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An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning in particular when the act of listening is understood to be shared with others.
 
Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a young, post–World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent—a cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of imaginative thought. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book’s appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude considers the question: What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?

We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the story of being human. Animal Acts collects eleven exciting, provocative, and moving stories by solo performers, accompanied by commentary that places the works in a broader context.

Work by leading theater artists Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, Deke Weaver, Carmelita Tropicana, and others joins commentary by major scholars including Donna Haraway, Jane Desmond, Jill Dolan, and Nigel Rothfels. Una Chaudhuri’s introduction provides a vital foundation for understanding and appreciating the intersection of animal studies and performance. The anthology foregrounds questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other issues central to the human project within the discourse of the “post human,” and will appeal to readers interested in solo performance, animal studies, gender studies, performance studies, and environmental studies.

A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism

Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question—what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime’s Identity, Stevie Suan examines how anime’s recognizable media-form—no matter where it is produced—reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality.

Far from valorizing the individualistic “originality” so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime’s character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality. 

Anime’s Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media.

How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh’s career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate.

Gallagher investigates Soderbergh’s work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant!, as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh’s role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions—an argument supported by the film’s several Academy Award nominations—and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike. Each section explores a central aspect of the film: its status as an auteur adaptation; its relation to the science fiction genre; its themes of communication on narrative and meta-narrative levels; its aesthetics of time and space; and the political and ethical questions it raises. Ultimately, Roche declares Arrival a unique, multifaceted experience in the world of hard science fiction films, placing it in context with works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact while also examining how it bridges the gap between genre and art house cinema.

Maria Cristina Fava explores the rich creative milieu shaped by artists dedicated to using music and theater to advance the promotion, circulation, and acceptance of leftist ideas in 1930s New York City. Despite tensions between aesthetic and pragmatic goals, the people and groups produced works at the center of the decade’s sociopolitical and cultural life. Fava looks at the Composers’ Collective of New York and its work on proletarian music and workers’ songs before turning to the blend of experimentation and vernacular idioms that shaped the political use of music within the American Worker’s Theater Movement. Fava then reveals how composers and theater practitioners from these two groups achieved prominence within endeavors promoted by the Works Project Administration.

Fava’s history teases out fascinating details from performances and offstage activity attached to works by composers such as Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, and Harold Rome. Endeavors encouraged avant-garde experimentation while nurturing innovations friendly to modernist approaches and an interest in non-western music. Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock offered a memorable example that found popular success, but while the piece achieved its goals, it became so wrapped up in myths surrounding workers’ theater that critics overlooked Blitzstein’s musical ingenuity.

Provocative and original, Art Music Activism considers how innovative classical composers of the 1930s balanced creative aims with experimentation, accessible content, and a sociopolitical message to create socially meaningful works.

Bringing an art historical perspective to the realm of American and European film, Art in the Cinematic Imagination examines the ways in which films have used works of art and artists themselves as cinematic and narrative motifs. From the use of portraits in Vertigo to the cinematic depiction of women artists in Artemisia and Camille Claudel, Susan Felleman incorporates feminist and psychoanalytic criticism to reveal individual and collective perspectives on sex, gender, identity, commerce, and class.

Probing more than twenty films from the postwar era through contemporary times, Art in the Cinematic Imagination considers a range of structurally significant art objects, artist characters, and art-world settings to explore how the medium of film can amplify, reinvent, or recontextualize the other visual arts. Fluently speaking across disciplines, Felleman's study brings a broad array of methodologies to bear on questions such as the evolution of the "Hollywood Love Goddess" and the pairing of the feminine with death on screen.

A persuasive approach to an engaging body of films, Art in the Cinematic Imagination illuminates a compelling and significant facet of the cinematic experience.

Artaud and His Doublesis a radical re-thinking of one of the most influential theater figures of the twentieth century. Placing Artaud's writing within the specific context of European political, theatrical, and intellectual history, the book reveals Artaud's affinities with a disturbing array of anti-intellectual and reactionary writers and artists whose ranks swelled catastrophically between the wars in Western Europe.

Kimberly Jannarone shows that Artaud's work reveals two sets of doubles: one, a body of peculiarly persistent received interpretations from the American experimental theater and French post-structuralist readings of the 1960s; and, two, a darker set of doubles—those of Artaud's contemporaries who, in the tumultuous, alienated, and pessimistic atmosphere enveloping much of Europe after World War I, denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self. Artaud and His Doubleswill generate provocative new discussions about Artaud and fundamentally challenge the way we look at his work and ideas.

A cogent reconsideration of Assayas’s cinematic oeuvre and what it teaches us about the political today

The films of Olivier Assayas are widely celebrated for their complex responses to the many shifts that globalization has introduced in our time. Brian Price contends that they offer a different way of regarding the so-called problem of cultural and political enmeshment that Carl Schmitt and other conservative thinkers fear, including a contention that enmeshment is not a problem at all, in fact, but rather a different mode of social and political organization. Price puts Assayas’s films in dialogue not only with Schmitt’s theory of the political but also with the history of political philosophy after Schmitt, especially in the work of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Chantal Mouffe, all of whom have attempted to reckon with the friend/enemy dynamic at the core of the political.

At the heart of Assayas’s cinematic oeuvre, and of this book, is a reflection on what it means to be politically serious, which, Price shows, cannot be reduced to criteria that can simply be applied or repeated. The boundaries between the political and the varied forms of the social demand a sensitivity to change and the unknown, none of which can be accessed in the states of absolute certainty that are derived from crises that do not repeat in the same ways. The messiness and nuances of modern life are held together by moving images, which insist that we know why we value what we demand and seek to protect.
 

A bold new understanding of montage and French cinematic history

Amid the tumult of change that swept through French society in the wake of World War II, a trio of visionary filmmakers sought to make meaning of the chaos by revitalizing a common method: montage. Revealing Nicole Védrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker as more than just groundbreaking auteurs, Ivan Cerecina shows how their collective infusion of montage with avant-garde aesthetics renewed the art of cinema while helping France reckon with its past and imagine its future.

Assembly Lines challenges a dominant story of postwar French film, championed by critics at important film journals like Cahiers du cinéma, that has generally centered realist film aesthetics. Working against this tendency, Cerecina shows how Védrès, Resnais, and Marker revitalized montage as a technique in response to the crises of the times, using it to process the ravages of the recent past, expose hidden connections, and uncover signs of coming catastrophe. Wedding insightful analyses of films and French cultural history with writings from lesser-heard voices like André Malraux, Jacques Brunius, and Henri Langlois, Assembly Lines illuminates obscured networks of critics, filmmakers, and historians to reshape our conception of French film and documentary. Meanwhile, Cerecina’s in-depth archival research unearths vital documents, including correspondence and production notes on Védrès’s Paris 1900 and Resnais’s Night and Fog.

More than a cinematic retrospective, Cerecina’s investigation of montage is also a call to action today as contemporary crises prompt reevaluation of our cultural histories. Assembly Lines exemplifies a powerful, future-oriented practice of historical reflection with implications that go well beyond the study of film.

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For over a century, Hollywood controlled the largest unified film market in the developed world, making it the global leader in film production and distribution. Since 2017, however, China has surpassed the North American market in the number of screens and cutting-edge technology. At the Chinese Multiplex asserts that this change was not the result of market forces, but rather of government policies that helped engineer what is arguably the greatest cultural infrastructure project in history. In China, the state plays a central role in the development of the film exhibition market that follows the same patterns as other infrastructure projects initiated by the Chinese Communist Party. While state-directed, the growth of the Chinese film exhibition market—centered on new multiplexes housed in China’s growing number of urban shopping malls—is part of a larger project to engineer a consumer economy in China. China’s simultaneous embrace of the digital economy, particularly the QR code, has also played a crucial role in the shifting landscape of China’s media industry. 

Focusing on the movie theatre as a contested site, author James Udden offers a timely study of China’s domestic film market. The picture that emerges is one complicated by conflicts between government regulation and private investment, by concerns about digitally managed pricing variables, and by questions about the future viability of a film market focused on regime-friendly blockbusters.

In this study, Emma Wilson closely analyzes the range of Egoyan's films and their visual textures, emotional control, and perverse beauty. Offering a full-scale chronological overview of Egoyan's work on films up to and including Where the Truth Lies, Wilson shows the persistence and development of certain structures and themes in Egoyan's cinema: questions of exile and nostalgia, trauma and healing, the family and sexuality. While drawing on ideas about intercultural cinema, Wilson also sets Egoyan's films in the context of contemporary Canadian cinema and European art-house cinema. Egoyan's own comments on his films thread throughout Wilson's analyses, and the book features a recent interview with the director.