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    Among the countless gangster films produced by Hollywood, few are as haunting, complex, or ingeniously crafted as White Heat (1948). Students of film history and screen writing will appreciate this treatment—an engaging study of teh various artistic elements that turned what might have been just another gangster film into an innovative classic of the genre and a model of cooperative filmmaking at its best.
    Crucial to White Heat's success, McGilligan stresses, was the rare manner in which every aspect of production coalesced: studio, script, cast, crew, and director.

The first book to critically examine the legacy of pop superstar Mariah Carey.

When it comes to Mariah Carey, star power is never in doubt. She has sold hundreds of millions of albums and cut more chart-topping hits than any other solo artist—ever. And she has that extraordinary five-octave vocal range. But there is more to her legacy than eye-popping numbers.

Why Mariah Carey Matters examines the creative evolution and complicated biography of a true diva, making the case that, despite her celebrity, Carey’s musicianship and influence are insufficiently appreciated. A pioneering songwriter and producer, Carey pairs her vocal gifts with intimate lyrics and richly layered sonic details. In the mid-1990s, she perfected a blend of pop, hip-hop, and R&B with songs such as “Fantasy” and “Honey” and drew from her turbulent life to create the introspective masterpiece Butterfly. Andrew Chan looks beyond Carey’s glamorous persona to explore her experience as a mixed-race woman in show business, her adventurous forays into house music and gospel, and her appeal to multiple generations of queer audiences. He also reckons with the transcendent ideal of the voice that Carey represents, showing how this international icon taught artists around the world to sing with soul-shaking intensity and a spirit of innovation.

From struggles over identity politics in the 1990s to current concerns about a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity, culture wars play a prominent role in the twenty-first century. Movies help to define and drive these conflicts by both reflecting and shaping cultural norms, as well as showing what violates those norms. In this pathfinding book, Daniel S. Cutrara employs queer theory, cultural studies, theological studies, and film studies to investigate how cinema represents and often denigrates religion and religious believers—an issue that has received little attention in film studies, despite the fact that faith in its varied manifestations is at the heart of so many cultural conflicts today.

Wicked Cinema examines films from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Circle, Breaking the Waves, Closed Doors, Agnes of God, Priest, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Dogma. Central to all of the films is their protagonists’ struggles with sexual transgression and traditional belief systems within Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—a struggle, Cutrara argues, that positions believers as the Other and magnifies the abuses of religion while ignoring its positive aspects. Uncovering a hazardous web of ideological assumptions informed by patriarchy, the spirit/flesh dichotomy, and heteronormativity, Cutrara demonstrates that ultimately these films emphasize the “Otherness” of the faithful through a variety of strategies commonly used to denigrate the queer, from erasing their existence, to using feminization to make them appear weak, to presenting them as dangerous fanatics.

Relying on extensive archival research and on sixty interviews with fiddlers and their families and friends, Cauthen tells the rich, full story of old-time fiddling in Alabama. 

Writing of life in the Alabama Territory in the late 1700s, A. J. Pickett, the state's first historian, noted that the country abounded in fiddlers, of high and low degree. After the defeat of the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1813, the number of fiddlers swelled as settlers from the southern states surrounding Alabama claimed the land. The music they played was based on tunes brought from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but in Alabama they developed their own southern accent as their songs became the music of celebration and relaxation for the state's pioneers. Early in the 20th century such music began to be called "old-time fiddling," to distinguish it from the popular music of the day, and the term is still used to distinguish that style from more modern bluegrass and country fiddle styles.

In With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow, Cauthen focuses on old-time fiddling in Alabama from the settlement of the state through World War II. Cauthen shows the effects of events, inventions, ethnic groups, and individuals upon fiddlers' styles and what they played. Cauthen gives due weight to the "modest masters of fiddle and bow" who were stars only to their families and communities. The fiddlers themselves tell why they play, how they learned without formal instruction and written music, and how they acquired their instruments and repertoires. Cauthen also tells the stories of "brag" fiddlers such as D.Dix Hollis, Y. Z. Hamilton, Charlie Stripling, "Fiddling" Tom Freeman,"Monkey" Brown, and the Johnson Brothers whose reputations spread beyond their communities through commercial recordings and fiddling contests. Described in vivid detail are the old-style square dances, Fourth of July barbeques and other celebrations, and fiddlers' conventions that fiddler shave reigned over throughout the state's history.

Essays by Theodor W. Adorno on art and cinema.
 
In Without Model, Theodor W. Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of ‘Amorbach’, but also his acute sociocultural analysis of the central topic of the culture industry. He criticizes attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.
 

Marina Goldovskaya is one of Russia's best-known documentary filmmakers. The first woman in Russia (and possibly the world) to combine being a director, writer, cinematographer, and producer, Goldovskaya has made over thirty documentary films and more than one hundred programs for Russian, European, Japanese, and American television. Her work, which includes the award-winning films The House on Arbat Street, The Shattered Mirror, and Solovky Power, has garnered international acclaim and won virtually every prize given for documentary filmmaking.

In Woman with a Movie Camera, Goldovskaya turns her lens on her own life and work, telling an adventurous, occasionally harrowing story of growing up in the Stalinist era and subsequently documenting Russian society from the 1960s, through the Thaw and Perestroika, to post-Soviet Russia. She recalls her childhood in a Moscow apartment building that housed famous filmmakers, being one of only three women students at the State Film School, and working as an assistant cameraperson on the first film of Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia's most celebrated director. Reviewing her professional filmmaking career, which began in the 1960s, Goldovskaya reveals her passion for creating films that presented a truthful picture of Soviet life, as well as the challenges of working within (and sometimes subverting) the bureaucracies that controlled Russian film and television production and distribution. Along the way, she describes a host of notable figures in Russian film, theater, art, and politics, as well as the technological evolution of filmmaking from film to video to digital media.

A compelling portrait of a woman who broke gender and political barriers, as well as the eventful four decades of Russian history she has documented, Woman with a Movie Camera will be fascinating reading for a wide audience.

Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS
Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction​
​Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards​

“But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.”
“Women are just not that interested in making horror films.”
 
This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.

Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.

Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

Women in television news have made great strides in the past twenty-five years. No longer limited to being the token pretty face on the nightly newscast, women have taken their places as working journalists in newsrooms, on the campaign trail, in war zones, and in the highest echelons of network news management. Barbara Walters and Connie Chung have even occupied the coveted network anchor's chair, if only briefly.

In this book, 70 of the foremost women in television news reflect on their professional successes, the personal and professional sacrifices that often bought those successes, and the barriers that still confront women in the news business. Weaving their interviews into a compelling text, Judith Marlane covers a wide range of issues, including looks versus ability and experience, sexual harassment, the resistance to women news anchors, the difficulties of balancing work and family life, women's and men's salaries, and the willingness of women to help other women in the business.

This book builds from Marlane's 1976 work, Women in Television News. Interviews with many of the same women highlight the gains that women have made in broadcast journalism. Simultaneously, Marlane has expanded her range of informants to include fifteen of America's most famous male anchors and correspondents to gather their assessments of the role of women in broadcasting today.

Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage explores the overlooked, gendered challenge posed by heroines and villainesses in comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies through who displayed their wit through repartee, plotting, and disguise, combining verbal skill with physical action to produce a feminized perspective. The chapters showcase the portrayal of women’s wit in the works of Frances Boothby, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Polwhele, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, Delarivier Manley, and Susanna Centlivre, in which female characters criticize authority and address female spectators in the theater, including them as part of an emerging critical discourse on the public stage. As the first-ever scholarly monograph about women’s wit in drama before the twentieth century, this book draws attention to the cultural and social role that wit played in the public sphere as a mode of critique, empowerment, and play for women both on and offstage.

Among the signal achievements of African American culture is the style of music known as the blues, an art form evolved from southern black songs of the late nineteenth century. From the field hollers and steel-bodied guitar of its early days to the electric amplification of today's performers, the visceral power of the blues has long been celebrated for its creativity, spontaneity, and ingenuity. It has served as a wellspring for other forms of music, including gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock, and rap, and has exerted an influence on literature and the visual arts as well. 

This book brings together some of the most significant writings about the blues published between 1911 and 1998. Included are selections by folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, literary artists, musicians, critics, and aficionados. The extraordinary appeal of the blues is reflected in the range of contributors to this volume, among them Howard W. Odum, Alan Lomax, Richard Alan Waterman, Langston Hughes, Paul Oliver, Sam Charters, Janheinz Jahn, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Charles Keil, Jeff Todd Titon, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, and Angela Davis. From these various perspectives emerges a new understanding of the blues: its origins in African aesthetics; the impact of slavery and Reconstruction; its early folk manifestations; and the importance of religion, style, gender, audience, protest, and the record business in its development as an art form. Further context is provided by a comprehensive introduction, section overviews, and an extensive bibliography, discography, and videography of blues materials.

During the mid-1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era's music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since. 

In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s. 

Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of well-informed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that “everyone is a critic.”