By reconsidering assumptions about mainstream popular culture and its revolutionary possibilities, author Dana Heller reveals that John Waters' popular 1988 film Hairspray is the director's most subversive movie. Represents the first scholarly work on any of film director John Waters' films Incorporates original interview material with the director Reveals meanings embedded in the film's narrative treatment of racial and sexual politics
Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award The Midwest of popular imagination is a «Heartland» characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow–minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures. Heartland TV ...
High Treason and Low Comedy is the first in-depth treatment in English of E. E. Kisch’s work as a playwright, a phase of his life to which he devoted considerable effort during the years 1920–1925.The translations of his two most successful works for the cabaret stages of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia form the basis of discussions that fit them into several intersecting streams: biographical, historical, and cultural. The plays are Die Hetzjagd, which describes the last day on earth of...
Why are we drawn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock so long after his final film appeared? What is the source of Hitchcock’s magic? This book answers these questions by focussing upon the fabric of the films themselves, upon the way in which they enlist and sustain our desire, holding our attention by constantly withholding something from us.
In <i>Hollywood 1938</i>, Catherine Jurca brings to light a tumultuous year of crisis that has been neglected in histories of the studio era. With attendance in decline, negative publicity about stars that were «poison at the box office,» and a spate of bad films, industry executives decided that the public was fed up with the movies. Jurca describes their desperate attempt to win back audiences by launching Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year, a massive, and unsuccessful, public...
Hollywood 1963-1976 chronicles the upheaval and innovation that took place in the American film industry during an era of pervasive cultural tumult. Exploring the many ideologies embraced by an increasingly diverse Hollywood, Casper offers a comprehensive canon, covering the period's classics as well as its brilliant but overlooked masterpieces. A broad overview and analysis of one of American film's most important and innovative periods Offers a new, more expansive take on the accepted canon of...
The horses that captured the moviegoers’ hearts are the common denominator in Hollywood Hoofbeats. As author Petrine Day Mitchum writes, “the movies as we know them would be vastly different without horses. There would be no Westerns—no cowboy named John Wayne—no Gone with the Wind, no Ben Hur, no Dances with Wolves…” no War Horse, no True Grit, no Avatar! Those last three 21st-century Hollywood creations are among the new films covered in...
This is a major new assessment of the American movie industry in the 1990's, focusing on the development of new communication technologies such as cable and home video and examining their impact on the production and distribution of motion pictures.