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A rejuvenating look at sleep’s integral role in feminist practice, critique, and imagination

Inequality is notoriously exhausting to confront, but through theater, performance art, and theory, feminist artists and thinkers have explored a radical counter to this exhaustion: sleep. Centering creative work on this restorative practice, Sleep with Spectators is a refreshing and visionary counterhistory of feminism that offers sleep as a tool for imagining new ways of living—ones that prioritize not only rest but also care and interdependence.

Taking performance as a unique means of perceiving private and unconscious aspects of daily life, Danielle Drees draws from opera, plays, and avant-garde theater to find instances of sleep and sleeplessness as novel embodiments of core feminist concerns. Among her subjects are Sarah Kane’s free verse text 4.48 Psychosis; María Irene Fornés’s queer drama of racial–sexual transformation, Enter THE NIGHT; and Regina José Galindo’s America’s Family Prison, in which Galindo, her partner, and their baby spent twenty-four hours in a “family-sized” cell rented from a private prison outfitter. Adeptly engaging this fascinating collection of international archival material through the lenses of Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and disability studies, Sleep with Spectators illuminates how sleep performances reveal and critique inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability.

Idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary, Sleep with Spectators charts an original path through the feminist performance archive, presenting new ways of indexing injustice and interrogating the political conditions of rest.

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Bringing together performance studies, critical theory, and contemporary Japanese cultural studies to offer an unsettling glimpse into a global future of crisis already arriving

Slow Death examines contemporary artistic practice as a form of active engagement with the condition of “slow death”: the diffused feeling of decline with no end in sight. The theater and performance artists discussed here confront the realities of a state that is no longer tenable, rehearsing slow death’s modalities, probing its implications, and imagining possible endpoints through dramaturgy. As these artists show, the very notion of progress—whether framed as a march toward a hopeful future or a retreat into the comforts of a nostalgic past—carries an inescapable irony. Both trajectories seem equally unsustainable, rendering any prospect of radical transformation elusive. This sense of endless suspendedness emerges as a pervasive motif across the artworks discussed, such as the anticapitalist performance spaces created by Tanino Kurō and the queer feminist dramaturgy of Ichihara Satoko. Yet, as coauthors Kyoko Iwaki, Jessica Nakamura, and Corey Wakeling identify throughout, to enact slow death in performance is not to capitulate to despair but to expose its structure and, in doing so, uncover latent forms of everyday resistance.

The first collected volume to define superhero television as a distinct cultural phenomenon, broadening horizons of what superhero stories have been and might become.

Superhero films dominate Hollywood and recent studies of popular culture. Superheroes are also abundant on television, and have been for decades, yet critics have largely neglected this intersection of genre and medium. Small-Screen Supers gathers an international group of scholars who, for the first time, examine superhero television as a distinct cultural and artistic phenomenon.

Informed by a range of critical perspectives, contributors examine animated and live-action shows aimed at children, teens, and adults, combining scholarship on popular contemporary programming with analysis of less-successful shows from the recent and distant past. Collectively, the anthology emphasizes how superhero television has reflected, informed, and transformed American culture and media. In particular, Small-Screen Supers argues that superhero TV—more so than film—foregrounds demographic diversity and social critique. Whether interpreting the 1980s cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends as a queer sitcom, underscoring the progressive politics of Supergirl, or investigating pandemic-inspired subjectivities in Werewolf by Night, the authors reflect on superhero television as a unique mode of expression with important implications for understanding American popular culture.

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

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.

How does a totalitarian government influence the arts, and how do the arts respond? Spanish Film Under Franco raises these important questions, giving English speakers a starting point in their study of Spanish cinema.

After a brief overview of Spanish film before Franco, the author proceeds to a discussion of censorship as practiced by the Franco regime. The response of directors to censorship—the “franquista aesthetic,” or “aesthetic of repression,” with its highly metaphorical, oblique style—is explored in the works of Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, and other important directors.

Virginia Higginbotham combines historical perspective with detailed critical analysis and interpretation of many famous Franco-era films. She shows how directors managed to evade the censors and raise public awareness of issues relating to the Spanish Civil War and the repressions of the Franco regime.

Film has always performed an educational function in Spain, reaching masses of poor and uneducated citizens. And sometimes, as this study also reveals, Spanish film has been ignored when the questions it raised became too painful or demanding.

The author concludes with a look at post-Franco cinema and the directions it has taken. For anyone interested in modern Spanish film, this book will be essential reading.

How Spanish-language television networks continue to thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape.

The US television industry has suffered blow after blow amid media convergence and the rise of streaming. Those legacy broadcasters that survive are much diminished and highly dependent on live programming—the last redoubt of old media. There is an exception, though: Spanish-language television is thriving.

Spanish-Language Television surveys the Latinx media landscape to better appreciate why Univision and Telemundo have flourished while others faltered. Manuel G. Avilés-Santiago and Jillian M. Báez show that the major Spanish-language networks are unusually flexible and open to innovation in hopes of reaching new demographics. Univision and Telemundo were early to streaming. To appeal to “billennial” audiences—bilingual millennials—who threatened to stray from TV, they rebuilt the telenovela, which now features social commentary, diverse characters, and genre crossovers. Today’s reality programs defy old norms of linguistic correctness, and the airwaves are becoming less hospitable to racism and sexism, resulting in rising ratings and ad revenues. The first book-length treatment of reception patterns in Latinx TV, Spanish-Language Television deepens our understanding of new media in a moment of transformation and possibility.

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television arrived to electrify audiences with explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that offered audiences such thrills, with "sensation scenes" of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. In Spectacles of Reform , Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing that spectacle plays a crucial role in American activism. By examining how theater producers and political groups harnessed its power and appeal, Hughes suggests that spectacle was—and remains—central to the dramaturgy of reform.

Engaging evidence from lithographs to children's books to typography catalogs, Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard suffering from the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how they conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today's producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet.

To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Consequently, Spectacles of Reform will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.