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The sound of musicals
Despite having had its obituary written many times, the movie musical remains a flourishing twenty-first century form, and as this volume demonstrates, one that exists far beyond the confines of Broadway and Hollywood. The Sound of Musicals examines the films, stars, issues and traditions of the genre from the 1930s to the present day. Featuring sixteen original essays by leading international scholars, this illuminating collection addresses the complex history and global variety of the movie musical, and considers the delight and passionate engagement that musicals continue to inspire in audiences around the world.The contributors address key issues for understanding the movie musical: questions of genre and generic traditions; questions of history, bringing fresh perspectives to a consideration of Classical Hollywood musicals; and the musical beyond Hollywood, looking at alternatives to the Hollywood model from the 'New Hollywood' and American independent cinema to Bollywood and other national musical traditions. Individual chapters consider key musical stars such as Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand; film-makers including Robert Altman and Christophe Honoré, and classic musicals such as South Pacific (1958) and Hairspray (1988). In his introduction to the volume, Steven Cohan addresses the significance and enduring appeal of this multi-faceted genre, and considers its recent renaissance with movies such as the High School Musical franchise, and the success of the television series Glee.
eBook
Longue Vue house and gardens
A study of the interiors and gardens of New Orleans's unrivaled jewel and architectural masterpiece, which has been accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and listed as a national historic landmark, and was designed and built between 1934 and 1942 by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman and architects Charles and William Platt for Edgar Bloom and Edith Rosenwald Stern, New Orleans's foremost mid-twentieth-century philanthropists and civil-rights activists.
Book
Great Duty
English-Canadian cultural critics from across the political spectrum championed self-improvement, self-awareness, and lively engagement with one's surroundings, struggling to find a balance between the social benefits of democracy and modernization and what they considered the debilitating influence of the accompanying mass culture. They used print and broadcast media in an attempt to convince Canadians that choosing wisely between varieties of culture was an expression of personal and national identity, making cultural nationalism in Canada a \"middlebrow\" project. As Kuffert argues, \"if English Canadians are today more familiar with the ways in which modern life and mass culture envelop and define them, if they live in a nation where private citizens and cultural institutions view the media as avenues of entertainment, as businesses, or as the means to construct identity, they should be aware of the role of wartime and post-war cultural critics\" in creating those orientations toward culture.
eBook
Invasion of the body snatchers
Upon its release in 1956, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers was widely perceived as another 'B' movie thriller in the cycle of science fiction and horror films that proliferated in the 1950s. Yet the film addresses numerous issues brewing in post-war US society, including the Cold War, McCarthyism and the changing dynamics of gender relations. In the fifty years since the film's release, its reputation has grown from cult status to become an acknowledged classic of American cinema. With its narrative of emotionless alien duplicates replacing average folk, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first post-war horror film to locate the monstrous in the everyday, thus marking it as a pivotal moment in American horror film history four years before Psycho.In this first comprehensive critical study of the film, Barry Keith Grant traces Invasion's historical and generic contexts to explore the importance of Communism and conformity, post-war modernity and gender politics in order to understand the film's cultural significance and metaphorical weight. He also provides an account of the film's fraught production history and offers an extended discussion of the distinctive contributions of the production personnel. Concluding with a consideration of the three remakes it has inspired, Grant illustrates how Invasion of the Body Snatchers' enduring popularity derives from its central metaphor for the monstrous, which has proven as flexible as that of the vampire and the zombie.
eBook
The effect of competition on the intra-industry dispersion of earnings
Although several studies have examined the link between competition and average earnings and others have focussed on the magnitude and determinants of establishment wage differentials, very little is known about the effect of competition on the intra-industry dispersion of earnings. Using a comprehensive data set on the incidence of price-fixing across British manufacturing industries in the 1950s, I compare collusive and competitive industries and find strong evidence of a negative effect of collusion on the intra-industry dispersion of plant average earnings. This result is robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of collusion.
Journal Article
Demystifying Disney
Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation provides a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date examination of the Disney studio’s evolution through its animated films. In addition to challenging certain misconceptions concerning the studio’s development, the study also brings scholarly definition to hitherto neglected aspects of contemporary Disney. Through a combination of economic, cultural, historical, textual, and technological approaches, this book provides a discriminating analysis of Disney authorship, and the authorial claims of others working within the studio; conceptual and theoretical engagement with the constructions of ‘Classic’ Disney, the Disney Renaissance, and Neo-Disney; Disney’s relationship with other studios; how certain Disney animations problematise a homogeneous reading of the studio’s output; and how the studio’s animation has changed as a consequence of new digital technologies. For all those interested in gaining a better understanding of one of cinema’s most popular and innovative studios, this will be an invaluable addition to the existing literature.
eBook
Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy
For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.
eBook
Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture
In this original study, Thompson explores the complicated relationships between Americans and television during the 1950s, as seen and effected through popular humor. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture documents how Americans grew accustomed to understanding politics, current events, and popular culture through comedy that is simultaneously critical, commercial, and funny. Along with the rapid growth of television in the 1950s, an explosion of satire and parody took place across a wide field of American culture—in magazines, comic books, film, comedy albums, and on television itself. Taken together, these case studies don't just analyze and theorize the production and consumption of parody and television, but force us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar “consensus” culture as well.
eBook
Natalie Wood
Throughout her career, Natalie Wood teetered precariously on the edge of greatness. Trained in the classical Hollywood studio style, but best mentored by Method directors, Wood was the ideal actress for roles depicting shifting perceptions of American womanhood. Nonetheless, while many of her films are considered classics of mid-twentieth century American cinema, she is less remembered for her acting than she is for her mysterious and tragic death. Rebecca Sullivan's lucid and engaging study of Natalie Wood's career sheds new light on her enormous, albeit uneven, contributions to American cinema. This persuasive text argues for renewed appreciation of Natalie Wood by situating her enigmatic performances in the context of a transforming star industry and revolutionary, post-war sexual politics.
eBook