Following the first appearance of arcade video games in 1971 and home video game systems in 1972, the commercial video game market was exuberant with fast-paced innovation and profit. New games, gaming systems, and technologies flooded into the market until around 1983, when sales of home game systems dropped, thousands of arcades closed, and major video game makers suffered steep losses or left the market altogether. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, editor Mark J. P. Wolf assembles essays that examine the fleeting golden age of video games, an era sometimes overlooked for older games’ lack of availability or their perceived “primitiveness” when compared to contemporary video games. In twelve chapters, contributors consider much of what was going on during the pre-crash era: arcade games, home game consoles, home computer games, handheld games, and even early online games. The technologies of early video games are investigated, as well as the cultural context of the early period—from aesthetic, economic, industrial, and legal perspectives. Since the video game industry and culture got their start and found their form in this era, these years shaped much of what video games would come to be. This volume of early history, then, not only helps readers to understand the pre-crash era, but also reveals much about the present state of the industry. Before the Crash will give readers a thorough overview of the early days of video games along with a sense of the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement of those times. Students and teachers of media studies will enjoy this compelling volume.

The book investigates what have become of Cameroonian transnational family and friendship ties in the age of the mobile phone and the internet that make people readily available and reachable. Most theoretical literature states that these tools of sociality cement transnational social relationships through instantaneous interaction. To capture the different experiences and impressions on the significance of these media in easing communication for migrants and non-migrants, Tazanu draws on ethnographic accounts based on his fieldwork in Freiburg (Germany) and Buea (Cameroon). He argues that it is mainly the migrants who maintain or are expected to maintain ties with non-migrants back in Cameroon through calls and material support. The main finding of the study is that cell phones and the internet have facilitated discontents, grudges, insults, fights, avoidance, arguments and estrangement of relationships much more than they have contributed to binding friends or families through direct mediation. Underlying these aspects of distanciation are the high expectations and sometimes contradictory motives for instant virtual interaction. Non-migrantsí accounts suggest that direct availability and reachability should lead to uninterrupted transnational interaction and also that the cultural practices of remittances from migrants are easily requested and coordinated. Such motives are generally contrary to migrantsí wishes, willingness or ability to support friends and families in Cameroon. These unexpected outcomes arising from rapid speed of interaction questions the advantages that are often associated with instant sociality across space and time. The finding is a call for the cultural background and life-world experiences of media users to be taken into consideration when theorising the significance of information technology in the debate on media globalisation.

Who was Rita Hayworth? Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, she spent her life subjected to others' definitions of her, no matter how hard she worked to claim her own identity. Although there have been many "revelations" about her life and career, Adrienne McLean's book is the first to show that such disclosures were part of a constructed image from the outset. McLean explores Hayworth's participation in the creation of her star persona, particularly through her work as a dancer-a subject ignored by most film scholars. The passive love goddess, as it turns out, had a unique appeal to other women who, like her, found it extraordinarily difficult to negotiate the competing demands of family, domesticity, and professional work outside the home. Being Rita Hayworth also considers the ways in which the actress has been treated by film scholarship over the years to accomplish its own goals, sometimes at her expense.

Best Years shines light on a critical juncture in American history and the history of American cinemaùthe end of World War II (1945) and a year of unprecedented success in Hollywood's "Golden Age" (1946). This unique time provides a rich blend of cinema genres and typesùfrom the battlefront to the home front, the peace film to the woman's film, psychological drama, and the period's provocative new style, film noir. This book focuses on films that were famous, infamous, forgotten, and unforgettable, with big budget A-films, road shows, and familiar series share the spotlight.

Since the earlier twentieth century, literary genres have traveled across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes. Literature may now be anything from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal--visual constellations in print and on screen, cinematic narratives, or electronic textualities that range from hypertext to Flash. New technologies have left their imprint on literature as a paper-based medium, and vice versa. This volume explores the interactions between literature and screenbased media over the past three decades. How has literature turned to screen, how have screens undone the tyranny of the page as a medium of literature, and how have screens affected the page in literary writing? This volume answers these questions by uniquely integrating perspectives from digital literary studies, on the one hand, and film and literature studies, on the other. "Page" and "screen" are familiar catchwords in both digital literary studies and film and literature studies. The contributors reassess literary practice at the edges of paper, electronic media, and film. They show how the emergence of a new medium in fact reinvigorates the book and the page as literary media, rather than signaling their impending death. While previous studies in this field have been restricted to the digitization of literature alone, this volume shows the continuing relevance of film as a cultural medium for contemporary literature. Its integrative approach allows readers to situate current shifts within the literary field in a wider, long-term perspective.

In Beyond Casablanca, Kevin Dwyer explores the problems of creativity in the Arab and African world, focusing on Moroccan cinema and one of its key figures, filmmaker M. A. Tazi. Dwyer develops three themes simultaneously: the filmmaker's career and films; filmmaking in postcolonial Morocco; and the relationship between Moroccan cinema, Third World and Arab cinema, and the global film industry. This compelling discussion of Moroccan cinema is founded upon decades of anthropological research in Morocco, most recently on the Moroccan film sector and the global film industry, and exhibits a sensitivity to the cultural, political, social, and economic context of creative activity. The book centers on a series of interviews conducted with Tazi, whose career provides a rich commentary on the world of Moroccan cinema and on Moroccan cinema in the world. The interviews are framed, variously, by presentations of Moroccan history, society, and culture; the role of foreign filmmakers in Morocco; thematic discussions of cinematic issues (such as narrative techniques, the use of symbols, film as an expression of identity, and problems of censorship); and the global context of Third World filmmaking.

Since digital surround sound technology first appeared in cinemas 20 years ago, it has spread from theaters to homes and from movies to television, music, and video games. Yet even as 5.1 has become the standard for audiovisual media, its impact has gone unexamined. Drawing on works from the past two decades, as well as dozens of interviews with sound designers, mixers, and editors, Mark Kerins uncovers how 5.1 surround has affected not just sound design, but cinematography and editing as well. Beyond Dolby (Stereo) includes detailed analyses of Fight Club, The Matrix, Hairspray, Disturbia, The Rock, Saving Private Ryan, and Joy Ride, among other films, to illustrate the value of a truly audiovisual approach to cinema studies.

Black Camera is devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States. It regularly features essays and interviews that engage film in social as well as political distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.