The westward expansion in the 18th and 19th century is well documented and was done by (what we believe) an entirely white/Caucasian group of people who took their chances and finally settled the West; if we believe the many tales, novels and most importantly the countless western movies. But actually, there were also some others, […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Film Noir by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) (2016)
Recent publications on film noir tell of the lively interest in the style/genre/cycle. And ever since film noir was subject to definition (and analysis) by French critics, the question of what exactly it is, a style, a genre, a cycle, a movement, has not been answered in total. “Film noir,” as reports Homer B. Pettey, […]
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow (2016)
Psychedelic drugs, most prominently LSD, can be credited for having changed Americans and American culture forever. Hardly anything else in the last 60 years has had such a strong influence on American culture as a whole, meaning it had the power to influence the arts (in particular, music), politics, spirituality, technology and naturally a high […]
Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing … by Dennis Broe (2014)
There are many different approaches to the analysis of film noir, since film studies today deal with almost any facet, be it technical, stylistic or director specific. Dennis Broe, however, has the emphasis on the social-cultural and most of all the working-class aspects of these films. He locates the origins of film noir to a […]
The Bronze Age of DC Comics by Paul Levitz (2015)
The third volume of the DC chronicles is out and shows the company’s changing face and politics in the years 1970-1984. As the Golden Age and the Silver Age were focused on the development of DC comics until the year 1970, the current edition is labeled the “Bronze Age“ and demonstrates how the comic artists […]
Connecting Detectives: The Influence of 19th Century Sleuth Fiction… by Lewis D. Moore (2015)
Not only in detective fiction the issue of motive and “just how” things were finally done is of interest, the same questions (and more like them) are relevant in the simple analysis of literary traditions in which the authors of that fiction could benefit from. Lewis Moore tries to find complementary, similar behavior and continuing […]
Rock ‘N’ Film. Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music by David E. James (2016)
While already in the 1940s the Hollywood musical artistically integrated film, acting, dancing and singing, it also had another very important feature. “With sound, the movies had become the major means of disseminating popular songs, both those composed for Broadway musicals that were subsequently filmed and those written by the studio’s own teams of lyricists.” […]
Columbia Noir: A Complete Filmography, 1940-1962 by Gene Blottner (2015)
Columbia Pictures, today a part of Sony Pictures Entertainment, has released literally tons of movies. Of those, Gene Blottner lists a selection of altogether 169 pictures, and they are all associated with film noir in one way or another, while they are from the genres of Westerns, science-fiction, drama, detective story, comedy or horror movie. […]
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor (2015)
This very musical biography is the classical blueprint for a music biopic or future TV series, although this has not yet been realized by the film industry. Mazor’s extensive research project on music marketer and Okeh Records producer Ralph Peer is the exciting story of a young clerk working both in shipping and in his […]