This study of early sound shorts begins with an explanation of the development of sound motion pictures in Hollywood by such influential companies as Warner Bros. and Fox, with an emphasis on short subjects, leading up to the first few months when all of the major studios were capable of producing them. The next chapters discuss the impact on other mass entertainments, the development of audible news reels and other non-fiction shorts, as well as the origins of animated sound subjects. A comprehensive list of pre-1932 American-made shorts completes the volume.
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.
This collection of fourteen essays provides a rich and detailed history of the relationship between and music and image in documentary films, exploring the often overlooked role of music in the genre and its subsequent impact on an audience’s perception of reality and fiction. Exploring examples of documentary films which make use of soundtrack music, from an interdisciplinary perspective, Music and Sound in Documentary Film is the first in-depth treatment on the use of music in the nonfiction film and will appeal to scholars and students working in the intersection of music and film and media studies.
Communication technologies surround us in every part of our lives: via television, web, blogging, mass media, and much more. How do people in business keep up with the latest and greatest trends, and how do they differentiate good information from bad information? How do they get help analyzing information and coming to conclusions about trends that will impact their businesses and business decisions? How do they consider the environmental and sustainability issues surrounding communication technology? This book answers these essential questions. It's for professionals and students working in telecommunications, including electronic mass media, digital signage, computers, consumer electronics, games, satellites, and telepresence. The best of the best minds on these topics all come forward here, each in their own chapter, to report on, analyze, and make recommendations, for the new edition of this definitive guide to new technologies. New to this edition: . New coverage of historical perspectives on communication technology bring the ideas and concepts to the forefront, providing a thoroughly grounded approach designed to appeal to professors looking for more the why's than the how's of comm. tech . New chapters on digital cinema, mobile commerce, digital television, cinema technologies, e-books, home video, digital audio, and telepresence. . As always, every chapter is updated to reflect the latest trends on the topic . Brand new! Instructor's manual with testbank and sample syllabus . Website - brand new for this edition. Chapter-by-chapter additional coverage of technologies and further resources. Continually updated.
Wild Bill Elliott was a major western star. His screen persona met evil head-on and emerged victorious, bringing cheers from Saturday audiences. This book covers Elliott's entire career. It begins with a biographical sketch and then discusses each of his 78 starring roles as well as his more than 130 supporting roles. The film entries include studio, release date, alternate titles, cast and credit listings, songs, location filming, color, running time, source, story synopsis, notes and commentary, quotations from published reviews and a critical summation of the film. Appendices include Elliott's short films, TV and radio appearances and comic books.
From the first synchronized sound films of the late 1920s through the end of World War II, African American music and dance styles were ubiquitous in films. Black performers, however, were marginalized, mostly limited to appearing in "specialty acts" and various types of short films, whereas stardom was reserved for Whites. Jumping the Color Line discusses vernacular jazz dance in film as a focal point of American race relations. Looking at intersections of race, gender, and class, the book examines how the racialized and gendered body in film performs, challenges, and negotiates identities and stereotypes. Arguing for the transformative and subversive potential of jazz dance performance onscreen, the six chapters address a variety of films and performers, including many that have received little attention to date. Topics include Hollywood's first Black female star (Nina Mae McKinney), male tap dance "class acts" in Black-cast short films of the early 1930s, the film career of Black tap soloist Jeni LeGon, the role of dance in the Soundies jukebox shorts of the 1940s, cinematic images of the Lindy hop, and a series of teen films from the early 1940s that appealed primarily to young White fans of swing culture. With a majority of examples taken from marginal film forms, such as shorts and B movies, the book highlights their role in disseminating alternative images of racial and gender identities as embodied by dancers – images that were at least partly at odds with those typically found in major Hollywood productions.
Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces in film, effects which differ from other types of soundtrack music, such as jazz or symphony. These effects are examined from three perspectives: peculiar qualities of the operatic voice; various properties commonly associated with opera, such as excess, otherness or death; and multifaceted tensions between opera and cinema - for instance, opera as live, embodied, high art and cinema as technologically mediated, popular entertainment. Joe argues that when opera excerpts are employed on soundtracks they tend to appear at critical moments of the film, usually associated with the protagonists, and the author explores why it is opera, not symphony or jazz, that accompanies poignant scenes like these. Joe's film analysis focuses on the time period of the post-1970s, which is distinguished by an increase of opera excerpts on soundtracks to blockbuster titles, the commercial recognition of which promoted the production of numerous opera soundtrack CDs in the following years. Joe incorporates an empirical methodology by examining primary sources such as production files, cue-sheets and unpublished interviews with film directors and composers to enhance the traditional hermeneutic approach. The films analysed in her book include Woody Allen’s Match Point, David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046.
Samuel ÒRoxyÓ Rothafel (1882Ð1936) built an influential and prolific career as film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theater manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. He helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and moviegoing become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The first book devoted to RothafelÕs multifaceted career, American Showman examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theater, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. Roxy scored motion pictures, produced enormous stage shows, managed many of New YorkÕs most important movie houses, directed and/or edited propaganda films for the American war effort, produced short and feature-length films, exhibited foreign, documentary, independent, and avant-garde motion pictures, and expanded the conception of mainstream, commercial cinema. He was also one of the chief creators of the radio variety program, pioneering radio broadcasting, promotions, and tours. The producers and promoters of distinct themes and styles, showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the moviegoing experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theater into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. RoxyÕs interest in media convergence also reflects a larger moment in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises, exploit them through content release Òevents,Ó and give rise to feature films, soundtracks, broadcasts, live performances, and related consumer products. Regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the film and radio industries, Roxy was instrumental to the development of film exhibition and commercial broadcasting, musical accompaniment, and a new, convergent entertainment industry.
Jazz and Death: Reception, Rituals, and Representations critically examines the myriad and complex interactions between jazz and death, from the New Orleans "jazz funeral" to jazz in heaven or hell, final recordings, jazz monuments, and the music’s own presumed death. It looks at how fans, critics, journalists, historians, writers, the media, and musicians have narrated, mythologized, and relayed those stories. What causes the fascination of the jazz world with its deaths? What does it say about how our culture views jazz and its practitioners? Is jazz somehow a fatal culture? The narratives surrounding jazz and death cast a light on how the music and its creators are perceived. Stories of jazz musicians typically bring up different tropes, ranging from the tragic, misunderstood genius to the notion that virtuosity somehow comes at a price. Many of these narratives tend to perpetuate the gendered and racialized stereotypes that have been part of jazz’s history. In the end, the ideas that encompass jazz and death help audiences find meaning in a complex musical practice and come to grips with the passing of their revered musical heroes -- and possibly with their own mortality.
The book offers a provocative review of thinking about privacy and identity in the years encompassing and disrupted by the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century – focusing (in particular) on the socio-technological transformations associated with modernism. It argues that, with many of the most interesting modern thinkers of the period dead or marginalised (or both) by 1948, their ideas about how rights such as privacy should develop to accommodate the exigencies of modern life failed to find much of a voice in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they anticipated in surprising ways some of our ‘new’ ways of thinking in more recent times. After a brief introduction, the chapters are framed in terms of case studies on the right to privacy, the right to data protection and the right to be forgotten, each finishing with a consideration of how these rights require further rethinking in the digital century.
