Books on the topic 'Film making performance'

The opening decades of the twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of modern sound media, with workers in US film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles tailored to emerging technologies of electric sound reproduction that directly shaped dominant forms and experiences of modern sound culture. Focusing on broadcasting’s initial expansion period during the 1920s, Making Radio explores the forms of creative labor pursued for the medium before the better-known network era of the 1930s and 1940s, assessing their role in shaping radio’s own identity and identifying affinities with parallel practices pursued for conversion-era film and phonography. Tracing programming forms adopted by early radio writers and programmers, production techniques developed by studio engineers, and performance styles cultivated by on-air talent, it shows how radio workers negotiated a series of broader industrial and cultural pressures to establish best practices for their medium. In the process, it argues, these sound workers shaped not only the future of broadcasting, but also contributed to much broader shifts in popular forms of music, drama, and public oratory, ushering in a new era of electric sound entertainment.

This chapter examines how jazz fans, especially the most active concertgoers (the regulars), respond to a musical performance. It first considers how fans become part of jazz communities and how they contribute to the New York City jazz scene. It then shows how nonperforming musicians fill the performance space, suggesting that these offstage participants, who are also “performing” jazz, constitute the unseen scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making. It also explains what happens when fans are in the house: how their musical tastes develop, how they view performers and performances, and how their private and public listening practices inform their understandings of and appreciation for jazz and jazz performances. The chapter concludes that when jazz audiences with “big ears” attend to and interact with live music and musicians, it creates a sympathetic environment where jazz can come alive.

When midcentury Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock ’n’ roll stars. Such stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. This book examines how casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock’s emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. Examining stars from Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new—ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance. It then sketches the intellectual and artistic trends over the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German Dance Studies. It follows the broadly chronological organization of the volume as a whole: opening essays on theater dance before 1900; then research clusters on Weimar dance, dance in the German Democratic Republic, and conceptual dance; and a closing reflection on the circulation of dance in an era of globalization. Throughout it emphasizes the complex interplay between dance-making and dance writing, as well as interrelations between dance practice and research and artistic and intellectual trends in German culture at large.

Well before the success of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, female artists were integral to the commercial expansion and aural reception of country music. Women in early country music took on and redefined the theatrical and musical roles of the hillbilly maiden, the unruly Okie, the singing cowgirl, and the honky-tonk angel in live performance, on radio, in film, and in the recording studio. This book accounts for the vibrant presence of female country artists through an interdisciplinary focus on performance and vocal expression in relation to the cultural currents of the 1930s and 1950s. Across a variety of media, women’s country music engendered new ways of making sense of public and private spaces (such as the home, the dance hall, and the honky-tonk) that were integral to the real and imagined lives of working-class women striving for upward social mobility and/or resisting the rigidity of middle-class codes of behavior. Connecting the female singing voice to the theatrics of the popular stage and to the musical practices of specific country styles, this study shows how women in country music wielded a range of performative devices in order to work within and against social and commercial expectations.

Bob Dylan has constantly reinvented the persona known as “Bob Dylan,” renewing the performance possibilities inherent in his songs, from acoustic folk, to electric rock and a late, hybrid style which even hints at so-called world music and Latin American tones. Then in 2016, his achievements outside of performance – as a songwriter – were acknowledged when he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize. Dylan has never ceased to broaden the range of his creative identity, taking in painting, film, acting and prose writing, as well as advertising and even own-brand commercial production. The book highlights how Dylan has brought his persona(e) to different art forms and cultural arenas, and how they in turn have also created these personae. This volume consists of multidisciplinary essays written by cultural historians, musicologists, literary academics and film experts, including contributions by critics Christopher Ricks and Nina Goss. Together, the essays reveal Dylan’s continuing artistic development and self-fashioning, as well as the making of a certain legitimized Dylan through critical and public recognition in the new millennium. This volume seeks to reflect the range of Bob Dylan’s multiple activities, the ‘late style’ of his creativity and his personae in all their later variety, from the Time Out of Mind album (1997) up to the release in March 2020 of ‘Murder Most Foul’. Bob Dylan (born 1941) is perhaps best-known as a singer and songwriter whose major impact occurred several decades ago. His achievements as a songwriter and master of language were – provocatively? – acknowledged when he was awarded the 2016 Nobel Literature Prize. However, Dylan has never ceased to broaden the range of his creative identity, especially through intermediality, taking in painting, film, acting, radio-presenting and prose writing, as well as advertising and even own-brand commercial production, either reinforcing or calling into question his perceived authenticity. The book highlights how Dylan has brought his persona(e) to different art forms and cultural arenas, and how they in turn have also created these personae. Chronicles, Volume One, his autobiography, charts his beginnings as a folk singer and the later recording of the Oh Mercy album. In terms of his identity as a visual artist, while Dylan’s Revisionist Art exhibition focused on his reworkings of magazine covers, the Brazil Series paintings show him extending his visual creativity to cultural spaces beyond the United States. Dylan has constantly reinvented the persona known as ‘Bob Dylan’.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the disavowed claims of the past on the present through a group of cultural productions—literature, drama, and film—focused on racialized subject-formations and cultural formations. Investigating the intersection of categories of social difference, nation making, and buried social memory, it uncovers a host of hidden dialogues for the purpose of dismantling the legacy effects of historical racial subjugation and inequality. The book brings psychoanalytic paradigms of mourning and melancholia and discussions of race and performance by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Julian Carter, Diana Taylor, and Kimberly Benton into conversation with literary work on post-Emancipation America's everyday life and ritual practice to challenge scholarship that calls for the clinical separation of ethnic studies and psychoanalysis as well as the divorce of psychoanalysis and socioeconomic history, and presumes that this disengagement is central to American nationhood's continued relationship with unresolved racial grievances. This study develops a theory of “cultural melancholy” that uncovers the ideological and psychical claims of the history of slavery and ongoing racial subjugation on contemporary racialized subject-formations and dominant American culture.

Inspired by the celebrated pianist-bandleaders Eddy Duchin and Carmen Cavallaro and the cinematic technique of José Iturbi in Hollywood films, pianist-entertainer Liberace (1919–1987) developed a distinctive and highly successful aesthetic and performance style that prioritized visual spectacle and emphasized the tactile elements of his playing. As evident in his first Soundies from 1943, then his nationally syndicated television show in the 1950s, Liberace highlighted the physicality and materiality of his music-making, an approach that later evolved into the signature props and flashy costumes of his live stage shows. The new medium of television enabled Liberace to integrate the traditions of Romantic pianism with new genres of popular music in a highly embodied manner that appealed to his fans as much as it bothered his critics invested in music’s physical and material transcendence.

The book takes on a systematic treatment of dynamic decision making and performance measurement. The analytical foundations of the dynamic production technology are introduced and developed in detail for several primal representations of the technology with an emphasis on dynamic directional distance functions. Dynamic cost minimization and dynamic profit maximization are developed for primal and dual representations of the dynamic technology. A dynamic production environment can be characterized as one where current production decisions impact future production possibilities. Consequently, the dynamic perspective of production relationships necessarily involves the close interplay between stock and flow elements in the transformation process and how current decisions impact the changes in future stocks. Stock elements in the production transformation process can involve physical elements that can be effectively employed in the transformation process, which can include the stock of technical knowledge and expertise available to the decision maker during the decision period. The dynamic generalization of concepts measuring the production structure (e.g., economies of scale, economies of scope, capacity utilization) and performance (e.g., allocative, scale and technical inefficiency, productivity) are developed from primal and dual perspectives. As an important source of productivity growth, production efficiency analysis is the subject of countless studies. Yet, theoretical and empirical studies focusing on production efficiency have ignored typically the time interdependence of production decisions and the adjustment paths of the firm over time. The empirical implementation of these production and performance measures is developed at length for both nonparametric and econometric approaches.

Since the early 1990s, at least forty-five initiatives have been mounted to improve the environmental and social performance of the mining industry. Many changes in the formal legal and regulatory systems have also been introduced. However, no systematic approach has been adopted to test whether this effort is making a difference. Without such monitoring of success, the tension between companies, communities, and governments regarding the role of mining in society will continue. This chapter makes the case for using ‘contribution analysis’ to fill this gap, a systematic means to assess and track mining’s contribution to human and ecosystem well-being over the full project and product life cycles. This is a higher test than current practice. It brings out a fuller picture of the positives and negatives of natural resources and their management, provides greater opportunity for the perspectives of all interests to be heard, and is fairer.

This chapter examines the link between business strategies and skill in the context of the the latter being regarded as key to economic growth and competitive advantage. A high-skilled workforce is viewed both as a driver of this approach and one of its outcomes. A number of countries have attempted to create more high-skilled jobs through raising the qualification levels of their workforces. The idea behind this supply-side intervention is that a high-skilled workforce will attract businesses that wish to or already do compete on quality and/or innovation or will encourage existing organisations to make better use of these skills and improve organisational performance. The problem is increasing evidence of growing levels of over-qualification amongst these workforces as too few high skilled jobs are created. Moreover many firms have remained successful operating with low skilled jobs competing on cost. Drawing on existing research, this chapter explores these developments and issues. It starts by making an important contextual distinction between skill levels and skill use, how they feature in firm business strategies, and their relevance to governments, employers and employees. It then presents the two key theories of skill and business strategies: the HRM Approach and the Institutional/Comparative Approaches. Questioning the determinism of these approaches, the chapter then seeks to move debate beyond assumptions of direct relationships between strategy and skill. The conclusion presents an alternative approach to developing the relationship between business strategies and skill that incorporates managerial agency.

Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; as well as photographs, interviews, films, and performances to suture a fragmented past. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Framed by War reveals how what unfolded in Korea set the stage for US power in the postwar era. US destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean women and children, enabling US intervention and fortifying transnational connections with symbolic and material outcomes. In the 1950s Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and the Cold War scripts needed to support these internationalist efforts required the erasure of those who could not fit the family frame. These were the geographies to which Korean women and children were bound, but found ways to navigate in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between, reconfiguring notions of race and kinship along the way.

Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion aims at advancing the study of anime, understood as largely TV-based genre fiction rendered in cel, or cel-look, animation with a strong affinity to participatory cultures and media convergence. Taking Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangerion) as a case study, this volume acknowledges anime as a media form with clearly recognizable aesthetic properties, (sub)cultural affordances and situated discourses. First broadcast in Japan in 1995-96, Neon Genesis Evangelion became an epoch-making anime, and later franchise. The initial series used already available conventions, visual resources and narrative tropes typical of anime in general and the mecha (or giant-robot) genre in particular, but at the same time it subverted and reinterpreted them in a highly innovative and as such standard-setting way. Investigating anime through Neon Genesis Evangelion this volume takes a broadly understood media-aesthetic and media-cultural perspective, which pertains to medium in the narrow sense of technology, techniques, materials, and semiotics, but also mediality and mediations related to practices and institutions of production, circulation, and consumption. In no way intended to be exhaustive, this volume attests to the emergence of anime studies as a field in its own right, including but not prioritizing expertise in film studies and Japanese studies, and with due regard to the most widely shared critical publications in Japanese and English language. Thus, the volume provides an introduction to studies of anime, a field that necessarily interrelates media-specific and transmedial aspects. In Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion, anime is addressed from a transnational and transdisciplinary stance. The disciplinary and methodological perspectives taken by the individual chapters range from audio-visual culture, narratology, performance and genre theory to fandom studies and gender studies. In its first part, the book focuses on textual analysis and media form in the narrow sense with regard to filmic media, bank footage, voice acting and musical score, and then it broadens the scope to consider subcultural discourse, franchising, manga and video game adaptations, as well as critical and affective user engagement.