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An authoritative guide to modelmaking for theater

This third edition of noted scenographer Darwin Reid Payne’s landmark text builds upon Payne’s theories and exercises to provide a modern exploration of the practice of theatrical modelmaking. With chapters on traditional and contemporary materials, tools, and techniques, the book serves as a foundational guide to understanding the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of scenographic modelmaking, making it essential for the beginner, generalist, and professional design practitioner.

The volume begins with a brief history of the scenographic model and explores how modelmaking has adapted to changes in materials, technology, and commercial influences over time. It details setting up a safe, productive model-building studio before introducing the types and purposes of various scenographic models. It then instructs the reader in constructing common model elements and accessories. Later chapters explore how the models reveal stage space and create mood and atmosphere through tonal shading and lighting; discuss the use of found objects, collage techniques, and projection models in scenic design; and delve into 3D printing and computer routering. The final chapter provides information on various aspects of photography and image sharing related to design and production communication.

This comprehensive text provides information not just from theater but also from other modeling disciplines and sources, including architecture, film, dioramas, dollhouse modeling, and model railroading. A useful resource for high school, community college, university, and community theater enthusiasts, it is an excellent reference book for theater designers throughout the country.

A bold and far-reaching new study of French queer cinema reimagines the relationship between sexuality and space

Spatiality has long been a crucial and potent lens for understanding French culture and aesthetics. While canonical greats of French cinema such as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Louis Malle invoked the notion of flânerie to explore ideas of modernism, spatial exploration, and urban sociality, Jules O’Dwyer demonstrates how a more recent generation of French queer filmmakers continues to engage with—and contest—this legacy by focusing attention on the cognate practice of cruising.

Through the work of Jacques Nolot, Sébastien Lifshitz, Christophe Honoré, Vincent Dieutre, Alain Guiraudie, and others, The Seduction of Space draws film theory, queer studies, and spatial inquiry into close proximity to examine the politics of cruising and the gendering of space. Making the case that cinema not only documents the queer spaces of the past but continues to produce them, O’Dwyer maps the relationships between sex and spatiality as he takes up such varied topics as public sex in the porn theater, racial eroticization in the banlieue, and the ecocritical valences of rural cruising.

Foregrounding the crucial role that spatiality plays in shaping the parameters of France’s visual cultures and political imaginary, The Seduction of Space is both an urgent queer reconceptualization of this tradition and a clarion call for film scholars to tarry with the politics of sexuality in all its messiness.

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Silent film is more than just a cinema of firsts, greats, or classics. It is a cinema of experimentation, ambition, and connection. To watch a silent film is to be transported into another world. The Silent Film Companion seeks to broaden the silent film canon by focusing on compelling non-canonical films from around the globe, providing a fresh perspective and new view of silent cinema. With over fifty films discussed, this volume captures just a sliver of the many delights silent cinema has to offer. It encourages discovery, and rediscovery, of the world of silent cinema: one where the movies were still young, full of possibility, and eager to entice others to take part in a wonderful adventure. 

Films covered are from fourteen countries, including Brazil, Mexico, China, Cuba, India, Italy, and Russia, and represent a diversity of subjects. Each chapter provides historical and cultural context to the film, the filmmakers, and a concise analysis of each film. The Silent Film Companion is a must-read for students and fans of silent cinema interested in seeing a side of silent cinema that is rarely explored.

What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame?

Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image.

This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy?

The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

Drawing on the cinematic oeuvre of Ripstein and Garciadiego to reconceptualize the idea of the sordid

The sordid is not an ideology, an affect, or even a form of taste or sensibility. It is, Agustín Zarzosa argues, an image and an evocation of the process of degradation. The Sordid Image: The Naturalist Cinema of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego offers the first sustained study of this pivotal filmmaker-screenwriter pair, drawing on their multidecade collaborations to reframe an enduring problem of film theory: how to represent marginalized people.

Together, Ripstein and Garciadiego have constructed a recognizable cinematic world filled with social outcasts, characterized by self-degradation and unreason, and set within squalid environments. Inscribing the Ripsteinian universe within the literary and cinematic traditions of naturalism, this book theorizes the notion of the sordid to examine the partners’ unique and epoch-defining films. We can, Zarzosa contends, understand the sordid as a cinematic image, with its specific components and pleasures, recasting questions of authorship, mise-en-scène, spectatorship, genre, and language.
 

The first in-depth analysis of the films of Alexander Payne through the lenses of authorship, tourism, and leisure.

With the films Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, and The Holdovers, Alexander Payne has carved out an unusual role in American cinema as a bankable auteur. There is something about Payne’s neurotics and searchers, his working stiffs and disillusioned idealists—something funny, moving, and filled with insight.

Jason Sperb dissects Payne’s oeuvre, focusing on the director’s penchant for travel narratives. Payne’s films usually center on male protagonists discontent with the emotional and material realities of the day-to-day and seeking satisfaction in some literal or metaphorical elsewhere. But their attempts to escape wind up perpetuating, rather than alleviating, the imbalance between labor and leisure that structures modern life. In this sense, Sperb argues, Payne’s characters are akin to tourists, searching for fleeting glimpses of the fulfillment they dream about. Examining themes of masculinity, nostalgia, whiteness, and class, The Stranger from Omaha is the first auteur study devoted to Payne’s delicately balanced cinematic world. An outsider even in his own heartland, Payne proves to be an artist working at a clarifying remove—a witness to the American condition, observing from just enough distance.

The Synchronized Society traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Author Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

The broadcasting industry’s trade association, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), sought to sanitize television content via its self-regulatory document, the Television Code. The Code covered everything from the stories, images, and sounds of TV programs (no profanity, illicit sex and drinking, negative portrayals of family life and law enforcement officials, or irreverence for God and religion) to the allowable number of commercial minutes per hour of programming. It mandated that broadcasters make time for religious programming and discouraged them from charging for it. And it called for tasteful and accurate coverage of news, public events, and controversial issues.

Using archival documents from the Federal Communications Commission, NBC, the NAB, and a television reformer, Senator William Benton, this book explores the run-up to the adoption of the 1952 Television Code from the perspectives of the government, TV viewers, local broadcasters, national networks, and the industry’s trade association. Deborah L. Jaramillo analyzes the competing motives and agendas of each of these groups as she builds a convincing case that the NAB actually developed the Television Code to protect commercial television from reformers who wanted more educational programming, as well as from advocates of subscription television, an alternative distribution model to the commercial system. By agreeing to self-censor content that viewers, local stations, and politicians found objectionable, Jaramillo concludes, the NAB helped to ensure that commercial broadcast television would remain the dominant model for decades to come.

The infamous low-budget horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) profoundly reshaped our understanding of the horror genre. Its influence looms large over the genre as the direct progenitor of the slasher and the enduring fascination for exploitation cinema as an allegory for brutal class warfare in a post-industrial society. By looking closely at the filmmakers’ individual choices in framing, editing, scoring, staging, lighting, and performance, Dan Hassler-Forest gives readers a fresh perspective on the familiar tropes of the Final Girl, Leatherface as prototype for countless psycho killers and the masterpiece that bought splatter cinema into the mainstream.

Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.

During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly—"in the streets"—eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics. 

At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the “beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution.” The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums.

By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.

Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics

Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.

The Total Black Experience is the first book to chronicle the history and social significance of Positively Black, one of the longest-running public affairs shows in the history of television. Spurred on by the findings of the Kerner Commission, executives at WNBC-TV greenlit the show and turned production over to a small but dedicated team of storytellers who quickly made it their mission to carve out a space for serious and nuanced discussion of issues important to the Black community and to celebrate all aspects of Black culture. They believed that accurate representation of their experiences was a right, not a privilege. The show’s first cohosts included the well-known Harlem-based activist Rev. Eugene Callender and Gus Heningburg, activist, successful consultant and mediator, and advocate for organized labor. Callender had founded Harlem Prep to equip young Black people for college, while Heningburg played a key role in stabilizing life in Newark following the rebellion there in the late 1960s. Both were adept at using the media to reach their constituencies. Combining in-depth interviews with painstaking archival research, The Total Black Experience introduces readers to key members of the Positively Black production team and analyzes thematic shifts in the show’s content. The book celebrates Positively Black’s longevity and challenges readers to explore the current state of Black representation on television.