Film, Visual Culture, and Performing Arts

  • Subjects /
  • Film, Visual Culture, and Performing Arts
Showing 1-100 of 381 titles.
Sort by:

Baroque Counterpoint

The classic text on Baroque Counterpoint, enlarged and revised, drawing from the master composers of the era.

Walking as Artistic Practice

Accessible to a wide range of readers, from artists to commuters to nature lovers and beyond, who wish to expand their understanding of walking.

The Jazz Problem

How jazz spurred a generational debate that reshaped American culture.

The Human Figure on Film

Offers a fresh approach to the problem of the human figure in an age of digital cinema.

Yiddish Cinema

Offers a bold new reading of Yiddish cinema by exploring the early diasporic cinema's fascination with media and communication.

Pepper Adams

A compelling biography of virtuoso, baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams and how his life intersected with some of the greatest poets, writers, painters, and musicians of his time.

Bay Lodyans

Considers how popular Haitian films not only provide entertainment but also help audiences in Haiti and the diaspora think through daily challenges.

The Sound of Vultures' Wings

Explores the music of the Tibetan Chöd tradition.

Feminism's Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

Torturous Etiquettes

Explores the “torture” of mannered behavior and the prevalence of etiquette as a theme in classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema.

Haight-Ashbury, Psychedelics, and the Birth of Acid Rock

Illuminates the beginnings, downfall, and legacy of the acid-inspired, spontaneous, and playful approach to life and music in Haight-Ashbury from 1964–1967.

Ducktails, Drive-ins, and Broken Hearts

An unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of '50s rock and roll, from the biggest stars, like Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, to those who barely grabbed the spotlight.

Tourists and Trade

How two roadside craft shops in upstate New York transformed American crafts into a fine art.

Musicology of Religion

Spearheads a new field for the combined study of religion and music, drawing upon theories and methods of the social sciences, ethnomusicology, philosophy, theology, liturgical studies, and cognitive studies.

Following the Ticker

Traces the influence of the stock market on Americans' beliefs about politics.

Perfect Pitch, Third Revised Edition

The autobiography of one of the 20th century’s most innovative and wittiest composers/performers/authors who witnessed the birth of modern music.

Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives

Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.

Ana M. López

Brings together Ana M. López's field-defining essays on Latin American film and media in one indispensable volume.

Life Above the Clouds

Edited by Steven DeLay
Subjects: Philosophy

The definitive philosophical exploration of the work of pioneering filmmaker Terrence Malick.

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity

Examines literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of Chinese women, across centuries and continents.

Distancing Representations in Transgender Film

Argues that transgender representations in film make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life.

A Silence from Hitchcock

Extensive meditations on silence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The Touch of the Present

Explores the importance of the body and the senses in educational encounters, drawing out the aesthetic and political dimensions of educational practices.

The Obscure Substance of Sky

A book of poems and painted images.

Blues on Stage

Tells the story of classic blues singers from Ma Rainey to Bessie Smith.

Philosophical Archaeology

Explores the potential for a novel philosophy of history to be uncovered by tracing the connections between Giorgio Agamben's work (theoretical practice) and contemporary art (artistic practice).

Tommy, Trauma, and Postwar Youth Culture

The cultural history of one of rock's greatest masterpieces told through the eyes of its creator.

Cinema of Discontent

Uses popular films to reveal the tensions generated during Japan’s postwar "economic miracle," challenging the prevailing view that it was a story of great national success.

Henry Dreyfuss

Celebrates the design work of Henry Dreyfuss and his associates that revolutionized 20th century industrial design from telephones to trains to thermostats.

Bob Dylan's New York

A walking tour and history of Bob Dylan's life and time in New York, from Greenwich Village to Woodstock.

A Philosophy of Music Education

A Philosophy of Music Education is considered the classic text on the relation of aesthetics to the practical teaching and performing of music.

Free Jazz

A new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author’s experience as a performer.

Honeymoon Couples and Jurassic Babies

Contextualizes Sabha Theatre historically, politically, and aesthetically, revealing how it expresses a Tamil Brahmin identity that is at once traditional and modern.

Woman-Centered Brazilian Cinema

Illuminates the complex factors that have helped or hindered creative work by and about women in the twenty-first-century Brazilian film industry.

Ways of the Hand

A visual and narrative memoir of a lifetime's encounters with 112 trendsetters, musicians, politicians, writers, and ordinary people by a noted folklorist-photographer.

The Hard Sell of Paradise

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Nietzsche in Hollywood

Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

Orienting Italy

Explores Italian filmmakers' representations of China and the Chinese, both at home and abroad.

(White)Washing Our Sins Away

Analyzes how White American mainline Protestants used the internal musical controversies of the turn-of-the-millennium Worship Wars to negotiate their shifting position within the nation's diversifying religious and sociopolitical ecosystems.

Punk Rock

Shows how punk rock shaped modern culture around the world.

The Holiday in His Eye

Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

Gilbert and Sullivan

By Kurt Gänzl
Subjects: Literature

Highlights the original cast members—both the well-known and the (until now) wholly unknown—who staged the duo's comic operas in Britain and in America.

The Tyranny of Common Sense

Elucidates how neoliberalism rules all areas of life and operates as a form of common sense, taking Mexico as a case study.

Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

Analyzes socially engaged art practices worldwide, linking them to decolonial struggle and critique.

Whiteness at the End of the World

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

No Jurisdiction

A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.

Wonder Strikes

By Steven E. Knepper
Foreword by William Desmond
Subjects: Philosophy

The first book-length examination of the prominent contemporary philosopher William Desmond's approach to aesthetics, art, and literature.

White Cottage, White House

Argues that Irish American masculinity functioned to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in Hollywood cinema from 1930 to 1960.

The Cinematographer's Voice

A unique exploration of contemporary filmmaking from cinema’s ultimate insiders.

Action, Action, Action

Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.

Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East

Traces the circulation of Hollywood films in North Africa and the Middle East from the early twentieth century to the present.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

A novel fusing of multiple approaches and range of examples exploring the dimensions, objects, and import of aesthetic encounters.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

Examines the filmic representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity and its role in mediating racial politics in Mexico.

Sharkey

The incredible, true story of the twentieth century's greatest performing sea lion and the man who trained him.

Screening #MeToo

Considers how Hollywood films since the 1960s have both reflected and shaped attitudes toward rape and sexual violence.

Writ on Water

A powerful and original statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of “film imagination” to our lives as human beings in the world.

Mary Frank

Presents sculpture, painting, drawings, prints, and photographs from throughout the artist's illustrious career.

Ida Rubinstein

The critical biography of a dynamic and under-represented figure who produced and starred in some of the most innovative works of her day.

The Coming Death

Explores questions of death and mortality in several key texts of East Asian literature and cinema.

Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation

Examines the place of book-to-film adaptations by one of Italy's most famous postwar film directors.

Premises and Problems

Discusses world literature and cinema from the perspective of literary languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position.

Seeing Symphonically

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Curtains of Light

Provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema

Sheds light on emergent Latin America cinema that addresses the politics of environmental destruction, the unevenness of climate change consequences, and new ways of visualizing the world beyond the human.

The Godfather and Sicily

Offers a distinctive interpretation of The Godfather as a novel and film sequence.

Was It Yesterday?

Explores how nostalgia operates in contemporary US film and television.

Unholy Trinity

Examines representations of religion in Mexican film from the Golden Age to the early twenty-first century.

Alton's Paradox

Uses extensive archival research to explore the manifold contributions of foreign film workers to emerging film industries in Latin America from the 1930s to early 1940s.

Encountering the Impossible

The first academic explanation for how spectators use their imaginations as part of the experience and appreciation of popular fantasy filmmaking.

Race and the Suburbs in American Film

Explores how suburban space and the body are racialized in American film.

Avant-Gardes in Crisis

Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s.

Perpetual Movement

Offers both a production history and a close analysis, with a chapter for each of the film's eleven shots.

A Voyage with Hitchcock

Extensive meditations on the theme of the voyage in six Hitchcock films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion.

Rock on Record

Rock on Record shows students how to listen to and enjoy the rich repertory of rock records made between the 1950s and 1980s.

The Musical, Second Edition

A complete introduction to musical theater from its roots in the eighteenth century through today, written by a master historian.

Mexico Unmanned

Demonstrates how transhistorical myths of masculinity are both perpetuated and challenged in recent Mexican cinema.

Digital Meets Handmade

Embraces the problems and solutions posed by the dynamic dance of digital technology with the traditions of craftsmanship and perceived value in jewelry.

Creative Inquiry

Introduces both undergraduate students and general readers to the exploratory mindset and hands-on skills essential to the cultivation of creativity.

Life after the Revolution

Shares the unique story of a Christmas tree farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, where, for over four decades, women artists boldly built a space where they could create community and art together.

Convenient Criticism

By Dan Chen
Subjects: Communication

Explains why and how local critical reporting can exist in China despite the kinds of media control that are the hallmarks of authoritarian rule.

Knowing It When You See It

Lively analysis of how Henry James's fiction anticipates later filmmakers' concerns with what we can see and what we can know.

Capitán Latinoamérica

Analyzes contemporary superhero-themed cinema, television, and web series in Latin America.

Giallo!

Traces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon.

Mind Reeling

Across a variety of genres, shows how mental disorders are depicted in cinema.

The Hebrew Orient

Examines the role that images of Palestine played in the construction of prewar Jewish American identity.

Tastemakers and Tastemaking

Considers how and why taste persists in the analysis of Mexican film and television by looking at key figures and their impact on the curation of violence.

Qorbanot

A dynamic dialogue of poetry and art that reimagines the ancient, biblical concept of sacrifice.

Kathy Goodell

Explores the through-lines in the artist's work across painting, drawing, and sculpture; examining a mystic language that loops between disciplines, coasts, and generations.

Postcolonial Lack

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai

Examines Shanghai both as a real city and an imaginary locale, from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives.

Letters from Hollywood

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.

Improv for Democracy

Explores how improv-based teaching and training methods can bridge differences and promote the communication, leadership, and civil skills our world urgently needs.

Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery

A study of the significance of the visual arts in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in relation to the work of five artists not known or discussed by him.

Funny How?

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Miraculous Realism

An authoritative study of this postsecular film movement from the French-Belgian border region that rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Slapstick Camera

Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.

Epistemic Responsibility

By Lorraine Code
Subjects: Philosophy

Develops a new kind of epistemological position that highlights virtue over more standard epistemological theories.

Jan Sawka

Shows how Sawka’s experience as a political refugee, and his working method, which emphasized imagery drawn from memory, resulted in powerful works that speak of and to the universal human condition.

The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.

Brute Force

Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.