Luckily, there are a great number of famous noir films, and many good actors that left their mark on the whole genre. Nevertheless, author White approaches those films mainly as plain detective movies and drama, very much the way they were labeled when they came out. In his opinion there are certain features that can […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)
In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond (2...
The mere mention of the word ”minstrelsy“ brings back numerous unpleasant, racist, stereotypical and humiliating issues of the past. It is interesting to find out then, that many of the most popular cartoon characters were actually modeled on or even continued the line of minstrelsy characters: the most popular would be Walt Disney’s (early) Mickey […]
Bending Steel. Modernity and the American Superhero by Aldo J. Regalado (2015)
By examining interviews, trade magazines and even testimonies, letters, memoirs and other personal data author Regalado seeks direct impact of the superheroes on the real lives of actual people. Or rather, he aims to find out just how “the big forces of American modernity shaped the lives of Americans on an individual level and how […]
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman (2014)
When technology and ethnographic curiosity meet, the result often is a huge body of data – mostly consisting of recordings and data stored in all varieties of the current technical standards. In five chapters, each one quite enthralling, Brian Hochman elaborates on various researchers, field studies and vanishing cultures, with subjects as Plains Indian sign […]
Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain by Melanie Keene (2015)
Mythical characters from folklore and fairy tales saw a revival unprecedented in 19th-century England. Fairies, and their realms, for many authors served as prominent means to comment on contemporary society and fairy tales were used as parables. Taking into consideration the many modern inventions such as steam engines, machines and electricity that transformed everyday life, […]
Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ by The Subcultures Network (2015)
The seven concise chapters of the book at hand actually represent a special issue of Contemporary British History (26.3) from 2012. They were conceived as the results of a symposium devoted to examining youth-associated cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that transformed Britain in the aftermath of WWII. The post-war consensus (1945-1979), […]
Lee, Myself & I: Inside The Very Special World Of Lee Hazlewood by Wyndham Wallace (2015)
In case you are looking for a straightforward biography of a pop music giant, you may not immediately like Lee, Myself and I. One reason may be the large room the „Myself“ and the „I“ take up on those pages; and they refer to biographer Wallace, not to Lee Hazlewood. However, if one considers the […]
The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range 1943-1962 by David Meuel (2015)
By now, there are many excellent books on film noir, even on specific themes, locations, eras and countries. However, at least one major theme (or sub genre) has escaped the authors so far. The noir experience in America’s probably oldest and unique (usually most optimistic in outlook) movie tradition, the western, has not yet been […]