Film Star Autographs

Further Reading: Film

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American Civil War ... In the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, had campaigned against expanding slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. The Republicans strongly advocated nationalism, and in their 1860 platform they denounced threats of disunion as avowals of treason...

Musical Theatre ... Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, culminating with the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America, followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the works of American creators like George M. Cohan...

Chinese Rock ... Many Northwest Wind songs were highly idealistic and heavily political, parodying or alluding to the revolutionary songs of the Communist state, such as "Nanniwan" (南泥湾) and "The Internationale" (国际歌). It is, however, associated with the non-Communist national music side instead of the revolutionary side...

Minimal Music ... Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, and later John Adams) emerged to become publicly associated with American minimal music...

Bollywood ... Etymology The name "Bollywood" is derived from Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry... Dating back to 1932, "Tollywood" was the earliest Hollywood-inspired name, referring to the Bengali film industry based in Tollygunge, whose name is reminiscent of "Hollywood" and was the center of the cinema of India at the time... The name "Tollywood" went on to be used as a nickname for the Bengali film industry by the popular Kolkata-based Junior Statesman youth magazine, establishing a precedent for other film industries to use similar-sounding names, eventually leading to the term "Bollywood" being coined...

Film Industry ... Though the expense involved in making movies almost immediately led film production to concentrate under the auspices of standing production companies, advances in affordable film making equipment, and expansion of opportunities to acquire investment capital from outside the film industry itself, have allowed independent film production to evolve... Modern film industry The major business centers of film making are in the United States, Nigeria, Hong Kong and India... Because of labor and infrastructure costs, many films are produced in countries other than the one in which the company which pays for the film is located...

Kabuki ... The individual kanji characters, from left to right, mean sing (歌), dance (舞), and skill (伎). Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as "the art of singing and dancing." These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology...

Video Game ... The input device used to manipulate video games is called a game controller, and varies across platforms. For example, a controller might consist of only a button and a joystick, while another may feature a dozen buttons and one or more joysticks...

Film Theory ... Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium... It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer... These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form...

Cover Version ... On occasion a cover becomes more popular and well-known than the original like Santana's version in 1970 of Peter Green's and Fleetwood Mac's 1968 song Black Magic Woman or Jimi Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower". The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan's original, became a Top 10 single in 1968 and was ranked 48th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time...

Theatre Of India ... The major source of evidence for Sanskrit theatre is A Treatise on Theatre (Nātyaśāstra), a compendium whose date of composition is uncertain (estimates range from 200 BCE to 200 CE) and whose authorship is attributed to Bharata Muni. The Treatise is the most complete work of dramaturgy in the ancient world...

Art ... Many definitions of art have been proposed by philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science"...

Jazz ... It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. Its West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note...

Film Criticism ... The vast majority of film critics on television and radio have all but disappeared over the last thirty years, as well... It can be observed that most of the discussion of film on television is focused on the amount of box office business a film does, as if financial success were the only criterion needed to define artistic success... Conversely, it's been claimed positive film reviews have been known to spark interest in little-known films...

Butoh ... The first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima...

Sexual Reproduction ... After rains or when dew deposits a film of water, the motile sperm are splashed away from the antheridia, which are normally produced on the top side of the thallus, and swim in the film of water to the archegonia where they fertilize the egg... The sperm released from the antherida respond to chemicals released by ripe archegonia and swim to them in a film of water and fertilize the egg cells thus producing a zygote...

Improvisation ... The skills of improvisation can apply to many different abilities or forms of communication and expression across all artistic, scientific, physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines. For example, improvisation can make a significant contribution in music, dance, cooking, presenting a speech, sales, personal or romantic relationships, sports, flower arranging, martial arts, psychotherapy, and much more...

Rock And Roll ... The term "rock and roll" now has at least two different meanings, both in common usage. The American Heritage Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music...

Electronic Music ... Electronic music was once associated almost exclusively with Western art music but from the late 1960s on the availability of affordable music technology meant that music produced using electronic means became increasingly common in the popular domain. Today electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music...

Animation ... A 5,000 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta has five images of a goat painted along the sides. This has been claimed to be an example of early animation...

Conceptual Art ... Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the UK, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself...

Aleatoricism ... Film In film-making, there are several avant-garde examples; one is Allison Knowles' computer poem "House of Dust", Fred Camper's SN (1984, first screening 2002) uses coin-flipping for one section to determine which three of 16 possible reels to screen and what order they should go in (3360 permutations)...

Futurism ... Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists...

Western Calligraphy ... Also props and moving images for film and television, testimonials, birth and death certificates/maps, and other works involving writing...

Hindi Dance Songs ... Holi aai rey kanhai, Holi aai rey Holi aai rey kanhai, rang chhalkey Suna dey jara bansuri होली आई रे कन्हाई, होली आई रे, होली आई रे कन्हाई, रंग छलके , सुना दे जरा बांसुरी Holi has come, Kanhai (affectionate for Krishna) Holi has come, Kanhai, color is splashed Play us some flute (video search) Inhi Logon Ne, Pakeezah (1956-1971) The lyrics by Majrooh Sultanpuri are in an old form of Hindi, which had become archaic by the time the film was completed...