Performing Arts

Alternative worlds in films such as The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind offer similarities and resonances to our world, but provide a way for filmmakers to address the human condition by forming a sincere and serious connection with everyday life. An illuminating new book explores the history, background and meaning of films that feature alternative worlds – films in which characters cross back and forth between another world and our own, which bring out correspondences and resonances between the worlds they depict. The popularity of such films suggests a need to engage with important themes during troubling times, as well as to be entertained and transported, says author James Walters – rather than merely constituting part of the wider trend of adults finding comfort in books and films ostensibly for children. The films discussed in the book use the fantasy of an alternative world to debate a series of universal conditions associated with human experience: insecurity, ambition, loneliness, apprehension, bravery, vanity, inarticulateness, anxiety, ambiguity, introversion, love, and so on. Because these films are often viewed as Hollywood ‘product’ they don’t always have the intellectual cachet of European films dealing with similar themes, but Walters suggests that there is complexity and depth behind these superficially light films. Traditionally, Realist cinema has dealt with weighty issues, but increasingly films featuring alternative worlds offer an engaging way of dealing with ‘serious’ content and issues. In each of the films discussed the flight from the real world results in characters having to face reality again, equipped with new knowledge and experience, enabling them to find a way of living there from that day on. more...

Price: $20.00

Probably no decade saw as many changes in the Hollywood film industry and its product as the 1930s did. At the beginning of the decade, the industry was still struggling with the transition to talking pictures. Gangster films and naughty comedies starring Mae West were popular in urban areas, but aroused threats of censorship in the heartland. Whether the film business could survive the economic effects of the Crash was up in the air. By 1939, popularly called “Hollywood’s Greatest Year,” films like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz used both color and sound to spectacular effect, and remain American icons today. The “mature oligopoly” that was the studio system had not only weathered the Depression and become part of mainstream culture through the establishment and enforcement of the Production Code, it was a well-oiled, vertically integrated industrial powerhouse. The ten original essays in American Cinema of the 1930s focus on sixty diverse films of the decade, including Animal Crackers, Dracula, The Public Enemy, Trouble in Paradise, 42nd Street, King Kong, Imitation of Life, It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Swing Time, Nothing Sacred, Jezebel, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Stagecoach. more...

Price: $17.00

A smug glance at the seventies—the so-called “Me Decade”—unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics—all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. American Cinema of the 1970s, however, looks beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history. Far from a placid era, the seventies was a decade of social upheavals. Events such as the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities, the Watergate investigations, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the American involvement in Vietnam are only a few among the many landmark occurrences that challenged the foundations of American culture. The director-driven movies of this era reflect this turmoil, experimenting with narrative structures, offering a gallery of scruffy antiheroes, and revising traditional genre conventions. Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now. more...

Price: $17.00

Providing an introduction to independent American Cinema, this work offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century, and a study of key individual films and film-makers. It helps readers develop an understanding of the complex relations between independent and mainstream American cinema. more...

Price: $107.46

Volume Four of the distinguished American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama series offers a thorough, candid, and fascinating look at the theater in New York during the last decades of the twentieth century.   more...

Price: $75.00