Open Access Books - Arts - 2023

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Browsing Open Access Books - Arts - 2023 by Title

  • Publication
    Beyond the Movie Theater: Sites, Sponsors, Uses, Audiences
    ( 2023)
    Waller, Gregory A.
    A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.
  • Publication
    Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death
    ( 2023)
    O'Brien, Sarah
    Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death gathers pivotal and more mundane moments, dispersed across a predominantly Western history of moving images, in which animals materialize in movies and TV shows, from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to quandaries over hunting trophies in recent home-renovation reality TV series, to animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully views these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. She explores the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens, and, more importantly, to understanding these images as more and less connected to the "production for consumption" of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers' regard for animals.
  • Publication
    Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933: Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
    ( 2023)
    Cowan, Michael
    This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed to assimilate and influence a new medium: a project emerging from the world of amateur science before taking new directions into industry, art and politics. Through an interdisciplinary approach—in dialogue with social history, print history and media archaeology—it also transforms our theoretical understanding of what a film society was and how it operated. Far from representing a mere collection of pre-formed cinephiles, film societies were, according to the book’s central argument, productive social formations, which taught people how to nurture their passion for the movies, how to engage with cinema, and how to interact with each other. Ultimately, the study argues that examining film societies can help to reveal the diffuse agency by which generative ideas of cinema take shape.
  • Publication
    Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy
    ( 2023)
    Stanfill, Mel
    Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works-cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs-to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.
  • Publication
    Telling Sounds: Tracing Music History in Digital Media Archives
    ( 2023)
    Santi, Matej ; Berner, Elias
    How are music and sound involved in the creation of audiovisual documents? What kind of quantitative and qualitative research permits the examination of music and, more generally, sound for Austrian (music) history on the basis of digitized audiovisual sources? These questions were approached in the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project “Telling Sounds" at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna.This volume consists of various case studies conducted by the members of the team. The project’s main task was the conception and development of a Digital Humanities research tool: LAMA – Linked Annotations for Media Analysis. It was designed for the purpose of using machine-readable open data to annotate and link the ways in which music has been used and contextualized in different audio and audiovisual media texts in different times throughout Austrian history. Each of the case studies is dedicated to different genres of music, media texts, and events or timespans in history.Contributions by Aylin Basaran Elias Berner Paul Gulewycz Birgit Haberpeuntner Julia Jaklin Birgit Michlmayr Peter Provaznik Cornelia Szabó-Knotik Meike Wilfing-Albrecht
  • Publication
    The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture
    ( 2023)
    Amsler
    In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet, such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud's discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler's book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud.
  • Publication
    The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life
    ( 2023)
    Schultz-Figueroa, Benjamin
    In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings-including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles-have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa's incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history-and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.
  • Publication
    The Erard Grecian Harp in Regency England:
    ( 2023)
    Poulopoulos, Panagiotis
    During the early nineteenth century, the harp was transformed into a sophisticated instrument that became as popular as the piano. This was largely the result of the harp's intensive technical, musical and visual upgrading, which gradually led to the transition from the single- to the double-action pedal harp. A major figure in this process was Sébastien Erard (1752-1831), a tireless inventor and prolific manufacturer of harps and pianos operating branches in Paris and London. With the introduction in 1811 of the so-called 'Grecian' model, the first commercially built double-action harp, the Erard firm managed to establish the harp not only as a novel, state-of-the-art instrument, but also as a powerful symbol of luxury, wealth and status. Drawing upon a wide variety of primary sources, including surviving instruments, archival documents and iconographical evidence, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the development, production and consumption of the Erard Grecian harp in Regency England. The innovative approaches employed by the Erard firm in the manufacture and marketing of harps are measured against competitors but also against the work of leading entrepreneurs in related trades, ranging from the mechanical devices and precision tools of James Watt, Henry Maudslay or Jacques Holtzapffel, through the ornamental pottery of Josiah Wedgwood, to the clocks and watches of George Prior or Abraham-Louis Breguet. In addition, the book examines the omnipresent role of the harp in the education, art, fashion and literature of the Regency era, discussing how the image and perception of the instrument were shaped by groundbreaking advances, such as the Industrial Revolution, Neoclassicism, and the Napoleonic Wars.
  • Publication
    The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute
    ( 2023)
    Nickleson, Patrick
    Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories-but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism, Patrick Nickleson holds in tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich's Pendulum Music, Glass's work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca's works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct. Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière's philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as "(early) minimalism," to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category "art music." Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project-artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls-not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife.
  • Publication
    Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett
    ( 2023)
    Duckett, Victoria Harriet, Prof.
    A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett. Talented and formidable women with global ambitions, these performers forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Building upon extensive archival research in France, England, and the United States, Victoria Duckett argues that, through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image, these three artists strengthened ties between countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change.
  • Publication
    World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War
    ( 2023)
    Salazkina, Masha
    A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.