Publisher description

Pizzato focuses on the staging of Self and Other as phantom characters inside the brain (in the 'mind's eye', as Hamlet says). He explores the brain's anatomical evolution from animal drives to human consciousness to divine aspirations, through distinctive cultural expressions in stage and screen technologies.

This textbook provides a global, chronological mapping of significant areas of theatre, sketched from its deepest history in the evolution of our brain's 'inner theatre' to ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern developments. It considers prehistoric cave art and built temples, African trance dances, ancient Egyptian and Middle-Eastern ritual dramas, Greek and Roman theatres, Asian dance-dramas and puppetry, medieval European performances, global indigenous rituals, early modern to postmodern Euro-American developments, worldwide postcolonial theatres, and the hyper-theatricality of today's mass and social media. Timelines and numbered paragraphs form an overall outline with distilled details of what students can learn, encouraging further explorations online and in the library. Questions suggest how students might reflect on present parallels, making their own maps of global theatre histories, regarding geo-political theatrics in the media, our performances in everyday life, and the theatres inside our brains.

In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies' phantoms. Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror (The Haunting, 1963), romance (Portrait of Jennie, 1948), comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.

A new take on our bio-cultural evolution explores how the "inner theatre" of the brain and its "animal-human stages" are reflected in and shaped by the mirror of cinema. • Creates a new model exploring the "inner theater" of human reality perceptions, fantasies, memories, and dreams in relation to art, ritual, everyday actions, and cultural events • Employs neuroscience research, evolutionary theory, and various performance paradigms, drawing on what is known about the animal ancestry and neural circuitry of the human brain to probe the framework of our bio-cultural evolution • Explains how the "emotion pictures" found in prehistoric caves represent turning points in human awareness • Examines a wide range of beast-people films ranging from the 1931 Dracula to the Twilight series (2008–2012) and the 2014 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, showing how viewers connect to the films and the potential positive and negative impacts they have

There is a complex relationship between performance, youth, and the shifting material circumstances (social, cultural, economic, ideological, and political) under which theatre for children and youth is generated and perceived. This book explores different aspect of theatre for young audiences using examples from theatrical events globally.

Simon Brett is back with one of his best theater-inspired detective novels in Star Trap. Though the target for murder is an odious theater and television star, actor/detective Charles Paris finds that the main character is behind the strange happenings backstage, including the rehearsal pianist being shot in the hand, and an actor falling and breaking his leg. Why does the star want to sabotage his show? The answer is one much more human than it first appears.

How do twentieth-century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? This volume grapples with this paradox, examining literary texts and performance media that include Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Anne Sexton's poetry, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise, and HBO's Six Feet Under.

B> The seventh edition of A Short History of the Movies continues the tradition that has made it one of the most popular books ever in film history. This volume offers students a panoramic overview of the worldwide development of film, from the early Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin shorts, through the studio heyday of the 1930s and 1940s and the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, to the pictures and their technology appearing in the multiplexes of today. This new edition, which has been revised and rewritten to reflect current scholarship and recent industry developments, and new films and filmmakers, represents an accurate, scrupulous updating of a classic. Features an emphasis on key historical and aesthetic principles provides solid scholarship in an accessible, intelligent, and readable format. Inlcudes almost 500 color and black-and-white photographs including frame enlargements and production stills. Includes evaluations of great works from such directors as Griffith, Ford, Scorsese, and Hitchcock illuminates conflicts and controversies in many areas of filmmaking. Also features extensive treatment of international film enables comparison and contrast between American films and those of other countries, particularly Germany, Russia, France, Italy, and China. For anyone interested in the history of film.