Exploring early hits such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, as well as more recent successes such as Battlestar Galactica and Lost, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader illuminates the history, narrative approaches, and themes of the genre. The book discusses science fiction television from its early years when shows attempted to recreate the allure of science fiction cinema, to its current status as a sophisticated genre with a popularity all its own. J. P. Telotte has assembled a wideranging volume rich in theoretical scholarship yet fully accessible to science fiction fans. The book supplies readers with valuable historical context, analyses of essential science fiction series, and an understanding of the key issues in science fiction television.

Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters-Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino-author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt. The aspirations of these individuals demonstrate the unifying role that the American motion picture capital played in shaping cultural notions of reputation, success, glamour, and visibility. Through extensive and unprecedented primary research and illuminating analyses of films, texts, and personal writings, each chapter provides new insight into its subject's dealings in the mythic city. Hollywood Ambitions affords a unique understanding of the tremendous diversity of the Hollywood experience and its allure in the first half of the cinematic century.

A cigar-chomping storyteller who signaled "Action!" by shooting a gun, Samuel Fuller has been lionized as one of the most distinctive writer/directors ever to emerge from Hollywood. In such films as The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor, and The Big Red One, Fuller gleefully challenged classical and generic norms-and often standards of good taste-in an effort to shock and arouse audiences. Tackling war, crime, race, and sexuality with a candor rare for any period, Fuller's maverick vision was tested by Hollywood's transition from the studio system to independent filmmaking. Now, in the first full account of all of the director's audaciously original work, author Lisa Dombrowski brings his career into new relief. The Films of Samuel Fuller features close analysis of Fuller's pictures and draws on previously untapped production and regulatory files, script notes, and interviews to explore how artistic, economic, and industrial factors impacted Fuller's career choices and shaped the expression of his personal aesthetic. Fans of Fuller and American cinema will welcome this in-depth study of a provocative director who embodied both the unique opportunities and challenges of postwar filmmaking.

This book is about a family tree: the line of descent that can be traced from Perugino in Italy in the fifteenth century to Edouard Manet in France in the nineteenth. It is not the usual kind of genealogy, of those connected by blood, more an 'apostolic succession', following the way in which art in Europe was taught, from one generation to the next, from 1480 to 1880. The book reveals how the nature and methods of artistic instruction changed over the centuries, from the guild system and the individual workshop to the academy and the establishment of state institutions dedicated to the purpose, as exemplified in France.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theater Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery's collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge epitomizes the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon theater as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.

This catalogue accompanies the first ever loan exhibition of drawings from Waddesdon Manor, the house that was built and furnished by Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839-1989) to show off his works of art and to entertain the fashionable world.Most of the drawings gathered together for this exhibition have never been exhibited in pulbic and most have not been published. There are works by major French draughtsmen of the eighteenth century, including Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Nicolas Lancret, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince. Other artists are less familiar, Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Moreau le jeune among them, and it is hoped that this exhibition will introduce the visitor to the verve and originality of their work. The selection reflects the diversity of the Rothschild Collection and the overlapping preoccupations and unflagging curiosity of its creators. It encompasses observation and invention, academic learning and social comment, propaganda and reportage, and sheds light on the many different techniques and uses of drawing. It is hoped that scruntiny of these works outside their usual context will intrigue those that do not know Waddesdon, surprise those that do and give insight and pleasure to new audiences.

Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using historical sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture's contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.

Between 1907 and 1980, many state and local governments empowered motion picture censor boards with the legal authority to keep any movie they considered obscene, indecent, or harmful from being shown. Although the mainstream American film industry accepted the form of censorship known as "prior restraint," the independent distributors and exhibitors challenged the government censors in court. In Freedom of the Screen, Laura Wittern-Keller tells the story of those who fought prior restraint on movies. By drawing attention to this inequity -- film was the only medium so constricted by the 1950s -- the distributors pushed a reluctant judiciary to square its interpretation of movie expression with the rights of other media. As these legal interpretations gradually became more sympathetic to artistic freedom -- largely because of the independent distributors' lawsuits -- Hollywood was free to discard its outmoded restraints and deliver provocative, relevant movies to American audiences.

The influence of classic film noir on the style and substance of television in the 1950s and 1960s has persisted to the present day. Its pervasiveness suggests the vitality of the noir depiction of human experience and the importance of TV for transmitting the legacy of film noir and producing new forms of noir. Noir television is also noteworthy for its capacity to raise philosophical questions about the nature of the human condition. Drawing from the fields of philosophy, media studies, and literature, the contributors to The Philosophy of TV Noir illuminate the best of noir television, including such shows as Dragnet, The Fugitive, Miami Vice, The X-Files, CSI, and 24.

Though it may come as a surprise to both cinema lovers and industry professionals who believe that 3-D film was born in the early 1950s, stereoscopic cinema actually began in 1838, more than 100 years before the 3-D boom in Hollywood was created by the release of Arch Oboler's African adventure film, Bwana Devil, filmed in "Natural Vision" 3-D. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838--1952, is a comprehensive prehistory of the stereoscopic motion picture. In the late nineteenth century, stereoview cards were popular worldwide, and soon filmmakers wanted to capture these "living pictures" with motion, sound, and color. Writing a new chapter in the history of early cinema, Ray Zone not only discusses technological innovation and its cultural context but also examines the aesthetic aspects of stereoscopic cinema in its first century of production.

Early Connecticut Silver is a catalog of the most significant pieces of silver hollowware made by Connecticut silversmiths between the years 1700 and 1840, as well as representative flatware and other pieces such as swords and Masonic jewels. In all, it constitutes an exhibit that could never be mounted in a single museum, and one that proves the authors' conviction that Connecticut silver is distinctive and worthy of comparison to the more sophisticated contemporary styles associated with the silversmiths of Boston and New York City. Wesleyan is proud to offer a new edition of this essential work, featuring an introduction by Erin Eisenbarth that brings the coverage up to date, incorporating the research done on this subject since the original publication. The book still includes an introductory essay that defines "the Connecticut school," and an annotated index of silversmiths known to have worked in Connecticut and an index of the marks used by them.

Director of such often-revived films as Winchester '73, The Glenn Miller Story, and El Cid, Anthony Mann enjoyed a lasting and important career as one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers. Mann's Westerns, noir pictures, and epics are admired and studied by fans and scholars alike, and he was an expert in the fundamental elements of cinema (movement and placement of the camera, composition in the frame, and careful editing). Jeanine Basinger's Anthony Mann, which places the director's visual style at the center of its analysis, was among the first formal studies of any filmmaker, and it set a standard in the field over twenty-five years ago. Long out of print and much in demand, this pioneering book is now available again, featuring complete coverage of those Mann films not discussed in the original work, as well as over fifty rare film stills. Wesleyan is proud to issue this expanded edition of an essential text, making it available to new generations of filmgoers and readers.

In the late 1950s to 1970s, an Afro-Peruvian revival brought the forgotten music and dances of Peru's African musical heritage to Lima's theatrical stages. The revival conjured newly imagined links to the past in order to celebrate-and to some extent recreate-Black culture in Peru. In this groundbreaking study of the Afro-Peruvian revival and its aftermath, Heidi Carolyn Feldman reveals how Afro-Peruvian artists remapped blackness from the perspective of the "Black Pacific," a marginalized group of African diasporic communities along Latin America's Pacific coast. Feldman's "ethnography of remembering" traces the memory projects of charismatic Afro-Peruvian revival artists and companies, including José Durand, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, and Perú Negro, culminating with Susana Baca's entry onto the global world music stage in the 1990s. Readers will learn how Afro-Peruvian music and dance genres, although recreated in the revival to symbolize the ancient and forgotten past, express competing modern beliefs regarding what constitutes "Black Rhythms of Peru."

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance-and indeed all sacred music-is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

An illustrated introduction to internationally acclaimed glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell's career, this book charts the evolution of Powell's remarkable body of work. Dazzling photographic close-ups not only detail the luminous murrini patterns that have become Powell's signature but also reveal new ways of appreciating the complex interplay of color and texture in his art. Biographical and analytical essays by Mark Lucas, Laurie Winters, and James Yood explore such topics as the teamwork that is so critical to Powell's unique glassmaking process; his teaching and learning experiences on the road, from the former Soviet Union to Salt Lake City during the Olympics; and the story of the two freak injuries that deeply affected his work and how he thinks about it. Reflections by Kenn Holsten, Marvin Lipofsky, Dante Marioni, Bonnie Marx, John Roush, and Lino Tagliapietra further supplement the book. The book's stunning photographs encourage the viewer to see Powell's work from different viewpoints, and they highlight the unique interactions between transparent, opaque, and translucent glass and Powell's bold color combinations. Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker vividly portrays the tension and excitement involved in the artist's nontraditional, collaborative approach to working with molten glass.

An expert writer and thinker on movie history and directorial style, Kent Jones is among the most notable film critics of his generation. His sharp, informed analyses and cogent assessments of cinema and its practitioners have made him a significant voice both in America and internationally. Jones' inaugural collection brings together the best of his reviews (on films including In the Mood for Love, A History of Violence, and The New World), evaluations of specific filmmakers (Wes Anderson, John Cassavetes, and the Coen brothers), polemics (on summer blockbusters, digital cinema, and Hollywood politics), and appreciations of other film critics. Several of these pieces are published here in English for the first time, having previously appeared only in the French journals Cahiers du Cinéma and Trafic. Physical Evidence is a penetrating and personal examination of contemporary and classic cinema, one that values nothing so much as seeing on the screen the proof-the physical evidence-of the filmmaker's own personal quest.