Dear MeCCSA Subscribers,
I hope the following titles will be of interest to you:
Diva
Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema
Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology
"Diva is an impressive study on an important and fascinating topic. Those interested in European cultural studies, feminism, World War I, theater history, and early twentieth-century nationalism-to name a few areas-will find this book of value." -Charles Musser, Professor of Film Studies and Theater Studies, Yale University
"Diva is a phenomenally rich archival, cultural, and theoretical source regarding early Italian cinema most specifically and European modernity in the early twentieth century more generally. Few film histories offer this kind of intellectual range, and I eagerly anticipate this book's impact on the field and its reverberation among other related disciplines." -Jennifer M. Bean, Director of Cinema Studies and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Washington
As scientific discoveries and technological advances radically modernized Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, artists of all types began questioning what it means to be human in an increasingly mechanistic world. Animated by a luminous goddess at its center, the diva film provided a forum for denouncing social evils and exploring new models of behavior among the sexes. These melodramas of courtship, seduction, marriage, betrayal, abandonment, child custody, and public reputation, to mention only a few themes, offered women a vision of-if not always a realistic hope for-emancipation and self-discovery.
Accompanying the book: Diva Dolorosa - a DVD of clips from early Italian films rarely seen by modern film goers
Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate) captures the spirit of the diva in this DVD of clips from early Italian films. Diva Dolorosa presents excerpts of fourteen films from the period 1914-1920, including Malombra, Rapsodia Satanica, and Il Fuoco. It features the work of actresses Lyda Borelli, Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, Soava Gallone, and Elena Makowska.
Diva Dolorosa is a Nederlands Filmmuseum production made in coproduction with VPRO television and in collaboration with Cineteca del Comune di Bologna. The DVD was produced by Zeitgeist Films, Ltd
Texas University Press
March 2008 7 x 10 inches 368pp 125 b&w illustrations £24.99 PB 978-0-292-71711-4
SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £17.50 to MeCCSA Subscribers
Postage and Packing £2.75
To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: MP071108D for discount)
Authorship in Film Adaptation
Edited and with an Introduction by Jack Boozer, Georgia State University
Authoring a film adaptation of a literary source not only requires a media conversion but also a transformation as a result of the differing dramatic demands of cinema. The most critical central step in this transformation of a literary source to the screen is the writing of the screenplay. The screenplay usually serves to recruit producers, director, and actors; to attract capital investment; and to give focus to the conception and production of the film project. Often undergoing multiple revisions prior to production, the screenplay represents the crucial decisions of writer and director that will determine how and to what end the film will imitate or depart from its original source.
Authorship in Film Adaptation is an accessible, provocative text that opens up new areas of discussion on the central process of adaptation surrounding the screenplay and screenwriter-director collaboration. In contrast to narrow binary comparisons of literary source text and film, the twelve essays in this collection also give attention to the underappreciated role of the screenplay and film pre-production that can signal the primary intention for a film. Divided into four parts, this collection looks first at the role of Hollywood's activist producers and major auteurs such as Hitchcock and Kubrick as they worked with screenwriters to formulate their audio-visual goals. The second part offers case studies of Devil in a Blue Dress and The Sweet Hereafter, for which the directors wrote their own adapted screenplays. Considering the variety of writer-director working relationships that are possible, Part III focuses on adaptations that alter genre, time, and place, and Part IV investigates adaptations that alter stories of romance, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Texas University Press
July 2008 6 x 9 inches 384pp 24 b&w illustrations £19.99 PB 978-0-292-71853-1
SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £14.00 to MeCCSA Subscribers
Postage and Packing £2.75
To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: MP071108AFA for discount)
Black Space
Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film
Adilifu Nama, California State University
"Black Space stands as fresh, insightful work that fills an obvious and significant gap in the critical and theoretical discussion of the African American absence/presence (along with the broader issues of race and difference) in science fiction cinema. Besides the occasional anthology essay or journal article, I can think of no work by a single author that presents such sustained, 'cover to cover' discussion of this vital and underexplored area in black representation." - Ed Guerrero, New York University, author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film and Do the Right Thing, as well as many essays and articles on black cinema, its culture and politics
Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness.
Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking.
The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.
Texas University Press
March 2008 248pp 58 b&w illustrations £17.99 PB 978-0-292-71745-9
SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £12.50 to MeCCSA Subscribers
Postage and Packing £2.75
To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: MP071108BS for discount)
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