectives and draw links between social, financial, and legal traditions and frameworks.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Cindy Sherman's Office Killer
Another Kind of Monster
Dahlia Schweitzer
Intellect Books, 2014
One of the twentieth century’s most significant artists, Cindy Sherman has quietly uprooted conventional understandings of portraiture and art, questioning everything from identity to feminism. Critics around the world have taken Sherman’s photographs and extensively examined what lies underneath. However, little critical ink has been spilled on Sherman’s only film, Office Killer, a piece that plays a significant role both in Sherman’s body of work and in American art in the late twentieth century. Dahlia Schweitzer breaks the silence with her trenchant analysis of Office Killer and explores the film on a variety of levels, combating head-on the art world’s reluctance to discuss the movie and arguing instead that it is only through a close reading of the film that we can begin to appreciate the messages underlying all of Sherman’s work.

The first book on this neglected piece of an esteemed artist’s oeuvre, Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer” rescues the film from critical oblivion and situates it next to the artist’s other iconic works.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Mediatization(s)
Theoretical Conversations between Europe and Latin America
Carlos A, Scolari
Intellect Books, 2021
In the last decade, European and Latin American researchers have set a solid theoretical corpus around mediatization. For the first time, this book brings together these two theoretical traditions—the Latin American sociosemiotic matrix consolidated by Eliseo Verón in the 1980s and the institutional and constructivist approaches developed in Europe—to explore the theoretical and applied exchanges between the approaches.

This book presents the work of key authorities on mediatization from Europe and Latin America in one single volume, integrating macro-level theorization with applied observations of mediatization processes from a multidisciplinary perspective. Presented in a handbook format, with comprehensive introductory sections written by the editors and original texts signed by world-renowned researchers, this collection is a vital new resource for researchers and students alike. 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Neosentience
The Benevolence Engine
Bill Seaman
Intellect Books, 2011

Coined by artist and media researcher Bill Seaman, “neosentience” describes a new branch of scientific inquiry related to artificial intelligence. This volume explores the groundbreaking work of Seaman and theoretical physicist Otto E. Rossler in exploring the potential of an intelligent robotic entity possessed of a form of sentience that ever more closely resembles that of a human being. Individual chapters approach the concept from a range of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and the arts. Neosentience is a burgeoning area of interest, and this book encourages readers to reflect on how we experience and interpret the world, how memory works, and what it is to be human.  

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Locating the Audience
How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales
Kirsty Sedgman
Intellect Books, 2016
How do audiences experience live performances? What is gained when a national theater is born? These questions and more are the subject of Locating the Audience—the first in-depth study of how people form relationships with a new theater company. Investigating the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman explores how different people felt about the way their communities were engaged and their places “performed” by the theater’s productions. Mapping the complex interplay between audience experience and identity, the book presents a significant contribution to our contemporary project of defining cultural value. Rather than understanding value as an end point—“impact”—Sedgman makes the provocative claim that cultural value can better be understood as a process. By talking to audiences and capturing pleasures and disappointments, Locating the Audience shows the meaning-making process in action.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Selling War
The Role of the Mass Media in Hostile Conflicts from World War I to the "War on Terror"
Josef Seethaler
Intellect Books, 2013
This book is the first collection of essays to explore the changing relationships between war, media, and the public from a multidisciplinary perspective and over an extended historical period. It is also the first textbook for students in this field, discussing a wide range of theoretical concepts and methodological tools for analyzing the nature of these relationships. Shedding new light on conflicts spanning from World War I through the so-called War on Terror, the contributors explore the roles of traditional media, war blogs, and eyewitness reporting; of war correspondents and embedded journalism; and of propaganda, wartime public relations, and information warfare.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Media-Democracy Paradox in Ghana
Rethinking Political Communication in an African Context
Wilberforce Sefakor Dzihah
Intellect Books, 2020

This volume focuses on the matrix offered by the media-democracy paradox in Ghana, Africa, and the Global South. As the first black African country south of the Sahara to attain political independence from Great Britain, Ghana is widely acknowledged by the international community as a model of democracy. This book examines the praxis of this democracy and its media, delving into Ghana’s evolvement, media practices, leadership aspirations, pressure group politics, and ideological cleavages. 

A rich data source for students, scholars, researchers, and political actors on both the African continent and the diaspora, The Media-Democracy Paradox in Ghana challenges the dominant Western theories of media and democracy, examines the growing influence of social media in political discourse, and provides insightful analysis of debates surrounding political communication and its implications for strengthening democratic culture.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Sustainability, Participation and Culture in Communication
Jan Servaes
Intellect Books, 2013
At a time when sustainability is on everyone’s lips, this volume is one of the first to offer an overview of sustainability and communication issues—including community mobilization, information technologies, gender and social norms, mass media, interpersonal communication, and integrated communication approaches—from a development and social change perspective. Drawing on contemporary theories of communication as well as real-world examples from development projects around the world, the contributors showcase the increasing richness and versatility of communication research and practice. Together, they make a case for adopting a more comprehensive perspective on communication in the areas of development and social change.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Theatre for Children in Hospital
The Gift of Compassion
Persephone Sextou
Intellect Books, 2016
Recent decades have seen a new appreciation develop for applied theater and the role of arts-based activities in health care. This book looks specifically at the place of theater for children who are hospitalized, showing how powerfully it can enhance their social and mental well-being. Child-led performances, for example, can be used as a technique to distract young patients from hospitalization, prepare them for painful procedures, and teach them calming techniques to control their own pre- or post-operative stress. Persephone Sextou details the key theoretical contexts and practical features of theater for children, in the process offering motivation, guidance, and inspiration for practitioners who want to incorporate performance into their treatment regimen.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Heavy Metal and Disability
Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies
Jasmine Hazel Shadrack
Intellect Books, 2024
A study of the distinctive relationship between metal and disability.

Persisting across metal’s subgenres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival. While metal scholars who contribute to this collection see metal as a space of possibility, in which dis/ability and other intersectional identities can be validated and understood, the collection does not imply that the possibilities that metal affords are always actualized. This collection situates itself in a wider struggle to open up metal, challenging its power structures—a struggle in which metal studies has played a significant part.

Metal’s preoccupation with unleashing and controlling sensorial overload acts both as an analog of neurodiversity and as a space in which those who are neurodivergent find ways to understand and leverage their sensory capacities. Metal offers potent resources for the self-understanding of people with disabilities. It does not necessarily mean that this potential is always explored or that metal scenes are hospitable to those with disabilities. This collection is disability-positive, validating people with disabilities as different and not damaged.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Re-Imagining the City
Art, Globalization and Urban Spaces
Kristen Sharp
Intellect Books, 2013
Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces examines how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experience and production in urban spaces. It maps how cultural productions in art, architecture, and communications media are contributing to the reimagining of place and identity through events, artifacts, and attitudes. This book recasts how we understand cities—how knowledge can be formed, framed, and transferred through cultural production and how that knowledge is mediated through the construction of aesthetic meaning and value.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dance and Authoritarianism
These Boots are Made for Dancing
Anthony Shay
Intellect Books, 2021
Everyone who watched the opening ceremony of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. Public performance and festival at such scale are familiar to us in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and contemporary North Korea, but this new book addresses lesser-known examples—in Spain, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia, and Uzbekistan—and explores the various political regimes that ruled them. 

Using dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and gendered phenomena, Anthony Shay shows us how dance and mass movement have served as important political tools throughout history and across a variety of authoritarian regimes. Dance and Authoritarianism is a significant and original contribution to the scholarship at the intersection of dance, ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, and history.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
Dancing Diplomats
Anthony Shay
Intellect Books, 2019
In this book, Anthony Shay examines the history of the Moiseyev Dance Company and the life and works of its renowned choreographer and founder, Igor Moiseyev. Founded in Moscow in 1937 amid a mass Soviet Union campaign of political repression, Moiseyev’s theatrical dance troupe came to be an international force, transforming the folk traditions of the Soviet Union into a vital diplomatic tool that helped usher in a new era of cultural exchange. The author explores the company through multiple lenses of spectacle, Russian nationalism, and the Cultural Cold War to analyze its history and its enduring contributions to dance and global culture. The first English-language study of its kind, Shay blends academic research with personal anecdote to provide a nuanced analysis of Moiseyev’s importance in choreographic art and his place in the world of dance.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
International Horror Film Directors
Global Fear
Danny Shipka
Intellect Books, 2016
Horror films have for decades commanded major global audiences, tapping into deep-rooted fears that cross national and cultural boundaries in their ability to spark terror. This book brings together a group of scholars to explore the ways that this fear is utilized and played upon by a wide range of filmmakers. Contributors take up such major figures as Guillermo del Toro, Lars Von Trier, and David Cronenberg, and they also offer introductions to lesser-known talents such as Richard Franklin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Juan López Moctezuma, and Alexandre Aja. Scholars and fans alike dipping into this collection will discover plenty of insight into what chills us.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Bangladesh’s Changing Mediascape
From State Control to Market Forces
Brian Shoesmith
Intellect Books, 2013

With contributions from a diverse group of media and communications scholars from around the globe, Bangladesh’s Changing Mediascape presents a pioneering study of the trends, patterns, and prospects shaping the contemporary Bangladeshi media. Among the many topics discussed here are the difference among specific media formats, including television, newspapers, radio, film, and photography; policy issues; and the challenge that new media poses to governance in a developing nation faced with innumerable economic, social, and political problems. Eschewing the currently dominant development communication model, the editors argue that market forces rather than planned state interventions will contribute to a more equitable communication environment.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Inclusion in New Danish Cinema
Sexuality and Transnational Belonging
Meryl Shriver-Rice
Intellect Books, 2015
Often recognized as one of the happiest countries in the world, Denmark, like its Scandinavian neighbors, is known for its progressive culture, which is also reflected in its national cinema. It is not surprising, then, that Danish film boasts as many successful women film directors as men, uses scripts that are often cowritten by the director and the screenwriter, and produces one of the largest numbers of queer films directed by and starring women. Despite all this, Danish film is not widely written about, especially in English. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema brings this vibrant culture to English-language audiences. Meryl Shriver-Rice argues that Denmark has demonstrated that film can reinforce cultural ethics and political values while also navigating the ongoing and mounting forces of digital communication and globalization.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Storytellers of Art Histories
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life
Yasmeen Siddiqui
Intellect Books, 2021
An anthology amplifying the voices of the figures reshaping art histories across disciplines and a range of fluid practices. 

With a focus on gender, race (including whiteness), class, sexuality, and transnationality—all of which are often marginalized in dominant art histories—each individual has provided short, often personal contributions detailing how they become passionate about their practice. The contributors’ offerings are varied and surprising, appealing equally to people enmeshed in the field through their work as well as those with a beginner’s interest. Their pieces take various forms—epistolary, children’s fable, interview, coauthored narrative, pastiche, memoir, manifesto, and apology—and a number of the essays perform in their structure or content the theories they explore about publishing, curating, and archival work.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Theatre in Passing 2
Searching for New Amsterdam
(E)lena K. Siemens
Intellect Books, 2015
This book discusses spaces of performance from formal opera houses to parks and graffiti around the world and is a companion to Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo-Diary. Drawing once again on Michel de Certeau’s notion of a “second poetic geography,” this new volume examines prominent theatrical destinations —New York, London, and Paris—along with others that are often overlooked, including Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In addition to indoor theaters, the book covers a variety of outdoor theatrical spaces, as well as street theater. Like its predecessor, Theatre in Passing 2 is richly illustrated with photographs by the author and provides fascinating insights on the intersection of performing arts, visual culture, and photography.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Theatre in Passing
A Moscow Photo-Diary
(E)lena K. Siemens
Intellect Books, 2011

Theatre in Passing explores spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Inspired by French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s model of a "second, poetic geography" in which the walker—the everyday practitioner—invents the space observed by the voyeur, this book takes the reader on a tour of spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Through text and photography, the city’s "theatrical geography" is uncovered, from the Bolshoi Theater in Theater Square to hidden gems like the recently restored Kuskovo estate.  With additional sections on street theater and other public gatherings, Theatre in Passing is a must-read book for anyone curious about the theatrical architecture and geography of Russia’s capital.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Street Fashion Moscow
Elena Siemens
Intellect Books, 2017
Few cities in the world offer the diversity of stunning visuals that can be found on the streets of Moscow, from famous landmarks like Red Square to the Boulevard Ring and Kamergersky Lane and the residential areas beyond the Garden Ring. For this book, former Moscow resident Elena Siemens traveled them all as an urban flâneur, taking photographs of contemporary fashion in action and setting it alongside explorations of modern and historic representations of fashion and beauty as seen in a wide variety of products of Russian culture. Through her photos and analysis, Siemens considers the question of how contemporary Russians understand their post-Soviet identity and express it through the ways they present themselves in public.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Athens
Eirini Sifaki
Intellect Books, 2014
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 neighborhoods, 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 neighborhoods, 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, the book ultimately works to establish connections between the various aesthetics of dominant representations of Athens.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand
Simon Sigley
Intellect Books, 2013

In this innovative work of cultural history, Simon Sigley tells the story of film culture in New Zealand from the establishment of the Auckland Film Society in the 1920s to the present day.

Rather than focusing on the work of individual filmmakers, Sigley approaches cinema as a form of social practice. He examines the reception of international film theories and discourses and shows how these ideas helped to shape distinct cultural practices, including new forms of reviewing; new methods of teaching; and new institutions such as film societies, art house cinemas, and film festivals. He goes on to trace the emergence in New Zealand of the full range of activities and institutions associated with a sophisticated film culture—including independent distribution and exhibition networks, film archives, university courses, a local feature film industry, and liberalized film censorship. In doing so, Sigley makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the myriad ways film can shape our thinking, our icons, our institutions, and our conversations. A fascinating case history of how a culture can develop, Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in film culture and cultural history.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Meyerhold and the Cubists
Perspectives on Painting and Performance
Amy Skinner
Intellect Books, 2015
This book offers a rich analysis of collage practices in the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Focusing on the philosophical and formal tenets of the form, and supporting her analysis with wide-ranging examples from both theater and fine art, Amy Skinner develops collage as a framework for reading the whole of the theatrical experience, from scenography and mise-en-scène to text and spectatorship. An innovative exploration of the influence of collage on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theater, Meyerhold and the Cubists will be essential for theater scholars and practitioners alike.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Sophia Loren
Moulding the Star
Pauline Small
Intellect Books, 2009

In films from Houseboat to The Millionairess to Two Women, Sophia Loren established herself as an actress whose stardom spanned Italy, Europe, and finally Hollywood. Hers was a highly original rise to fame for a European film actress, and in Sophia Loren, Pauline Small highlights a unique career which transcended Italian film culture.

            Sophia Loren is the first book to explore in detail the transfer of Loren’s stardom from Italy to Hollywood and the reasons for her American success, particularly during the 1960s. Looking individually at Loren’s major films and drawing on rare archival materials in Italy, Small provides a thorough exploration of the commercial and cultural forces that combined to ensure Loren’s enduring star status.

Perfect for scholars and aficionados of 1960s Italian and American film, Sophia Loren is a fascinating look at one of the major personalities of modern cinema.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
A Divided World
Hollywood Cinema and Emigré Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933-1948
Nick Smedley
Intellect Books, 2011

The New Deal introduced sweeping social, political, and cultural change across the United States, which Hollywood embraced enthusiastically. Then, when the heady idealism of the 1930s was replaced by the paranoia of the postwar years, Hollywood became an easy target for the anticommunists. A Divided World examines some of the important programs of the New Deal and the subsequent response of the film community—especially in relation to social welfare, women’s rights, and international affairs. The book also provides an analysis of the major works of three European directors—Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang—compared and contrasted with the products of mainstream Hollywood. This is a new interpretation of an influential period in American film history and it is sure to generate further debate and scholarship.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Roots of Modern Hollywood
The Persistence of Values in American Cinema, from the New Deal to the Present
Nick Smedley
Intellect Books, 2014
In this insightful study of Hollywood cinema since 1969, film historian Nick Smedley traces the cultural and intellectual heritage of American films, showing how the more thoughtful recent cinema owes a profound debt to Hollywood’s traditions of liberalism, first articulated in the New Deal era. Although American cinema is not usually thought of as politically or socially engaged, Smedley demonstrates how Hollywood can be seen as one of the most value-laden of all national cinemas. Drawing on a long historical view of the persistent trends and themes in Hollywood cinema, Smedley illustrates how films from recent decades have continued to explore the balance between unbridled individualistic capitalism and a more socially engaged liberalism. He also brings out the persistence of pacifism in Hollywood’s consideration of American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Middle East. His third theme concerns the treatment of women in Hollywood films, and the belated acceptance by the film community of a wider role for the American post-feminist woman. Featuring important new interviews with four of Hollywood’s most influential directors—Michael Mann, Peter Weir, Tony Gilroy, and Paul Haggis—The Roots of Modern Hollywood is an incisive account of where Hollywood is today and the path it has taken to get there. 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Preston Sturges
The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director
Nick Smedley
Intellect Books, 2019
Few directors of the 1930s and ‘40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. Beginning with a foreword by Peter Bogdanovich, this book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges’ whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges’ last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director’s final years in more detail than we’ve ever seen, showing a master still at work—even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage.
 
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Christopher R. Smit
Intellect Books

As sustainability and eco-responsibility become a part of our everyday cultural conversation, we’re finally being forced to acknowledge that what we consume matters. What we fail to realize is that we unconsciously, continually, and at times violently consume much more than just food—including celebrities. The Exile of Britney Spears takes the ubiquitous pop star of its title as its primary example, explaining that we have consumed, digested, and eliminated Britney Spears in a process uniquely characteristic of American popular culture. In Christopher Smit’s provocative account of the sociological, aesthetic, and political outcomes of this new mediated cannibalism, he offers the idea of exile as a new metaphor for the outcome of popular consumption. By investigating the psychological, personal, and social matrix of Britney’s rise and fall, he outlines the process of her inevitable exile from global taste and favor.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
One for the Girls!
The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn
Clarissa Smith
Intellect Books, 2007

We usually think of women as the victims of pornography rather than its consumers. Whether appearing in films, peering provocatively from the pages of magazines, or posing on explicit Web-sites, women are considered the dehumanized objects of unseen lascivious male viewers. But in her controversial new book One for the Girls!, Clarissa Smith debunks this myth and challenges women to read, watch, and enjoy pornography on their own terms. Focusing on the British magazine For Women, Smith looks at its readers’ responses to male pinups and erotica and explores the intricacies of women’s unique reactions to pornography.

“Clarissa Smith has achieved something special with her new proffering from her masculinities repertoire. Smith’s text is groundbreaking, multidisciplinary and—equally importantly—extremely readable. It is the last point perhaps that really sets this work apart, as One for the Girls has a great deal to offer both the specialist academic and the general reader. Clarissa Smith’s accessible style allows readers with little prior knowledge of critical theory, cultural studies or the 1980s pornography debate, to not only understand these discourses, but to develop a strong grasp of their impact in this context.”—Michelle Parsons, Transition Tradition
 
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Mathias Spahlinger
Neil Thomas Smith
Intellect Books, 2021
The first book-length study in English of composer Mathias Spahlinger, one of Germany’s leading practitioners of contemporary music.

One of the most stimulating and provocative figures of the new music scene, Mathias Spahlinger has long been a touchstone for leftist, “critical” composition in Germany, yet his work has received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship until now. 

Spahlinger’s practice offers a unique negotiation of the modernist legacy as well as passionate political and philosophical engagement. Born in 1944, today his position as one of the most venerable exponents of post-WWII modernism in his homeland is undeniable: his music is regularly performed, he has received commissions from many of the major orchestras and new music groups in Germany, and in 2014 he received the Berliner Kunstpreis, Berlin’s top art prize. 

Bringing a critical perspective to Spahlinger’s life and work, this monograph provides an essential reference for scholars of new music and twentieth-century modernism.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Los Angeles
Gabriel Solomons
Intellect Books, 2011
The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century, Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales—from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel—have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures, from Chinatown to Forrest Gump, Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood. This volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle.
 
World Film Locations: Los Angeles pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes—both famous and lesser-known—with an accompanying array of evocative full-color film stills, demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness, as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view. Insightful essays throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors, thematic elements, and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features, as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.
 
A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of Robert Altman, Nicholas Ray, Michael Mann, and Roman Polanski, World Film Locations: Los Angeles is moreover a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Rome
Gabriel Solomons
Intellect Books, 2014
This volume of the World Film Locations series explores the city of Rome, 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 worldwide 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-six key films set in Rome, including The Belly of an ArchitectThe Facts of MurderThe Bicycle ThiefRoman Holiday, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, is complemented by essays that further examine the relationship between the city and cinema to provide an engaging, colorful, and insightful page-turning journey for both travelers and film buffs alike.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Philosophical Actor
A Practical Meditation for Practicing Theatre Artists
Donna Soto-Morettini
Intellect Books, 2010

There have been many books published on acting, actor training, and practical theories for preparing for a role, but none of these books have ever looked philosophically at the language and the concepts that we use when we talk about acting. The Philosophical Actor is the first attempt to grapple with the fundamental questions of truth, art, and human nature unexamined in past treatments, from the first great essay by Diderot to the exhaustive system described by Stanislavski. With wide appeal to actors, directors, acting students, acting teachers and trainers, Donna Soto-Morettini draws from twenty-five years of experience as an acting teacher and director to introduce innovative ways of thinking about acting.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Painting, History and Meaning
Sites of Time
Craig Staff
Intellect Books, 2020

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events, ideas, and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past. Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism, and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela, and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between art and history. 

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Why Would Anyone Wear That?
Fascinating Fashion Facts
Celia E. Stall-Meadows
Intellect Books, 2013
Bustles. Tight-laced Corsets. Caged crinolines that encased the hapless wearer in hoops of steel. Why would anyone want to wear such things? Yet, you can be certain that no lady of the Victorian upper class would choose to leave home without them—and she’d complete her look with a feather- and flower-festooned bonnet as befit the latest fashion.

With a blend of wisdom and wit, Why Would Anyone Wear That? explores extreme fashions from around the world. The Victorian era was by no means alone in strange sartorial choices. Throughout history, men and women have turned to clothing and accessories to adorn and accentuate parts of the body. Some of the fashions, like bloomers, were surprisingly functional. Others, like powdered wigs and hobble skirts, were inconvenient and uncomfortable. And a few particularly painful practices could even permanently disfigure the wearer, like brass coils worn in Burma to lengthen the neck and the custom of binding of women’s feet to fit tiny lotus slippers in Song dynasty China. Presenting dozens of the most peculiar fashions, including shoes, hats, jewelry, undergarments, and outerwear, the book provides insightful commentary, placing the garments and accessories in the proper historical, social, and cultural context.

If you’ve ever wondered why the codpiece was created or the leisure suit went out of style, this book will answer that question and many more. Fully illustrated and packed with fun facts, Why Would Anyone Wear That? introduces readers to the fascinating stories behind some of the world’s weirdest fashions.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Switching to Digital Television
UK Public Policy and the Market
Michael Starks
Intellect Books, 2007
Sometime in the next four years, in a move that is bound to anger consumers and endanger the careers of politicians, the United Kingdom plans to turn off its analog, terrestrial television and switch fully to digital TV. Switching to Digital Television argues that, in order for the initiative to succeed, public policymakers need to carefully consider competitive market forces and collaborate with the broadcasting industry.
This authoritative study of the government policy behind the switchover also draws on the United Kingdom’s experience as a basis for comparative analysis of the United States, Japan, and western European nations, all of which will face similar questions in coming years.
 
“The book provides an interesting and ‘different’ history of Digital Television, and if you want to know why and how the decisions were made, it deserves a place on your bookshelf.”– Jim Slater, Image Technology Magazine
 
“Michael Starks brilliantly describes the complex mix of Government and industry responses to technological change which have led to the digital switchover process in the UK.”—Barry Cox, Chairman of Digital UK
 
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Anarchitectural Experiments
When Unbuilt Designs Turn to Film
Maciej Stasiowski
Intellect Books, 2022
A deeply researched exploration of the influence of simulation and cinematic design on visionary or speculative architecture. 

This book outlines the impact of film and animation on architectural representation through key projects. The opening analysis is useful in contextualizing speculative architectural projects, while the later chapters link the theory to imagery. To support his argument, Maciej Stasiowski here curates a diverse collection of interesting case studies that are accessible and easy to read.

Through its comprehensive review of speculative architecture and various media that describe it, Stasiowski’s book sets itself apart from other works in the discipline by discussing speculative projects that engage with cinematic strategies of portrayal and specifically the effect that modern technologies have on the subject now and in its potential futures. This thorough examination of the use of cinema and animation as a method of architectural visualization offers insights into a converging field of architectural and filmic disciplines and will appeal to architects and designers, filmmakers, academics, artists, set designers, and film production designers.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Directory of World Cinema
Africa
Blandine Stefanson
Intellect Books, 2014
Eschewing the postcolonial hubris that suggests Africa could only define itself in relation to its colonizers, a problem plaguing many studies published in the West on African cinema, this entry in the Directory of World Cinema series instead looks at African film as representing Africa for its own sake, values, and artistic choices.

With a film industry divided by linguistic heritage, African directors do not have the luxury of producing comedies, thrillers, horror films, or even love stories, except perhaps as DVDs that do not travel far outside their country of production. Instead, African directors tend to cover serious sociopolitical ground, even under the cover of comedy, in the hopes of finding funds outside Africa. Contributors to this volume draw on filmic representations of the continent to consider the economic role of women, rural exodus, economic migration, refugees, and diasporas, culture, religion, and magic as well as representations of children, music, languages, and symbols.

A survey of national cinemas in one volume, DirectoryofWorldCinema: Africa is a necessary addition to the bookshelf of any cinephile and world traveler. 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Punk Pedagogies in Practice
Disruptions and Connections
Francis Stewart
Intellect Books, 2023
Can the ethos of punk bring educational change?

As teachers, administrators, and policymakers continue to examine how best to approach pedagogical practice, the exploration of new, innovative approaches becomes ever more important. Punk Pedagogies in Practice builds on existing research to connect theory and practice while disrupting current approaches to the post-16 sector. Contributors share insights that apply to a wide range of disciplines, settings, teaching, and learning styles, drawing on experiences in further education, higher education, migrant education, zine workshops, community education, and instruction for speakers of other languages. Taken together, the essays collected here affirm the importance of creativity, resistance, critical mindsets, and do-it-yourself philosophy in contemporary education.

Contributions by: Ipsita Chatterjea, Mike Dines, Asya Draganova, Jon Evans, Muhammad Fakhran al Ramadhan, Michael Gratzke, Matt Grimes, Craig Hamilton, Michael Hepworth, Adam Hounslow-Eyre, Dave Kane, Nathan Kerrigan, Marco Milano, Ces Pearson, Sarah Raine, Katie Shaw, Francis Stewart, Iain Taylor, Dean Thiele, Elke Van dermijnsbrugge, L. Viner, and Laura Way.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Havana
Ann Marie Stock
Intellect Books, 2014
Havana is among the world’s leading cinematic locales. In films made beyond the island as well as those created by local cineastes, Havana is depicted as a vibrant Caribbean city. The quantity and quality of the works representing this tropical cityscape attest to the prominence of this film location and underscore the need for a book dedicated to it.

World Film Locations: Havana situates Havana as a modern city in prerevolutionary times, noting the architectural and cultural shifts evident during the revolution, and comments on recent reconfigurations of the city and its inhabitants in the wake of global forces. Among the forty-six scene reviews chosen to show the city in all its multifaceted glory, films such as Our Man in Havana, I Am Cuba, Hello Hemingway, Habana Blues and Chico and Rita are bookended by seven insightful essays. The essays look at the history of revolutionary cinema in Cuba and consider documentary films, from the Latin American Newsreel to avant-garde experimental work, including the island’s documentary tradition showcasing local faces and places that have paved the way for present-day media and audiovisual art. The essays also explore the multifaceted film culture of the capital, the cine club movement, historic cinemas and film venues around the city, the abundance of film festivals such as the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, and film-themed cafeterias, restaurants, bookstores, and markets.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Fan Phenomena
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Jennifer K. Stuller
Intellect Books, 2013
Few could have predicted the enduring affection inspired by Joss Whedon’s television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With its origins in a script Whedon wrote for a 1992 feature film of the same name, the series far outpaced its source material, gathering a devoted audience that remains loyal to the show more than a decade after it left the airwaves. Heralded for its use of smart, funny, and emotionally resonant narrative; subversive and feminist characterizations; and unique approaches to television as an art form, the show quickly developed its own unique fan community, who built on existing narratives through fan fiction, media manipulation, and performance.
Fan Phenomena: Buffy the Vampire Slayer explores how this continued devotion is internalized, celebrated, and critiqued. Featuring interviews with culture makers, academics, and creators of participatory fandom, the essays here are a window into the more personal and communal aspects of the fan experience. Essays from critical thinkers and scholars address how Buffy inspires the creation of, among other enduring artifacts of fandom, fan fiction, crafting, performance, cosplay, and sing-alongs.
As an accessible yet vigorous examination of a beloved character and her world, Fan Phenomena: Buffy the Vampire Slayer provokes a larger conversation about the relationship between cult properties and fandom, and how their interplay permeates the cultural consciousness, in effect contributing to culture through new narrative, academia, language, and political activism.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dancing Bahia
Essays on Afro-Brazilian Dance, Education, Memory, and Race
Lucia M. Suarez
Intellect Books, 2018

Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars, artists, and dance activists from Brazil, Canada, and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to socio-political notions of race and community, resisting stereotypes, and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.

Using the Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia as its focal point, this volume brings to the fore questions of citizenship, human rights, and community building. The essays within are informed by both theory and practice, as well as black activism that inspires and grounds the research, teaching, and creative output of dance professionals from, or deeply connected to, Bahia.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident
The Life and Work of Aleksandar Petrovic
Vlastimir Sudar
Intellect Books, 2013
In the liberal West as in socialist Yugoslavia, the films of Aleksandar Petrovic dramatize how enforced dogmatism can corrode any political system. A case study of the oft-overlooked Yugoslav director’s colorful and eventful career, A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident explores how Petrovic developed specific political and social themes in his films. A response to the political vagaries of his time, these anti-dogmatic views were later to become a trademark of his work. Although interest in socialist Yugoslavia and its legacy has risen steadily since the 1990s, the history of Yugoslav cinema has been scarcely covered, and this book marks a fresh contribution to a burgeoning area of interest.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The "Legend of Zelda
Ocarina of Time": A Game Music Companion
Tim Summers
Intellect Books, 2022
Critical analysis of the music of the iconic 1998 Nintendo 64 video game. 

More than twenty years after its creation, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still held in high critical regard as one of the finest examples of the video game medium. The same is true of the game’s music, whose superlative reception continues to be evident, whether in the context of the game or in orchestral concerts and recordings of the game’s music.

Given music’s well-established significance for the video game form, it is no coincidence that music is placed at the forefront of this most lauded and loved of games. In Ocarina of Time, music connects and unifies all aspects of the game, from the narrative conceit to the interactive mechanics, from the characters to the virtual worlds, and even into the activity of legions of fans and gamers, who play, replay, and reconfigure the music in an enduring cultural site that has Ocarina of Time at its center. As video game music studies begins to mature into a coherent field, it is now possible to take the theoretical apparatus and critical approaches that have been developed in antecedent scholarship and put these into practice in the context of an extended concrete game example.

The most extensive investigation into the music of a single game yet undertaken, this book serves three important primary purposes: first, it provides a historical-critical account of the music of an important video game text; second, it uses this investigation to explore wider issues in music and media studies (including interactivity, fan cultures, and music and technology); and third, it serves as a model for future in-depth studies of video game music.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking
The Conditions and Practices of Migrant Minor Cinemas in Sweden 1950-1990
John Sundholm
Intellect Books, 2019
This book will be released as Open Access.

Based on a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, this book examines 40 years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. John Sundholm and Lars Gustaf Andersson consider the creativity that lies in the state of exile, offering analyses of over 50 rarely seen immigrant films that would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived. They shed light on the complex web of personal, economic, and cultural circumstances that surround migrant filmmaking, discuss associations that became important sites of self-organization for exiled filmmakers, and explore the cultural practice of minor immigrant cinema archiving. The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking applies film theory to immigrant filmmaking in a transnational context, exploring how immigrant filmmakers use film to find a place in a new cultural situation.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays
Caridad Svich
Intellect Books, 2016
“JARMAN (all this maddening beauty”) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE Award–winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts includes a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena), and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich’s work.

“Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . She is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart.”—Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
The Hour of All Things and Other Plays
Caridad Svich
Intellect Books, 2018
This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection—often tested, but never wholly severed—across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo, and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
MEDIA
A Transdisciplinary Inquiry
Jeremy Swartz
Intellect Books, 2020

MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores evolving definitions of media and interrogates how media technologies are transforming media theory and practice. The collection addresses the emerging roles of media across a wide range of disciplines, featuring contributions from an array of internationally known scholars and practitioners.

The definition of media itself is in a constant state of flux, expanding to include an ever-widening range of concepts, products, services, and institutions. Here, the authors reconceptualize media, drawing not only on media and communication studies, but also philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, art, computer science, and information studies, among other disciplines. The collection challenges traditional notions of media, explores emerging media, and reexamines concepts including technology, environment, and ecology; multimedia, mediation, and labor; and participation, repair, and curation. These timely and original discussions by established scholars in the field provide a valuable contribution to the fusion of media across disciplines. 

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dysfunction and Decentralization in New Media Art and Education
Robert W. Sweeny
Intellect Books, 2015
When using digital technologies, many types of dysfunction can occur, ranging from hardware malfunctions to software errors to human ineptitude. Many new media artworks employ various strategies of dysfunctionality in order to explore issues of power within societies and culture. When using digital technologies, many types of dysfunction can occur, from hardware malfunctions to software errors and human ineptitude. Robert W. Sweeney examines how digital artists have embraced the concept of the error or glitch as a form for freedom—imperfection or dysfunction can be an integral element of the project. In this book, he offers practical models and ideas for how artists and educators can incorporate digital technologies and integrate discussions of decentralized models of artistic production and education.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage
José Antonio Sánchez
Intellect Books, 2014
An analysis of reality and "the real" as presented in contemporary artistic creation, Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage examines the responses given by performing arts to the importance placed on reality beyond representation. This book proposes four historic itineraries defined by the ways in which the issue of the real is addressed: the representation of visible reality and its paradoxes, the place of the real on the lived body, the limits placed on representation by experiences of pain and death, and those practices that denounce the real. Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage will be warmly welcomed by scholars of aesthetics and contemporary artistic practice. 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter