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Filmed entirely in Bali - the famed Hindu island in the archipelago of Indonesia - this historical video shows the day-to-day life of the islanders, their folk songs, gamelan orchestras and dance dramas. The temple is the focal point of each village where the villagers gather for religious ceremonies as well as for music and dance. The film features stunning, rarely captured footage of two religious dance/dramas named Barong, and Ketchak, the legendary \"monkey chant\".

Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle across ensuing decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film has formed a backdrop to an array of formal, contextual, and ideological battles. In this book, Paul Cuff takes account of those battles and challenges received opinion on Gance's view of both his film and its subject.|Paul Cuff takes account of the struggle across decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film Napoleon and challenges received opinion on this work.

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe's national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of \"world cinema\" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition. Onder invloed van de rivaliteit met Hollywood en de val van de muur in 1989 vond er in de jaren '90 in veel West-Europese landen een levendig debat plaats over de toekomst van de nationale filmtradities. Van het bestaan van zich onderscheidende 'nationale' stijlen, zoals bijvoorbeeld neo-realisme, zou niet langer kunnen worden uitgegaan. Film zou een benepen kunstvorm geworden zijn, die redding zoekt in het bewaren van de 'nationale' erfenis of hoopt op artistieke vernieuwing van televisie en door de overheid gesubsidieerde prestigeprojecten. In European Cinema blikt Thomas Elsaesser terug op het debat en geeft een genuanceerder beeld van verschillende factoren die sinds de jaren zestig een rol speelden. Er is o.m. aandacht voor de raakvlakken met de 'world cinema' en de opkomst van de Aziatische film, de invloed van het internationale film festival circuit, de rol van televisie en de veranderende esthetiek in auteur-cinema. Nieuwe toeschouwers hebben andere voorkeuren, en nieuwe technologieën bieden de mogelijkheid om bestaande identiteiten te hervormen, maar de Europese cinema heeft nog steeds een belangrijke functie in het vaststellen van kritische en creatieve agenda's, ook al is haar economische en institutionele basis in beweging.

I Want To Be Ready draws on original archival research, careful readings of individual performances, and a thorough knowledge of dance scholarship to offer an understanding of the \"freedom\" of improvisational dance. While scholars often celebrate the freedom of improvised performances, they are generally focusing on freedom from formal constraints. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Houston Baker, among others, Danielle Goldman argues that this negative idea of freedom elides improvisation's greatest power. Far from representing an escape from the necessities of genre, gender, class, and race, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever shifting landscape of constraints. This work will appeal to those interested in dance history and criticism and also interdisciplinary audiences in the fields of American and cultural studies.

How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? In this title, the author investigates many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening.

A recent restaging in London of John Harbison’s opera based on Yeats’s late dance play raises serious questions about a fitting style of staging and performance and an appropriate directorial approach to what is a quite unique and challenging drama.

What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao's term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. InFiery Cinema,Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China's experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China's varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinemaadvances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

Broadway musicals are one of America's most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation? The Great White Wayis the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years fromShow Boat(1927) toThe Scottsboro Boys(2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States. Presented chronologically,The Great White Wayshows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927-1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon-Show Boat(1927),Oklahoma!(1943),Annie Get Your Gun(1946),The Music Man(1957),West Side Story(1957),A Chorus Line(1975), and42nd Street(1980), among others.New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.

When a young dancer notices that her instructor isn't holding everyone in the ensemble to the same standard, she is determined to stop her friend from being counted out of the competition.