When widescreen technology was introduced to filmmaking in 1953, it changed the visual framework and aesthetic qualities of cinema forever. Before widescreen, a director's vision for capturing beautiful landscapes or city skylines was limited by what could be included in the boxy confines of an Academy Ratio film frame. The introduction and subsequent evolution of widescreen technology has allowed directors to push the boundaries of filmmaking. Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema explores the technological changes of the widescreen technique and how the format has inspired directors and also sparked debates among film critics. Examining early filmmakers such as Buster Keaton and D. W. Griffith and genre pioneers like Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, Harper Cossar explains how directors use wider aspect ratios to enhance their creative visions. Letterboxed tracks the history of stylistic experimentation with the film frame and demonstrates how the expansion of the screen has uncovered myriad creative possibilities for directors.

A history of tapestry from its Egyptian origins up to the author’s day.

Leonardo's anatomical studies actually set themselves as an ideal meeting point between artistic and scientific interests because the study of the functioning of the body was essential for artistic practice in order to achieve the correct representation of the human figure. For Leonardo, the artistic practice was determined by an inexhaustible desire for knowledge that led him to study the human body through the Vitruvian proportions and through dissection, carried out by the artist with special care over the middle years of the first decade of the sixteenth century. Drawing becomes essential to understand and reproduce the structure of the male and female body, a "wonderful machine" perfectly thought out. The organs are devices and the body is a machine: Man then becomes a further testing ground for mechanical science.

The Essential Cult TV Reader is a collection of insightful essays that examine television shows that amass engaged, active fan bases by employing an imaginative approach to programming. Once defined by limited viewership, cult TV has developed its own identity, with some shows gaining large, mainstream audiences. By exploring the defining characteristics of cult TV, The Essential Cult TV Reader traces the development of this once obscure form and explains how cult TV achieved its current status as legitimate television. The essays explore a wide range of cult programs, from early shows such as Star Trek, The Avengers, Dark Shadows, and The Twilight Zone to popular contemporary shows such as Lost, Dexter, and 24, addressing the cultural context that allowed the development of the phenomenon. The contributors investigate the obligations of cult series to their fans, the relationship of camp and cult, the effects of DVD releases and the Internet, and the globalization of cult TV. The Essential Cult TV Reader answers many of the questions surrounding the form while revealing emerging debates on its future.

A comprehensive and compelling examination of one of cable television's most innovative and popular networks, The Essential HBO Reader looks at every aspect of HBO's development as a corporation, a creative voice, and a brand. The authors explore the network's diverse repertoire of programming, from drama to comedy to documentaries and sports -- including such acclaimed shows as The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Angels in America, America Undercover, and Def Comedy Jam -- as they detail HBO's nearly forty-year history and its profound influence on the entertainment industry.

According to the sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1951 book, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, the "new entrepreneur" was a lone wolf able to succeed in post-World War II corporate America by elusively meandering through various institutions. During this time, anthology writers such as Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky achieved a level of creativity that has rarely been equaled on television since. Yet despite their success, anthology writers still needed to evade the constraints and censorship of 50s television in order to stay true to their creative powers and political visions. Thus they worked as new entrepreneurs who adapted their more controversial scripts for the Hollywood, Broadway, and book publishing industries. Even after the television networks cancelled their prestigious anthology series at the end of the 50s, the most resilient writers were able to redefine what it meant to be entrepreneurs by launching cutting-edge shows such as The Twilight Zone and The Defenders that are still popular today. The New Entrepreneurs includes detailed textual analysis of legendary, sometimes hard-to-find, television anthology scripts that have received only cursory glances in television history until now.

In 1967 Egypt and the Arab world suffered a devastating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War. Though long past the age at which most singers would have retired, the sexagenarian Egyptian singer Umm Kulth m launched a multifaceted response to the defeat that not only sustained her career, but also expanded her international fame and shaped her legacy. By examining biographies, dramas, monuments, radio programming practices, and recent recordings, Laura Lohman delves into Umm Kulth m's role in fashioning her image and the conflicting ways that her image and music have been interpreted since her death in 1975.

Characterized by grandiose song-and-dance numbers featuring ornate geometric patterns and mimicked in many modern films, Busby Berkeley's unique artistry is as recognizable and striking as ever. From his years on Broadway to the director's chair, Berkeley is notorious for his inventiveness and signature style. Through sensational films like 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and Dames (1934), Berkeley sought to distract audiences from the troubles of the Great Depression. Although his bold technique is familiar to millions of moviegoers, Berkeley's life remains a mystery.Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley is a telling portrait of the filmmaker who revolutionized the musical and changed the world of choreography. Berkeley pioneered many conventions still in use today, including the famous "parade of faces" technique, which lends an identity to each anonymous performer in a close-up. Carefully arranging dancers in complex and beautiful formations, Berkeley captured perspectives never seen before.Jeffrey Spivak's meticulous research magnifies the career and personal life of this beloved filmmaker. Employing personal letters, interviews, studio memoranda, and Berkeley's private memoirs, Spivak unveils the colorful life of one of cinema's greatest artists.

This small and beautifully illustrated book showcases the work of two great American modernists, painter Abraham Walkowitz and dancer Isadora Duncan. Born in the same year (1878), both artists influenced the development of modern art in the early twentieth century by blending figurative gesture with abstraction. Duncan grew up in a free-spirited and artistic household in California and then moved to Europe. Walkowitz immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was a child and lived most of his life in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union School and the National Academy of Design.Walkowitz and Duncan met in 1906 in Paris at the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Deeply impressed by Duncan's musicality and expressivity, Walkowitz drew thousands of images of Duncan dancing throughout his life. Because Walkowitz's renderings of Duncan were produced quickly, they carry an element of improvisational vitality that matches the dynamic energy of her presence onstage. In her introductory essay, author Ann Cooper Albright weaves literary theory, art criticism, and dance history into a fluid narrative to explore how Walkowitz's drawings realize Duncan's dancing on paper. Modern Gestures reproduces over fifty watercolors of this unique oeuvre, many of which have never before been published. A perfect gift, this sumptuous little volume will provide hours of enjoyment to anyone interested in dance or modern art.

This gripping story of one of the great graphic satirists and watercolour artists of the British School is based upon a mass of new research. Rowlandson kept no diary, wrote few letters, and occurs only infrequently in the memoirs of others. Source material is not abundant. But in more than a decade's research, using church and official records, newspaper reports, contemporary accounts, sales catalogues and consideration of his pictures, the authors shed new light on Rowlandson's family background, his education and art training in London and Paris, his personal and professional associations, his travels in Britain and abroad, and the work itself. Fully illustrated, this major contribution to scholarship will appeal to the general reader and specialist alike and is destined to become the standard work on this benchmark British artist.

Focusing on the differences and similarities between the renowned 'Alpais' Limoges ciborium, dated to c. 1200, in the Musée du Louvre, and examples in the British Museum, the National Museums of Scotland, together with two electrotype copies of the 'Alpais' ciborium in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this volume uses a cross-disciplinary approach, based on the differing specialisations of the authors (curators, scientists and conservators) to examine the group of ciboria. New and previously unpublished information, analyses and conclusions are presented that will serve to locate all the ciboria in their respective artistic and cultural context.

Belligerent and evasive, Josef von Sternberg chose to ignore his illegitimate birth in Austria, deprived New York childhood, abusive father, and lack of education. The director who strutted onto the set in a turban, riding breeches, or a silk robe embraced his new persona as a world traveller, collected modern art, drove a Rolls Royce, and earned three times as much as the president. Von Sternberg traces the choices that carried the unique director from poverty in Vienna to power in Hollywood, including his eventual ostracism in Japan. Historian John Baxter reveals an artist few people knew: the aesthete who transformed Marlene Dietrich into an international star whose ambivalent sexuality and contradictory allure on-screen reflected an off-screen romance with the director.In his classic films The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), and Blonde Venus (1932), von Sternberg showcased his trademark visual style and revolutionary representations of sexuality. Drawing on firsthand conversations with von Sternberg and his son, Von Sternberg breaks past the classic Hollywood caricature to demystify and humanize this legendary director.

Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels. In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual community in Southern California. Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Monument Eternal illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist.

This is the first account of the evolution of music at Wesleyan University, a campus known since the mid-nineteenth century for its musical life-first as the "Singing College of New England" and then, after 1960, as the home of a renowned undergraduate and graduate department that integrates world music studies with more traditional Western and experimental musical forms. Through excerpts from accounts in the campus newspaper over the earlier decades and eyewitness accounts by key figures in recent times, the book compactly surveys a wide range of musical formations, practices, repertoires, and events from the 1830s to the early 2000s. Vividly illustrated with both historical and contemporary images, Music at Wesleyan presents a portrait of the school that today blends educational innovation and cultural diversity with creative passion and intellectual rigor, and includes a foreword by Richard K. Winslow, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus at Wesleyan University. A companion digital archive at http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/maw_audio/ features audio files of glee club, gamelan, jazz, experimental, African, Indian, and other performances.

During the highly charged years of World War II, movies perhaps best communicated to Americans who they were and why they were fighting. These films were more than just an explanation of historical events: they asked audiences to consider the Nazi threat, they put a face on both our enemies and allies, and they explored changing wartime gender roles.We'll Always Have the Movies shows how film after film repeated the narratives, character types, and rhetoric that made the war and each American's role in it comprehensible. Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry have watched more than six-hundred films made between 1937 and 1946 -- including many never before discussed in this context -- and have analyzed the cultural and historical importance of these films in explaining the war to moviegoers. This extensive study shows how filmmakers made the chaotic elements of wartime familiar, while actual events became film history, and film history became myth.

The Editors give a wide and yet concise presentation of the history of Swedish film through carefully selected articles by Swedish and international film scholars. The book draws upon a rich tradition of research on Swedish cinema, and it offers a varied and inspiring introduction to the history from the very first film screenings to contemporary works. The anthology is organized in thematic sections on, for instance, the Swedish cinema institutions; silent films; genre cinema; authors and art cinema, and a reflection on the film industry before and after the new millennium. Combining in-depth studies with contextualizing introductions, the book provides a rich spectrum of perspectives on Swedish film previously unavailable in English. The book will be essential reading for students, scholars and anyone who has an interest in Swedish cinema!