San Antonio College Library

In Frances Guerin's history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light - electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights - and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin's...

"The brilliant philosopher Slavoj Zizek with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, now using their inventive interpretation of moving pictures to examine ideology. The collective fantasies that shape our beliefs and practices."

"In The Entertainment Economy, Michael J. Wolf demonstrates that media and entertainment have moved beyond culture to become the driving wheel of the global economy. From New York to New Delhi, from London to Lagos, from Singapore to Seattle, every business is locked in the same battle for consumer attention that movie producers and television programmers deal with on a daily basis. Consumer businesses, just like entertainment businesses, have to...

"The classical Hollywood films that were released between the 1930s and 1960s were some of the most famous products of global trade, crisscrossing borders and rising to international dominance. In analyzing a series of Hollywood films that illustrate moments of nuanced transnational engagement with the "foreign," Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood enriches our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema...

Corrigan argues that in the past 25 years the increased conglomerization of film production/distribution companies and the rise of VCR, satellite, and cable television technologies have altered the way films are made and how we view them. The result is a growing internationalization of national cinema cultures and an increasing fragmentation of the audience. Video has reduced the movie to private and domestic performance. At the same time, audiences...

Projections of War reveals how and why Hollywood marshaled its artistic resources on behalf of the war and interprets the cultural meanings and enduring legacies of the motion picture record of the war years.

"In Polio and Its Aftermath Marc Shell, who himself had polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He draws a detailed yet comprehensive picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease that affects every facet of human existence."--Jacket.

This interdisciplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. In Rousing the Nation, Laura Browder explores the fiction, drama, and film produced during the decade by socially conscious intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American art. Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos, arguing that their work successfully...