Brian De Palma is perhaps best known as the director behind the gangster classic Scarface. Yet as ingrained as Scarface is in American popular culture, it is but one of a sizeable number of controversial films—many of which are consistently misread or ignored—directed by De Palma over his more than four-decade career. In Un-American Psycho, Chris Dumas places De Palma's body of work i…
A new approach to a director whose contribution to cinema is often overshadowed his personal life, Polanski and Perception focuses on Roman Polanski's interest in the nature of perception and how this is manifested in his films. The incorporation of cognitive research into film theory is becoming increasingly widespread, with novel cinematic technologies and recent developments in digital pro…
A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultu…
For all their ubiquity, life and death have not been fully explored as integral themes in many forms of contemporary Chinese art. Life and Death addresses that lacuna. Exploring the strategies employed by a variety of Chinese artists who engage with these timeless concerns, Silvia Fok opens a new line of inquiry about contemporary art in a rapidly changing environment.  Fok focuses, in partic…
Artist, Researcher, Teacher explores the relationship of three professional identities that often intersect in the lives of art practitioners, educators, and students. Challenging conventional wisdom about specialization and professional identity, Alan Thornton shows that many individuals have complex, varied, and evolving relationships with visual art—relationships that do not fit into any …
Despite the increasing popularity of academic filmmaking programs in the United States, some of contemporary America's most exciting film directors have emerged from the theater world.  Directors: From Stage to Screen and Back Again features a series of interviews with directors who did just that, transitioning from work on stage productions to work in television and on full-length features. Â…
This second Volume of Computers and Typography reflects new developments in this rapidlychanging field. This book complements without in any way supplanting Volume1 through an extensive elaboration of issues that were considered only briefly the first Volume. Its aim is to alert those involved in computer interface design that the skills of layout, spacing and usage of type are equally vital in…
We are in the middle of a process of complex cultural transformation, but to what extent is this matched by the transformation in the way we see ourselves? This book covers a wide-ranging discussion on the interaction between Art, Science and Technology, and goes on to challenge assumptions about 'reality'. Loosely themed around four key elements of Mind, Body, Art and Values, the editor leads …
Throughout the centuries Aristotle's Poetics remained something of a mystery. What was the great philosopher trying to say about the nature of drama and storytelling? What did he mean by pity, fear and catharsis?In this book, Ari Hiltunen explains the mystery of the 'proper pleasure', which, according to Aristotle, is the goal of drama and can be brought about by using certain storytelling stra…