Downeast
Downeast

Author: Gigi Georges

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0063254263

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In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future. “It’s almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes” (Kirkus) in this “heartfelt portrait” and “worthy tribute” (Publishers Weekly). Nestled in Maine’s far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour’s drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park. Yet it’s a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie—five teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region—it is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center. Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father’s knee. Audrey is a beloved high school basketball star who earns a coveted college scholarship but questions her chosen path. Josie, a Yale-bound valedictorian, is determined to take the world by storm. All five girls know the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. As the girls reach adulthood, they discover that despite significant challenges, there is much to celebrate in “the valley of the overlooked.” Their stories remind us of the value of timeless ideals: strength of family and community, reverence for nature’s rule, dignity in cracked hands and muddied shoes, and the enduring power of home. Revealed through the eyes of Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie, Downeast is based on four years of intimate reporting. The result is a beautifully rendered, emotionally startling, and vital book. Downeast will break readers’ hearts yet offer them hope, providing answers to what the future may hold for rural America.

D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation

Author: Melvyn Stokes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-01-15

Total Pages: 741

ISBN-13: 0199887519

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In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.

Hollywood Before Glamour
Hollywood Before Glamour

Author: M. Tolini Finamore

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-01-28

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 023038949X

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This exploration of fashion in American silent film offers fresh perspectives on the era preceding the studio system, and the evolution of Hollywood's distinctive brand of glamour. By the 1910s, the moving image was an integral part of everyday life and communicated fascinating, but as yet un-investigated, ideas and ideals about fashionable dress.

Woodsqueer
Woodsqueer

Author: Gretchen Legler

Publisher: Trinity University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 159534960X

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“Woodsqueer” is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on not just making a living but making a life—in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine. Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and other skills they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting). Legler’s story is at times humbling and grueling, but it is also amusing. A homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century, Woodsqueer reminds us of the benefits of living close to the land. Legler unapologetically considers what we have lost in America, in less than a century—individually and collectively—as a result of our urban, mass-produced, technology-driven lifestyles. Illustrated with rustic pen-and-ink illustrations, Woodsqueer shows the value of a solitary sojourn and both the pathway to and possibilities for making a sustainable, meaningful life on the land. The result, for Legler and her partner, is an evolution of their humanity as they become more physically, emotionally, and even spiritually connected to their land and each other in a complex ecosystem ruled by the changing seasons.

Interpretation and Film Studies
Interpretation and Film Studies

Author: Phillip Novak

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-31

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 3030447391

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This book argues that the sustained interpretation of individual movies has, contrary to conventional wisdom, never been a major preoccupation of film studies—that, indeed, the field is marked by a dearth of effective, engaging, and enlightening critical analyses of single films. The book makes this case by surveying what has been written about four historically important and well-known movies (D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East, Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert), none of which has been the focus of sustained critical attention, and by exhaustively examining the kinds of work published in four influential film journals (Cinema Journal, Screen, Wide Angle, and Movie). The book goes on to argue for the value of the work of interpretation, illustrating this value through extended analyses of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, both of which thematize interpretation. Novak demonstrates the causes and consequences of reading poorly and the importance of reading well.

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

Author: Alan P. Lightman

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1101871865

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In this meditation on religion and science, Lightman explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world. As a physicist, he has always held a scientific view of the world. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea he was overcome by the sensation that he was merging with a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. This is his exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses, and the journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of his quest. -- adapted from publisher info.

D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith

Author: Anthony Slide

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2012-07-02

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1628468238

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D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) is one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture. As director of The Birth of a Nation, he is also one of the most controversial. He raised the cinema to a new level of art, entertainment, and innovation, and at the same time he illustrated, for the first time, its potential to influence an audience and propagandize a cause. Collected together here are virtually all of the “interviews” given by D. W. Griffith from the first in 1914 to the last in 1948. Some of the interviews concentrate on specific films, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and, most substantially, Hearts of the World, while others provide the director with an opportunity to expound on topics of personal interest, including the importance of proper exhibition of his and other’s films, and his search for truth and beauty on screen. The interviews are taken from many sources, including leading newspapers, trade papers, and fan magazines. They are often marked by humor and by a desire to please the interviewer and thus the reader. Griffith may not have been particularly enthusiastic about giving interviews, but he seems always determined to put on a good show. Ultimately, D. W. Griffith: Interviews provides the reader with a unique insight into the mind and filmmaking techniques of a director whose work and philosophy is as relevant today as it was when he was at the height of his fame in the 1910s and 1920s.