In recent years, there has been something of an explosion in the performance of live music to silent films. There is a wide range of films with live and new scores that run from the historically accurate orchestral scores to contemporary sounds by groups such as Pet Shop Boys or by experimental composers and gothic heavy metal bands. It is no exaggeration to claim that music constitutes a bridge between the old silent film and the modern audience; music is also a channel for non-scholarly audiences to gain an appreciation of silent films. Music has become a means both for musicians and audiences to understand this bygone film art anew. This book is the first of its kind in that it aims to bring together writings and interviews to delineate the culture of providing music for silent films. It not only has the character of a scholarly work but is also something of a manual in that it discusses how to make music for silent films.

This is the first English translation of René Clair's Cinéma d'hier, cinéma d'aujour'dui, which, when it first appeared in France in 1970, easily won the prize for best film book of the year. In it the master of French film comedy plays with time in much the same way that a film editor might - he combines reviews written during the twenties and thirties with comments made in 1950 and again in 1970, and includes brief notes from other years as well as an imaginary dialogue with himself across time. The result is surprisingly unified. It is Clair's coherent vision of the cinema as he surveys his entire career and the whole of film history. In the best sense of the term, it is an essay, and one of the very few such works written by a giant in the world of film -- From back cover

From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future.

How the communist revolution failed, presented in a series of catastrophes. The communist project in the twentieth century grew out of utopian desires to oppose oppression and abolish class structures, to give individual lives collective meaning. The attempts to realize these ideals became a series of colossal failures. In Yesterday's Tomorrow, Bini Adamczak examines these catastrophes, proceeding in reverse chronological order from 1939 to 1917: the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Great Terror of 1937, the failure of the European Left to prevent National Socialism, Stalin's rise to power, and the bloody rebellion at Kronstadt. In the process, she seeks a future that never happened.

Yesterday’s Melodies Todays Memories is a rare collection of profiles of all important music-makers of the Hindi Film Industry between 1931 and 1970. It not only gives a biographical background of each music artiste, but it goes further to interview many of the surviving giants and completes the task by listing some of the best songs with which that person is associated. Here are singers that include the whole gamut from KL Saigal to Asha Bhosle, lyricists that include Sahir and Gulzar, music composers from Naushad to RD Burman, artistes that were part-time singers and full time actors like Ashok Kumar, melody queens like Noor Jahan and Lata Mangeshkar, gentlemen lyricists like Prem Dhawan and gentlemen singers like Manna Dey, mischief-makers like Kishore Kumar and rebels without pause like OP Nayyar and Majrooh Sultanpuri. In fact, this book is a house in which all these great talents live happily, each in a separate room, given space for self-expression. The serious research that has gone into this book is evident as you move from one chapter to another, opening layers after layers presented non-seriously. Over 100 music makers are presented this way and many more in a huge single chapter.

Recipient of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his writing, Barry Longyear flexes his creative and comic chops in Yesterday’s Tomorrow. In these true stories, Longyear wanders from scenic Maine backdrops to the smoky hum of backwoods Twelve Step meetings, all while dissecting why some recoveries don’t come naturally—and why it’s okay to let down our guard and laugh. Recovery is one hell of a roller coaster. It twists and plummets, upending our stomachs, while some maniac cackles hysterically in the front car. What’s so damn funny? Besides our stomach’s contents, what are we missing? Truth is, while we all sit anxiously awaiting that next drop, Barry Longyear is enjoying the wild ride. An award-winning author and proprietor of the Life Sucks Better Clean blog, Barry has been on recovery’s ride for a while now. He understands the importance of stupid questions and sarcastic responses. He’s honest to the point of embarrassment. And he has real problems: with friends, with self-ordained recovery police, and with the god of his childhood. But he also has a strong recovery full of laughter. Despite all its ups and downs, your recovery, too, can be a good one.

Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Westworld, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.

France (1837) was the third volume published in Cooper's Gleanings in Europe series, but first in the chronology of his European experience. Less sequential than his other travel narratives, France distills his impressions of French and European culture during his first two years abroad. Exhibiting many qualities of the familiar essay, it considers a wide range of topics of interest to Cooper, his friends, and potential readers in the United States. As a celebrity thoroughly at home in the brilliant society of Bourbon Paris, Cooper was able to provide fascinating glimpses of personalities, spectacles, institutions, and manners--from his distinctly American perspective. Indeed, as Professor Philbrick remarks, "No other of Cooper's works, perhaps, brings us closer to his speaking voice or puts us more directly in contact with the man himself, with all his idiosyncratic preoccupations, his quick resentments, his restless curiosity, his surprising humor, and his nobility of principle." The reader of this edition is brought even closer to Cooper in the draft of a hitherto unpublished letter, probably intended for this book, which illustrates Cooper's grasp of the still finer points of French customs and attitudes.

Helmut Gaus (1942) is doctor of Modern History and a professor in the Faculty of Social and Political Science at the University of Ghent in Belgium.