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3258 books match the query 'Performing Arts' and 184 start with m

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Movies & Mass Culture

Belton, John

Rutgers University Press, 1995

Movies and Mass Culture looks at the ways in which American identity shapes and is shaped by motion pictures. Movies serve not only as texts that document who we think we are or were, but they also reflect changes in our self-image, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another. They assist audiences in negotiating major changes in identity, carrying them across difficult periods of cultural transition so that a more or less coherent national identity again emerges. Films thus help their viewers to span the gaps and fissures that cultural changes cause, allowing passage over any disjointedness that in some way might disrupt our sense of what we believe in as a nation. This volume examines this process, illustrating the ways in which films aided America's transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy; from a nation of producers to one of consumers; and from a community of individuals to a mass society.

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Movies Grow Up 1940-1980

Charles Champlin

Ohio University Press, 1980

Nearly 200 photos enhance Champlin’s readable, fascinating survey of the movies from the Golden Age up through the year 1980. According to Champlin, movies are the art form of our time — perhaps even the art form of this century. With this revised and enlarged edition of his book, one of the most comprehensive and eloquent works on film is available once again.

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Movies That Mattered

More Reviews from a Transformative Decade

Dave Kehr

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Dave Kehr’s writing about film has garnered high praise from both readers and fellow critics. Among his admirers are some of his most influential contemporaries. Roger Ebert called Kehr “one of the most gifted film critics in America.” James Naremore thought he was “one of the best writers on film the country as a whole has ever produced.” But aside from remarkably detailed but brief capsule reviews and top-ten lists, you won’t find much of Kehr’s work on the Internet, and many of the longer and more nuanced essays for which he is best known have not yet been published in book form.

With When Movies Mattered, readers welcomed the first collection of Kehr’s criticism, written during his time at the Chicago Reader. Movies That Mattered is its sequel, with fifty more reviews and essays drawn from the archives of both the Chicago Reader and Chicago magazine from 1974 to 1986. As with When Movies Mattered, the majority of the reviews offer in-depth analyses of individual films that are among Kehr’s favorites, from a thoughtful discussion of the sobering Holocaust documentary Shoah to an irresistible celebration of the raucous comedy Used Cars. But fans of Kehr’s work will be just as taken by his dissections of critically acclaimed films he found disappointing, including The Shining, Apocalypse Now, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Whether you’re a long-time reader or just discovering Dave Kehr, the insights in Movies That Mattered will enhance your appreciation of the movies you already love—and may even make you think twice about one or two you hated.

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Movies under the Influence

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A cultural history of the enduring relationship between film spectatorship and intoxicating substances

Movies under the Influence charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and mind-altering substances from early cinema through the psychedelic 1970s. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece examines how the parallel trajectories of these two enduring aspects of American culture, linked by their ability to influence individual and collective consciousness, resulted in them being treated and regulated in similar ways. Rather than looking at representations of drug use within film, she regards cinema and intoxicants as kindred experiences of immersion that have been subject to corresponding forces of ideology and power.

Exploring the effects of intoxicants such as caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, and psychedelics on film spectatorship, Szczepaniak-Gillece demonstrates how American movie theaters sought to cultivate a dual identity, presenting themselves as both a place of wholesome entertainment and a shadowy zone of illicit behavior. Movies under the Influence highlights the various legislative, legal, and corporate powers that held sway over the darkened anonymity of theaters, locating the convergence of moviegoing and drug use as a site of mediation and social control in America.

As much as substances and cinema are points where power intervenes, they are also settings of potential transcendence, and Movies under the Influence maintains this paradox as a necessary component of American film history. Recontextualizing a wide range of films, from Hollywood to the avant-garde, this book examines the implicit relationship intoxicants suggest between mass media, spectatorship, and governmental regulation and provides a new angle from which to understand cinema’s lasting role in evolving American culture.

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Movies, Censorship, and the Law

Ira H. Carmen

University of Michigan Press, 1966

Who decides what movies we should see? In some of the nation's largest cities motion pictures are screened by review boards meeting in secret. Their files are seldom open to inspection, and they often wield a nearly absolute power over what the public is shown.This is the story of motion-picture censorship in America. It begins in 1915 when the Supreme Court denied freedom of the press to movies. In a fast-moving account of court cases and behind-the-scenes skirmishes, Ira Carmen follows the history of movie censorship to the present day. He shows how very recent court decisions reflect new thinking on censorship and the nature of obscenity.Today, forty-seven states and countless cities and towns have obscenity laws on their statute books. Are the censors stout guardians of the public morality . . . or witch-hunters? In a series of dramatic interviews with film censors in major cities, Carmen captures the flavor of the struggle between censor and exhibitor. The interviews reveal how censors think—what kinds of films they suppress and for what reasons, how they feel about foreign films as opposed to American, how they are influenced by court decisions, and how well they abide by those decisions.This pioneering book reveals what effect court decisions really have at the grassroots level. It examines the role of the constitution in the censorship debate and asks how effective the American political and judicial systems have been in coping with the problem. Finally, it offers a challenging analysis of what kind of censorship, if any, is needed in a free society.

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Moving Color

Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism

Yumibe, Joshua

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Color was used in film well before The Wizard of Oz. Thomas Edison, for example, projected two-colored films at his first public screening in New York City on April 23, 1896. These first colors of early cinema were not photographic; they were applied manually through a variety of laborious processes—most commonly by the hand-coloring and stenciling of prints frame by frame, and the tinting and toning of films in vats of chemical dyes. The results were remarkably beautiful.

Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. Looking backward, Joshua Yumibe traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century. Looking forward, he explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas in which many colors have become, once again, vividly unhinged from photographic reality. Throughout this history, Moving Color revolves around questions pertaining to the sensuousness of color: how color moves us in the cinema—visually, emotionally, and physically.

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Moving Consciously

Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga, and Touch

Edited by Sondra Fraleigh

University of Illinois Press, 2015

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Moving Image Theory

Ecological Considerations

Edited by Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson. Foreword by David Bordwell

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Blending unconventional film theory with nontraditional psychology to provide a radically different set of critical methods and propositions about cinema, Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations looks at film through its communication properties rather than its social or political implications. Drawing on the tenets of James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception, the fifteen essays and forty-one illustrations gathered here by editors Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson offer a new understanding of how moving images are seen and understood.

Focusing on a more straightforward perception of the world and cinema in an attempt to move film theory closer to reality, Moving Image Theory proposes that we should first understand how cinema communicates information about the representation of the three-dimensional world through properties of image and sound.

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Moving Islands

Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific

Diana Looser

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Moving Islands reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theater, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe. Diana Looser’s study moves beyond a predictable country-specific or island-specific focus to encompass an entire region defined by diversity and global exchange, showing how performance operates to frame social, artistic, and political relationships across widely dispersed locations. The study also demonstrates how Oceanian performance contributes to international debates about diaspora, indigeneity, urbanization, and environmental sustainability. The author considers the region’s unique cultural and geographic dynamics as she brings forth the paradigm of transpasifika to suggest a way of understanding these intercultural exchanges and connections, with the aim to “rework the cartographic and disciplinary priorities of transpacific studies to privilege the activities of Islander peoples.”

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Moving Lessons

Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education

Janice Ross

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Moving Lessons is an insightful and sophisticated look at the origins and influence of dance in American universities, focusing on Margaret H'Doubler, who established the first university courses and the first degree program in dance (at the University of Wisconsin). Dance educator and historian Janice Ross shows that H'Doubler (1889–1982) was both emblematic of her time and an innovator who made deep imprints in American culture. An authentic "New Woman," H'Doubler emerged from a sheltered female Victorian world to take action in the public sphere. She changed the way Americans thought, not just about female physicality but also about higher education for women.
Ross brings together many discourses—from dance history, pedagogical theory, women's history, feminist theory, American history, and the history of the body—in intelligent, exciting, and illuminating ways and adds a new chapter to each of them. She shows how H'Doubler, like Isadora Duncan and other modern dancers, helped to raise dance in the eyes of the middle class from its despised status as lower-class entertainment and "dangerous" social interaction to a serious enterprise. Taking a nuanced critical approach to the history of women's bodies and their representations, Moving Lessons fills a very large gap in the history of dance education.

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Moving Performances

Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage

Scheper, Jeanne

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations.

Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife.

As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.

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Multiculturalism and the Mouse

Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment

By Douglas Brode

University of Texas Press, 2006

In his latest iconoclastic work, Douglas Brode—the only academic author/scholar who dares to defend Disney entertainment—argues that "Uncle Walt's" output of films, television shows, theme parks, and spin-off items promoted diversity decades before such a concept gained popular currency in the 1990s. Fully understood, It's a Small World—one of the most popular attractions at the Disney theme parks—encapsulates Disney's prophetic vision of an appealingly varied world, each race respecting the uniqueness of all the others while simultaneously celebrating a common human core. In this pioneering volume, Brode makes a compelling case that Disney's consistently positive presentation of "difference"—whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, ideology, or spirituality—provided the key paradigm for an eventual emergence of multiculturalism in our society.

Using examples from dozens of films and TV programs, Brode demonstrates that Disney entertainment has consistently portrayed Native Americans, African Americans, women, gays, individual acceptance of one's sexual orientation, and alternatives to Judeo-Christian religious values in a highly positive light. Assuming a contrarian stance, Brode refutes the overwhelming body of "serious" criticism that dismisses Disney entertainment as racist and sexist. Instead, he reveals through close textual analysis how Disney introduced audiences to such politically correct principles as mainstream feminism. In so doing, Brode challenges the popular perception of Disney fare as a bland diet of programming that people around the world either uncritically deem acceptable for their children or angrily revile as reactionary pabulum for the masses.

Providing a long overdue and thoroughly detailed alternative, Brode makes a highly convincing argument that with an unwavering commitment to racial diversity and sexual difference, coupled with a vast global popularity, Disney entertainment enabled those successive generations of impressionable youth who experienced it to create today's aura of multiculturalism and our politically correct value system.

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Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism

Diane Carson

University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Murder Most Queer

The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater

Jordan Schildcrout

University of Michigan Press, 2014

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.

Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance. These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships. Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

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Murder Most Queer

The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater

Jordan Schildcrout

University of Michigan Press, 2014

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Murder by Accident

Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions

Jody Enders

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk about an author’s intentions for a given work. In Murder by Accident, Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater.

Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present.

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Murder in Hollywood

Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

Charles Higham

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

    For more than eighty years, the famous unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor, the legendary bisexual film director, has generated debate and controversy. Now, best-selling author Charles Higham has solved the crime. Higham uncovers the corruption and intrigue of Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties—and the film industry moguls’ complete domination of the city’s authorities.
    When it was discovered that a famous star of the day had probably killed Taylor, a massive cover-up began—from the removal of crucial evidence to the naming of innocent people as killers—which has continued until now to protect the truth. Murder in Hollywood goes beyond the killing to unearth unknown details about the life of Taylor before his arrival in Hollywood, as well as the stories and histories buried by the crooked authorities and criminals involved the case. The author’s exclusive interviews with the culpable star, his unique possession of long-vanished police records, and the support of the present-day Los Angeles county coroner—who examined the evidence as if the murder had taken place now—have ensured a hair-raising thriller.
    Charles Higham successfully presents the most plausible and convincing solution yet to the mystery. In the process he paints a vivid portrait of Hollywood in the 1920s—from its major stars to its bisexual subculture. The result is a compelling answer to a long-standing mystery and a fascinating study of a place, and an industry that, as today, let people reinvent themselves. Murder in Hollywood is more extraordinary than any crime of fiction and more exciting than any action adventure movie.

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Muscle Works

Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity

Broderick D. V. Chow

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Men’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today

This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.

Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.

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Muscles in the Movies

Perfecting the Art of Illusion

John D. Fair

University of Missouri Press, 2020

John Fair and David Chapman tell the story of how filmmakers use and manipulate the appearance and performances of muscular men and women to enhance the appeal of their productions. The authors show how this practice, deeply rooted in western epistemological traditions, evolved from the art of photography through magic lantern and stage shows into the motion picture industry, arguing that the sight of muscles in action induced a higher degree of viewer entertainment. From Eugen Sandow to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, muscular actors appear capable of performing the miraculous, and with the aid of stuntmen and filming contrivances, they do. By such means, muscles are used to perfect the art of illusion, inherent in movie-making from its earliest days.

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Music Hall and Modernity

The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture

Barry J. Faulk

Ohio University Press, 2004

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of “the people.”

In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.

Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

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Music and Levels of Narration in Film

Steps across the Border

Guido Heldt

Intellect Books, 2013

Music and Levels of Narration in Film is the first book-length study to synthesize scholarly contributions toward a narrative theory of film music. Moving beyond the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music—or music that is not understood as part of a film’s “story world”—Guido Heldt systematically discusses music at different levels of narration, from the extrafictional to “focalizations” of subjectivity. Heldt then applies this conceptual toolkit to study the narrative strategies of music in individual films, as well as genres, including musicals and horror films. The resulting volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.

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Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York

Michael V. Pisani

University of Iowa Press, 2014

Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds.

Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays.

The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe.

Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.

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Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment

Lily E. Hirsch

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Although the use of music for extramusical purposes has been a part of American culture for some time, the phenomenon remained largely unknown to the general public until revelations became widespread of startling military practices during the second Iraq War. In Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, Lily E. Hirsch explores the related terrain at the intersection of music and law, demonstrating the ways in which music has become a tool of law enforcement and justice through: police and community leaders’ use of classical music in crime deterrence and punishment; the use of rap lyrics as prosecutorial evidence; allegations of music as incitement to violence; and the role of music in U.S. prisons and in detention centers in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In the course of her study, Hirsch asks several questions: How does the law treat music? When and why does music participate in the law? How does music influence the legal process? How does the legal process influence music? And how do these appropriations affect the Romantic ideals underlying our view of music?

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Music, Sound, and Technology in America

A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio

Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda, eds.

Duke University Press, 2012

This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the phonograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more than 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music as presented by the radio." Among the selections are articles from popular and trade publications, advertisements, fan letters, corporate records, fiction, and sheet music. Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. Most importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.

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Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater

William C. Scott

Dartmouth College Press, 2000

Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater

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Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater

William C. Scott

Dartmouth College Press, 2000

William C. Scott extends concepts set forth in his Goodwin Award-winning Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater (1984) by examining scansion patterns in the odes of the seven surviving Sophoclean tragedies. Analyzing the play as performed-its full expression in words, music, and dance-Scott finds that Sophocles' metrical patterns are not a secondary detail of the plays but a central feature of their musical organization. Just as the playwright enhanced awareness of themes with a series of recurring and developing verbal images, he also designed the music to guide the audience's understanding of unfolding, often ambiguous events. The fabric of music and meaning is so tightly woven, Scott argues, that significant portions of the plays cannot be fully realized on stage unless the musical effects created by the poet are incorporated. While his work necessarily centers on the chorus, Scott carefully integrates that role into the meaning of the play as a whole, asserting that the chorus becomes a single persona, a character with partial knowledge, limited perspective, and inconsistent responses. The combination of words, meters, and forms provides a new perspective on each play.

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Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater

Artistic Developments in the Muslim World

Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk

University of Texas Press, 2011

From "green" pop and "clean" cinema to halal songs, Islamic soaps, Muslim rap, Islamist fantasy serials, and Suficized music, the performing arts have become popular and potent avenues for Islamic piety movements, politically engaged Islamists, Islamic states, and moderate believers to propagate their religio-ethical beliefs. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater is the first book that explores this vital intersection between artistic production and Islamic discourse in the Muslim world.

The contributors to this volume investigate the historical and structural conditions that impede or facilitate the emergence of a "post-Islamist" cultural sphere. They discuss the development of religious sensibilities among audiences, which increasingly include the well-to-do and the educated young, as well as the emergence of a local and global religious market. At the heart of these essays is an examination of the intersection between cultural politics, performing art, and religion, addressing such questions as where, how, and why pop culture and performing arts have been turned into a religious mission, and whether it is possible to develop a new Islamic aesthetic that is balanced with religious sensibilities. As we read about young Muslims and their quest for a "cool Islam" in music, their struggle to quell their stigmatized status, or the collision of morals and the marketplace in the arts, a vivid, varied new perspective on Muslim culture emerges.

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Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges

Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

Michael M. J. Fischer

Duke University Press, 2004

Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international attention, garnering both critical praise and popular success. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and his broad command of critical theory, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that the widespread appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to Iran’s domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas of a world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as a tool for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and visual media in Persian culture.

Fischer reveals how the distinctive expressive idiom emerging in contemporary Iranian film reworks Persian imagery that has itself been in dialogue with other cultures since the time of Zoroaster and ancient Greece. He examines a range of narrative influences on this expressive idiom and imagery, including Zoroastrian ritual as it is practiced in Iran, North America, and India; the mythic stories, moral lessons, and historical figures written about in Iran’s national epic, the Shahnameh; the dreamlike allegorical world of Persian surrealism exemplified in Sadeq Hedayat’s 1939 novella The Blind Owl; and the politically charged films of the 1960s and 1970s. Fischer contends that by combining Persian traditions with cosmopolitan influences, contemporary Iranian filmmakers—many of whom studied in Europe and America—provide audiences around the world with new modes of accessing ethical and political experiences.

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My Fair Ladies

Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves

Wosk, Julie

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Runner-up for the 2015 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize

The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet as technology has advanced over the past century, the figure of the lifelike manmade woman has become nearly ubiquitous, popping up in everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science to The Stepford Wives. Now Julie Wosk takes us on a fascinating tour through this bevy of artificial women, revealing the array of cultural fantasies and fears they embody.

My Fair Ladies considers how female automatons have been represented as objects of desire in fiction and how “living dolls” have been manufactured as real-world fetish objects. But it also examines the many works in which the “perfect” woman turns out to be artificial—a robot or doll—and thus becomes a source of uncanny horror. Finally, Wosk introduces us to a variety of female artists, writers, and filmmakers—from Cindy Sherman to Shelley Jackson to Zoe Kazan—who have cleverly crafted their own images of simulated women.

Anything but dry, My Fair Ladies draws upon Wosk’s own experiences as a young female Playboy copywriter and as a child of the “feminine mystique” era to show how images of the artificial woman have loomed large over real women’s lives. Lavishly illustrated with film stills, artwork, and vintage advertisements, this book offers a fresh look at familiar myths about gender, technology, and artistic creation.

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My Life in Vaudeville

The Autobiography of Ed Lowry

Ed Lowry, Edited by Paul M. Levitt

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

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An entertaining record of a life and a time

Ed Lowry joined the vaudeville circuit in 1910 at the age of fourteen. He never achieved stardom equal to the likes of Fred Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, Buster Keaton, or Eddie Cantor, and he never considered himself an “artiste.” Instead, he saw himself as a hoofer and comic simply trying to make a living on the vaude scene. My Life in Vaudeville recounts Lowry’s long career in entertainment from the viewpoint of a foot soldier with a big dream.

Lowry’s story begins in the heyday of vaudeville in the early twentieth century and follows its gradual decline. Unlike many of his associates, he recognized that movies and other forms of entertainment were the future, and thus branched out into other venues. He took gigs in radio in Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and Los Angeles; explored revues, cabarets, burlesque, and film; and organized USO road shows. With wit and perception, he reveals his stage roots as an entertainer playing to his audience, and editor Paul M. Levitt’s introduction beautifully sets the stage for Lowry’s gags-to-riches tale, providing much-needed historical perspective.

My Life in Vaudeville is an unpretentious record of a time when thousands of young people went into show business to escape the boredom of daily life, and Lowry’s story is a view of vaudeville not often encountered. Lowry does much more than recall the daily life of a working actor, musician, and comedian. His story brings vaudeville to life and places it within the larger narratives of popular culture and popular entertainment of the twentieth century.

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Mysterious Actions

New American Drama, Volume 99

Jody McAuliffe, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

With this special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly presents five never-before-published plays by some of the brightest stars in contemporary American theater. Mysterious Actions presents works that go beyond realism and will challenge audiences’ expectations,moving them toward a revolutionary theatrical experience. The plays by Neal Bell, Nilo Cruz, Erin Cressida Wilson, Marlane Meyer, and Don DeLillo employ techniques and situations that are original and unexpected. Each is followed by a scholarly analysis by such respected critics as Fredric Jameson, José Esteban Muñoz, and Frank Lentricchia, as well as an interview with each playwright.
Monster, by Neal Bell, is a powerful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, thrusting the violence of the novel into the sharp relief of our times. Nilo Cruz’s Two Sisters and a Piano takes an intimate look at Cuba during the collapse of the Soviet Union and contemplates the meaning of “Cubanness” in today’s culture. The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life, DeLillo’s short play, meditates on the “gradually shattering” nature of human relationships. In The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, Erin Cressida Wilson follows a boy-man as he embarks on an epic journey into emotionality and sensuality with the help of the women in his life. And Marlane Meyer’s play, The Mystery of Attraction, navigates the dangerous waters of contemporary masculinity.

Contributors. Neal Bell, Nilo Cruz, Don DeLillo, Frederic Jameson, William Davies King, Frank Lentricchia, Jody McAuliffe, Marlane Meyer, José Esteban Muñoz, Teri Reynolds, Erin Cressida Wilson

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Mystery of the Wax Museum

Edited, with an introduction by Richard Koszarski; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

The Depression-era vogue for horror and the supernatural produced some of Hollywoood's most memorable chillers, among them Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount), Frankenstein, (Universal), and King Kong (RKO). At Warner Brothers, the main entry was Mystery of the Wax Museum, directed by Michael Curtiz, a grand thriller of 1933 in which Fay Wray (Who would appear opposite Kong later that same year) was threatened with waxy immortality by the maniacal Lionel Atwill.

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Méliès Boots

Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris

Matthew Solomon

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Winner of the 2024 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award

Before he became an influential cinematic innovator, Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Méliès Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès’ career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Méliès operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Méliès’ unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Méliès called "the new profession of the cinéaste." The book also reveals Méliès' connections to the Incohérents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the group’s relevance for Méliès, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Méliès in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Méliès’ work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.

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