Results by title
3258 books match the query 'Performing Arts' and 231 start with c
C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television
Donald G. Godfrey
University of Illinois Press, 2014
This is the first biography of the important but long-forgotten American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins (1867-1934). Historian Donald G. Godfrey documents the life of Jenkins from his childhood in Indiana and early life in the West to his work as a prolific inventor whose productivity was cut short by an early death. Jenkins was an inventor who made a difference.
As one of America's greatest independent inventors, Jenkins's passion was to meet the needs of his day and the future. In 1895 he produced the first film projector able to show a motion picture on a large screen, coincidentally igniting the first film boycott among his Quaker viewers when the film he screened showed a woman's ankle. Jenkins produced the first American television pictures in 1923, and developed the only fully operating broadcast television station in Washington, D.C. transmitting to ham operators from coast to coast as well as programming for his local audience.
Godfrey's biography raises the profile of C. Francis Jenkins from his former place in the footnotes to his rightful position as a true pioneer of today's film and television. Along the way, it provides a window into the earliest days of both motion pictures and television as well as the now-vanished world of the independent inventor.
Caffe Cino
The Birthplace of Off-Off-BroadwayWendell C. Stone
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
“It’s Magic Time!” That colorful promise began each performance at the Caffe Cino, the storied Greenwich Village coffeehouse that fostered the gay and alternative theatre movements of the 1960s and launched the careers of such stage mainstays as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Robert Heide, Harry Koutoukas, Robert Patrick, Robert Dahdah, Helen Hanft, Al Pacino, and Bernadette Peters. As Off-Off-Broadway productions enjoy a deserved resurgence, theatre historian and actor Wendell C. Stone reopens the Cino’s doors in this vibrant look at the earliest days of OOB.
Rife with insider interviews and rich with evocative photographs, Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway provides the first detailed account of Joe Cino’s iconic café theatre and its influence on American theatre. A hub of artistic innovation and haven for bohemians, beats, hippies, and gays, the café gave a much-sought outlet to voices otherwise shunned by mainstream entertainment. The Cino’s square stage measured only eight feet, but the dynamic ideas that emerged there spawned the numerous alternative theatre spaces that owe their origins to the risky enterprise on Cornelia Street.
Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West
Andrew Gibb
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
This interdisciplinary study draws on performance studies, theatre historiography, and New Western History to identify how the unique power relations of historical California were constituted and perpetuated through public performances—not only traditional theatrical productions but also social events such as elite weddings and community dances—and historical events like the U.S. seizure of the city of Monterey, the feting of Commodore Stockton in San Francisco, and the Bear Flag Revolt.
Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the FilmEdited by Edward Lamberti and Michael Williams
Intellect Books, 2026
This edited collection explores how Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me by Your Name speaks powerfully to questions of contemporary sexual identity and romance.
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release. A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) set in 1983 “somewhere in northern Italy,” Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures, prejudices, or tragedy.
While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen, its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. This edited collection points out the ways in which the film is abundantly infused with narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general, between the open and the hidden, and between the past and the present? The contributors to this collection provide stimulating and contemplative responses to this question.
Camp TV
Trans Gender Queer Sitcom HistoryQuinlan Miller
Duke University Press, 2019
Camp
Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject--A ReaderFabio Cleto, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1999
This groundbreaking collection addresses the multi-layered issue of camp, whose inexhaustible breadth of reference and theoretical relevance have made it one of the most salient and challenging issues on the contemporary critical stage. Reassessing the role and significance of the finest essays on camp written by leading intellectuals in cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies and queer theory, this critical anthology both "queers" camp as an issue and offers an excellent key to rethinking the history, theory, and practice of camp.
The anthology is divided into five thematic/historical sections: Tasting It; Flaunting the Closet; Gender, and Other Spectacles; Pop Camp, Surplus Counter-Value, or the Camp of Cultural Economy; and The Queer Issue. These groupings help the reader situate the critical debates around the subject. Fabio Cleto's introduction brings new theoretical insights to the subject of camp while tracing its history as an object of intellectual and cultural critique and analysis.
A comprehensive bibliography that traces the earliest use of the word 'camp' to the present completes this unique and exciting volume.
“Is ‘camp’ a kind of irony, an effect of one’s historic vantage point, an art form or an elitist aesthetic? … From landmark early works by Christopher Isherwood and Susan Sontag to influential contemporary pieces by Esther Newton, Andrew Ross and Judith Butler, this anthology encapsulates the philosophical discussion of this slippery postmodern concept.”
--Publishers Weekly
“As an object of critical inquiry, camp has proven notoriously difficult to define. Fabio Cleto takes this difficulty as his point of departure in the most recent anthology of a growing body of scholarly literature on the topic…Cleto resists defining camp [but] does not abandon the task of framing, in a coherent but flexible way, camp as a problematic.”
--Semiotica
“Fabio Cleto’s collection variously associates ‘camp’ with the 1960s, aestheticism, androgyny, cross-dressing, the cultural figure of the dandy, decadence, drag, exaggeration, kitsch, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, the sentimental, and the transvestite… The essayists in Camp disagree freely and fiercely over definitions. This is to be expected in a queer reader, one whose contributors endeavor to ‘read across’ the meanings of camp.”
--The Gay & Lesbian Review
Capitalism Hates You
Marxism and the New Horror FilmJoshua Gooch
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist society
Capitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease.
Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism’s varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system.
Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society.
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Career Movies
American Business and the Success MystiqueBy Jack Boozer
University of Texas Press, 2002
Achieving the American Dream became inextricably linked with career/business success after World War II, as an increasingly consumerist America learned to define the dream through possessions and status. Not surprisingly, Hollywood films in the postwar years reflected the country's preoccupation with work and career success, offering both dramatic and comedic visions of the career quest and its effects on personal fulfillment, family relations, women's roles, and the creation (or destruction) of just and caring communities.
In this book, Jack Boozer argues that the career/business film achieved such variety and prominence in the years between 1945 and 2001 that it should be considered a legitimate film genre. Analyzing numerous well-known films from the entire period, he defines the genre as one in which a protagonist strives for career success that often proves to be either elusive despite hard work, or unfulfilling despite material rewards and status. Boozer also explores several distinct subgenres of the career movie—the corporate executive films of the 1950s; the career struggles of (single, married, and/or parenting) women; the entrepreneurial film as it is also embodied in texts about immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities and business-oriented femmes fatales; the explosion of promotionalism and the corporatization of employment; and, finally, the blurring of work and private life in the brave new world of the televirtuality film.
Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance
Igniting CitizenshipYvonne Daniel
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Carnival Texts
Three Plays for Ensemble PerformanceJames MacDonald
Intellect Books, 2011
Designed for undergraduate performance, Carnival Texts comprises three related dramatic works, all of which have as their point of departure Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, a literary style designed to subvert dominant assumptions through chaos and humor. Making creative use of post-Brechtian performance theory, these texts blur the distinction between spectator and performer in a fascinating exploration of physical, moral, and cultural upheaval in a postmodern age. Performance theory is crucial to understanding how performance affects collective understanding, and this book will be of interest to a broad range of students of drama and theater.
Carnival Theater
Uruguay’s Popular Performers and National CultureGustavo Remedi
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Offers a new model for interpreting popular national culture through Uruguay’s carnival theater troupes
The murgas are troupes of performers, musicians, writers, and creators who, during Montevideo’s Carnival, perform on the tablados, temporary stages built in the neighborhoods of Uruguay’s capital city each year. Throughout the period of Uruguay’s subjection to a brutal dictatorship and in the following era of “democratization,” the murgas, envisioned originally as popular theater, were transformed into a symbol of social resistance, celebrated by many and perceived by others as menacing and subversive.
Focusing on the cultural practices of the lower classes and more specifically on the processes and productions of the murgas, Gustavo Remedi’s Carnival Theater is a deeply thoughtful consideration of Uruguayan society’s identity crisis and subsequent redefinition in the wake of the authoritarian-bureaucratic-technocratic regimes of the 1970s. A revealing work of cultural criticism, the book proposes a new set of criteria for the interpretation and critique of national culture.
Carrying All before Her
Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800Chelsea Phillips
University of Delaware Press, 2022
The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.
Cartographic Cinema
Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Casting a Shadow
Creating the Alfred Hitchcock FilmEdited by Will Schmenner and Corinne Granof
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Scott Curtis considers the four functions of Hitchcock’s sketches and storyboards and how they undermine the impression of Hitchcock as a lone artist. Tom Gunning examines the visual vocabulary and cultural weight of Hitchcock’s movies. Bill Krohn focuses sharply on the film I Confess, tracking its making over a very cooperative path.
Finally, Jan Olsson draws on the television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to show the ways that collaboration contributes to the formation of his well known public persona. Anchored by editor Will Schmenner’s introduction, this book represents an important contribution to Hitchcock scholarship and a provocative glimpse at his unsung strength as a collaborative artist.
Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850
Anaïs Pédron
University of Delaware Press, 2021
Celluloid Activist
The Life and Times of Vito RussoMichael Schiavi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
“Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review
“In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards
Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association
Celluloid China
Cinematic Encounters with Culture and SocietyHarry H. Kuoshu
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002
Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society by Harry H. Kuoshu is a lucid introduction to the cinema of mainland China from the early 1930s to the early 1990s. Emphasizing both film contexts and film texts, this study invites film scholars and students to a broad cinematic analysis that includes investigations of cultural, cross-cultural, intellectual, social, ethnic, and political issues. Such a holistic evaluation allows for a better understanding of both the genesis of a special kind of film art from the People’s Republic of China and the culture exemplified in those films.
The fifteen films include: Two Stage Sisters; Hibiscus Town; Farewell My Concubine; Street Angel; Three Women; Human, Woman, Demon; Judou; Girl from Hunan; Sacrificed Youth; Horse Thief; Yellow Earth; Old Well; Red Sorghum; Black Cannon Incident; and Good Morning, Beijing. Discussions of each film have an introduction, passages from the director’s own notes whenever available, and a scholarly article. Discussion questions are found in an appendix. Within its complete bibliography, the book also features a suggested reading list for Chinese film classes. Celluloid China is the first book to provide such an exhaustive study of the art and cultural context of Chinese cinema.
Celluloid Pueblo
Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar SouthwestJennifer L. Jenkins
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Celluloid Pueblo tells the story of Western Ways Features and its role in the invention of the Southwest of the imagination. Active during a thirty-year period of profound growth and transformation, the Herberts created a dynamic visual record of the region, and their archival films now serve as a time capsule of the Sunbelt in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing upon a ten-year career with Fox, Western Ways owner-operator Charles Herbert brought a newshound’s sensibility and acute skill at in-camera editing to his southwestern subjects. The Western Ways films provided counternarratives to Hollywood representations of the West and established the regional identity of Tucson and the borderlands.
Jennifer L. Jenkins’s broad-sweeping book examines the Herberts’ work on some of the first sound films in the Arizona borderlands and their ongoing promotion of the Southwest. The book covers the filmic representation of Native and Mexican lifeways, Anglo ranching and leisure, Mexican missions and tourism, and postwar borderlands prosperity and progressivism. The story of Western Ways closely follows the boom-and-bust arc of the midcentury Southwest and the constantly evolving representations of an exotic—but safe and domesticated—frontier.
Celluloid Vampires
Life After Death in the Modern WorldBy Stacey Abbott
University of Texas Press, 2007
In 1896, French magician and filmmaker George Méliès brought forth the first celluloid vampire in his film Le manoir du diable. The vampire continues to be one of film's most popular gothic monsters and in fact, today more people become acquainted with the vampire through film than through literature, such as Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. How has this long legacy of celluloid vampires affected our understanding of vampire mythology? And how has the vampire morphed from its folkloric and literary origins?
In this entertaining and absorbing work, Stacey Abbott challenges the conventional interpretation of vampire mythology and argues that the medium of film has completely reinvented the vampire archetype. Rather than representing the primitive and folkloric, the vampire has come to embody the very experience of modernity. No longer in a cape and coffin, today's vampire resides in major cities, listens to punk music, embraces technology, and adapts to any situation. Sometimes she's even female.
With case studies of vampire classics such as Nosferatu, Martin, Blade, and Habit, the author traces the evolution of the American vampire film, arguing that vampires are more than just blood-drinking monsters; they reflect the cultural and social climate of the societies that produce them, especially during times of intense change and modernization. Abbott also explores how independent filmmaking techniques, special effects makeup, and the stunning and ultramodern computer-generated effects of recent films have affected the representation of the vampire in film.
Censorium
Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass PublicityWilliam Mazzarella
Duke University Press, 2013
At the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and critical theory, Censorium is a pathbreaking analysis of Indian film censorship. The book encompasses two moments of moral panic: the consolidation of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the global avalanche of images unleashed by liberalization since the early 1990s. Exploring breaks and continuities in film censorship across colonial and postcolonial moments, William Mazzarella argues that the censors' obsessive focus on the unacceptable content of certain images and the unruly behavior of particular audiences displaces a problem that they constantly confront yet cannot directly acknowledge: the volatile relation between mass affect and collective meaning. Grounded in a close analysis of cinema regulation in the world's largest democracy, Censorium ultimately brings light to the elusive foundations of political and cultural sovereignty in mass-mediated societies.
Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
By Monika Mehta
University of Texas Press, 2011
India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship's role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring.
Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.
Chai Noon
Jews and the Cinematic Wild WestJonathan L. Friedmann
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
This volume joins other reconsiderations of outsider and minority representations in Westerns to offer a more nuanced view of the genre. Friedmann engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film, including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable.
Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids
Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, TexasBy Alison Macor
University of Texas Press, 2010
Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2011
During the 1990s, Austin achieved "overnight" success and celebrity as a vital place for independent filmmaking. Directors Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez proved that locally made films with regional themes such as Slacker and El Mariachi could capture a national audience. Their success helped transform Austin's homegrown film community into a professional film industry staffed with talented, experienced filmmakers and equipped with state-of-the art-production facilities. Today, Austin struggles to balance the growth and expansion of its film community with an ongoing commitment to nurture the next generation of independent filmmakers.
Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids chronicles the evolution of this struggle by re-creating Austin's colorful movie history. Based on revealing interviews with Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Mike Judge, Quentin Tarantino, Matthew McConaughey, George Lucas, and more than one hundred other players in the local and national film industries, Alison Macor explores how Austin has become a proving ground for contemporary independent cinema. She begins in the early 1970s with Tobe Hooper's horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and follows the development of the Austin film scene through 2001 with the production and release of Rodriguez's $100-million blockbuster, Spy Kids. Each chapter explores the behind-the-scenes story of a specific movie, such as Linklater's Dazed and Confused and Judge's Office Space, against the backdrop of Austin's ever-expanding film community.
Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima
Variety Theater in the Nineteenth CenturyGillian Rodger
University of Illinois Press, 2010
In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these entertainments, and Rodger profiles key male impersonators Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner while examining how both gender and sexuality gave shape to variety. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, variety theater developed into a platform for ideas about race and whiteness.
As some in the working class moved up into the middling classes, they took their affinity for variety with them, transforming and broadening middle-class values. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima places the saloon keepers, managers, male impersonators, minstrels, acrobats, singers, and dancers of the variety era within economic and social contexts by examining the business models of variety shows and their primarily white, working-class urban audiences. Rodger traces the transformation of variety from sexualized entertainment to more family-friendly fare, a domestication that mirrored efforts to regulate the industry, as well as the adoption of aspects of middle-class culture and values by the shows' performers, managers, and consumers.
Change Mummified
Cinema, Historicity, TheoryPhilip Rosen
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
An innovative study of the intersections between history and film.
Exploring the modern category of history in relation to film theory, film textuality, and film history, Change Mummified makes a persuasive argument for the centrality of historicity to film as well as the special importance of film in historical culture. What do we make of the concern for recovering the past that is consistently manifested in so many influential modes of cinema, from Hollywood to documentary and postcolonial film? How is film related to the many modern practices that define themselves as configuring pastness in the present, such as architectural preservation, theme parks, and, above all, professional historical research? What is the relation of history in film to other media such as television and digital imaging? How does emphasizing the connection between film and modern historicity affect the theorization and historicization of film and modern media culture?
Pursuing the full implications of film as cultural production, Philip Rosen reconceptualizes modern historicity as a combination of characteristic epistemological structures on the one hand, and the social imperative to regulate or manage time on the other. Emphasizing a fundamental constellation of pursuit of the real, indexical signification and the need to control time, he interrogates a spectrum of film theory and film texts. His argument refocuses the category of temporality for film and cultural theory while rethinking the importance of historicity. An original and sustained meditation on the historiographic status of cinematic signs, Change Mummified is both an intervention in film and media studies and an argument for the continuing necessity of modern historical thinking in its contradictions.
Changing Channels
Television and the Struggle for Power in RussiaEllen Mickiewicz
Duke University Press, 1999
Revised and expanded
During the tumultuous 1990s, as Russia struggled to shed the trappings of the Soviet empire, television viewing emerged as an enormous influence on Russian life. The number of viewers who routinely watch the nightly news in Russia matches the number of Americans who tune in to the Super Bowl, thus making TV coverage the prized asset for which political leaders intensely—and sometimes violently—compete. In this revised and expanded edition of Changing Channels, Ellen Mickiewicz provides many fascinating insights, describing the knowing ways in which ordinary Russians watch the news, skeptically analyze information, and develop strategies for dealing with news bias.
Covering the period from the state-controlled television broadcasts at the end of the Soviet Union through the attempted coup against Gorbachev, the war in Chechnya, the presidential election of 1996, and the economic collapse of 1998, Mickiewicz draws on firsthand research, public opinion surveys, and many interviews with key players, including Gorbachev himself. By examining the role that television has played in the struggle to create political pluralism in Russia, she reveals how this struggle is both helped and hindered by the barrage of information, advertisements, and media-created personalities that populate the airwaves. Perhaps most significantly, she shows how television has emerged as the sole emblem of legitimate authority and has provided a rare and much-needed connection from one area of this huge, crisis-laden country to the next.
This new edition of Changing Channels will be valued by those interested in Russian studies, politics, media and communications, and cultural studies, as well as general readers who desire an up-to-date view of crucial developments in Russia at the end of the twentieth century.
Changing Minds or Changing Channels?
Partisan News in an Age of ChoiceKevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Changing the Subject
Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies 1959-2009Edited and with an Introduction by Joseph Roach
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal
The Life and Times of a Female ImpersonatorSandip Roy
Seagull Books, 2025
As the last great female impersonator of Bengali theater, Chapal Bhaduri—known as Chapal Rani—once held audiences spellbound in the jatra tradition, where men became goddesses and heroines. But when women finally took their place on stage, Chapal found himself exiled from the world he had ruled. In this groundbreaking biography, Sandip Roy captures the rise and fall of a performer whose art was inseparable from his identity.
Told in Chapal’s own voice and interwoven with evocative fictional vignettes, Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal brings to life Kolkata’s golden age of theater and the resilience of a man who refused to disappear. Through decades of research and deeply personal interviews, Roy crafts a moving portrait of gender and belonging.
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama
Tragedy, History, TragicomedyJohn E. Curran
University of Delaware Press, 2014
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Character, Scene, and Story
New Tools from the Dramatic Writer's CompanionWill Dunne
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Featuring forty-two new workshop-tested exercises, this sequel to The Dramatic Writer’s Companion allows writers to dig deeper into their scripts by fleshing out images, exploring characters from an emotional perspective, tapping the power of color and sense memory to trigger ideas, and trying other visceral techniques. The guide also includes a troubleshooting section to help tackle problem scenes. Writers with scripts already in progress will find they can think deeper about their characters and stories. And those who are just beginning to write will find the guidance they need to discover their best starting point. The guide is filled with hundreds of examples, many of which have been developed as both plays and films.
Character, Scene, and Story is fully aligned with the new edition of The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, with cross-references between related exercises so that writers have the option to explore a given topic in more depth. While both guides can stand alone, together they give writers more than one hundred tools to develop more vivid characters and craft stronger scripts.
Charles Ludlam Lives!
Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical CompanySean F. Edgecomb
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.
Charles Ludlam Lives!
Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical CompanySean F. Edgecomb
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.
Charlie Chaplin, Director
Donna Kornhaber
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.
Chaucer on Screen
Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury TalesEdited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Chicago Death Trap
The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903Nat Brandt. Introduction by Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.
Advertised as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois was Chicago’s most modern playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the city’s building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.
The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building had not been completed, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.
Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.
Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows
From Shock Theatre to SvengoolieTed Okuda and Mark Yurkiw
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Chicago
With the Chicago Tribune Articles That Inspired ItMaurine Watkins, Edited by Thomas H. Pauly, Foreword by Charles H. Cosgrove
Southern Illinois University Press, 2025
In 1924, the murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner shocked the world, providing the real-life inspiration for Maurine Watkins’s unforgettable characters, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Now, a century later, this reissue of Watkins’s play offers a fresh look at the origins of the story that has since become a household name.
From the silent film Chicago produced by Cecil B. DeMille in 1927 to the 1942 film Roxie Hart starring Ginger Rogers and the Broadway sensation created by Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb, and John Kander, this play has continuously evolved. It even inspired the 2002 Oscar-winning film Chicago starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. But until recently, as editor Thomas H. Pauly writes in the book’s introduction, the real-life roots of the story were obscured.
While researching for a book on crime-as-entertainment during the 1920s, Pauly came across Maurine Watkins’s play, which was then out of print. After noticing similarities between the play and a series of articles Watkins penned for the Chicago Tribune prior to the creation of her play, Pauly knew he had stumbled upon a revelation: Watkins’s play was based on real people. His republication of the play, alongside substantial background material and a reprinting of Watkins’s news articles, has become an indispensable starting point for all subsequent interest in Watkins and Chicago, whose subject remains as topical as ever.
This special edition includes a new foreword by Charles H. Cosgrove, author of They Both Reached for the Gun: Beulah Annan, Maurine Watkins, and the Trial That Became Chicago. Cosgrove’s extensive research into the real-life cases provides deeper insight into the world that Watkins portrayed with such satirical brilliance. Additionally, the original editor, Thomas H. Pauly, has contributed a new preface, further enhancing understanding of the play and its inspiration, the thrilling true-crime story that captivated a nation and birthed a cultural phenomenon.
Chicano-Chicana Americana
Pop Culture Pluralism Starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe OntiverosAnthony Macías
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Each biographical chapter analyzes an underappreciated actor, revealing their artistic contributions to U.S. common culture. Their long-shot careers tell a tale of players taking action with agency and fighting for screen time and equal opportunity despite disadvantages and differential treatment in Hollywood. These dynamic and complex individuals altered cinematic representations—and audience expectations—by surpassing stereotypes.
The book explores American national character by showing how ethnic Mexicans attained social and cultural status through fair, open competition without a radical realignment of political or economic structures. Their creative achievements demanded dignity and earned respect. Anthony Macías argues that these performances demonstrated a pop culture pluralism that subtly changed mainstream America, transforming it from the mythological past of the Wild West to the speculative future of science fiction.
Chicanos And Film
Representation and ResistanceChon A. Noriega
University of Minnesota Press, 1992
Chick Flicks
Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film MovementB. Ruby Rich
Duke University Press, 1998
For over three decades Rich has been one of the most important voices in feminist film criticism. Her presence at film festivals (such as Sundance, where she is a member of the selection committee), her film reviews in the Village Voice, Elle, Out, and the Advocate, and her commentaries on the public radio program “The World” have secured her a place as a central figure in the remarkable history of what she deems “cinefeminism.” In the hope that a new generation of feminist film culture might be revitalized by reclaiming its own history, Rich introduces each essay with an autobiographical prologue that describes the intellectual, political, and personal moments from which the work arose. Travel, softball, sex, and voodoo all somehow fit into a book that includes classic Rich articles covering such topics as the antiporn movement, the films of Yvonne Rainer, a Julie Christie visit to Washington, and the historically evocative film Maedchen in Uniform. The result is a volume that traces the development not only of women’s involvement in cinema but of one of its key players as well.
The first book-length work from Rich—whose stature and influence in the world of film criticism and theory continue to grow—Chick Flicks exposes unexplored routes and forgotten byways of a past that’s recent enough to be remembered and far away enough to be memorable.
Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre
The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile ActorsShauna Vey
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Looking at the daily work lives of five members of the Marsh Troupe—the father and manager, Robert Marsh, and four child performers, Mary Marsh, Alfred Stewart, Louise Arnot, and Georgie Marsh—Vey reveals the realities of the antebellum theatre and American society: the rise of the nineteenth-century impresario; the emerging societal constructions of girlhood and goodness; the realities of child labor; the decline of the apprenticeship model of actor training; shifts in gender roles and the status of working women; and changes in the economic models of theatre production, including the development of the stock company system.
Both a microhistory of a professional theatre company and its juvenile players in the decade before the Civil War and a larger narrative of cultural change in the United States, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre sheds light on how childhood was idealized both on and off the stage, how the role of the child in society shifted in the nineteenth century, and the ways economic value and sentiment contributed to how children were viewed.
Children of Cuarón
Speculative Futures Through Cinematic FictionMatt Garcia
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men thrusts readers into a gripping near-future world where environmental collapse and global infertility have fortified borders and torn apart the fabric of society. Its stark depictions of mass deportation, lawless border zones, and the desperate fight for survival echo powerfully through Octavia Butler’s prophetic novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, where environmental breakdown, migration, childbirth, and the resilience of women’s bodies form the core of her visionary storytelling. Remarkably, the futures imagined in these works are no longer distant—Butler’s 2024 has arrived, and Cuarón’s 2027 is nearly here. Children of Cuarón: Speculative Futures Through Cinematic Fiction ignites bold, necessary conversations about borders, immigration, and the urgent political, environmental, and social challenges facing our world today. By examining how speculative fiction dares to imagine what comes next, this book invites readers to confront the realities of our present—and the possibilities of our future—with fresh eyes and uncompromising clarity.
Chimes at Midnight
Orson Welles, DirectorLyons, Bridget G
Rutgers University Press, 1988
This volume offers a complete continuity script of Chimes at Midnight, including its famous battle sequence. Each shot is described in detail and is keyed to the original Shakesperian sources, thus making the volume an invaluable guide to Welles as an adaptor and creator of texts. The first complete transcription of the continuity script of Chimes is accompanied by the editor's critical introduction on Welles's transformation of Shakespeare; a special interview with Keith Baxter, one of the film's principal actors, which discusses its production history; reviews and articles; and a biographical sketch of Welles, a filmography, and a bibliography.
China Forever
The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic CinemaEdited by Poshek Fu
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Chinatown Film Culture
The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese NeighborhoodKim K. Fahlstedt
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Chinatown Opera Theater in North America
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019
Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018
Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018
Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019
The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities
Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Chinese Cinema
Identity, Power, and GlobalizationEdited by Jeff Kyong-McClain, Russell Meeuf, and Jing Jing Chang
Hong Kong University Press, 2022
In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second-largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture.
Chinese Connections
Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and DiasporaGina Marchetti
Temple University Press, 2009
Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.
With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.
Contributors include: Grace An, Aaron Anderson, Chris Berry, Evans Chan, Li-Mei Chang, Frances Gateward, Andrew Grossman, Peter Hitchcock, Chuck Kleinhans, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Helen Leung, Aaron Magnan-Park, Gayle Wald, Esther C.M. Yau, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Xuelin Zhou and the editors.
Chinese Dance
National Movements in a Revolutionary AgeLiangyu Fu & Emily Wilcox
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019