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Since the beginning of television, Westerns have been playing on the small screen. From the mid-1950s until the early 1960s, they were one of TV's most popular genres, with millions of viewers tuning in to such popular shows as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and Disney's Davy Crockett. Though the cultural revolution of the later 1960s contributed to the demise of traditional Western programs, the Western never actually disappeared from TV. Instead, it took on new forms, such as the highly popular Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, while exploring the lives of characters who never before had a starring role, including anti-heroes, mountain men, farmers, Native and African Americans, Latinos, and women.

Shooting Stars of the Small Screen is a comprehensive encyclopedia of more than 450 actors who received star billing or played a recurring character role in a TV Western series or a made-for-TV Western movie or miniseries from the late 1940s up to 2008. Douglas Brode covers the highlights of each actor's career, including Western movie work, if significant, to give a full sense of the actor's screen persona(s). Within the entries are discussions of scores of popular Western TV shows that explore how these programs both reflected and impacted the social world in which they aired. Brode opens the encyclopedia with a fascinating history of the TV Western that traces its roots in B Western movies, while also showing how TV Westerns developed their own unique storytelling conventions.

Why Havana attracted the most important architects in the 1950s, and how the Cuban Revolution transformed the uses of these impressive skyscrapers. 

During the 1950s, Havana’s Vedado district became an epicenter of modern architecture. Architects from around the world—including Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Josep Lluis Sert—worked in Cuba and helped make Havana one of the most modern capitals in Latin America. After the Cuban Revolution, the buildings designed during Cuba’s American-influenced hyper-capitalist past had to be reimagined, about what use what use could luxury hotels, private condominiums, and golf clubs could have in a socialist society. Writers and artists from around the world including Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, and Gabriel García Márquez flocked to Havana to witness the first socialist experiment in the Americas and marveled at the modern towers. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about “Skyscrapers in Havana” for his first journalistic piece about his trip. In contrast, modern architects abandoned Cuba after the Revolution: not even those designers who had built projects there set foot in the island again. 

Considering Havana’s architecture as part of a larger Cuban modernity, Gallo places built projects in dialogue with film, literature, and other cultural texts, revealing how poets, novelists, filmmakers, and designers theorized the city’s urban fabric. Skyscrapers in Havana features six chapters, each devoted to an iconic modernist structure, as well as five shorter meditations on the architects, including Le Corbusier, who had the opportunity to go to Cuba after the Revolution but decided to stay away. 

William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

Sound is half the picture, and since the 1960s, film sound not only has rivaled the innovative imagery of contemporary Hollywood cinema, but in some ways has surpassed it in status and privilege because of the emergence of sound design.

This in-depth study by William Whittington considers the evolution of sound design not only through cultural and technological developments during the last four decades, but also through the attitudes and expectations of filmgoers. Fans of recent blockbuster films, in particular science fiction films, have come to expect a more advanced and refined degree of film sound use, which has changed the way they experience and understand spectacle and storytelling in contemporary cinema.

The book covers recent science fiction cinema in rich and compelling detail, providing a new sounding of familiar films, while offering insights into the constructed nature of cinematic sound design. This is accomplished by examining the formal elements and historical context of sound production in movies to better appreciate how a film sound track is conceived and presented.Whittington focuses on seminal science fiction films that have made specific advances in film sound, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX 1138, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner (original version and director's cut), Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Matrix trilogy and games—milestones of the entertainment industry's technological and aesthetic advancements with sound.

Setting itself apart from other works, the book illustrates through accessible detail and compelling examples how swiftly such advancements in film sound aesthetics and technology have influenced recent science fiction cinema, and examines how these changes correlate to the history, theory, and practice of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.

Originally issued in hardcover in 1996 by Garland Publishing, this important reference work is now available in paperback for a wider audience. A distinguished team of contributors has compiled entries on 140 significant South American feature films from the silent era until 1994. The entries discuss each film's subject matter, critical reception, and social and political contexts, as well as its production, distribution, and exhibition history, including technical credits. The entries are grouped by country and arranged chronologically. Both fiction and documentary films (some no longer in existence) are included, as well as extensive title, name, and subject indexes and glossaries of film and foreign terms.

Following Stalin’s death, Soviet film—like Soviet culture—changed in meaningful ways. Emerging from a system that had stymied individual, creative voices, prominent directors now found their own respective styles, as they embraced their personal visions to produce works that diverged significantly from the mainstream. Grounded in auteur theory, this volume explores how these filmmakers expressed themselves through creative cinematic means rather than through a narrow emphasis on narrative or in accordance with popular—and governmental—whims.

Each chapter focuses on a specific filmmaker, from well-known auteurs Aleksei German Sr., Kira Muratova, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Larisa Shepit’ko, to others less familiar in the West: Sergei Solovyov, Roman Balayan, Otar Iosseliani, Tengiz Aduladze, and Ali Khamraev. Hailing from a range of Soviet republics, they all impacted the Soviet cinematic sphere despite harsh censorship and the repression of artists throughout the nation. By integrating cinematic and theoretical perspectives into a discussion of auteur Soviet films, this volume illuminates the significance of a cinematic trend that took place in both Soviet culture and international film history.

Contributors: Robert Efird, Tim Harte, Lilya Kaganovsky, David Gomiero Molina, Lida Oukaderova, Elizabeth A. Papazian, Marina Rojavin, Rita Safariants, Sydney Stotter, Sergey Toymentsev

The golden age of Soviet cinema, in the years following the Russian Revolution, was a time of both achievement and contradiction, as reflected in the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. Tensions ran high between creative freedom and institutional constraint, radical and reactionary impulses, popular and intellectual cinema, and film as social propaganda and as personal artistic expression. In less than a decade, the creative ferment ended, subjugated by the ideological forces that accompanied the rise of Joseph Stalin and the imposition of the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all the arts.

Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 records this lost golden age. Denise Youngblood considers the social, economic, and industrial factors that influenced the work of both lesser-known and celebrated directors. She reviews all major and many minor films of the period, as well as contemporary film criticism from Soviet film journals and trade magazines. Above all, she captures Soviet film in a role it never regained—that of dynamic artform of the proletarian masses.