Performing Arts

Looks at dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and the 1930s, including ballet, modern dance and dance in the cinema and Revue. Artists examined include Josephine Baker, Jean Cocteau, Valeska Gert, and George Balanchine. more...

Price: $135.00

Alisa, Alice' is a humanely cruel and deeply moving drama, full of passion and desire. The clash of two cultures – two worlds – is described with psychological accuracy and depth. Alisa, a young Muslim refugee scarred by the Balkan war finds shelter with Magda, a representative of the common so-called civilised but self-destructive and self-loving western world. Magda, through the sadism arising from her despair and loss of purpose, her psychological confusion, causes the suicide of Alisa. Their relationship permeated as much with love as with hatred, is decanted through the dictatorship of language into a miraculous, irrational and mysterious atmosphere. In places, the style of the play is reminiscent of Pinter’s comedy of menace. The realistically based dramatic events are firmly grounded in a recognisable and actual contemporaneity. Poetic ambiguity facilitates universal interpretation, and here and there extends to the magical and surreal. more...

Price: $29.95

Both a work of feminist film criticism and an analysis of popular culture, this provocative book examines from a cultural studies perspective top film melodramas such as From Here to Eternity, A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden . more...

Price: $39.95

Focusing on a variety of filmmaker's use of narrative allegories for the “conservative modernization” Brazil and other nations underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, Ismail Xavier examines the way Cinema Novo transformed Brazil's cultural memory. Includes discussions of Black God, White Devil, Land in Anguish, Red Light Bandit, Macunaíma, Antônio das Mortes, The Angel Is Born, and Killed the Family and Went to the Movies. more...

Price: $67.50

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