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In 1914, an unknown French filmmaker arrived in New York; within four years, Maurice Tourneur (1876–1961) would become one of America’s most acclaimed directors. In this masterful biography, Christine Leteux shows how intimately connected Tourneur’s life was to major events of the twentieth century as well as to the profound transformations in movie making. A master of directing silent films, he quickly managed the transition to sound. His last major work was created for Continental Films, the German-owned firm that controlled the French film industry during the Nazi Occupation. His son, Jacques, followed in his footsteps, also becoming an acclaimed director.

Drawing heavily on previously unpublished archival documents, Leteux reinvigorates film history and demonstrates that we know far less about this era of filmmaking than we often assume. She reveals not only how Tourneur jumped from France to the United States and back again but also how he shifted from one company to another, moving quickly up the ladder to bigger productions and ever larger studios. Tourneur’s drive, insight, technical proficiency, skill with actors, ability to create new forms of storytelling, and fame on both sides of the Atlantic make it all the more surprising that he is not better known today—an oversight that has now been corrected thanks to Leteux’s impressively detailed research and nuanced storytelling.

Mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it coopts its affect, form, and content from racial oppression and protest while aiming meanness toward people in marginalized groups.

Kim Hong Nguyen’s feminist media study examines four types of white mean girl feminism prominent in North American popular culture: the bitch, the mean girl, the power couple, and the global mother. White feminists mime the anger, disempowerment, and resistance felt by people of color and other marginalized groups. Their performance allows them to pursue and claim a special place within established power structures, present as intellectually superior, substitute nonpolitical playacting for a politics of solidarity and community, and position themselves as better, more enlightened masters than patriarchy. But, as Nguyen shows, the racialized meanness found across pop culture opens possibilities for building an intersectional feminist politics that rejects performative civility in favor of turning anger into liberation.

How media shapes our actions and feelings about race
 

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism.

From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. 

Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists. 

An exploration of the representational culture of Alzheimer’s disease and how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging 
 

With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer’s disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer’s, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease’s relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease. 

Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer’s threatens—memory, for example—are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer’s. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging.

Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer’s contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer’s disease and aging in America.

Tracing the integration of digital technologies in film production and distribution that empowered a generation of filmmakers and expanded the global market for Mexican films.

Digital filmmaking and distribution have transformed the movies from what gets made and how to who gets to experience it. But while this has been a global evolution, local cultural forces have also played a decisive role. Mexico is a case in point. In Mexican Cinema in the Digital Age, Marvin D’Lugo traces the dramatic impact of technological innovation on one country’s film industry and aesthetics, revealing profound interactions between art and nation in an era when cultural products know no borders.

Through close analysis of more than twenty movies made this century, D’Lugo shows how technological advances fed the creative energies of Mexican filmmakers. In particular, the agility of the mobile digital camera contributed to a new audiovisual style in Mexico, which achieved global commercial success in the pre-streaming age. Since then, the rise of streaming has encouraged filmmakers to create works that are understood as distinctively Mexican yet marketable to global audiences. As a result, ordinary Mexicans increasingly see their own society through the eyes of outsiders. D’Lugo argues that the consequence has been a novel political subjectivity, as today’s cinema promotes a sense of Mexican cultural affiliation shorn of old nationalist tropes.

Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City.

David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. "Politics of the City" examines the films Rojo amanecer,Novia que te vea,Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas. "Human Geographies" looks at El Callejón de los Milagros,Mecánica nacional,El castillo de la pureza,Todo el poder, and Lolo. "Mapping Gender" discusses Danzón,De noche vienes,Esmeralda,La tarea,Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.

“Not a mirror but a magnifying glass”—such, in the poet Mayakovsky’s words, was the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The first to insist on the primacy of the director’s role, indeed the first to conceive of it as a role, this passionately dedicated Russian director tore down the fourth wall and forced the actors and audience together into one inescapable community of experience.

Yet Meyerhold recorded few of his theories in writing, and the intensity and brilliance of his work must be recaptured through the actors and artists who helped create the performances. Focusing on Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary career, Paul Schmidt has assembled in this book journals, letters, reminiscences, and, of special interest, actual rehearsal notes that build a fascinating, intimate picture of Meyerhold as a theorist and as a man.

Included are Meyerhold’s frantic notes to his teacher, friend, and bête noire Stanislavsky; detailed descriptions of how he trained his actors in “biomechanics”; and memories by such students as Eisenstein and such friends as Pasternak and Ehrenburg. One chapter deals with Meyerhold’s never-realized conception of Boris Godunov, while another describes his direction of Camille, which starred Zinaida Raikh, his wife, and which played its 725th and last performance on the day Stalin’s government liquidated Meyerhold’s theater. Paul Schmidt’s introduction and headnotes enhance our understanding of Meyerhold as a pioneer of modern theater.