Sport films have been central to American cinema, playing an increasingly important role in the communication of a commonsense understanding of race, gender, class, history, and social relations. Oddly, scholars have neglected sport films and their significance. Offering a comparative, theoretically grounded, and interdisciplinary approach, Visual Economies of/in Motion marks a novel and important point of departure in sport studies and cultural studies. It brings together a dozen essays on feature films and documentaries to probe the articulation of ideologies and identities, play and power, and sporting worlds and social fields. -- Amazon.com.

Focusing on visual approaches to performance in global cultural contexts, Perspectives in Motion explores the work of Adrienne L. Kaeppler, a pioneering researcher who has made a number of interdisciplinary contributions over five decades to dance and performance studies. Through a diverse range of case studies from Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and interdisciplinary approaches, this edited collection offers new critical and ethnographic frameworks for understanding and experiencing practices of music and dance across the globe.

The current practice of the cult of María Lionza is one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela. Based on long-term fieldwork, this book explores the role of images and visual culture within the cult. By adopting a relational approach, A Goddess in Motion shows how the innumerable images of this goddess—represented as an Indian, white or mestizo woman—move constantly from objects to bodies, from bodies to dreams, and from the religion domain to the art world. In short, this book is a fascinating study that sheds light on the role of visual creativity in contemporary religious manifestations.

On dance and culture

This book on autonomous road-following vehicles brings together twenty years of innovation in the field. The book uniquely details an approach to real-time machine vision for the understanding of dynamic scenes, viewed from a moving platform that begins with spatio-temporal representations of motion for hypothesized objects whose parameters are adjusted by well-known prediction error feedback and recursive estimation techniques.

With contributions by Prosper Godonoo, Urla Hill, C. Richard King, David J. Leonard, Jack Lule, Murry Nelson, David C. Ogden, Robert W. Reising, and Joel Nathan Rosen Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations includes essays on Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Curt Flood, Paul Robeson, Jim Thorpe, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. The essayists in this volume write about twentieth-century athletes whose careers were affected by racism and whose post-career reputations have improved as society's understanding of race changed. Contributors attempt to clarify the stories of these sports stars and their places as twentieth-century icons by analyzing the various myths that surround them. When media, fans, sports leagues, and the athletes themselves commemorate sports legends, shifts in popular perceptions often serve to obscure an athlete's role in history. Such revisions can lack coherence and trivialize the efforts of some legendary competitors and those associated with them. Adding racial tensions to this process further complicates the task of preserving the valuable achievements of key players.

Markets in Motion is a graphical overview of the economic conditions and events that have influenced the U.S. stock market since 1900. Decade by decade, you'll examine how different economic and policitcal environments can be directly correlated to stock market movements. Each decade features graphs displaying the performance of the Dow Jones Average, the Dow Jones price to dividend ratio, industrial production, money supply, consumer price index, T bill rate, and the Discount rate. Embedded on the graphs are short descriptions of important political, economic, and historical events. Use this information to reference similar environments today and gain an edge in determining the future direction of the market.

The manipulation of pictures and video in digital form has been an established research activity for more than twenty years. It is only recently, however, that digital image and video processing equipment has been accessible to the gen eral public. This is due in part to the rapidly growing economy. of the home computer. A major contributing factor has been the marked rise in the pres ence of the non-academic user on the internet, particularly the World Wide Web (WWW). Manipulating digital imagery has become synonymous with the WWW. It is the drive to present audio and visual media to the home user in an interactive form and to increase the available range of choices, which has encouraged agreements to begin digital video television broadcasting before the turn of the century. With the increased demand for video material, there is a perceived increase in demand for material from archive sources and this has fuelled commercial interest in automatic digital restoration processes. Further more there is a continuing effort to design techniques for correcting errors in received compressed video bit streams for the purposes of live communications links over noisy channels e. g. mobile telephones and the internet. This book introduces the reader to a range of digital restoration activities beyond the well traversed areas of noise reduction and deblurring. It describes a number of problems associated with archived film and video.

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film’s underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas. As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators’ engagement with historical events.