Coming Attractions

Movie trailers—those previews of coming attractions before the start of a feature film—are routinely praised and reviled by moviegoers and film critics alike: "They give away too much of the movie." "They're better than the films." "They only show the spectacular parts." "They lie." "They're the best part of going to the movies." But whether you love them or hate them, trailers always serve their purpose of offering free samples of a film to influence moviegoing decision-making. Indeed, with their inclusion on videotapes, DVDs, and on the Internet, trailers are more widely seen and influential now than at any time in their history. Starting from the premise that movie trailers can be considered a film genre, this pioneering book explores the genre's conventions and offers a primer for reading the rhetoric of movie trailers. Lisa Kernan identifies three principal rhetorical strategies that structure trailers: appeals to audience interest in film genres, stories, and/or stars. She also analyzes the trailers for twenty-seven popular Hollywood films from the classical, transitional, and contemporary eras, exploring what the rhetorical appeals within these trailers reveal about Hollywood's changing conceptions of the moviegoing audience. Kernan argues that movie trailers constitute a long-standing hybrid of advertising and cinema and, as such, are precursors to today's heavily commercialized cultural forms in which art and marketing become increasingly indistinguishable.

Looks at the future of Hollywood in the wake of rapid technological innovation, examining the potential opportunities, for both the entertainment and high-tech industries, of new digital and Web formats in terms of the creation, distribution, and consumption of entertainment products, and arguing that the two industries must work together if they are both to succeed.

Are you serious? And when Katie asks the question, will she believe the answer? Katie Weldon has only one more semester before she becomes a college graduate. The future is on her doorstep, and she’s eager for answers to what’s next. Rick is at the top of her list. She’s ready for the future of their relationship to be finalized—or so she thinks. Is she really ready to make a serious commitment? Could it be that God is asking her the same question about her relationship with him? The third book in the Katie Weldon Series reunites the Christy Miller gang as Katie learns about relationships, change, and moving on in life.

It's been three years since Helen Townsend has made love to a woman, three years that she's buried herself in work as a successful columnist for one of New York's top newspapers. At last, she admits she's tired of loneliness, of being closeted, and her column reflects her restlessness. Enter Princess Charming in the shapely form of gifted concert pianist Cory Chamberlain, and Helen embraces love once again. But when notables from Hollywood to Broadway give Helen their approval to perform in a star-studded, all lesbian and gay show, will Helen and Cory find happiness when one yearns to break out of the closet and breathe free, while the other fears that will destroy her career?

Moving image culture seems to privilege the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet perfect, in-focus visibility does not come 'naturally' to the moving image, and if there is one visual effect the eye of the camera can record better than the human eye it is blur. Looking beyond popular media to works of experimental cinema and video art, this groundbreaking collection addresses the aesthetics and politics of moving images in states of decay, distortion, indistinctness and fragmentation. A range of international scholars examines what is at stake in these images' sometimes radical foregrounding of materiality and mediation, or of evanescence and spectrality, as well as their challenging of the dominant position accorded to 'legible' images. How have artists and filmmakers rendered the 'indefinite' image, and what questions does it pose? With a range of approaches, from aesthetics to phenomenology to production studies, the authors in this volume investigate techniques, themes and concepts that emerge from this wilful excavation of the moving image's material base.

The journal of Daisy Fay Harper from 1952, when she is eleven years old, through the next six years and her crowning as Miss Mississippi.