Experimental cinema, as well as experimental video practices, have always been art forms widely explored by women. Yet, while the field of cinema studies has devoted research - although only recently - to women involved in narrative and commercial films, as directors, actresses, screenwriters and in other roles of cinema industry, the history of women’s experimental audio-visual production is still little explored and would benefit from being retraced and framed in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie is therefore aimed at tracing women’s experimental practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach through the analysis of cases studies from the mid-century up to the present time.

The internationally acclaimed actress Patricia Neal has been a star on stage, film, and television for nearly sixty years. On Broadway she appeared in such lauded productions as Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, for which she won the very first Tony Award, and The Miracle Worker. In Hollywood she starred opposite the likes of Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, and Tyrone Power in some thirty films. Neal anchored such classic pictures as The Day the Earth Stood Still, A Face in the Crowd, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, but she is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Alma Brown in Hud, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1963. But there has been much, much more to Neal's life. She was born Patsy Louise Neal on January 20, 1926, in Packard, Kentucky, though she spent most of her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee. Neal quickly gained attention for her acting abilities in high school, community, and college performances. Her early stage successes were overshadowed by the unexpected death of her father in 1944. Soon after she left New York for Hollywood in 1947, Neal became romantically involved with Gary Cooper, her married co-star in The Fountainhead, an attachment which brought them both a great deal of notoriety in the press and a great deal of heartache in their personal lives. In 1953, Neal married famed children's author Roald Dahl, a match that would bring her five children and thirty years of dramatic ups and downs. In 1961, their son, Theo, was seriously injured in an automobile accident and required multiple neurosurgeries and years of rehabilitation; the following year their daughter, Olivia, died of measles. At the pinnacle of her screen career, Patricia Neal suffered a series of strokes which left her in a coma for twenty-one days. Variety even ran a headline erroneously stating that she had died. At the time, Neal was pregnant with her and Dahl's fifth child, Lucy, who was born healthy a few months later. After a difficult recovery, Neal returned to film acting, earning a second Academy Award nomination for The Subject Was Roses. She appeared in a number of television movie roles in the 1970s and 1980s and won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Dramatic TV Movie in 1971 for her role in The Homecoming. Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life is the first critical biography detailing the actress's impressive film career and remarkable personal life. Author Stephen Michael Shearer has conducted numerous interviews with Neal, her professional colleagues, and her intimate friends and was given access to the actress's personal papers. The result is an honest and comprehensive portrait of an accomplished woman who has lived her life with determination and bravado.

History of Cinema Without Names is an editorial project which gathers research papers presented at Gorizia Conference, Italy. It promotes a new research perspective on the notions of film authorship, style, and genre, with the aim of re-articulating their theoretical definition.

While television has always played a role in recording and curating history, shaping cultural memory, and influencing public sentiment, the changing nature of the medium in the post-network era finds viewers experiencing and participating in this process in new ways. They skim through commercials, live tweet press conferences and award shows, and tune into reality shows to escape reality. This new era, defined by the heightened anxiety and fear ushered in by 9/11, has been documented by our media consumption, production, and reaction. In Small Screen, Big Feels, Melissa Ames asserts that TV has been instrumental in cultivating a shared memory of emotionally charged events unfolding in the United States since September 11, 2001. She analyzes specific shows and genres to illustrate the ways in which cultural fears are embedded into our entertainment in series such as The Walking Dead and Lost or critiqued through programs like The Daily Show. In the final section of the book, Ames provides three audience studies: analyses of live tweets from Shonda Rhimes's drama, How to Get Away with Murder (2010-2020); ABC's reality franchises, The Bachelor (2002-present) and The Bachelorette (2003-present); and political coverage of the 2016 Presidential Debates. Though film has been closely studied through the lens of affect theory, little research has been done to apply the same methods to television. Engaging an impressively wide range of texts, genres, media, and formats, Ames offers a trenchant analysis of how televisual programming in the United States responded to and reinforced a cultural climate grounded in fear and anxiety.

The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the "collective genius" of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances. Includes 65 photographs.

This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims at pushing the discussion on the relationships between avant-garde arts and popular culture far beyond traditional scholarship on the topic, stressing the concept of cultural history more than the specificity of film, media and music histories. By adopting a global perspective, the authors will elaborate useful analytical and theoretical tools to re-assess the “avantpop connection” as a dynamics of two-way exchanges across several artistic and media domains and different geographical and historical contexts.

In 1971, Newsweek heralded The Last Picture Show as "the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane." Indeed, few filmmakers rivaled Peter Bogdanovich's popularity over the next decade. Riding the success of What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich became a bona fide celebrity, making regular appearances in his own movie trailers, occasionally hosting late-night television shows, and publicly advocating for mentors John Ford and Howard Hawks. No director of his era surpassed his ability to capture an audience's imagination.In Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director, journalist and critic Peter Tonguette offers a film-by-film journey through the director's life and work. Beginning with a string of 1970s classics, Tonguette explores well-known films such as Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), and Noises Off (1992), as well as the director's work on stage and television. Drawing on interviews conducted over sixteen years, Tonguette pairs his analysis with an extensive, previously unpublished series of Q&As with Bogdanovich. These exclusive interviews reveal behind-the-scenes details about the director's life, work, and future plans. Part memoir, part biography, this book offers a uniquely intimate portrait of one of Hollywood's most underappreciated directors.

During the early Hollywood sound era, studio director George Cukor produced nearly fifty films in as many years, famously winning theBest Director Oscar at the 1964 Academy Awards for My Fair Lady. His collaborations with so-called difficult actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe unsettled producers even as his ticket sales lined their pockets. Fired from Gone with the Wind for giving Vivien Leigh more screen time than Clark Gable, Cukor quickly earned a doublesided reputation as a “woman’s director. ” While the label celebrated his ability to help actresses deliver their best performances, the epithet also branded the gay director as suitable only for work on female-centered movies such as melodramas and romantic comedies. Desperate for success after a failed drag film nearly ended his career, Cukor swore to work within Hollywood’s constraints. Nevertheless, What Price Hollywood? Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor finds that Cukor continued to explore gender and sexuality on-screen. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical lenses, Elyce Rae Helford examines how Cukor’s award-winning and lesser-known films engage Hollywood masculinity and gender performativity through camp, drag, and mixed genres. Blending biography with critical analysis of more than twenty-five films, What Price Hollywood? tells the story of a once-ina- generation director who produced some of the best films in history.

Suspended between transparency and naturalness on the one hand, and opacity and artificiality on the other, colour is integral to the cinematic apparatus in an ideological as well as technological sense. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims to address colour in the middle decades of the twentieth century - from the 1930s to the 1960s - examining it as an analogue and material quality of still and moving images and, more broadly, of the intermedial cultures in which cinema was embedded. During the mid-century, colour gradually became the norm, and film and media from the era track this transition formally as well as culturally, showing a constant tension within colour between the display of its technical wizardry and its concealment, and between attempts to control it and its own autonomous resistance to regulation.

After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as "Trump Country," decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. These stereotypes ultimately ward off potential investments in the region's educational system and skew how students understand themselves and the place they call home. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, Literacy in the Mountains: Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region. Focusing on five Kentucky newspapers printed between 1885 and 1920, Samantha NeCamp explores the complex ways readers in the mountains negotiated their local and national circumstances through editorials, advertisements, and correspondence. In local newspapers, community action groups announced meeting times and philanthropists raised funds for a network of hitherto unknown private schools. Preserved in print, these stories and others reveal an engaged citizenry specifically concerned with education. Combining literacy and journalism studies, NeCamp demonstrates that Appalachians are not -- and never have been -- an illiterate, isolated people.

The XXV FilmForum Cinematic Medium Across World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibitions conference has been devoted to exploring the interrelations between moving images, the cinematic medium and other arts and media as seen through global exhibiting events, such as the Large International Exhibitions, the Universal Expositions and the world fairs throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The general aim has been to shed light on the meaningful interrelations between moving images, media and arts throughout modernity and postmodernity – which means encompassing the pre-cinema, cinema and post-cinema eras, with a specific focus on Universal Expositions. In fact, the Universal Expositions proved to be a crucial and privileged field of excavation and investigation on the emergence as well as on the fluctuant re-configurations of the moving images within the broad media environment of the modern era.

One of the most innovative films ever made, Sam Peckinpah's motion picture The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the film was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah's tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and impactful Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film -- violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise -- are just as relevant today as when the film first opened.To acknowledge the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together some of the leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director's greatest work. The book's nine essays cover an array of topics. Explored are the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies, the background of the film's production, the European response to the film's view of human nature, and the strong sense of the Texas/Mexico milieu surrounding the film's action.

This comprehensive biography is the first to present Lewis Milestone's remarkable life -- a classic rags-to-riches American narrative -- in full and explores his many acclaimed films from the silent to the sound era. Creator of All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men, the original Ocean's Eleven and Mutiny on the Bounty, Lewis Milestone (1895-1980) was one of the most significant, prolific, and influential directors of our time. A serious artist who believed in film's power not only to entertain, but also to convey messages of social importance, Milestone was known as a man of principle in an industry not always known for an abundance of virtue. Born in Ukraine, Milestone came to America as a tough, resourceful Russian-speaking teenager and learned about film by editing footage from the front as a member of the Signal Corps of the US Army during World War I. During the course of his film career, which spanned more than 40 years, Milestone developed intense personal and professional relationships with such major Hollywood figures as Howard Hughes, Kirk Douglas, Marlene Dietrich, and Marlon Brando. Addressed are Milestone's successes -- he garnered 28 Academy Award nominations -- as well as his challenges. Using newly available archival material, this work also examines Milestone's experience during the Hollywood Blacklist period, when he was one of the first prominent Hollywood figures to fall under suspicion for his alleged Communist sympathies.

To describe women in film history as "invisible" may seem strange as throughout film history, women on the silver screen have given audiences their version of what it is to be a woman. And as film stars they have always been associated with the glamour of the film industry - the living embodiment of female attraction and pleasure. In Making the invisible visible, however, a group of researchers dissect the underrepresentation of women in areas of film culture often overlooked. Despite some significant differences - between countries, between eras, between kinds of job - production teams and film crews have almost always been men. Still today, many film professions are dominated by men. The authors explore womens scope for action in a variety of professional roles, based for example on discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in the film industry. The texts also present fresh perspectives on women actors and the nature of celebrity. Contributors: Elisabet Björklund, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Dagmar Brunow, Associate Professor in Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, Head of the Film and Broadcasting Section at the National Library of Norway. Christopher Natzén, Research coordinator at the National Library of Sweden. Ingrid Ryberg, filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Culture, Aesthetics and Media - University of Gothenburg. Tytti Soila, Professor Emeritus in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.

Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance explores how contemporary Dominican theater and performance artists portray a sense of collective belonging shaped by the transnational connections between the homeland and the diaspora. Through close readings of plays and performances produced in the Dominican Republic and the United States in dialogue with theories of theater and performance, migration theory, and literary, cultural, and historical studies, this book situates theater and performance in debates on Dominican history and culture and the impact of migration on the changing character of national identity from end of the twentieth century to the present. By addressing local audiences of island-based and diasporic Dominicans with stories of characters who are shaped by both places, the theatrical performances analyzed in this book operate as a democratizing force on conceptions of Dominican identity and challenge assumptions about citizenship and national belonging. Likewise, the artists’ bi-national perspectives and work methods challenge the paradigms that have traditionally framed Latin(o) American theater studies.

Updated edition featuring a new foreword by David "Mr. McFeely" Newell.Born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers began his television career in 1951 at NBC. In 1954, he became program director for the newly founded WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, the first community-supported television station in the United States. From 1954 to 1961, Rogers and Josie Carey produced and performed in WQED's The Children's Corner, which became part of the the Saturday morning lineup on NBC in 1955 and 1956.It was after Fred Rogers was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963, with a special charge of serving children and their families through television, that he developed what became the award-winning PBS series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.