Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen

Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen PDF Author: Susan Delson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058554
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In the 1940s, folks at bars and restaurants would gather around a Panoram movie machine to watch three-minute films called Soundies, precursors to today's music videos. This history was all but forgotten until the digital era brought Soundies to phones and computer screens—including a YouTube clip starring a 102-year-old Harlem dancer watching her younger self perform in Soundies. In Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time, Susan Delson takes a deeper look at these fascinating films by focusing on the role of Black performers in this little-known genre. She highlights the women performers, like Dorothy Dandridge, who helped shape Soundies, while offering an intimate look at icons of the age, such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. Using previously unknown archival materials—including letters, corporate memos, and courtroom testimony—to trace the precarious path of Soundies, Delson presents an incisive pop-culture snapshot of race relations during and just after World War II. Perfect for readers interested in film, American history, the World War II era, and Black entertainment history, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen and its companion video website (susandelson.com) bring the important contributions of these Black artists into the spotlight once again.

Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen

Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen PDF Author: Susan Delson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058554
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1940s, folks at bars and restaurants would gather around a Panoram movie machine to watch three-minute films called Soundies, precursors to today's music videos. This history was all but forgotten until the digital era brought Soundies to phones and computer screens—including a YouTube clip starring a 102-year-old Harlem dancer watching her younger self perform in Soundies. In Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time, Susan Delson takes a deeper look at these fascinating films by focusing on the role of Black performers in this little-known genre. She highlights the women performers, like Dorothy Dandridge, who helped shape Soundies, while offering an intimate look at icons of the age, such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. Using previously unknown archival materials—including letters, corporate memos, and courtroom testimony—to trace the precarious path of Soundies, Delson presents an incisive pop-culture snapshot of race relations during and just after World War II. Perfect for readers interested in film, American history, the World War II era, and Black entertainment history, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen and its companion video website (susandelson.com) bring the important contributions of these Black artists into the spotlight once again.

Dudley Murphy, Hollywood Wild Card

Dudley Murphy, Hollywood Wild Card PDF Author: Susan Delson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816646548
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Follows the life of Hollywood's first independent filmmaker known for "The Emperor Jones" and "Ballet mâecanique."

The Soundies

The Soundies PDF Author: Mark Cantor
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476646422
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 2077

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Book Description
The 1940s saw a brief audacious experiment in mass entertainment: a jukebox with a screen. Patrons could insert a dime, then listen to and watch such popular entertainers as Nat "King" Cole, Gene Krupa, Cab Calloway or Les Paul. A number of companies offered these tuneful delights, but the most successful was the Mills Novelty Company and its three-minute musical shorts called Soundies. This book is a complete filmography of 1,880 Soundies: the musicians heard and seen on screen, recording and filming dates, arrangers, soloists, dancers, entertainment trade reviews and more. Additional filmographies cover more than 80 subjects produced by other companies. There are 125 photos taken on film sets, along with advertising images and production documents. More than 75 interviews narrate the firsthand experiences and recollections of Soundies directors and participants. Forty years before MTV, the Soundies were there for those who loved the popular music of the 1940s. This was truly "music for the eyes."

Blackbird

Blackbird PDF Author: Katie Kapurch
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271096292
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei PDF Author: Ai Weiwei
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Animal sculpture
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This title looks at Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's 'Circle of Heads', his twelve large bronze animal heads depicting the ancient Chinese zodiac.

Intersecting Aesthetics

Intersecting Aesthetics PDF Author: Charlene Regester
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496848861
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Contributions by Cynthia Baron, Elizabeth Binggeli, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Priscilla Layne, Eric Pierson, Charlene Regester, Ellen C. Scott, Tanya L. Shields, and Judith E. Smith Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work ultimately explores the effects racial perspectives have on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions. Several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and the adaptations of Black stories in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Using archival material, contributors demonstrate the ways commercial obstacles have led Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate cultural norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. Through uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics reveals themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation. The volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); and the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001). They also explore studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1947), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954) and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995).

Land of a Thousand Balconies

Land of a Thousand Balconies PDF Author: Jack Stevenson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781900486231
Category : B films
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Most books about B-movies are straight-forward genre guides, biographies or encyclopaedias. Not this one. In addition to chapters on film showmen, gimmicks and cult films, Land of a Thousand Balconies documents those incidents and unusual film happenings which author Jack Stevenson has -- over the past fifteen years -- been privy to in his various capacities as show organiser, tour arranger, festival jury member and projectionist-for-hire. Land of a Thousand Balconies also focuses on movie theatres and renegade exhibition spaces, lamenting on the disappearing 'sense of place' that is such an integral part of the movie-going experience. Here the reader is invited to tour a diversity of venues -- from the notorious old grindhouses of San Francisco, the home-made store-front cinemas of Seattle and NY, through to the underground film clubs of Europe. Book jacket.

Women of Vision

Women of Vision PDF Author:
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452904252
Category : Feminist films
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description


Improvising Cinema

Improvising Cinema PDF Author: Gilles Mouëllic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789089645517
Category : Arts in general
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression. Improvising Cinema reflects both on the permanence of attempting improvisation and the relationship between technology and aesthetics. Mouëllic concludes preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the creative act exists only within the brief time span of the performance.

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies PDF Author: David Neumeyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190250593
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies gathers two dozen original essays that chart the history and current state of interdisciplinary scholarship on music in audiovisual media, focusing on four areas: history, genre and medium, analysis and criticism, and interpretation.