The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror


David J. Skal - 1993
    Skal chronicles one of our most popular and pervasive modes of cultural expression. He explores the disguised form in which Hollywood's classic horror movies played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control catalyzed by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in visceral, transformative special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the AIDS epidemic and the current fascination with vampires; and much more. Now with a new Afterword by the author that looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, The Monster Show is a compulsively readable, thought-provoking inquiry into America's obsession with the macabre.

Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors


Steve Hullfish - 2008
    It is a fascinating "virtual roundtable discussion" with more than 50 of the top editors from around the globe. Included in the discussion are the winners of more than a dozen Oscars for Best Editing and the nominees of more than forty, plus numerous Emmy winners and nominees. Together they have over a thousand years of editing experience and have edited more than a thousand movies and TV shows.Hullfish carefully curated over a hundred hours of interviews, organizing them into topics critical to editors everywhere, generating an extended conversation among colleagues. The discussions provide a broad spectrum of opinions that illustrate both similarities and differences in techniques and artistic approaches. Topics include rhythm, pacing, structure, storytelling and collaboration.Interviewees include Margaret Sixel (Mad Max: Fury Road), Tom Cross (Whiplash, La La Land), Pietro Scalia (The Martian, JFK), Stephen Mirrione (The Revenant), Ann Coates (Lawrence of Arabia, Murder on the Orient Express), Joe Walker (12 Years a Slave, Sicario), Kelley Dixon (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead), and many more. Art of the Cut also includes in-line definitions of editing terminology, with a full glossary and five supplemental web chapters hosted online. This book is a treasure trove of valuable tradecraft for aspiring editors and a prized resource for high-level working professionals. The book's accessible language and great behind-the-scenes insight makes it a fascinating glimpse into the art of filmmaking for all fans of cinema.

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry


Harold Bloom - 1973
    Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of criticism and post-structuralist literary theory. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotations, this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded - neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. A new introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past quarter of a century.

Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer


Paul Schrader - 1972
    Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state with austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This important book is an original contribution to film analysis and a key work by one of our most searching directors and writers.

An Actor Prepares


Konstantin Stanislavski - 1938
    Stanislavski's simple exercises fire the imagination, and help readers not only discover their own conception of reality but how to reproduce it as well.

Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile


Jane Blocker - 1999
    In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities. As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.

Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide


Lois Tyson - 1998
    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

Cut to the Chase: Writing Feature Films with the Pros at UCLA Extension Writers' Program


Linda Venis - 2013
    Or maybe they have a great script, but no clue about how to navigate the choppy waters of show business. Enter Cut To The Chase, written by professional writers who teach in UCLA Extension Writers' Programme, whose alumni's many credits include Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl; Twilight; and the Academy Award nominated Letters from Iwo Juima. From learning how to identify story ideas that make a good movie to opening career doors and keeping them open, this authoritative, comprehensive, and entertaining book, edited by Writers' Program Director Linda Venis, will be the film-writing bible for decades to come."A well-organized soup-to-nuts manual for aspiring Nora Ephrons and Charlie Kaufmans, from the faculty of a notable screenwriting program. . . . A readable writer's how-to that goes down smoothly."- Kirkus Reviews

Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital


Sarah Thornton - 1995
    She portrays club cultures as "taste cultures" brought together by micro-media like flyers and listings, transformed into self-conscious "subcultures" by such niche media as the music and style press, and sometimes recast as "movements" with the aid of such mass media as tabloid newspaper front pages. She also traces changes in the recording medium from a marginal entertainment in the 50s to the clubs and raves of the 90s.Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term "subcultural capital" to make sense of distinctions made by "cool" youth, noting particularly their disparagement of the "mainstream" against which they measure their alternative cultural worth. Well supported with case studies, readable, and innovative, Club Cultures will become a key text in cultural and media studies and in the sociology of culture.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination


Sandra M. Gilbert - 1979
    An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."Contents:The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity --Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship --The parables of the cave --Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia --Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) --Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers --Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve --Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell --A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil --A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress --The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley --The buried life of Lucy Snowe --Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision --George Eliot as the angel of destruction --The aesthetics of renunciation --A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune


Stuart Galbraith - 2002
    The Emperor and the Wolf is an in-depth look at these two great artists and their legacy that brims with behind-the-scenes details, many never before known, about their tumultuous lives and stormy relationships with the studios and with one another. More than just a biography, though, The Emperor and the Wolf is also an impromptu history of Japanese cinema -- its development, filmmakers, and performers -- and a provocative look at postwar American and Japanese culture and the different lenses through which two great societies viewed each other.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles


Mike Davis - 1990
    Mike Davis shows us where the city's money comes from and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

How to Write a Movie in 21 Days


Viki King - 1988
    Viki King's Inner Movie Method is a specific step-by-step process designed to get the story in the writer's onto the page. This method guides the would-be screenwriter through the writing of a movie. It answers such questions as:How to clarify the idea you don't quite have yetHow to tell if your idea is really a movieHow to move from what you want to say saying itHow to stop getting ready and startOnce you know what to write, the Inner Movie Method will show you how to write it. It also addresses such issues as:How to pay the rent while paying your duesWhat to say to your spouse when you can't come to bedHow to keep going when you think you can'tFor accomplished screenwriters honing their craft, as well as those who never before brought their ideas to paper, How to Write a Movie in 21 Days is an indispensable guide. And Viki King's upbeat, friendly style is like having a first-rate writing partner every step of the way.

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema


Peter Wollen - 1969
    Divided into three sections, Part One deals with the work of S.M. Eisenstein, both as a director and theorist of his art. Part two concerns the auteur theory and investigates the recurrence of themes and images throughout a director's career. Part three shows how the study of cinema can be considered a province of the general study of signs. Throughout this richly illustrated book the relationship of the cinema to the other arts is kept constantly before the reader. This new edition includes a retrospective chapter by the author.

Too Much Horror Business


Kirk Hammett - 2012
    In Too Much Horror Business, Kirk finally unveils his near-mythical treasure trove of rare posters, props, costumes, and toys from the early silent classics to more modern fare. From Bela Lugosi’s annotated Dracula script to the creepy Donnie Darko bunny suit to cool model kits from the 1960s, Hammett has amassed hundreds of items over the years, including priceless international collectibles as well as the quirkier toys of his youth. Alongside scores of full-color, original photographs in this highly designed volume, Kirk offers up thoughts about his appreciation for all things scary and fantastic, shedding light on not only the collection of a lifetime, but the man himself.Praise for Too Much Horror Business:“Like a classic record, there are numerous layers to Too Much Horror Business: The Kirk Hammett Collection, and that’s what makes it so utterly rewarding. Plus, it’s damn beautiful to look at. Ultimately, this is one of the best books of the year and a true game-changer. Whether you’re a Metallica fan, a horror fan, or just a reader in general, you need it.” —ArtistDirect.com