Product Description: This is the first book to survey the entire career of Joris Ivens, a prolific documentary filmmaker who worked on every continent over the course of seven decades. More than a biography of a leftist committed to changing the world through film, The Conscience of Cinema is also a microcosmic history of the documentary and its form, culture, and place within twentieth-century world cinema...read more

Product Description: Whether addressing HIV/AIDS, the policing of bathroom sex, censorship, or anti-globalization movements, John Greyson has imbued his work with cutting humour, eroticism, and postmodern aesthetics. Mashing up high art, opera, community activism, and pop culture, Greyson challenges his audience to consider new ways that images can intervene in both political and public spheres...read more

Product Description: The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh’s essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s and Joris Ivens’s manifestos of “committed” documentary from the 19 0s, reflects the book’s theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists...read more

Product Description: Gay male representation of sexuality has a long history of varied visibility and acceptance, but the 100 or so years of queer life before Stonewall were a period of unprecedented self-identification as well as renewed pressure to hide and suppress the erotic imagery of gay men in western culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

For more than twenty years, film critic, teacher, activist, and fan Thomas Waugh has been writing about queer movies. As a member of the Jump Cut collective and contributor to the Toronto-based gay newspaper the Body Politic, he emerged in the late 1970s as a pioneer in gay film theory and criticism, and over the next two decades solidified his reputation as one of the most important and influential gay film critics. The Fruit Machine—a collection of Waugh’s reviews and articles originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies—charts the emergence and maturation of Waugh’s critical sensibilities while lending an important historical perspective to the growth of film theory and criticism as well as queer moviemaking. In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence. (view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: This anthology of 25 articles is both historical and cross- cultural, covering the pioneering period of the twenties and thirties and the dynamic growth of committed documentary since the sixties; recent feminist initiatives in North America and Britain; committed documentary in the Third World over the last 25 years; the use of film within the American 'New Left;' and the particular problematic of radical film distribution...read more