Film, Visual Culture, and Performing Arts

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The Algonquin Round Table

The facts and legends of New York's famed artistic hub told by one of its key participants.

Through a Nuclear Lens

Examines the increasingly reciprocal nature of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange through films that center on nuclear issues.

The Life and Death of Buffalo's Great Northern Grain Elevator

A stunning visual memorial to Buffalo's architectural and industrial history.

Is Harpo Free?

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

Apparitions, Daemons, and Emanations

A study of non-representational art and poetry in the work of Bataille, Klossowski, and Michaux.

Awakening a Living World on a Kūṭiyāṭṭam Stage

Explores the cultural dynamics of this ancient form of Sanskrit theater.

The Sound of Vultures' Wings

Explores the music of the Tibetan Chöd tradition.

From Blues to Beyoncé

Explores how Black women have continually used sound to convey stories and forge community across generations.

Early Jazz

A concise history of early jazz, from its major innovators to its unrecognized heroes.

The Biggest Thing in Show Business

A freewheeling, nonlinear exploration of the performing duo and their decade-long collaboration from 1946 to 1956.

Folklore Matters

By Bruce Jackson
Subjects: Literature

Celebrates over a half-century of the work of one of America's greatest folklorists.

Jazz with a Beat

The neglected small group swing sound of the 1940s–60s takes its place in the pantheon of jazz literature.

The Power of Practice

Situates yoga practice within a musical context in the life and work of famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin

A Theory of Harmony

The classic work on Levy’s theory of negative harmony.

Resonances against Fascism

Makes a case for the power of music and sound in the face of fascistic forces, from modernism to the present.

Expanding the Music Theory Canon

The first music theory anthology to provide 255 topically arranged examples by 67 historical women and people of color

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.

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.

Yiddish Cinema

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

Bay Lodyans

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

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.

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.

Torturous Etiquettes

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

Tourists and Trade

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

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.

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.

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.

Following the Ticker

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

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.

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity

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

A Silence from Hitchcock

Extensive meditations on silence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Life Above the Clouds

Edited by Steven DeLay
Subjects: Philosophy

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

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.

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.

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.

Blues on Stage

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

Henry Dreyfuss

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Orienting Italy

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

Nietzsche in Hollywood

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

Punk Rock

Shows how punk rock shaped modern culture around the world.

(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.

Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whiteness at the End of the World

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

White Cottage, White House

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

Action, Action, Action

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

The Cinematographer's Voice

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

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.

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.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

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

Screening #MeToo

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

Sharkey

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

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curtains of Light

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

Race and the Suburbs in American Film

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

Seeing Symphonically

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

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.

Unholy Trinity

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

Perpetual Movement

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

Was It Yesterday?

Explores how nostalgia operates in contemporary US film and television.

The Godfather and Sicily

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

Premises and Problems

Edited by Luiza Franco Moreira
Introduction by Luiza Franco Moreira
Subjects: Literature
Series: SUNY Press Open Access

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

Avant-Gardes in Crisis

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

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.

Creative Inquiry

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

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.

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.

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.

The Hebrew Orient

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

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.

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.

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.