Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema. The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director. This double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based. An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.
The earliest films made in Cuba—newsreel footage of the Cuban-Spanish-American War—date from the end of the nineteenth century, but Cuba cannot be said to have had an indigenous film industry before the revolution of 1959. The melodramas, musicals, and comedies made until then reflected Hollywood's—and the United States's—cultural domination of the island, but the revolution precipitated urgent debates about the role of cinema in a socialist country and the kinds of films best suited to the needs of the people and their rulers. Among the feature films, documentaries, and short subjects made in accordance with revolutionary principles are celebrated works by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and other filmmakers who have had a profound influence on both Latin American and world cinema.Michael Chanan provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and absorbing account of Cuban cinema both before and after the revolution, deftly setting individual films and filmmakers within the larger framework of Cuba's social, political, and cultural history. First published as The Cuban Image in 1984 to wide acclaim, Cuban Cinema now appears in a new, expanded edition that updates Chanan's discussion to the beginning of the twenty-first century. New chapters address ongoing concerns about freedom of expression; Havana's restored importance within the Latin American film industry through the Havana Film Festival, before state support for filmmakers dwindled in the economic collapse that followed the fall of the Soviet Union; Cuban cinema's place within the globalized cultural market; and the changing audience for Cuban films. The only book-length study of Cuban cinema written in English, this indispensable work on one of the world's most vital national cinemas offers a unique perspective on the Cuban experience in the twentieth century.Michael Chanan is a documentary filmmaker and professor of cultural and media studies at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
The Dream the Kicks is a classic account of the prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain. In this new paperback edition, which has been thoroughly revised to take into account recent scholarship of early cinema, Michael Chanan provides a fasciniating account of the rich and hitherto hidden history of the origins of film. Chanan demonstrates that the theory of `the persistence of vision', which led to the invention of moving pictures, has been superceded by modern scientific findings. In its place, he puts forward a theory of invention as a type of bricolage, and shows that cinematography was a product of the forces of nineteenth century capitalism. He discusses the wealth of influences, both popular and bourgeois, on the culture of early cinema, including diorama, the magic lantern, itinerant entertainers and music hall. He looks at the relationship between film and photography, and considers the nascent film business, the ways in which early cinema was received by its audiences and the developing aesthetics of cinema in its first fifteen years.
As local communities and public services reel under the impact of global economic turmoil, it is vital to find more creative ways for the services to work together with those who depend on them and who also, as citizens, ultimately govern them. Community practice is the name for that growing part of the relationship by which service providers and local residents collaborate flexibly and economically to meet needs, boost community strengths and service effectiveness, and link participative and representative democracy. Combining re-examination of theory with practical tools and approaches, Chanan and Miller provide a new framework for local involvement strategy, for policy-makers and practitioners alike. They show how this innovative but still amorphous movement can become more coherent, both on the ground and in public policy: reforming community development, building new kinds of neighbourhood partnership, measuring outcomes objectively, and combining the best innovations of the past three decades into a new synthesis. This is an important new perspective for all local public service agencies, all practitioners working in communities, and academics and students concerned with these fields.
As local communities and public services reel under the impact of global economic turmoil, it is vital to find more creative ways for the services to work together with those who depend on them and who also, as citizens, ultimately govern them. Community practice is the name for that growing part of the relationship by which service providers and local residents collaborate flexibly and economically to meet needs, boost community strengths and service effectiveness, and link participative and representative democracy. Combining re-examination of theory with practical tools and approaches, Chanan and Miller provide a new framework for local involvement strategy, for policy-makers and practitioners alike. They show how this innovative but still amorphous movement can become more coherent, both on the ground and in public policy: reforming community development, building new kinds of neighbourhood partnership, measuring outcomes objectively, and combining the best innovations of the past three decades into a new synthesis. This is an important new perspective for all local public service agencies, all practitioners working in communities, and academics and students concerned with these fields.
This wide-ranging study traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumiere films to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'. Chanan argues that documentary makes a vital contribution to the public sphere - where ideas are debated, opinion formed and those in authority are held to account.
Musica Practica is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, Michael Chanan explores the communal roots of the musical tradition and the effects of notation on creative and performing practice. He appraises the psychological wellsprings of music using the insights of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Tracing the growth of musical printing and the creation of a market for the printed score, he examines the transformation of patronage with the demise of the ancien régime, and draws on little-known texts by Marx to analyze the formation of the musical economy in the nineteenth century.Chanan sketches out an unwritten history of musical instruments as technology, from Tutankhamen's trumpets to the piano, the ancient Greek water organ to the digital synthesizer. The book concludes with reflections on the rise of modernism and the dissolution of the European tradition in a sea of postmodernism and "world music."Musica Practica assumes no specialist knowledge of music beyond an ordinary familiarity with common terms and an average acquaintance with the music of different styles and periods. It is a fascinating commentary on the soundtrack of daily life in the metropolis of the late twentieth century.
Repeated Takes is the first general book on the history of the recording industry, covering the entire field from Edison's talking tin foil of 1877 to the age of the compact disc.Michael Chanan considers the record as a radically new type of commodity which turned the intangible performance of music into a saleable object, and describes the upset which this caused in musical culture. He asks: What goes on in a recording studio? How does it affect the music? Do we listen to music differently because of reproduction?Repeated Takes relates the growth and development of the industry, both technically and economically; the effects of the microphone on interpretation in both classical and popular music; and the impact of all these factors on musical styles and taste. This highly readable book also traces the connections between the development of recording and the rise of new forms of popular music, and discusses arguments among classical musicians about microphone technique and studio practice.
In this book, a continuation of Michael Chanan's investigation of the relation between music and society, the author examines the composer in the light of Jurgen Habermas's study of the public sphere. Taking his cue from the German philosopher's remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music, Chanan examines the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Mozart in the eighteenth century by way of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler and Debussy in the nineteenth, to Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Gershwin, Weill, Ellington, Cage and Boulez in the twentieth.Drawing upon recent work in feminist and gay musicology, the book ranges over themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin, the ascendancy of the Romantic personality, the lure of the exotic in Milhaud's work, and the political economy of music.A detailed history of the idea of the composer as a public figure, Chanan's book charts both the dramatic change in the listening audience and, simultaneously, the composer's progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life."It is undoubtedly true, as the music critic Hans Keller used to observe, that more people nowadays hear a single broadcast of a new work by an avant-garde composer than would have heard all Beethoven's symphonies in his own lifetime. But the effects are not only quantitative; they also include radical alterations in the relationship between the audience and the object of aesthetic consumption, which seriously affect the situation of the composer, whose audience may now be wider and larger, but also becomes ever more fragmented and anonymous."
"Go Down, Moses"... "Blow Yo' Trumpet, Gabriel"..."Wade In De' Water"... Why is the Israelite theme so prevalent in the sacred folk songs known as the American Negro Spirituals? Could it have anything to do with the Hebrew captives who were brought from Africa to America during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? The Priestly footprints in these sacred folk songs suggest that a core group of Hebrews came from Africa to America, during the era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and seeded a prophetic new Israelite People. Who, in God's Name, were they? Tap the "Add To Cart" button to place your secure order. Receive your copy within days; and, ponder these questions with me. Read on... From the 17th-19th centuries, America had a peculiar, unprecedented, brutal system of unpaid labor known as Chattel Slavery. Chattel Slavery was race-based; the diverse captive laborers were primarily of Central and West African descent. A number of those Africans were Hebrews. The slave owners, for the most part, were elite White Men. In cold-blooded legal terms, the Chattel Slave was classified as animal property, subject to being bought, sold, rented-out, and disposed of, at-will. The slave owner exercised absolute authority over the poor Chattel Slave's life, liberty, labor, and offspring. America's captives were callously subjected to physical--and mental--trauma, and gross sexual abuse, as a normal way of life. In those pale, and frightful, days of The Great Tribulation, most of America's Chattel Slaves immersed themselves in the story of the Hebrew Captivity that is told in The Holy Bible's Book of Exodus. They fervently believed that the Great God of the Hebrews, personified in King Jesus, their mighty folk champion, would someday intervene on their behalf. With the coming of Emancipation in 1865, after 246 years of bitter bondage, they believed that The Lord did Reveal His Arm to free them; and, they celebrated as had no other People in the History of the World. Today it is commonly assumed that Black America's Israelite folk tradition is mere symbolism derived from the similarity between the People's experience of slavery in America and the Bible Story of the Israelite captivity in Egypt. But, with Hebrews from Africa in their midst, and in their bloodlines, did America's inspired captives have a deeper reason? Consider this... * The great year of the overthrow of Chattel Slavery in America (1865) is Prophesied in The Holy Bible. * Enslaved African Hebrew Priests knew from Signs in the Scriptures how long our captivity would last. * The prophesied number of years that our People would be in captivity is encrypted in some of the slave songs called The Negro Spirituals. I invite you to take a glimpse into the Reality that GOD IS WITH US in our Quest of Freedom. You are guaranteed to be enlightened, inspired, and intrigued, by my revelation of Black America's prophetic past and by my succinct, and crystal clear, Biblical solution to the problem of Black America's need for a transformed present and a triumphant future. This book is a must-read for Survivors of American Chattel Slavery. It is wonderful reading for all who are interested in feeding their heart, soul, and mind. Theologians, Clergy, Seminary Students, and Everyday Lay People, alike, will find this book intriguing, engaging and edifying. Seventeen years in development, five years in production, this dense, but digestible, thought-provoking tome is a teeming treasure trove of timeless Truth that is well worth the price. Enjoy HERU BAR-CHANAN Author
We wrote this book to illustrate the way a teacher and a loving family can help a child overcome social phobia and low self-esteem. In addition, the main character, Benjy, is able to use his imagination to answer a teacher's question, create an affirming story, make friends, and ultimately step up to help a new friend. Readers will recognize Benjy's personality in either themselves or those they may know and gain confidence. Teachers may want to use this book in their classrooms as a learning tool and as a means of creating an "aha" moment for their students.
Sapphire from the Land of Israel brings texts from Rav Kook's writings that deepen our understanding of each Torah portion, while providing a window into Rav Kook's thought. Rabbi Morrison's explanations are clear and meaningful, offering lessons that impact our religious and practical lives. -- Rabbi Shmuel JablonBecause of their poetic and mystical nature, Rav Kook's writings are difficult even for readers who are fluent in Hebrew and rabbinic texts. Sapphire from the Land of Israel uses a clear, succinct style to provide the reader with a window into Rav Kook's original and creative insights.A companion volume to Gold from the Land of Israel, this book presents more of Rav Kook's thoughts on the weekly Torah reading (parasha). It elucidates his views on many topics, including: Why do we find different names for God in the Torah?Why are first-born donkeys holy? Why did the Torah need to give doctors permission to heal?If "eye for an eye" means monetary compensation, why does the Torah not say that explicitly?Why are only kohanim allowed to serve in the Temple?Why doesn't the Torah explicitly state where to build the Temple?Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), the celebrated first Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel, is recognized as being among the most important Jewish thinkers of all times. His writings reflect the mystic's search for underlying unity in all aspects of life and the world, and his unique personality similarly united a rare combination of talents and gifts. Rav Kook was a prominent rabbinical authority and active public leader, but at the same time, a deeply religious mystic. He was both Talmudic scholar and poet, original thinker and saintly tzaddik.
"Inspiring This book is truly wonderful. Rav Kook zt"l is one of the most important Jewish thinkers and leaders of the last century... This book makes his words accessible and understandable. I highly recommend it." -- Rabbi Shmuel Jablon Rav Kook's writings, due to their poetic and mystical nature, are difficult even for those fluent in Hebrew and rabbinical texts. Gold from the Land of Israel uses a clear, succinct style to grant the reader a window into his original and creative insights. This book elucidates his thoughts on many fascinating topics in the format of a commentary to the Torah portion. Discussed are subjects such as: Can we reconcile the Torah's account of creation with modern science?What is the Torah's view on vegetarianism?What is the purpose of death?Why do bad things happen to good people?Why do we have dreams?Will the Third Temple have animal sacrifices?How can one attain joy in serving God?How should we balance our time between Torah study and work? "Rav Chanan Morrison explains Rav Kook's Torah like no one else... Purchase this book if you truly want to understand Rav Kook and bring the fulfillment of his teachings into your heart." -- Yoely Zipkin
"Such an uplifting collection of essays... a wonderful gift."--Douglas Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish StarBecause of their poetic and mystical nature, Rav Kook's writings are difficult even for readers who are fluent in Hebrew and rabbinic texts. Silver from the Land of Israel uses a clear, succinct style to provide the reader with a window into Rav Kook's original and creative insights.A companion volume to Gold from the Land of Israel on the Torah, this book presents Rav Kook's thoughts on Shabbat and Jewish holidays. It elucidates his views on many topics, including: How is the Sabbath like a bride?What is the inner meaning of the shofar blasts?Why are we instructed to drink on Purim?What were Rav Kook's views on secular Zionism?Why do we need both an oral and written Torah?Why must the Jewish calendar be set in the land of Israel?Why does a Jewish king need his own sefer Torah?Why is the Temple so central to Judaism?"Readers will find these Divrei Torah inspiring and meaningful. I highly recommend this book." --Rabbi Shmuel Jablon"Rabbi Morrison presents these lessons in easy to read language... they are gems that will delight." --Rabbi Israel Drazin
