Body Capital And Screens

Body, Capital and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth century in Europe and the U.S. that informed and educated people about life and health as well as practices improving them. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate the relationships between film/television, private and public actors of the health sector and economic developments. The book explores the performative and interactive power of these visual media on individual health understandings, perceptions and practices. Body, Capital and Screens aims to better understand how bodily health has evolved as a form of capital throughout the century.

Since 1978, the changes brought on by China's reforms have had an inevitable and significant impact on the development of literature, the arts, and the whole spectrum of culture. As well, contemporary Chinese films have reflected this transition towards commercialization and internationalization, which has included constant changes in cultural policies and the economic conditions for film production. The articles in this collection argue that contemporary Chinese films display a profound shift in identity construction. They explore Chinese identities related to class, nation, and gender, and they highlight aspects of individual identity. All of these are marked by contradiction, tension, multiple versions, changes over time, and other evidence of contingency and construction. The book draws attention to uncertain and unpredictable qualities of "Chineseness" which are often torn between past and present, but are also increasingly comprised of local, national, and global elements. (Series: Chinese History and Society / Berliner China-Hefte - Vol. 40)

In City of Screens Jasmine Nadua Trice examines the politics of cinema circulation in early-2000s Manila. She traces Manila's cinema landscape by focusing on the primary locations of film exhibition and distribution: the pirated DVD district, mall multiplexes, art-house cinemas, the university film institute, and state-sponsored cinematheques. In the wake of digital media piracy and the decline of the local commercial film industry, the rising independent cinema movement has been a site of contestation between filmmakers and the state, each constructing different notions of a prospective, national public film audience. Discourses around audiences become more salient given that films by independent Philippine filmmakers are seldom screened to domestic audiences, despite their international success. City of Screens provides a deeper understanding of the debates about the competing roles of the film industry, the public, and the state in national culture in the Philippines and beyond.

The mixed-race Hawaiian athlete George Freeth brought surfing to Venice, California, in 1907. Over the next twelve years, Freeth taught Southern Californians to surf and swim while creating a modern lifeguard service that transformed the beach into a destination for fun, leisure, and excitement. Patrick Moser places Freeth’s inspiring life story against the rise of the Southern California beach culture he helped shape and define. Freeth made headlines with his rescue of seven fishermen, an act of heroism that highlighted his innovative lifeguarding techniques. But he also founded California's first surf club and coached both male and female athletes, including Olympic swimming champion and “father of modern surfing” Duke Kahanamoku. Often in financial straits, Freeth persevered as a teacher and lifeguarding pioneer--building a legacy that endured long after his death during the 1919 influenza pandemic. A compelling merger of biography and sports history, Surf and Rescue brings to light the forgotten figure whose novel way of seeing the beach sparked the imaginations of people around the world.

The burgeoning scholarship on Western health films stands in stark contrast to the vacuum in the historical conceptualization of Eastern European films. This book develops a nonlinear historical model that revises their unique role in the inception of national cinematography and establishing supranational health security. Readers witness the revelation of an unknown history concerning how the health films produced in Eastern European countries not only adopted Western patterns of propaganda but actively participated in its formation, especially with regard to those considered “others”: Women and the populations of the periphery. The authors elaborate on the long “echo” of the discursive practices introduced by health films within public health propaganda, as well as the attempts to negate and deconstruct such practices by rebellious filmmakers. A wide range of methods, including the analysis of the sociological biographies of filmmakers, the historical reconstruction of public campaigns against diseases and an investigation into the production of health films, contextualizes these films along a multifaceted continuum stretching between the adaptation of global patterns and the cultivation of national authenticities. The book is aimed at those who study the history of film, the history of public health, Central and Eastern European countries and global history.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through thorough engagement with these approaches, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through bodies and choreographies in moving media. Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in making cultural meanings? Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer powerful new scholarship on dance in the popular screen.

The two-speed global economy continues to favor emerging Asian markets. After an early year correction, the region's markets are poised to gain on sound fundamentals. The Asia Capital Markets Monitor reviews emerging Asia's stock, bond, and currency markets and assesses their outlook, risks, and policy implications. This issue includes a special section on financial integration and capital flow volatility in emerging Asia: issues and policies.

An up-to-date survey of Shakespeare's King Lear on screen and the aesthetic, social and political issues raised by screen versions.