Movement in Stills


Book Description

I Can Never Say I Was Born To Dance, She Says With A Subtle Hint Of Pride. Yet For This Very Reason, Kumudini Lakhia Went On To Become One Of The Great Modern Innovators Of North Indian Classical Dance. Though She Studied Kathak Throughout Her Life, Her




Movement in Stills


Book Description

I can never say I was born to dance, she says with a subtle hint of pride. Yet for this very reason, Kumudini Lakhia went on to become one of the great modern innovators of North Indian classical dance. Though she studied Kathak throughout her life, her path to professional dance was shaped more by circumstance than tradition. Her work, criticised thirty years ago as sacrilege, is now considered classic, and continues to inspire novel approaches to the dance form. Told through the refracted lens of writer and dance student, Movement in Stills offers a unique blend of biography and personal impression.




Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures


Book Description

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and Art + Practice, on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles from September 18, 2021 through February 19, 2022.A foundational figure in dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup (1981), Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography; the dance was designated an American Masterpiece by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Samada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.




Film: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Film is considered to be the dominant art form of the twentieth century. It can be considered many other things; a record of events, a modern mythology, a career, an industry, an art, a hobby, and much else. Michael Wood explores the history of film, its venture into the digital age, and its role and impact on modern society.




Lois Greenfield


Book Description

Over the past 40 years, Lois Greenfield has earned a reputation as one of the world's most accomplished and respected photographers of human motion. Her images of dancers in mid-flight or mid-movement are astonishingly beautiful and capture the magic of dance in a unique way. In the 17 years since her last book was published, Greenfield has moved into digital colour photography, and some 150 of these breathtaking images are reproduced in Moving Still. They reflect her collaboration with leading contemporary dancers, many of whom perform with international touring companies. The book reunites Greenfield with the distinguished writer and curator William A. Ewing, her enduring champion across the decades and author of her two previous monographs, who provides an illuminating introduction as well as an interview with the photographer about her recent work. The extended captions by Greenfield provide fascinating insights into the creative process. Divided into four picture sections, the free-flowing, rhythmic design of the book does justice to the majestic beauty of Greenfield's photographs.







The Shape of Motion


Book Description

"Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema's impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen-the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might we learn about the moving image when we begin to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema's "motion forms:" structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks longstanding assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces our natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema's motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them"




The Stills


Book Description

With compassion and insight, Jess Montgomery weaves a gripping mystery and portrait of community in The Stills, the powerful third novel in the Kinship series. Ohio, 1927: Moonshining is a way of life in rural Bronwyn County, and even the otherwise upstanding Sheriff Lily Ross has been known to turn a blind eye when it comes to stills in the area. But when thirteen-year-old Zebediah Harkins almost dies after drinking tainted moonshine, Lily knows that someone has gone too far, and—with the help of organizer and moonshiner Marvena Whitcomb—is determined to find out who. But then, Lily’s nemesis, the businessman George Vogel, reappears in town with his new wife, Fiona. Along with them is also her former brother-in-law Luther Ross, now an agent for the newly formed Bureau of Prohibition. To Lily, it seems too much of a coincidence that they should arrive now. As fall turns to winter, a blizzard closes in. Lily starts to peel back the layers of deception shrouding the town of Kinship, but soon she discovers that many around her seem to be betraying those they hold dear—and that Fiona too may have an agenda of her own.




Stephen Stills: Change Partners


Book Description

Stephen Stills is one of the last remaining music legends from the rock era without a biography. During his six-decade career, he has played with all the greats. His career sky-rocketed when Crosby, Stills & Nash played only their second gig together at Woodstock in 1969. With the addition of Neil Young, the band would go on to play the first rock stadium tour in 1974. Stephen Stills is the only person to have been inducted twice in one night into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.




Roger Deakins


Book Description

Portraits and landscapes from the cinematographer famed for his work with Sam Mendes and the Coen brothers This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. It includes previously unpublished black-and-white photographs spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. After graduating from college Deakins spent a year photographing life in rural North Devon, in Southwest England, on a commission for the Beaford Arts Centre; these images are gathered here for the first time and attest to a keenly ironic English sensibility, while also documenting a vanished postwar Britain. A second suite of images expresses Deakins' love of the seaside. Traveling for his cinematic work has allowed Deakins to photograph landscapes all over the world; in this third group of images, that same irony remains evident.