Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Bicycle Thief

Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later.As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent cris...

What inspires a person to create? How does an artist see the world? What happens during a "eureka moment?" How does an artist find self-discipline? The Artist's Mentor is for those of us who want to create art but do not know how to begin. Drawing on interviews and autobiographical writings of more than 100 famous painters, photographers, sculptors, and film and video artists, Jackman gets to the heart of what makes art. Here, Michelangelo Brungardt, Frida Kahlo, Jean Renoir, Andy...

According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of "forging" the Mona Lisa, questioning the entire concept of originality. Forged explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects thei...

Few people have read as widely in the field of Canadiana as has John Robert Colombo. The curiosity of this Toronto writer, editor, and anthologist knows few if any bounds when it comes to the lore, literature, history, culture, and character of Canada. He has an inquiring mind and he seems able to find national and even international twists to subjects of interest or importance.Fascinating Canada, his latest book, is the product of over half a century of research, reading,...

The Books That Shaped Art History reassesses the impact of some of the most important texts of art history published during the twentieth century. Each of the sixteen incisive chapters focuses on a single title and is written by a leading art historian, curator or one of the promising scholars of todays generation. In bringing these cross-generational contributions together, this book provides a varied and invaluable overview of the history of art, told through its seminal texts. The sixte...

Will was pretty much the perfect role model.' - Beth Ditto, The Gossip In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes when local artist, DJ, activist, impresario, promoter, party-thrower, café operator, community-builder and lover Will Munro died of brain cancer at the unfathomably young age of 35. Famed for his subversive, irreverent visual art, which co-opted rock 'n' roll imagery and raunchy gay iconography, and his legendary Vazaleen dance parties, wh...

A lively and authoritative journey into the world of a cinema masterWith the revolutionary 8 1/2, Federico Fellini put his deepest desires and anxieties before the lens in 1963, permanently impacting the art of cinema in the process. Now, more than forty years later, film critic and Fellini confidant Tullio Kezich has written the work by which all other biographies of the filmmaker are sure to be measured. In this moving and intimately revealing account of ...

In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey consider Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, looking at themes and issues which have recurred throughout its history and continue to be of importance today.Examining themes such as regional identities, political disunity, and the role of the national language, they also cover a wide range of authors and works, including Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Montale, and Calvino. They explore some of the distincti...

Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films.Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the...

Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him ...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...