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The theater company Mabou Mines has for the past forty years created pathbreaking new theater by combining the latest concepts in music, visual arts, and technology with traditional forms of creative expression: puppetry, text, movement, theater design. From the beginning, the evanescence of performance and the dynamics of group work attracted the group. Most of their early pieces were never recorded, leaving little documentation of their foundational productions. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s provides this missing history, attempting to capture and describe the explorations of a group who set out to create indescribable performance. Iris Smith Fischer makes visible once again the celebrated company's least documented work, and offers accounts of the decisions and events that defined Mabou Mines' ideas and methods, particularly their creative collaborations with visual artists, musicians, writers, and dancers. Focusing on the heady days of the company's founding and first ten years, the book traces Mabou Mines' intellectual and artistic roots, frames them within the 1970s avant-garde, and outlines their significance in contemporary performance.

Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more.

The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

Winner, Best First Monograph, British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies

The first scholarly book on John Hughes examines Hollywood's complex relationship with genre, the role of the auteur in commercial cinema, and the legacy of favorites such as Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

In the 1980s and 1990s, John Hughes was one of Hollywood's most reliable hitmakers, churning out beloved teen comedies and family films such as The Breakfast Club and Home Alone, respectively. But was he an artist? Hughes, an adamantly commercial filmmaker who was dismissed by critics, might have laughed at the question. Since his death in 2009, though, he has been memorialized on Oscar night as a key voice of his time. Now the critics lionize him as a stylistic original.

Holly Chard traces Hughes's evolution from entertainer to auteur. Studios recognized Hughes's distinctiveness and responded by nurturing his brand. He is therefore a case study in Hollywood's production not only of movies but also of genre and of authorship itself. The films of John Hughes, Chard shows, also owed their success to the marketers who sold them and the audiences who watched. Careful readings of Hughes's cinema reveal both the sources of his iconic status and the imprint on his films of the social, political, economic, and media contexts in which he operated.

The first serious treatment of Hughes, Mainstream Maverick elucidates the priorities of the American movie industry in the New Hollywood era and explores how artists not only create but are themselves created.

A history of cinema’s role in popularizing the politics of Palestinian liberation

For decades, Arab American activists and allies have used film, video, and multimedia to mobilize support for the Palestinian cause in the United States. In this detailed history of cinema’s role within the broader solidarity movement, Umayyah Cable analyzes the various strands of cinematic activism that have helped move Palestinian liberation politics from the periphery and into the mainstream.

Cable charts the shifting discourse around Palestine as it has been shaped by grassroots film production and alternative media distribution networks as well as more conventional outlets. Ranging from the circulation of educational filmstrips by the Association of Arab American University Graduates in the 1970s to the treatment of Palestinian solidarity at contemporary Hollywood awards ceremonies and film festivals, Mainstreaming Palestine tells the story of how cinema has promoted Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics. While highlighting various public controversies and struggles against censorship, Cable also acknowledges the drawbacks of the Palestinian cause being subsumed by the mainstream, discussing how activism risks becoming fashionable, undermining the radical potential of the very tools that helped bring it there.

Combining archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews, text analysis, and visual analysis of film, video, and multimedia, Mainstreaming Palestine encourages readers to critically assess the relationship between the politics of liberation and the all-consuming engine of contemporary capitalism. By underscoring the impact of visual media on the evolution of the Palestinian solidarity discourse, this book offers both a treatise on the practical power of cinema and a necessary historicization of an urgent issue in American politics.

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Wearing a mask—putting on another face—embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."

Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making—representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.

2023 Wall Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association

How a Hollywood gem transformed the national discourse on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle the “veterans problem.” Today we call that problem PTSD, but in the initial aftermath of World War II, the modern language of war trauma did not exist. The film earned the producer Samuel Goldwyn his only Best Picture Academy Award. It offered the injured director, William Wyler, a triumphant postwar return to Hollywood. And for Harold Russell, a double amputee who costarred with Fredric March and Dana Andrews, the film provided a surprising second act.

Award-winning author Alison Macor illuminates the film’s journey from script to screen and describes how this authentic motion picture moved audiences worldwide. General Omar Bradley believed The Best Years of Our Lives would help “the American people to build an even better democracy” following the war, and the movie inspired broad reflection on reintegrating the walking wounded. But the film’s nuanced critique of American ideals also made it a target, and the picture and its creators were swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s. In this authoritative history, Macor chronicles the making and meaning of a film that changed America.

Journalist and activist Thorne Dreyer has interviewed hundreds of people for Rag Radio since it went on the air in 2009. Making Waves features transcripts from twenty-one of those interviews, with everyone from TV anchor Dan Rather to Senator Bernie Sanders to monumental sculptor Bob “Daddy-O” Wade. The Rag Radio archive is now part of the collections at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas.

As a student at the University of Texas in the 1960s, Dreyer joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became heavily involved in civil rights and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. He also helped create and edit two underground newspapers—The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston—and later ran a public relations business with a diverse list of clients, including progressive political campaigns. Dreyer credits the influence of his artist mother and writer father and their lively salons plus his journalism career, his political and social activism, and his stage acting experience for his interviewing success—“Put it all in a blender and Rag Radio was bound to whip up.”

Making Waves holds a wealth of information, but Dreyer makes it read like conversations among friends. “I always tell my guests that I want the discussion to be informal,” Dreyer says. “We’re going to record some important history here, but we also want to have fun.”

A struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of manhood defined Hollywood masculinity in the period between the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. David Greven's contention is that a profound shift in representation occurred during the early 1990s when Hollywood was transformed by an explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identity and sexualities. In the years that have followed, popular cinema has either emulated or evaded the representational strategies of this era, especially in terms of gender and sexuality.

One major focus of this study is that, in a great deal of the criticism in both the fields of film theory and queer theory, masochism has been positively cast as a form of male sexuality that resists the structures of normative power, while narcissism has been negatively cast as either a regressive sexuality or the bastion of white male privilege. Greven argues that narcissism is a potentially radical mode of male sexuality that can defy normative codes and categories of gender, whereas masochism, far from being radical, has emerged as the default mode of a traditional normative masculinity. This study combines approaches from a variety of disciplines—psychoanalysis, queer theory, American studies, men's studies, and film theory—as it offers fresh readings of several important films of the past twenty years, including Casualties of War, The Silence of the Lambs, Fight Club, The Passion of the Christ, Auto Focus, and Brokeback Mountain.

Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer

Manoel de Oliveira's eighty-five year career made him a filmmaking icon and a cultural giant in his native Portugal. A lifelong cinematic pioneer, Oliveira merged distinctive formal techniques with philosophical treatments of universal themes--frustrated love, aging, nationhood, evil, and divine grace--in films that always moved against mainstream currents.

Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive feature film oeuvre. Locating the director's work within the broader context of Portuguese and European cinema, Johnson discusses historical and political influences on Oliveira's work, particularly Portugal's transformation from dictatorship to social democracy. He ranges from Oliveira's early concerns with cinematic specificity to hybrid discourses that suggest a tenuous line between film and theater on the one hand, and between fiction and documentary on the other.

A rare English-language portrait of the director, Manoel de Oliveira invites students and scholars alike to explore the work of one of the cinema's greatest and most prolific artists.

Maryat Lee : a life in the theater, Dope!, and salt -- EcoTheater : the one thing willed -- EcoTheater's significance to the twenty-first century -- The EcoTheater process -- Sample EcoTheater scenes -- Some sayings and writings of Maryat Lee -- Maryat Lee : personal reminiscences -- Chronology