Download or read book Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen written by Susan Delson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1940s, folks at bars and restaurants would gather around a Panoram movie machine to watch three-minute films called Soundies, precursors to today's music videos. This history was all but forgotten until the digital era brought Soundies to phones and computer screens—including a YouTube clip starring a 102-year-old Harlem dancer watching her younger self perform in Soundies. In Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time, Susan Delson takes a deeper look at these fascinating films by focusing on the role of Black performers in this little-known genre. She highlights the women performers, like Dorothy Dandridge, who helped shape Soundies, while offering an intimate look at icons of the age, such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. Using previously unknown archival materials—including letters, corporate memos, and courtroom testimony—to trace the precarious path of Soundies, Delson presents an incisive pop-culture snapshot of race relations during and just after World War II. Perfect for readers interested in film, American history, the World War II era, and Black entertainment history, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen and its companion video website (susandelson.com) bring the important contributions of these Black artists into the spotlight once again.
Download or read book Dudley Murphy Hollywood Wild Card written by Susan Delson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the life of Hollywood's first independent filmmaker known for "The Emperor Jones" and "Ballet mâecanique."
Download or read book The Soundies written by Mark Cantor and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-04-19 with total page 2077 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1940s saw a brief audacious experiment in mass entertainment: a jukebox with a screen. Patrons could insert a dime, then listen to and watch such popular entertainers as Nat "King" Cole, Gene Krupa, Cab Calloway or Les Paul. A number of companies offered these tuneful delights, but the most successful was the Mills Novelty Company and its three-minute musical shorts called Soundies. This book is a complete filmography of 1,880 Soundies: the musicians heard and seen on screen, recording and filming dates, arrangers, soloists, dancers, entertainment trade reviews and more. Additional filmographies cover more than 80 subjects produced by other companies. There are 125 photos taken on film sets, along with advertising images and production documents. More than 75 interviews narrate the firsthand experiences and recollections of Soundies directors and participants. Forty years before MTV, the Soundies were there for those who loved the popular music of the 1940s. This was truly "music for the eyes."
Download or read book Blackbird written by Katie Kapurch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.
Download or read book Ai Weiwei written by Ai Weiwei and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title looks at Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's 'Circle of Heads', his twelve large bronze animal heads depicting the ancient Chinese zodiac.
Download or read book Intersecting Aesthetics written by Charlene Regester and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Cynthia Baron, Elizabeth Binggeli, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Priscilla Layne, Eric Pierson, Charlene Regester, Ellen C. Scott, Tanya L. Shields, and Judith E. Smith Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work ultimately explores the effects racial perspectives have on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions. Several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and the adaptations of Black stories in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Using archival material, contributors demonstrate the ways commercial obstacles have led Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate cultural norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. Through uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics reveals themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation. The volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); and the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001). They also explore studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1947), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954) and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995).
Download or read book Making Believe written by Lisa Bode and published by Techniques of the Moving Image. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rise of digital effects in cinema the human performer is increasingly the only "real" element on screen. Making Believe sheds new light on screen performance by historicizing it within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras.
Download or read book Land of a Thousand Balconies written by Jack Stevenson and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most books about B-movies are straight-forward genre guides, biographies or encyclopaedias. Not this one. In addition to chapters on film showmen, gimmicks and cult films, Land of a Thousand Balconies documents those incidents and unusual film happenings which author Jack Stevenson has -- over the past fifteen years -- been privy to in his various capacities as show organiser, tour arranger, festival jury member and projectionist-for-hire. Land of a Thousand Balconies also focuses on movie theatres and renegade exhibition spaces, lamenting on the disappearing 'sense of place' that is such an integral part of the movie-going experience. Here the reader is invited to tour a diversity of venues -- from the notorious old grindhouses of San Francisco, the home-made store-front cinemas of Seattle and NY, through to the underground film clubs of Europe. Book jacket.
Download or read book Women of Vision written by and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Soundies Book written by Scott MacGillivray and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Soundies" were the granddaddies of music videos: single-song musical movies that played in special jukeboxes during the 1940s. Some of the biggest musical stars (and stars of the future) appeared in these films: Louis Armstrong, Spike Jones, Liberace, Fats Waller, Stan Kenton, Cab Calloway, and many others. Thanks to Soundies, hundreds of unique musical performances were photographed for posterity. These mini-musicals were originally nothing more than a ten-cent novelty. Today, to film and music fans, they're a priceless part of history. Scott MacGillivray and Ted Okuda, authors of the landmark resource book The Soundies Distributing Corporation of America, now offer this revised and expanded guide to the Soundies musicals. This all-new book picks up where the original left off: more than 1800 titles are classified by performer, title, and date-many with new, individual annotations and all with new cross-references for easy reading and consultation. There is also a historical account of the prolific Soundies production companies, a look at Soundies' many competitors and descendants (including telescriptions and Scopitones), a checklist of the dozens of Soundies home-movie editions, and a listing of alternate titles to help collectors identify the films more easily. All in one handy volume: The Soundies Book.
Download or read book Improvising Cinema written by Gilles Mouëllic and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression. Improvising Cinema reflects both on the permanence of attempting improvisation and the relationship between technology and aesthetics. Mouëllic concludes preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the creative act exists only within the brief time span of the performance.
Download or read book Swing Shift written by Sherrie Tucker and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story, based on extensive individual interviews, of the women’s swing bands that toured extensively during World War II and after -- a kind of “League of their Own” for jazz.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media written by Carol Vernallis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection surveys the contemporary landscape of audiovisual media. Contributors from image and sound studies explore the history and the future of moving-image media across a range of formats including blockbuster films, video games, music videos, social media, experimental film, documentaries, video art, pornography, theater, and electronic music.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies written by David Neumeyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies gathers two dozen original essays that chart the history and current state of interdisciplinary scholarship on music in audiovisual media, focusing on four areas: history, genre and medium, analysis and criticism, and interpretation.
Download or read book Improvisation and Social Aesthetics written by Georgina Born and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Feminist Improvising Group, and contemporary Malian music, as well as the virtual sociality of interactive computer music, the significance of "uncreative" improvisation, responses to French New Wave cinema, and the work of figures ranging from bell hooks and Billy Strayhorn to Kenneth Goldsmith. Across its diverse chapters, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics argues that ensemble improvisation is not inherently egalitarian or emancipatory, but offers a potential site for the cultivation of new forms of social relations. It sets out a new conceptualization of the aesthetic as immanently social and political, proposing a new paradigm of improvisation studies that will have reverberations throughout the humanities. Contributors. Lisa Barg, Georgina Born, David Brackett, Nicholas Cook, Marion Froger, Susan Kozel, Eric Lewis, George E. Lewis, Ingrid Monson, Tracey Nicholls, Winfried Siemerling, Will Straw, Zoë Svendsen, Darren Wershler
Download or read book A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting written by Aniko Bodroghkozy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented in a single volume, this engaging review reflects on the scholarship and the historical development of American broadcasting A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting comprehensively evaluates the vibrant history of American radio and television and reveals broadcasting’s influence on American history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars on the topic, this wide-ranging anthology explores the impact of broadcasting on American culture, politics, and society from an historical perspective as well as the effect on our economic and social structures. The text’s original and accessibly-written essays offer explorations on a wealth of topics including the production of broadcast media, the evolution of various television and radio genres, the development of the broadcast ratings system, the rise of Spanish language broadcasting in the United States, broadcast activism, African Americans and broadcasting, 1950’s television, and much more. This essential resource: Presents a scholarly overview of the history of radio and television broadcasting and its influence on contemporary American history Contains original essays from leading academics in the field Examines the role of radio in the television era Discusses the evolution of regulations in radio and television Offers insight into the cultural influence of radio and television Analyzes canonical texts that helped shape the field Written for students and scholars of media studies and twentieth-century history, A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting is an essential and field-defining guide to the history and historiography of American broadcasting and its many cultural, societal, and political impacts.
Download or read book Understanding Popular Music Culture written by Roy Shuker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the variety of genres that make up pop music, Roy Shuker explores key subjects which shape our experience of music such as music production, the music industry, music policy, fans, audiences and subcultures.
