Harvard University Press - PERFORMING ARTS

Born in Flames

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Howard Hampton
Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and from the world at large. Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
Paperback April 2008

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Dudley Andrew
Steven Ungar
Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
Paperback March 2008

Making Dead Birds

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Robert Gardner
This detailed and candid account of the process of making Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is more than the chronicle of a single work. Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. This book not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.
Paperback March 2008

The Impulse to Preserve

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Robert Gardner
Foreword by Charles Simic
In The Impulse to Preserve, filmmaker Robert Gardner reflects on a life spent observing, recording, and illuminating the human condition in some of the most remote regions of the world. Originally published in 2006, this lavishly illustrated book is now distributed by the Peabody Museum Press.
Hardcover March 2008

The Virtual Life of Film

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

D. N. Rodowick
As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.
Hardcover / Paperback October 2007