Performing Arts

Penned by Mr. Broadway, Stewart F. Lane, It Happened at The Palace is your all-access pass to the epic saga of one of the most famous theatres in the world.

From its opulent Vaudeville roots to its star-studded Broadway nights, the Palace Theatre has been a beacon of entertainment, surviving the ebb and flow of time and taste. Lane, with his unparalleled expertise in theatrical productions, guides you through the grandeur and the grit of the theatre's past, the ambitious renovation that restored its former glory, and its enduring legacy in the heart of New York City.

More than a historical account; it's a love letter to the performing arts, a chronicle of New York's cultural evolution, and a business saga of revival and triumph. With an insider's perspective and more than 175 photographs, the author reveal untold stories, intimate portraits of stage legends, and the intricate process of preserving a landmark not only of bricks and mortar but of dreams and memories.

It Happened at The Palace: A History of New York’s Iconic Broadway Theater is an essential read for theatre aficionados, history buffs, and anyone who's ever been captivated by the magic of Broadway.

Dive into the fascinating world of movie make-up effects with this stunning illustrated oral history of the art form.

Masters of Make-Up Effects is a celebration of make-up artists and acclaimed make-up effects from the world of film and television. Authors Howard Berger and Marshall Julius have gleaned untold stories from the sets of cult classics (Planet of the Apes, An American Werewolf in London, The Thing), fan-favorite film and TV franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter and the MCU) and modern blockbusters like Dune to chart the fascinating evolution of an industry.

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos, many of which have never before been seen in print or on social media, it showcases some of the most iconic make-up effects of all time, while revealing how they came to be in the artists' own words.

Featuring a foreword by Guillermo del Toro, an afterword by Seth MacFarlane, and contributions from more than 50 make-up effects legends, as well as iconic actors including Doug Jones, Robert Englund, James McAvoy and Doug Bradley, and directors Mick Garris and John Landis, Masters of Make-up Effects is the most complete book on movie make-up history ever assembled, and a must read for cinema fans everywhere.

In Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern?

Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays—Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy—were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

Explore behind the scenes of the greatest monster movies ever made!

What makes a great movie monster? Academy Award-winning make-up effects artist Howard Berger and acclaimed journalist Marshall Julius have spoken to dozens of film industry legends to find out.

A celebration of monsters, monster movies and monster movie makers, Making Monsters delivers an illuminating, entertaining and accessible oral history of the genre, gathering an enviable array of A-list talent from make-up and digital effects legends (Tom Savini, Phil Tippett) to directors (John Carpenter, Ti West), actors (Simon Pegg, Barbara Crampton), composers (Michael Giacchino) and writers (Russell T Davies).

Packed with hundreds of images, from film stills to personal, behind-the-scenes pictures from dozens of interview subjects - many never before published - Making Monsters is a treasure trove of monstrous creations, and the stories behind them, that is sure to make fans jump, scream and howl with delight.

How Black women’s visual work functions in an era of new racial and gender meaning

In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.

Undesirability and Her Sisters collates what Barber terms “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. These works not only engage the visual senses but also incorporate olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that challenge traditional interpretations of Blackness and womanhood in art history, Black Studies, feminist and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and queer studies. Instead of transcendental beauty, wholeness, and individual and collective becoming, the perverse Black female figures profiled here eschew sublimation and synthesis as necessary responses to racial and gender subjugation in the past, present, and future.

Through its unique, groundbreaking analysis, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions on the ethics of representation—the capacity to speak and act for oneself, to have significance and impact, and ultimately, to reject acknowledgment.

In den Wolken lässt Aristophanes zwei Welten mit komischer Wucht aufeinanderprallen: die des ungebildeten Bauern Strepsiades und die des stadtbekannten Intellektuellen Sokrates, der in höheren Sphären schwebt und abstruse 'Forschungen' betreibt. Um Schulden, die sein Sohn gemacht hat, nicht zurückzahlen zu müssen, will Strepsiades von Sokrates das 'ungerechte Argument' lernen. Der moralisch zweifelhafte Plan geht erst auf, als der Sohn anstelle des Vaters bei Sokrates in die Lehre geht, aber anders, als alle Beteiligten sich vorstellen …

Die Uraufführung 423 v. Chr. war kein Erfolg, aber Aristophanes war von dem Stück weiterhin überzeugt und überarbeitete es. Es sind diese 'zweiten' Wolken, die wir haben. Die Sokrates-Figur machte sie zu einer der meistdiskutierten Komödien, aber es steckt viel mehr darin. Das Stück spielt Gegensätze und Konflikte aus, die im Athen jener Jahre erlebt und debattiert wurden: Stadt und Land, Alte und Junge, überkommene und moderne Erziehung, Alltagsverstand und wissenschaftliche Spekulation, traditioneller Götterglaube und sophistischer Relativismus, nicht zuletzt Gefahren durch und für Sprache. Dies alles erschließt die Ausgabe mit Einführung, griechischem Text, Prosaübersetzung und Kommentar.

Like other compilations of medieval urban drama, the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth have most frequently been discussed in the context of the devotional cultures and practices of the later Middle Ages. The pageants' preoccupation with law, and with witnessing in particular, has received much less attention, Emma Lipton observes, yet the cycle of forty-seven plays, which together tell the story of human history from the Creation through the Last Judgment, contains an extended sequence that stages the trials of Christ leading up to the Crucifixion, and legal discourse features prominently elsewhere as well. While the play collections associated with other cities also engage with legal concepts, the York Plays devote an unusual amount of attention to the law, Lipton contends. It is no coincidence that the plays themselves are preserved alongside a wide range of legal records in the York Memorandum Books, repositories of civic documents that were kept in the city's guildhall.

Engaging both theater and legal studies, Lipton is concerned in particular with the interfaces in the York Plays between dramatic practice and legal concepts of witnessing. In medieval English courts, witnesses were defined as neighbors; they spoke both to what they had seen and heard and also to common knowledge of events. At the same time, many legal theorists were concerned by how the temporal gap between initial experience and testimony might reshape the record of the past in light of the motives and emotions of individual witnesses and allied groups. With chapters focusing on space, speech, affect, and temporality, Cultures of Witnessing considers how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship, and how this in turn provides a way to theorize late medieval religious drama, whose players performed on the streets and neighborhoods in which they conducted their daily lives.

Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that's nothing compared to what happens when comedy gets its grubby paws on the confessional. Enter fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce, the "bestseller" of a world that stands to tell us a lot about the enduring influence of a Shakespeare or a Molière. It's the sacrilegious world of Immaculate Deception, the third volume in a series of stage-friendly translations from the Middle French. These twelve engagingly funny satires target religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. There is literally nothing sacred.

Why this repertoire and why now? The current political climate has had dire consequences for the pleasures of satire at a cultural moment when we have never needed it more. It turns out that the proverbial Dark Ages had a lighter side; and France's over 200 rollicking, frolicking, singing, and dancing comedies—more extant than in any other vernacular—have waited long enough for their moment in the spotlight. They are seriously funny: funny enough to reclaim their place in cultural history, and serious enough to participate in the larger conversation about what it means to be a social influencer, then and now. Rather than relegate medieval texts to the dustbin of history, an unabashedly feminist translation can reframe and reject the sexism of bygone days by doing what theater always invites us to do: interpret, inflect, and adapt.

A play in which history, memory, and legacy challenge notions of progress and country club ideals. With Radio Golf, Wilson's lifework comes full circle.

It's the late 1990s, and Aunt Ester's onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle's first play) is slated for demolition. The goal of this slick real estate venture is to boost both the depressed Hill District and Harmond Wilks's chance of becoming Pittsburgh's first Black mayor.

The play is the final part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Suzan-Lori Parks.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) overturned the dramatic conventions of his day and laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to directing and acting. Now, for the first time, the full lyricism, humor, and pathos of his greatest plays are available to an English-speaking audience. Marina Brodskaya's new translations of Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard not only surpass in accuracy all previous translations, but also provide the first complete English text of the plays, restoring passages entirely omitted by her predecessors. This much-needed volume renders Chekhov in language that will move readers and theater audiences alike, making accessible his wordplay, unstated implications, and innovations. His characters' vulnerabilities, needs, and neuroses—their humanity—emerge through their genuine, self-absorbed conversations. The plays come to life as never before and will surprise readers with their vivacity, originality, and relevance.

Escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) on a stolen motorcycle jumps an imposing barbed wire fence—caught on film, the act and its aftermath have become an unforgettable symbol of triumph as well as defeat for 1960s America. Combining production and reception history with close reading, Dreams of Flight offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of Allied prisoners who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside.

In a major addition to the academic library on the cinema of Youssef Chahine and on Arab and Egyptian cinema in general, Malek Khouri here presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date study on Chahine’s work to appear since his death in 2008. The methodological approach of the book, and more precisely the discussion of the theme of Arab national unity from a post-colonial point of view, emphasizes the ideological underpinnings of this Egyptian director’s themes as well as his esthetics. The author focuses on the interaction between Chahine’s personal and political preoccupations, his eclectic cinematic style, and his devotion to connecting with a wide audience of filmgoers.
The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema is an important contribution to original scholarship in the fields of cultural studies, sociology of film, and history of cinema, and will be of great interest to scholars, students, and cinema lovers all over the world.

A history of urban modernity in Cairo through cinema which "makes us see makes us see the movies in a whole new way" (Chris Berry, King’s College London)

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo’s urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for Egypt’s film industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the nineteenth century. The “reel” city—imagined, perceived, and experienced—provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and allows for an interrogation of the “real” city as it encountered modernity over the course of a century.

Bringing together chapters by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South.

Contributors
Ahmed H. AbdelAzim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Khaled Adham, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany
Kinda AlSamara, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Doaa Al Amir, October 6th University, Cairo, Egypt
Mirette Aziz, Misr International University, Egypt
Muhammad Emad Feteha, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Farah Gendy, Raef Fahmi Architects, Cairo, Egypt
Hala A. Hassanien, Architect, Wasl, Cairo, Egypt
Tayseer Khairy, Arab Academy for Science Technology & Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt
Mariam Marei, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Ameer Saad, Architect, Dar Al-Handasa, Cairo, Egypt
Heba Safey Eldeen, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt
Mohammad Salama, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA
Nour Sobhi, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt
Sherin Soliman, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt

Finalist for The Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research.

Silver Medal Winner of The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Non-Fiction Book Award, given by the International Latino Book Awards.

Honorable Mention for the Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, given by the International Latino Book Awards.

A queer genealogy of the famous performance space and the nuyorican aesthetic

One could easily overlook the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a small, unassuming performance venue on New York City’s Lower East Side. Yet the space once hosted the likes of Victor Hernández Cruz, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka and is widely credited as the homespace for the emergent nuyorican literary and aesthetic movement of the 1990s. Founded by a group of counterculturalist Puerto Rican immigrants and artists in the 1970s, the space slowly transformed the Puerto Rican ethnic and cultural associations of the epithet “Nuyorican,” as the Cafe developed into a central hub for an artistic movement encompassing queer, trans, and diasporic performance.

The Queer Nuyorican is the first queer genealogy and critical study of the historical, political, and cultural conditions under which the term “Nuyorican” shifted from a raced/ethnic identity marker to “nuyorican,” an aesthetic practice. The nuyorican aesthetic recognizes and includes queer poets and performers of color whose writing and performance build upon the politics inherent in the Cafe’s founding. Initially situated within the Cafe’s physical space and countercultural discursive history, the nuyorican aesthetic extends beyond these gendered and ethnic boundaries, broadening the ethnic marker Nuyorican to include queer, trans, and diasporic performance modalities.

Hip-hop studies, alongside critical race, queer, literary, and performance theories, are used to document the interventions made by queer and trans artists of color—Miguel Piñero, Regie Cabico, Glam Slam participants, and Ellison Glenn/Black Cracker—whose works demonstrate how the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has operated as a queer space since its founding. In focusing on artists who began their careers as spoken word artists and slam poets at the Cafe, The Queer Nuyorican examines queer modes of circulation that are tethered to the increasing visibility, commodification, and normalization of spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theater in the United States and abroad.

Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs.

The Mind-Body Stage provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents (including letters, libretti, religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, and architectural plans) from several countries.

Emerging from the shadows of empire and memory, this groundbreaking study reveals how contemporary Eastern European film and television use neo-noir to confront unresolved trauma, power, and injustice in the post-Soviet world.

This collection explores for the first time the pervasive presence of neo-noir film and TV series (including releases on widely popular streaming channels) in recent Balkan, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian cinema and television. Classic western noir’s structural pessimism was driven by a utopian desire for a just society, a quality which made it attractive to all eastern European countries. The films and series in the collection present modern iterations of a still-relevant colonial past, such as the repression of dissent and of sexual minorities, culpability in World War II, and the activities of the security services. Contemporary narratives reveal the effects of the violence released after the collapse of the Soviet Union—the continuing trauma and scars of an unprocessed past, social dysfunction, organized crime, ecological degradation, exploitation of indigenous populations, and restorative nostalgia for previous systems of governance.

As victory in World War II drew near, the Allies decided to hold a major trial of Nazi leaders, which began in Nuremberg in November 1945. Conflict soon broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union over not only how to assess German guilt but also how to depict the trial. The Americans saw it as a judicial and media spectacle that would convey “the greatest moral tale ever told,” illustrated with Hollywood techniques. The Soviets, for their part, drew on extensive experience filming show trials to craft their own narrative of the tribunal.

Sylvie Lindeperg offers a pioneering account of the cinematic stagecraft, storytelling, and imagery of the Nuremberg trials, revealing how film was used both as legal evidence and as a propaganda tool. She follows the American campaign to influence world opinion before, during, and after the trial, on stage and behind the scenes. Lindeberg chronicles how the hope of scripting a Hollywood-style courtroom drama crumbled amid rising geopolitical tensions and the mundane reality of the tribunal. The book interweaves in-depth reconstruction of the filming of the trial with portraits of the colorful characters who played leading or supporting roles. Drawing on American, British, Soviet, French, and German archives as well as analysis of films, newsreels, and photographs, Staging Nuremberg is a revelatory study of the theater of justice.

Laura Investigation in Classic Hollywood provides a detailed investigation of Laura, the beloved, award-winning and fondly remembered 1944 classic Hollywood detective drama. This book argues that we can shed new light on this fascinating film by thinking like filmmakers ourselves, exploring the hidden complexities we overlook while watching any movie.

Jonathan Demme was one of the most accomplished American film directors of his era, yet despite the scope and variety of his work, he remains underappreciated. After apprenticing with the B-movie impresario Roger Corman, from whom he learned to make films cheaply and quickly, Demme rapidly rose through the Hollywood ranks while retaining his restlessly curious instincts. He directed eighteen feature films and twelve documentaries and music films, as well as numerous shorter works. Among them are critical and cult favorites such as Something Wild, blockbusters including The Silence of the Lambs, and groundbreaking performance films, notably Stop Making Sense.

This book offers an in-depth look at Demme’s four decades of filmmaking, tracing the core elements that unite the disparate strands of his work. Louis Black and Steven Fore argue that Demme’s films share a compassionate, emotionally generous perspective on humanity’s flaws and foibles. No matter their scale, style, or subject matter, they show an affection for and fascination with people, as individuals and in communities. Ranging from low-budget productions to the pinnacle of Hollywood success, this book highlights the humanist sensibility, artistic ambitions, keen social criticism, and wry humor that are hallmarks of Demme’s work. Lively and comprehensive, The Cinema of Jonathan Demme offers a new lens on a major director.

Massacres in Early Modern Drama analyses the dynamically ambivalent meanings constructed by the language and action of massacre on the early modern stage. Informed by theories drawn from massacre studies, the monograph challenges orthodoxies about senseless violence, illuminates archaic forms of massacres, and attests to their brutally diverse stage representations.

Anchored by the contention that the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris (1572) was instrumental to early modern understandings of massacre, the book uses this atrocity, and its most famous dramatic depiction – Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris – as a hook to explore larger concerns about massacre in plays by Robert Greene, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare.

Thus, Massacres in Early Modern Drama considers how early modern drama forms part of a continual cultural process of trying to piece together the contentious and traumatic phenomenon of massacre.

Healthcare faces immense challenges. Ensuring both clinicians and the public remain healthy to negotiate a world of increasing complexity, misinformation and uncertainty is urgent. Does scientific knowledge help them do this?

In Thinking, healthcare professionals and researchers Brown, Harvey Bluemel, and Coccia explore how philosophy can help us think differently about health. Drawing from history, culture, literature, and lived experience, they trace the deep connections between ideas, healing, and human flourishing. Each chapter offers accessible explanations of key philosophical ideas, with examples and exercises to help readers bring those ideas into their own lives.

This book invites readers to slow down and give thinking the attention it deserves. Thinking is a guide, but also an invitation to ask better questions; make space for reflection; and to rediscover the value of thought in an age that prizes speed and certainty over depth and understanding.

What if the most consequential alliance between the United States and Turkey was not signed—but screened? Beginning in 1930 and crystallizing during the Cold War, the two nations forged an alliance through film: American and Turkish institutions used educational films—short documentaries shown in schools, villages, theaters, and public spaces—not just to inform but to persuade. These films promoted cooperation, encouraged economic development, and modeled ideals of modern citizenship. Yet beneath their instructional surface, they also advanced a racialized vision of progress.

Film Diplomacy offers a powerful new account of how film shaped international relations and national identity. Drawing on previously unexamined and recently declassified archives in Turkey and the United States, Ayşehan Jülide Etem demonstrates how both countries used educational films to align institutional agendas and geopolitical interests. The United States built on missionaries’ earlier use of film programs while shifting from Christianization to modernization to promote free market capitalism and prevent the spread of communism. Turkish officials embraced film to promote a homogenous, secular, and Western-facing national identity that erased groups such as Armenians, Blacks, Greeks, Jews, and Kurds. In both contexts, whiteness operated as an invisible standard—shaping who belonged, who was excluded, and what counted as modern.

By tracing the transnational network of educational cinema, Etem uncovers how film functioned as infrastructure, circulating ideologies, organizing institutions, and training citizens. Moving beyond conventional accounts of propaganda and soft power, this book exposes how film was central to the making of modern Turkey and sheds new light on media’s role in global politics.

• The Love Suicides at Amijima: Jihei, a married merchant and Koharu, a prostitute, fall deeply in love. Jihei cannot afford to buy her out, so the only solution is for them to commit double suicide
• The Tale of Genji: A stage version of Japan's classic Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, which follows the romantic exploits of Genji, the son of Emperor Kiritsubo
• The Magical Helmet: Princess Yaegaki mourns for her dead husband Katsuyori but one day she notices a new samurai in the household who looks just like him. It is indeed Katsuyori, who has adopted a disguise to prevent himself being killed. Now Yaegaki must struggle to save him!
• Plus 12 other stories!

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from around thirty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history.

Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past.

This book offers the first serious critical study of Roger Michell’s career as a filmmaker. Best known for Notting Hill, Michell brought a distinctive sensitivity to his work in both the UK and the US, across genres ranging from romantic comedy to historical drama.

While Michell had success in theatre and television, the focus here is on his twenty-year career in film and the particular qualities he brought to adaptation and character-driven storytelling. The book explores his handling of relationships and place, from the quiet emotional detail of Persuasion to the observational humour of The Duke, and highlights his ability to subvert narrative conventions through careful attention to mood, tone and performance.

McFarlane’s study positions Michell as a perceptive and underappreciated figure in contemporary British cinema, whose work continues to reward close viewing.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance, originality, and success of current Polish female directors, whose bold, vivid features have taken the film industry by storm. Film’s Feisty Femmes spotlights nine of the most productive, internationally acclaimed women in a profession traditionally dominated by men but characterized in 21st-century Poland by receptivity to creative talent regardless of gender. With the transition to a market economy, institutional innovations appreciably transformed the country’s filmmaking—a transformation of which audiences are the primary beneficiaries.

The volume’s seven chapters combine textual analysis with assessment of camerawork, situating each director’s major works in a cultural context that includes significant developments in Poland as well as international trends in cinema and gender politics. A major issue addressed throughout entails the directors’ relationship to feminism in narratives that are unapologetically gynocentric.

Under colonial repression and the rationalizing ideals of Enlightenment thought, one practice has long carried the pulse of resistance: dance.

Habla! explores how the dancing body speaks—how, through movement, sound, and rhythm, Latinx American communities enact forms of knowing and being that “talk back” to colonial modernity. Centering the traditions of Puerto Rican bomba, Mexican son jarocho, and the global phenomenon of perreo, Jade Power-Sotomayor reveals how these practices transform the body into a site of worldbuilding, social critique, and survival.

Introducing the concept of “embodied code-switching”—the corporeal strategies people use to move across cultural, linguistic, and affective registers—Power-Sotomayor traces how dancing navigates and disrupts the logics of separability, ownership, and extraction that underpin Western colonial thought. From bomba’s dialogue between dancer and drummer to perreo’s unapologetic assertion of a pleasure and power rooted in interdependence, Habla! shows how these embodied traditions sustain collective life and offer new grammars of relation.

Through performance, community practice, and activist projects, ¡Habla! demonstrates how the dancing, sounding body continues to generate meaning, connection, and possibility. In its motion—rooted and mobile at once—the dancing body speaks beyond words, carrying forward the histories and futures of Latinx América, and remapping the contours of Our América.

Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon.

Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged.

Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military—for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood).

Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favor of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.

Cinema before the World investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.

Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

Animation is a global artform, and The Animation Atlas is your essential guide to this exciting, expansive world.

From Michael Leader and Jake Cunningham, authors and hosts of the Ghibliotheque podcast, comes this whistle-stop tour through animated film history. A cartography of cartoons, The Animation Atlas takes in everything from titans of animation such as Disney, Pixar, Aardman and Studio Ghibli to pioneers, innovators and rising stars from the wider world of cinema.

A truly global history of animation - Each of the 30 chapters sets down in a different country to focus on local talent that has made a global impact on the form, from Spain to South Africa and China to Chile.

Box office hits and hidden gems - Features a dazzling selection of films, from hand-drawn Hollywood classics (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and award-winning CG masterpieces (Flow), to the works of revered artists such as Lotte Reiniger (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), Jan Švankmajer (Alice) and Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbour Totoro).

Dozens of gorgeous illustrations - Includes more than 150 photographs, artworks and stills from some of the most beautiful animated films ever made. A perfect gift for film lovers.

Step into the irreverent world of South Park, where no topic is off-limits and every episode is a wild ride of laughter and social commentary with this ultimate guide to the show that has been pushing boundaries and redefining comedy since 1997.

Inside this book, you'll find a treasure trove of unforgettable quotes from Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, alongside some mind-blowing facts that will make you say, "What the hell?!" and fascinating behind-the-scenes that reveal the genius behind the show. From their outrageous antics to their sharp critiques of society, South Park has become a cultural phenomenon that resonates with fans of all ages. Discover how creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone transformed their humble beginnings into a groundbreaking series with over 300 episodes, multiple Emmy Awards and a devoted fanbase that keeps growing. With insights into the making of iconic moments and the show's fearless approach to tackling current events, this book is perfect for die-hard fans and newcomers alike.

Whether you're looking for a laugh or a deeper understanding of the satirical brilliance that is South Park, The Little Guide to South Park is your front-row seat to all the outrageous fun. Get ready to relive the laughter and explore the chaos of South Park - because in this town, anything goes!

Welcome to the shadowy world of Stranger Things, where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary and secrets lurk in every corner of Hawkins, Indiana. This book is your gateway to the eerie mysteries that haunt the Upside Down, packed with chilling quotes, spine-tingling quips and unsettling facts that breathe life into this Netflix phenomenon.

From Eleven's haunting "Friends don't lie" to Dustin's unforgettable "Yeah, science!", each page is steeped in the echoes of laughter and the whispers of fear that have gripped fans from the very beginning. Uncover the dark tales behind the show's creation, explore the trivia that haunts the halls of the Byers' home, and relive the pulse-pounding moments that kept you wide-eyed and breathless.

Whether you're a devoted fan who can recount every chilling twist or a curious newcomer ready to step into the unknown, this book is your essential guide to the sinister charm of Hawkins. It's the perfect companion for those late-night binge-watching marathons, where shadows dance on the walls and the thrill of the unknown awaits.
Stranger Things is more than just a series; it's a cultural phenomenon that has woven its way into the fabric of our imaginations, drawing us into a world filled with '80s nostalgia, supernatural terror, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship that defy all odds.

So, are you prepared to venture into the darkness? Grab your copy, keep the lights on and let the eerie allure of Stranger Things pull you deeper into its haunting embrace!

Unequivocal Magic speaks to the “quiet power” of photographs and their hidden creativity, bringing readers into the author’s own journey into the history of a 1910 portrait of iconic French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. What begins as a quest to recognize the work of her once renowned photographer, Walter Barnett, becomes a story about the female performer in the West, whose use of image to innovate, protest, and survive public scrutiny can provide an enduring agency.

Alex Bertram has always found old photographs intriguing, an interest augmented by her work as a picture researcher for a publisher. On a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, she saw a 1910 portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress whose career by then had spanned half a century. Beset with questions about this unidealized representation of the actress in her older age, she wondered what the photograph could tell us about Bernhardt, its photographer, or the circumstances surrounding the making of the portrait.

Structured around the day Bernhardt had her picture taken in that London studio, Unequivocal Magic traces the travel of the portrait on its life journey, with Bertram returning again and again to this single day in 1910. Bertram’s narrative likewise embraces her own creative response upon seeing the portrait for the first time, enveloping that moment into her engagement with and close examination of the lives and work of both Barnett and Bernhardt.

A treasure trove of prompts, provocations, and practical exercises to help you spark new ideas, hone your craft, and unleash your creativity.

In A Year of Creative Thinking, award-winning writer, director, and filmmaker Jessica Swale guides you through 366 fun and rewarding activities—one for every day of the year (including leap years!)—to fire up your imagination and flex your creative muscles.

You'll find a host of writing prompts and imaginative challenges to get you going, quick-fire exercises to help you focus on key aspects of craft (including inventing scenarios, writing dialogue, building subtext, creating atmosphere and plot, and developing your characters), and plenty of quirky and unusual challenges to test your limits and help you explore new avenues. Some are writing exercises, others encourage you to draw, to listen to music, to get outside and find inspiration in your surroundings. Work through the activities day by day, or dip in to suit your needs—the choice is yours!

Fun, engaging and pressure-free, this book is designed to supercharge your imagination and boost your creativity, helping you build a set of expressive tools that you can apply in all aspects of your life.

Lea Koenig, one of the most loved and appreciated Jewish actresses among audiences and critics alike, sat down with Dr. Yaniv Goldberg for conversations about theater and life. In the conversations, Lea talks about her experiences from World War II, life in a communist regime, the choice not to have children, her professional path, and her way of working on roles. She also discusses the choice to give up her mother tongue, Yiddish, and perform in Hebrew. Lea shares her perspective on Judaism, Zionism, and Israeliness, and about the way she observes the world.

In an exciting and humorous way, Lea recalls defining moments of her life, difficult moments and happy ones, weaves memory after memory, and discovers how life and the theater are intertwined, and as Shakespeare's cliché says, indeed, the whole world is a stage.

This story is the stage of the life of the great Israeli actress Lea Koenig.

And if you look closely, the tale reflects the stage of our lives...

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socioeconomic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.

  In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need/Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear—demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

This book examines Russian and Ukrainian feature films to trace the roots and consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the cultural war stems from a colonial past, where Russia viewed Ukraine as an inferior "little brother." By examining cinematic representations of the countries’ shared history, this book reveals how Russia has used cinema to promote a strong, unified state and patriotic narratives, while Ukrainian cinema seeks to overcome colonial trauma and build a distinct national identity. It also investigates how cultural memories of Kyivan Rus, the Cossacks, World War II, the Soviet past, and the Russian war in Ukraine are depicted differently in Russian and Ukrainian cinema.

The films of Bigas Luna is the first comprehensive English-language study of the complete filmography of Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna, spanning from Tatuaje (1976) to DiDi Hollywood (2010).

Engaging with theoretical frameworks such as haptic cinema, erotic cinema, auteur theory, and studies of gender, sexuality, and national identity, the book situates close readings of Bigas Luna’s films within broader discussions of production and marketing. Fouz Hernández draws on extensive archival research—including original screenplays, press materials, and interviews with industry professionals—while engaging with previous scholarship in multiple languages.

Structured into five thematic chapters, the book explores key concerns in Bigas Luna’s work, including genre, gender representation, Iberian and Mediterranean identities, and meta-cinematic narratives. It can be read as a cohesive study of his oeuvre or as a reference for specific films.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Istanbul witnessed a cinematic revolution that carried profound implications for the way ideas of identity, nation, and gender were conceived. Re-examining film’s potential as both an artistic and ideological discipline, Torn is the Curtain interrogates the relationship between early film cultures and ideas of social transformation, highlighting how emergent ideas of post-colonialism, Orientalism, and feminism impacted Turkish film aesthetics. Consequently, this volume highlights how early cinema culture was not only shaped by ever-changing religious and cultural forces, but did itself shape contemporary debates about identity and cross-cultural exchange.

Mit dem Eintritt der USA in den Zweiten Weltkrieg schien der Einsatz von Propaganda geboten, um die eigene Bevölkerung von der Notwendigkeit der Kriegsbeteiligung zu überzeugen. Steht die Beeinflussung von Meinungen dem demokratischen Prinzip der freien Meinungsbildung auch entgegen, galt es damals, sich gegen totalitäre und faschistische Regime zu positionieren. Die zeitgenössische Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Dilemma wird im vorliegenden Buch diskursanalytisch untersucht. Wie vollzieht sich der Wandel von einer Zivilgesellschaft zu einer Kriegsgesellschaft, den die Roosevelt-Regierung auf Grundlage des Totalen Kriegs anstrebte? Wie umgehen mit dem Paradoxon, dass in der Kriegsgesellschaft das Individuum seine Freiheit aufgibt, um eben jene Freiheit für die Demokratie zu verteidigen? Mit filmwissenschaftlichen Methoden wird herausgearbeitet, wie das Kino diesen Widerspruch verhandelbar machte. Auf Grundlage des transdisziplinären Untersuchungsansatzes, in dem sich Diskursanalyse und filmwissenschaftliche Forschung miteinander verschränken, wird die komplexe historische Konstellation greifbar, in der sich die USA vor- und während des Zweiten Weltkriegs befanden.

Der Begriff der „Künstlichen Intelligenz" ist in aller Munde und die Implementierung von künstlich intelligenten Technologien omnipräsent. Vor diesem Hintergrund erscheint die verstärkte Beschäftigung von Künstler*innen mit Künstlich Intelligentem (KI) in Multi-Channel-Filminstallationen paradigmatisch und erkenntnisreich zugleich: Multi-Channel-Filminstallationen, die über KI reflektieren oder sogar mithilfe von KI produziert sind, handeln nicht einfach von KI. Vielmehr bringen sie selbst mit hervor, was KI sein kann, wie wir KI wahrnehmen und denken.

Die poetologisch-phänomenologische Studie identifiziert anhand der Installationen The Demon’s Brain von Agnieszka Polska und This is the Future / Power Plants von Hito Steyerl drei maßgebliche Erfahrungsdimensionen, die in ihrer spezifischen Modulation eine Idee bzw. Fantasie von KI in den Besucher*innen aufrufen. Mit einer hierfür entwickelten Theorie ästhetischer Erfahrung und Analysemethodik von Multi-Channel-Filminstallationen wird KI so über technische Aspekte hinausgehend als installatives Konzept von Erfahrung fassbar. Die Studie leistet somit einen maßgeblichen Beitrag zur Erforschung von KI nicht länger aus medientechnologischer, sondern aus medienästhetischer Perspektive.

Despite his professed disdain for actors, this book argues that Hitchcock’s films show a fascination with acting, and also contain many exceptional performances.

In this collection, the first on this subject, a group of distinguished film scholars analyse some key performances in Hitchcock’s work, covering his career from the British silent era to the last years of the Hollywood studio system. The actors covered range from Ivor Novello to Tippi Hedren, with classic, and less well-known films discussed including Notorious, Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

This book reflects the growing academic interest in film performance, and opens new perspectives on the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

This book aims to commemorate and honor people and events in Polish and Ukrainian theater at a time when people-to-people solidarity is especially important and should rise above nationalistic prejudices, historical resentments or political interests. For Polish and Ukrainian theater artists, 2014 and the beginning of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine marked a period when distant poetics and theatrical traditions, as well as artists who had no creative or social ties to each other, began to work together. They began to discover themselves and their theater in the face of an enemy that, for some, was real and a threat, destroying their country, and for others a potential danger.
The ambition of the book is to present artistic activities in a broad social and political context. For theater in the face of war never functions in an abstract vacuum, it happens here and now , created by people for whom art is both a form of artistic expression, but also a struggle for independence.

“One must make films with this knowledge: there’s no point anymore. Let film meet its end, that’s the only cinema.”

The Darkroom contains the script for Marguerite Duras’s 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck). Between images of a truck in motion, juxtaposed voiceovers, and cutaways to Duras in conversation with Gérard Depardieu, Le camion turns the art of film into a means of enabling the viewer to engage multiple faculties—not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.

Also included here is a series of short essays in which Duras makes provocative connections between film and textuality, as well as a fascinating dialogue with Michelle Porte. Together amounting to a crucial contribution to the field of film theory, these texts make brilliantly apparent the depth and integrity of Duras’s aesthetic, philosophical, and political thinking.

“when I admire a film | they say to me | yes, it’s very pretty | but it’s not | cinema | so | I asked myself | what it was”

Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart, and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard’s “years of memory”, these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, the monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, complementing and extending its themes. Like Histoire(s), they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and the nature of love.

Gathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, but something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: “Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details… Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that aren’t in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren’t literature or cinema. Traces of a film…”. In our era of ubiquitous video streaming, e-books, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions about the future of media—cinematic, literary, and otherwise.

The considerably large critical literature on Bollywood cinema is marked by an absence as it has not engaged fully with the ways in which songs lead to the memorial construction of films and how a spectator connects with films through their songs. The studies tended to deflect the emotional dimension of songs, their internal lyrical structure and their intertextual connections in favour of readings that treat songs as subsidiary to other formal elements. Consequently, there was little understanding of songs and their complex relationship with the narrative of the film. To address this absence, this book begins by taking a look at the prior history of Bollywood songs since the arrival of talkies with the film Alam Ara (1931). The chapter takes the reader through the journey of film songs from synchronous singing and music during production to non-diegetic music and the playback singer. In addition, the somewhat disparate filmic milieu of history, emotion and ethics, much of which are drawn from traditional texts, served to affirm the values of a secular India. Melodrama, mediated via Indian theories of sentimentality, became one of the key colonial discourses through which the politico-social order was critiqued and Indianness celebrated.
The book then raises the question, ‘Can one speak about periods?’ After defending periodisation in this instance because it does have heuristic value, the argument is given added support by positing melodrama as the dominant dramatic mode of Indian Hindi (Bollywood) cinema of the Golden Age. The term ‘melodrama’ is used to designate a film genre marked by sentimental songs that appeal to the heightened emotions of the spectator. Because emotionality is central to the concept of melodrama, a consideration of how emotions may be theorised is also given. The Indian classical concept of rasa is examined to provide a theoretical frame that is both historical and indigenous. Sentimental and melodramatic emotion ultimately enhanced cinema’s ethical role in building a post-colonial nation – a nation that was emerging from the trauma of partition as well as the excesses of colonisation. However, by focusing with holistic lens on the period in question – the ‘Golden Age’ – the book finesses the value of periodisation in this instance. Frame analyses of a sample of song sequences from a variety of films are used to demonstrate the roles of various song registers and the way these different registers (as identified in the appendices) work within the narrative. The argument for a connection between songs and narrative in the period is strengthened by an examination of the elements of song picturisation, most notably body movement, mise-en-scènes, lyrics, vocal expression, lighting, shots and music. A close examination of these elements reinforced the links between felt emotion and the melodramatic form in the Golden Age. Furthermore, it is argued that while Indian theories of emotional responses – notably rasa theory – recognised the place of cathartic outpouring in any dramatic presentation, the shape and structure of Bollywood cinema was indebted to the melodramatic imaginary that came to India with British colonisation. The archival material on English novels read in colonial times indicated that novels dealing with the ‘man of feeling’, novels such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), provided the melodramatic structures within which native structures of feeling (as in the varied rasas) may be given felt presence. That structure and its emotional pulling power dictated cinema and especially the cinema of the Golden Age. There are direct links between Devdas (1935), a seminal film based on a sentimental Bengali novel, and Pyaasa (1957), and these links speak to the presence of English discourses of sentimentality. Such was their pervasive power, indeed their affective intensities and strength, that no film of the ‘Golden Age of Bollywood’ escaped from their enervating and ineluctable presence.
The argument of the book – as indicated above – is followed through with references to many films. The instance of the ‘Islamicate’ film Mughal-e-Azam (1960) is taken up as an example of the power and pervasiveness of the melodramatic temper and the role of songs even when the cinematic genre is that of an epic. A close, paradigmatic reading of this film shows how the evocative power of sentimentality, emotional capital and the genre of melodrama invades an historical narrative and transforms history. To give greater depth to the place of songs, sentimentality and melodrama, the book turns to the two exceptional auteurs of the Golden Age, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. Between them, these two auteurs demonstrate a range of filmic articulations of songs in Hindi cinema, and their films illustrate, in an exemplary fashion, the role of songs in carrying the melodramatic and sentimental narrative of a film. The Hindi film auteur, as producer, director and actor, not only imposes his special style on his films but is visible on the screen itself.
This book is primarily concerned with songs from the Golden Age of Hindi cinema – 1951–1963 – a period in Hindi film history when emotion, sentiment and melodrama were regularly combined to create ‘affective intensities’. The registers, moods and, in some cases, ragas of songs have been examined over a broad corpus of examples to identify their effect on the spectator, their role in the narrative of the film and their thematisation associated with specific emotional states. In so doing, the book theorises sentimentality and melodrama in the context of Hindi film songs to more fully identify the nature of sentimentality and to more fully understand the way songs play a role in the melodramatic form.

Documentary films are often celebrated with aural metaphors: they give “voice” to the “voiceless” and ask the public to “listen.” But when did listening become synonymous with social justice? How exactly do documentaries train audiences to listen when they ask them to right historic wrongs or hold power to account?

The Documentary Audit challenges the association of listening with accountability and charts oppositional modes of listening otherwise. Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate.

From the British Crown’s promotional films to Zoom meeting recordings, from disability-informed filmmaking in Japan to forensic efforts to expose anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron, Rangan explores how historical and contemporary practitioners have challenged and refused the lures of normative documentary listening habits in order to listen with an accent, listen in crip time, and listen like an abolitionist. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges documentary and sound studies while considering raciolinguistics, disability access, and legal forensics, Rangan demonstrates how the question of listening is central to the study of documentary. Far from being a neutral ethic, The Documentary Audit shows, listening creates the reality it purports to verify—with transformative political possibilities.

In this masterful new work, film critic and philosopher Eyal Peretz forges a new connection between the concept of "America" and the medium of film. Through exemplary close readings of six fundamental American films—John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette—Peretz demonstrates the way the connection between "America" and film is enabled through the development of a philosophical concept of medium that allows both "America" and film to be thought anew.

As Peretz shows, "America" can be understood as a medium providing a new framework for understanding human life in modernity—an era that's seen the demise of theology (or the "death of god," as Nietzsche declared). Through incisive readings of the films mentioned above, Peretz shows each to function in its own singular fashion as an allegory of the way that "America"—that is, the demand to ground human life non-theologically—becomes the notion around which the medium of Hollywood film circulates.

Our Movies series enters the 21st century with this definitive lineup of the 100 most important films made during the 2000s, an age of evergreen franchises, historical epics, and comic-book superheroes, as well as fast-evolving CGI aesthetics, low-key global indies gaining unprecedented audiences, and hard-hitting documentaries (and mockumentaries) becoming mainstream feature hits.

Through the gripping stories, insightful dramas, and thrilling, mindless escapism 100 Movies of the 2000s gathers the best of the best around the globe, from the blockbuster Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings installments to cult classics Lost in Translation, Inglourious Basterds, No Country for Old Men, The Lives of Others, and And Your Mother Too. Each movie masterpiece is profiled with stills and production photos, a synopsis, analysis, and movie-buff trivia, as well as cast, crew, and technical listings.

“The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says, ‘Tuesday,’” proclaimed The New York Times. Never has a film evoked so much dread in its audience with so little gore than Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the 1977 novel by the master of terror himself, Stephen King, where true horror lies in the darkest corners of domesticity and isolation.

Equally a study of the intricate mechanics of Kubrick’s genius as an in-depth look at the making of a visual masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining gathers hundreds of hours of exclusive new interviews with the cast and crew in an unprecedented look at the 1980 cult classic. Slip in through the back door of The Overlook Hotel to witness Kubrick’s endless rounds of script rewrites, his revolutionary use of the Steadicam, the mechanics behind the infamous blood elevator, the mysterious mid-filming fire at Elstree Studios, and the countless takes needed to satisfy the meticulous force that was Kubrick.

Conceived and edited by Academy Award-winning director Lee Unkrich, dubbed by The Hollywood Reporter as “the world's foremost Shining aficionado,” with text by best-selling author J.W. Rinzler and a foreword by Steven Spielberg, this is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre.

The two-volume collection designed by M/M Paris includes hundreds of never-before-seen production photographs from the Stanley Kubrick Archive and the personal collections of cast and crew, rare documents and correspondence, conceptual art, an exclusive look at deleted scenes, and more.

THE SHINING and all related characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s22)

Get ready to quake in fear with this revised and expanded edition of our history of horror cinema. This chilling volume packs 640 pages full with the finest slashers, ghosts, zombies, cannibals, and more, curating the very creepiest screen creations from the flickering spooks of the 1920s to the special-effect terrors of the 21st century.

Across 10 illustrated chapters, the compendium gets under the skin of some of horror’s favorite figures and themes, whether the vampire, the haunted house, the female killer, or the werewolf. Each classic device is explored in aesthetic and historical terms, probing horror’s manipulation of archetypal human fears as much as socially and culturally specific anxieties.

A subsequent Top 50 movies section brings readers up close and trembling with 50 horror showpieces, from black-and-white classics like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Godzilla to Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and much, much more. Throughout, the book’s featured images include movie posters, set designs, film stills, and on-set shots.

From the moment Star Wars burst onto the screen in 1977, audiences have been in equal parts fascinated and appalled by the half-man/half-machine hybrid Darth Vader. In 1999, creator George Lucas began the story of how Anakin Skywalker grew up to train as a Jedi under Obi-Wan Kenobi, found love with the Queen of Naboo, Padmé Amidala, before turning to the dark side of his nature and becoming more machine than man.

After driving the development of nascent digital technology, George Lucas perceived how he could create new creatures and new worlds on a grander scale than ever before. He created the first digital blockbuster, and met fierce resistance when he pushed for widespread digital cameras, sets, characters, and projection – all of which are now used throughout the industry. He essentially popularized the modern way of making movies.

Made with the full cooperation of George Lucas and Lucasfilm, this second volume covers the making of the prequel trilogy — Episode I The Phantom Menace, Episode II Attack of the Clones, and Episode III Revenge of the Sith — and features exclusive interviews with Lucas and his collaborators. The book is profusely illustrated with script pages, production documents, concept art, storyboards, on-set photography, stills, and posters.

Star Wars exploded onto our cinema screens in 1977, and the world has not been the same since. After watching depressing and cynical movies throughout the early 1970s, audiences enthusiastically embraced the positive energy of the Star Wars galaxy as they followed moisture farmer Luke Skywalker on his journey through a galaxy far, far away, meeting extraordinary characters like mysterious hermit Obi-Wan Kenobi, space pirates Han Solo and Chewbacca, loyal droids C-3PO and R2-D2, bold Princess Leia Organa and the horrific Darth Vader, servant of the dark, malevolent Emperor.

Writer, director, and producer George Lucas created the modern monomyth of our time, one that resonates with the child in us all. He formed Industrial Light & Magic to develop cutting-edge special effects technology, which he combined with innovative editing techniques and a heightened sense of sound to give audiences a unique sensory cinematic experience.

In this first volume, made with the full cooperation of Lucasfilm, Lucas narrates his own story, taking us through the making of the original trilogy—Episode IV A New Hope, Episode V The Empire Strikes Back, and Episode VI Return of the Jedi—and bringing fresh insights into the creation of a unique universe. Complete with script pages, production documents, concept art, storyboards, on-set photography, stills, and posters, this is the authoritative exploration of the original saga as told by its creator.

During the post-production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick began working on his next project, a biopic on Napoleon Bonaparte. The dramatic rise and fall of the French emperor made for a great story, but it was his mind that most interested Kubrick, who couldn’t grasp how a brilliant tactician could fall victim to his own irrational temptations—and with devastating consequences.

While working on the script, Kubrick read every book about Napoleon that he could obtain, consulted with history experts, and amassed a database of research material that was by any standards excessive, including over 30,000 illustrations and location-scouting photos. Costumes were researched and designed, including paper military uniforms (to keep costs down). But as production neared, first M.G.M. and then United Artists got cold feet; historical epics were too risky at the time. Surely they regret it now, but cost of production was, in their opinion, not worth the risk.

Kubrick’s interest in Napoleon continued throughout the rest of his life, but the budget required to do the film the way he wanted was never realistic. Had he lived until the thousands of soldiers and horses he envisioned in the epic battle scenes could be convincingly rendered by computer, perhaps he would have made Napoleon. Perhaps it would have been his greatest achievement.

TASCHEN’s 2009 Limited Edition featured ten books—Script, Reference, Notes, Correspondence, Chronology, Production, Text, Costumes, Location Scouting, and Picture File—inside of a carved-out book. This new volume brings all original elements together in one compact volume, including a facsimile of Kubrick’s complete screenplay. In over 800 profusely illustrated pages, this collection of goodies contains all the clues to Kubrick’s methods, ideas, motivations, questions, intentions, and obsessions—everything you could ever want to know about the project and more.

Whether it’s Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, or The Big Sleep, roam a screen world of dark and brooding elegance with this essential handbook to Film Noir. From private eyes and perfect crimes to corrupt cops and doomed affairs, editors Paul Duncan and Jürgen Müller examine noir’s key themes and their most representative movies from 1940 to 1960.

Copiously illustrated with film stills as well as original posters, this book offers page after page of noir’s masterful visual compositions while exploring the narrative paradigms of this cryptic, compelling, and evolving genre. If that weren’t enough to tickle your cinematic appetite, the volume concludes with TASCHEN’s top 50 pick of noir classics.

Brimming with the enigmatic dames, desperate gangsters, and psycho killers that continue to cast a long and captivating shadow over cinema, this is a must-have handbook for noir aficionados and amateurs alike.

More than any other piece of furniture, the chair has been subjected to the wildest dreams of the designer. The particular curve of a backrest, or the twist of a leg, the angle of a seat or the color of the entire artifact; each element reflects the stylistic consciousness of an era.

From Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto to Verner Panton and Eva Zeisel, from Art Nouveau to International Style, from Pop Art to Postmodernism, the history of the chair is so complex that it requires a comprehensive encyclopedic work to do it full justice. They are all here: Thonet’s bentwood chairs and Hoffmann’s sitting-machines, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair and Ron Arad’s avant-garde armchairs. Early designers and pioneers of the modern chair are presented alongside the most recent innovations in seating.

This dedicated compendium displays each chair as pure form, along with biographical and historical information about the pieces and their designers. An illuminating tome for design aficionados and an essential reference for collectors.

Whether it’s Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, or The Big Sleep, roam a screen world of dark and brooding elegance with this essential handbook to Film Noir. From private eyes and perfect crimes to corrupt cops and doomed affairs, editors Paul Duncan and Jürgen Müller examine noir’s key themes and their most representative movies from 1940 to 1960.

Copiously illustrated with film stills as well as original posters, this book offers page after page of noir’s masterful visual compositions while exploring the narrative paradigms of this cryptic, compelling, and evolving genre. If that weren’t enough to tickle your cinematic appetite, the volume concludes with TASCHEN’s top 50 pick of noir classics.

Brimming with the enigmatic dames, desperate gangsters, and psycho killers that continue to cast a long and captivating shadow over cinema, this is a must-have handbook for noir aficionados and amateurs alike.

From the moment Star Wars burst onto the screen in 1977, audiences have been in equal parts fascinated and appalled by the half-man/half-machine hybrid Darth Vader. In 1999, creator George Lucas began the story of how Anakin Skywalker grew up to train as a Jedi under Obi-Wan Kenobi, found love with the Queen of Naboo, Padmé Amidala, before turning to the dark side of his nature and becoming more machine than man.

After driving the development of nascent digital technology, George Lucas perceived how he could create new creatures and new worlds on a grander scale than ever before. He created the first digital blockbuster, and met fierce resistance when he pushed for widespread digital cameras, sets, characters, and projection – all of which are now used throughout the industry. He essentially popularized the modern way of making movies.

Made with the full cooperation of George Lucas and Lucasfilm, this second volume covers the making of the prequel trilogy — Episode I The Phantom Menace, Episode II Attack of the Clones, and Episode III Revenge of the Sith — and features exclusive interviews with Lucas and his collaborators. The book is profusely illustrated with script pages, production documents, concept art, storyboards, on-set photography, stills, and posters.

One of the most creative minds of the 20th century, Walt Disney built a unique and unrivaled imaginative universe. Like scarcely any other classics of cinema, his astonishing collection of animated cartoons revolutionized storytelling on screen and enchant to this day across geographies and generations.

In this most expansive illustrated publication on Disney animation, some 1,500 images and essays by eminent Disney experts take us to the beating heart of the studio’s “Golden Age of Animation.” This landmark book traces Disney’s complete animation journey from the silent film era, through his first full-length feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and the pioneering artistic experiment Fantasia (1940), right up to his last masterpieces Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) and The Jungle Book (1967).

With extensive research conducted through the historical collections of the Walt Disney Company, as well as private collections, editor Daniel Kothenschulte curates some of the most precious concept paintings and storyboards to reveal just how these animation masterpieces came to life. Masterful cel setups provide highly detailed illustrations of famous film scenes while rare pictures taken by Disney photographers and excerpts from story conferences between Walt and his staff bring a privileged insider’s view to the studio’s creative process.

Each of the major animated features that were made during Walt’s lifetime—including Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians—are given their own focus chapter, without forgetting less familiar gems such as the experimental short films of the Silly Symphonies series and underappreciated episodic musical films such as Make Mine Music and Melody Time, all of which receive the same meticulous research and attention. Many unfinished projects, among them the proposed sequels to the legendary musical Fantasia or a homage to Davy Crockett by painter Thomas Hart Benton, are also highlighted with rarely seen artworks, many of them previously unpublished. Throughout, contributions from leading Disney specialists detail the evolution of each respective film.

Realizing the Disney style was a collective project and, as much as the master himself, The Walt Disney Film Archives acknowledges the outstanding animators and designers who influenced the style of the studio, among them Albert Hurter, Gustaf Tenggren, Kay Nielsen, Carl Barks, Mary Blair, Sylvia Holland, Tyrus Wong, Ken Anderson, Eyvind Earle, and Walt Peregoy.

Copyright © 2021 by Disney Enterprises, Inc.

On November 18, 1928, the world’s most famous Mouse made his very first public debut. Today, we celebrate 90+ years of Mickey in one of the most expansive illustrated publications on the Disney universe. Starting with the first sketches of a character who was almost named Mortimer, we trace the career of Walt Disney’s and Ub Iwerks’s most famous creation, one met with an explosion of worldwide popularity preceded only by the earlier successes of Charlie Chaplin.

With unlimited access to Disney’s vast historical collections as well as public and private collections, the authors bring Mickey’s success story to life: concept art, story sketches, background paintings, and animation drawings as well as historical photographs trace the origins and evolution of such timeless favorites as Steamboat Willie, The Band Concert, and Brave Little Tailor. They also follow Mickey as he builds on this legendary library of short cartoons by appearing in two historic feature-length films, Fantasia and Fun and Fancy Free.

Extensive archival research sheds new light on little-known chapters of Mickey’s career, the origins of the Mickey Mouse Club, and his use as a patriotic icon during World War II. Along the way, we encounter the work of all major Mickey artists in both film and comics, including such greats as Ub Iwerks, Win Smith, Ferdinand Horvath, Fred Moore, Floyd Gottfredson, Carl Barks, Manuel Gonzales, Paul Murry, Romano Scarpa, Giorgio Cavazzano, Byron Erickson, and César Ferioli.

Mickey Mouse has left an indelible mark on everyday culture as well as high art, becoming a favored subject for Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Roy Lichtenstein. As Walt Disney once said: “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing—that it was all started by a mouse.” And an end to the success story is nowhere in sight. Today, 90+ years after his creation, Mickey remains as lovable and popular as ever. Let’s pay tribute to the little fellow, his legend, and his legacy with a monument to the one and only Mickey Mouse.

Copyright © 2020 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Get ready to quake in fear with this revised and expanded edition of our history of horror cinema. This chilling volume packs 640 pages full with the finest slashers, ghosts, zombies, cannibals, and more, curating the very creepiest screen creations from the flickering spooks of the 1920s to the special-effect terrors of the 21st century.

Across 10 illustrated chapters, the compendium gets under the skin of some of horror’s favorite figures and themes, whether the vampire, the haunted house, the female killer, or the werewolf. Each classic device is explored in aesthetic and historical terms, probing horror’s manipulation of archetypal human fears as much as socially and culturally specific anxieties.

A subsequent Top 50 movies section brings readers up close and trembling with 50 horror showpieces, from black-and-white classics like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Godzilla to Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and much, much more. Throughout, the book’s featured images include movie posters, set designs, film stills, and on-set shots.

Star Wars exploded onto our cinema screens in 1977, and the world has not been the same since. After watching depressing and cynical movies throughout the early 1970s, audiences enthusiastically embraced the positive energy of the Star Wars universe as they followed moisture farmer Luke Skywalker on his journey through a galaxy far, far away, meeting extraordinary characters like mysterious hermit Obi-Wan Kenobi, space pirates Han Solo and Chewbacca, loyal droids C-3PO and R2-D2, bold Princess Leia and the horrific Darth Vader, servant of the dark, malevolent Emperor.

Writer, director, and producer George Lucas created the modern monomyth of our time, one that resonates with the child in us all. He formed Industrial Light & Magic to develop cutting-edge special effects technology, which he combined with innovative editing techniques and a heightened sense of sound to give audiences a unique sensory cinematic experience.

In this first volume, made with the full cooperation of Lucasfilm, Lucas narrates his own story, taking us through the making of the original trilogy—Episode IV: A New Hope, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi—and bringing fresh insights into the creation of a unique universe. Complete with script pages, production documents, concept art, storyboards, on-set photography, stills, and posters, the XXL-sized tome is an authoritative exploration of the original saga as told by its creator.

Our Movies series enters the 21st century with this definitive lineup of the 100 most important films made during the 2000s, an age of evergreen franchises, historical epics, and comic-book superheroes, as well as fast-evolving CGI aesthetics, low-key global indies gaining unprecedented audiences, and hard-hitting documentaries (and mockumentaries) becoming mainstream feature hits.

Through the gripping stories, insightful dramas, and thrilling, mindless escapism 100 Movies of the 2000s gathers the best of the best around the globe, from the blockbuster Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings installments to cult classics Lost in Translation, Inglourious Basterds, No Country for Old Men, The Lives of Others, and And Your Mother Too. Each movie masterpiece is profiled with stills and production photos, a synopsis, analysis, and movie-buff trivia, as well as cast, crew, and technical listings.

Take a journey through the makers and shapers of celluloid history. From horror to romance, noir to slapstick, adventure to tragedy, Western to new wave, this selection gathers the greats of 20th-century cinema into one indispensable guide to movie gold.

The collection is arranged chronologically and in an extra-handy format. Film entries include a synopsis, cast/crew listings, technical information, actor/director bios, trivia, and lists of awards, as well as film stills, production photos, and the original poster for each film.

From Metropolis to Modern Times, A Clockwork Orange to Buñuel’s The Young and the Damned, from the blockbusters to lesser-known masterpieces, thumb through and transform a quiet evening into an unforgettable screen encounter.

In 1968, when Stanley Kubrick was asked to comment on the metaphysical significance of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he replied: “It’s not a message I ever intended to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience… I tried to create a visual experience, one that directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content.”

Now available as part of our Bibliotheca Universalis series, The Stanley Kubrick Archives borrows from the director’s philosophy. From the opening sequence of Killer’s Kiss to the final frames of Eyes Wide Shut, it allows the masterful visuals of Kubrick’s films to impress through a sequence of compelling, mesmerizing stills. We uncover Kubrick’s creative process through fascinating archival material, including set designs, sketches, correspondence, documents, screenplays, drafts, notes, and shooting schedules.

Accompanying the visual and archival material are essays by noted Kubrick scholars, articles written by and about Kubrick, and a selection of Kubrick’s best interviews. The result is a visual, archival, and scholarly journey through masterworks of 20th-century cinema and the meticulous mind of the director behind them.

Within a year of arriving in Hollywood in 1914, British-born Charlie Chaplin had become the slapstick king of America. By the end of his second year on the silver screen, Chaplin’s fame had spread worldwide. He was the first international film star and rapidly one of the richest men in the world, with a million dollar contract, his own studio and his stock company of close collaborators. From Alaska to Zimbabwe, the bowler hat, cane, baggy trousers and outsized shoes of the Tramp became, and remains, an instantly recognizable silhouette.

With unrestricted access to the Chaplin archives, TASCHEN presents the ultimate book on the making of every one of his films. With 900 images, including stills, memos, storyboards and on-set photos, as well as interviews with Chaplin and his closest collaborators, it reveals the process behind the Chaplin genius, from the impromptu invention of early shots to the meticulous retakes and reworking of scenes and gags in his classic movies: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and the provocative Hitler parody The Great Dictator (1940).

The book includes: The Chaplin life history in words and pictures 900 images including many previously unseen stills, on-set photos, memos, documents, storyboards, posters, and designs, plus scripts and images for unmade films An oral history, told from the point of view of Chaplin himself, drawing upon his extensive writings, many of which have never been reprinted before. Supplementary interviews with some of his closest collaborators. Material from over 150 books of press clippings in Chaplin’s archives, which range from his early days in music halls to his death Chaplin’s short films, from Making a Living (1914) to The Pilgrim (1923), as well as all of his feature-length movies, from The Kid (1921) to A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Images and documents from the Chaplin Archives, © and/or Property of The Roy Export Company Ltd., scanned by Cineteca di Bologna

“Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence.” — Gay Talese

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese set out for Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to write a major profile on Frank Sinatra. When he arrived, he found the singer and his vigilant entourage on the defensive: Sinatra was under the weather, not available, and not willing to be interviewed.

Undeterred, Talese stayed, believing Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and used the meantime to observe the star and to interview his friends, associates, family members, and hangers-on. Sinatra never did grant the one-on-one, but Talese’s tenacity paid off: his profile Frank Sinatra Has a Cold went down in history as a tour de force of literary nonfiction and the advent of New Journalism.

In this illustrated edition, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is published with an introduction by Talese, reproductions of his manuscript pages, and correspondence. Interwoven are photographs from the legendary lens of Phil Stern, the only photographer granted access to Sinatra over four decades, as well as from top photojournalists of the ’60s, including John Bryson, John Dominis, and Terry O’Neill. The photographs complement Talese’s character study, painting an incisive portrait of Sinatra in the recording studio, on location, out on the town, and with the eponymous cold, which reveals as much about a singular star persona as it does about the Hollywood machine.

Since his release of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries in 1957, Ingmar Bergman has been one of the leading figures in international cinema. In a career that spanned 60 years, he wrote, produced, and directed 50 films that defined how we see ourselves and how we interact with the people we love, through works like Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander.

Before his death in 2007, Bergman gave TASCHEN and the Swedish publishing house Max Ström complete access to his archives at the Bergman Foundation as well as permission to reprint his writings and interviews, many of which have never been seen outside of Sweden. Picture researcher Bengt Wanselius, who was Bergman’s photographer for 20 years, scoured photo archives all over Sweden, discovered previously unseen images from Bergman’s films, and selected unpublished images from many photographers’ personal archives.

This re-edition draws from our out-of-print Bergman Archives, the most complete book on the director to date. For this award-winning production, TASCHEN Editor Paul Duncan gathered a team of Bergman experts who have researched and written a narrative that, for the first time, combined all of Bergman’s working life in film. Such is the depth of Bergman’s writings that most of the story is told in his own words. This book also features an introduction by Bergman’s close friend and collaborator, actor Erland Josephson.

On November 24, 2008, Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius won the 2008 August Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book published in Sweden. This is the most prestigious literary prize in Sweden, voted on by booksellers and librarians throughout the country.

One of the most prolific and influential auteurs at work over the past 40 years, cult Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has beguiled audiences worldwide with his thrilling dissertations on desire, passion, and identity. Cast an eye over his long list of productions and you’re confronted with intoxicating tales of psychological melodrama, black comedy, familial feud, and violent lust.

This edition of The Pedro Almodóvar Archives offers unique inside access to behind-the-scenes pictures and personal reminiscences as the director guides us through his journey, from his early days right through to I’m So Excited (2013) and Julieta (2016). Based on and expanded from the original TASCHEN XL volume produced in collaboration with Almodóvar himself, the book offers a fascinating insight into the creative process behind such cinematic tours de force as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and the Academy Award-winning All About My Mother and Talk To Her.

Each film is featured with its original poster, full cast and crew listings, as well as an essay by a leading Spanish author. Almodóvar personally supplements the vivid photographic material, captioning each image with his own reflections and comments. As an overview of a true original’s creativity and a luminous era of cinema, this is an indispensable companion to the mighty Almodóvar canon created by the master himself.