Conjuring Science

Conjuring Science PDF Author: Sofie Lachapelle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113749297X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Conjuring Science explores the history of magic shows and scientific entertainment. It follows the frictions and connections of magic and science as they occurred in the world of popular entertainment in France from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It situates conjurers within the broader culture of science and argues that stage magic formed an important popular conduit for science and scientific enthusiasm during this period. From the scientific recreations of the fairs to the grand illusions of the theatre stage and the development of early cinema, conjurers used and were inspired by scientific and technological innovations to create illusions, provoke a sense of wonder, and often even instruct their audience. In their hands, science took on many meanings and served different purposes: it was a set of pleasant facts and recreational demonstrations upon which to draw; it was the knowledge presented in various scientific lectures accompanied by optical projections at magic shows; it was the techniques necessary to create illusions and effects on stage and later on at the cinema; and it was a way to separate conjuring from the deceit of mediums, mystical showmen and quacks in order to gain a better standing within an increasingly scientifically-minded society.

Conjuring Science

Conjuring Science PDF Author: Sofie Lachapelle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113749297X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conjuring Science explores the history of magic shows and scientific entertainment. It follows the frictions and connections of magic and science as they occurred in the world of popular entertainment in France from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It situates conjurers within the broader culture of science and argues that stage magic formed an important popular conduit for science and scientific enthusiasm during this period. From the scientific recreations of the fairs to the grand illusions of the theatre stage and the development of early cinema, conjurers used and were inspired by scientific and technological innovations to create illusions, provoke a sense of wonder, and often even instruct their audience. In their hands, science took on many meanings and served different purposes: it was a set of pleasant facts and recreational demonstrations upon which to draw; it was the knowledge presented in various scientific lectures accompanied by optical projections at magic shows; it was the techniques necessary to create illusions and effects on stage and later on at the cinema; and it was a way to separate conjuring from the deceit of mediums, mystical showmen and quacks in order to gain a better standing within an increasingly scientifically-minded society.

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada PDF Author: Theresa Papanikolas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351576585
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada sheds new light on Paris Dada's role in developing the anarchist and individualist philosophies that helped shape the cultural dialogue in France following the First World War. Drawing on such surviving documentation as correspondence, criticism, periodicals, pamphlets, and manifestoes, this book argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Dada was driven by a vision of social change through radical cultural upheaval. The first book-length study to interrogate the Paris Dadaists' complex and often contested position in the postwar groundswell of anarcho-individualism, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada offers an unprecedented analysis of Paris Dada literature and art in relation to anarchism, and also revives a variety of little known anarcho-individualist texts and periodicals. In doing so, it reveals the general ideological diversity of the postwar French avant-garde and identifies its anarchist concerns; in addition, it challenges the accepted paradigm that postwar cultural politics were monolithically nationalist. By positioning Paris Dada in its anarchist context, this volume addresses a long-ignored lacuna in Dada scholarship and, more broadly, takes its place alongside the numerous studies that over the past two decades have problematized the politics of modern art, literature, and culture.

Disruptive Acts

Disruptive Acts PDF Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636075X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

The Paris Zone

The Paris Zone PDF Author: James Cannon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317021738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Since the mid-1970s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840s to the 1940s. This unusual territory, although marginal in a social and geographical sense, came to occupy a central place in Parisian culture. Previous studies have focused on its urban and social history, or on particular ways in which it was represented during particular periods. By bringing together and analysing a wider range of sources from the duration of the zone’s existence, this study offers a rich and nuanced account of how the area was perceived and used by successive generations of Parisian novelists (including Zola and Flaubert), poets, songwriters, artists, photographers, film-makers, politicians and town-planners. More generally, it aims to raise awareness of a neglected aspect of Parisian cultural history while pointing to links between current and past perceptions of the city’s periphery.

Cinéma&Cie 31

Cinéma&Cie 31 PDF Author: AA: VV:
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869772888
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Pop music meets the media... This issue is dedicated to a social and cultural phenomenon that we could call the ‘mediatization of pop music’. With a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s, it is our contention that these two decades significantly shaped our current mediatized culture both in its form and content. Since then, instead of political or confessional organisations, it was popular media and music that offered the contact point between public and private spheres, between the personal and the political, and this shift should be reconsidered as a focal trope in modern culture. We hope to widen the notion of mediatization by highlighting a range of historical processes that have had phenomenological after-effects: the experiential prototypes that were developed during this pivotal period later became persistent paradigms, and paved the way for the mediatized world we still live in.

New Silent Cinema

New Silent Cinema PDF Author: Katherine Groo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317819446
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.

Animal Life and the Moving Image

Animal Life and the Moving Image PDF Author: Michael Lawrence
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838714383
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked. Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporary user-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.

Artists and the Avant-garde Theater in Paris, 1887-1900

Artists and the Avant-garde Theater in Paris, 1887-1900 PDF Author: Patricia Eckert Boyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The publication consists of chapters on the three most important avant-garde theaters in Paris at that time: the Théâtre libre, the Théâtre d'art and the Théâtre de l'oeuvre. It also includes a checklist of the Atlas Collection at the National Gallery of Art.

April in Paris

April in Paris PDF Author: Irena Makaryk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487518595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Attracting over fifteen million visitors, the 1925 Paris Expo had an ambitious goal to create a new modernist style which would reflect the great scientific, industrial, and technological advances that produced a new spirit known as "modern." In April in Paris, author Irena R. Makaryk explores the theatre arts’ vital cultural and political impact at this celebrated international exhibition. Drawing extensively from unexplored archival documents from France, Austria, and North America, April in Paris is the first major study to focus on theatre arts at the 1925 Paris Expo and the audacious Soviet contributions to this fair. Turning a spotlight on the uses and representations of theatricalized spaces, Makaryk analyses their political challenge at a time when relations between the West and the USSR were rife with tension. Copiously illustrated with beautiful colour and black and white illustrations, this book elucidates the complex role of the international fair as a catalyst for spirited cultural debate and for aesthetic change.

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg PDF Author: Doug Fullington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190944501
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.