Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film

Since the fall of Communism, Russians have struggled to reconcile their social traditions with a flood of Western cultural imports. Contemporary Russian cinema has latched on to the resulting confusion and ambivalence, mining societal upheaval for revolutionary cinematic topics. Yana Hashamova explores this largely uncharted territory in Pride and Panic.

A groundbreaking study, Pride and Panic probes cinematic representations of the unsettled Russian national consciousness, a complex cocktail of fear, anger, and anxious uncertainty.

Martial Arts (Roleplaying Game)

Inscrutable masters from hidden temples. Special Forces soldiers. Swashbuckling pirates. Bare-chested brawlers.
GURPS Martial Arts brings fighting styles from throughout history to Fourth Edition. From popular Asian bare-handed techniques to European combat arts to fantastic non-human training, this book balances realistic historical schools with cinematic feats from Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Hollywood. Recreate the greatest fighters in the world, or create a style to fit a new campaign, Martial Arts has the techniques and guidelines you need. 

Why exactly was Citizen Kane such a revolutionary film? What are the hallmarks of Italian Neorealism? How do directors sew together a smooth scene from five or six different shots? Fabe answers these questions and more in this primer on the narrative structure of filmmaking, which analyzes 14 benchmark movies from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to Mike Figgis’s Timecode. (Since each film was selected to represent a significant cinematic movement—expressionism, postmodernism, French New Wave, etc.—the book also doubles as a concise history of film’s most innovative storytellers.)

Ably introduced by Caughie and building on a broad range of theoretical and cultural studie work by Diane Gillepsie, Brenda Silver, Gillian Beer, and others, the ten essays first pair Woolf and Walter Benjamin as beleaguered intellectuals in the marketplace (p.1) and analysts of modern machine-age European culture. They then explore Woolfs conceptual and artistic-responses to sound, film, cinematic, telescopic, automotive, and photographic technologies, consider Woolf as subject and object of mass-market designs, and speculate on possible e-text metamorphoses of Woolf and reading.

Is theater really dead? Does the theater, as its champions insist, really provide a more intimate experience than film? If so, how have changes in cinematic techniques and technologies altered the relationship between stage and film? What are the inherent limitations of representing three-dimensional spaces in a two-dimensional one, and vice versa?American Drama in the Age of Film examines the strengths and weaknesses of both the dramatic and cinematic arts to confront the standard arguments in the film-versus-theater debate.