This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book. Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.
The legacy of Graeme Chalmers’s research in art education underpins a foundational understanding of critical multiculturalism and offers a rigorous analysis of oppression and institutionalization of unequal power relations. His work begins in stories involving disruption and advocacy, and how when working in collaboration, we may then begin to share lived knowledge in ways that bring sociopolitical dimensions to the fore to help us move towards breaking cycles of divisiveness. International scholars share both reflective commentaries that look back upon Graeme Chalmers’s contributions, as well as offer diverse perspectives that look forward to the enduring potentialities and possibilities of his work today and into the future. These perspectives are presented alongside thirty years of his scholarship creating new insights and provocations that will continue to influence our collective work for social justice. Art, Culture, and Pedagogy: Revisiting the Work of F. Graeme Chalmers holds timeless wisdom, articulating Graeme’s deep respect for cultural pluralism, his passionate embrace of inclusivity and diversity, and his dedication to social justice issues – all issues of compelling urgency today. His distinguished international leadership and his pioneering ideas continue to be adopted, engaged, and applied at all levels of art education.
Its outstanding feature is the inclusion of journal articles. For more than 50 years the periodicals have been indexed, as well as compilations such as Festschriften, and the proceedings of congresses.
Embracing a wide range of research, this book offers various views on the intellectual history of Maya archaeology and ethnohistory and the processes operating in the rise and fall of Maya civilization. The fourteen studies were selected from those presented at the Second Cambridge Symposium on Recent Research in Mesoamerican Archaeology and are presented in three major sections. The first of these deals with the application of theory, both anthropological and historical, to the great civilization of the Classic Maya, which flourished in the Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize during the first millennium A.D. The structural remains of the Classic Period have impressed travelers and archaeologists for over a century, and aspects of the development and decline of this strange and brilliant tropical forest culture are examined here in the light of archaeological research. The second section presents the results of field research ranging from the Highlands of Mexico east to Honduras and north into the Lowland heart of Maya civilization, and iconographic study of excavated material. The third section covers the ethnohistoric approach to archaeology, the conjunction of material and documentary evidence. Early European documents are used to illuminate historic Maya culture. This section includes transcriptions of previously unpublished archival material. Although not formally linked beyond their common field of inquiry, the essays here offer a conspectus of late-twentieth century Maya research and a series of case histories of the work of some of the leading scholars in the field.
