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This collection of essays discusses topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, the author examines a wide range of topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. The author also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects.

There is nothing like a dame, exuberantly declares the song from the multicultural world of “South Pacific”, and proclaims, too, that a dame is a specific American creation, one of the things worth fighting for in our culture. This book validates that claim. It celebrates the fast-talking dames of 1930s and 1940s screen comedy, women of lively wit and brash speech who became the most impressive model of independent, articulate American womanhood. Coming of age during the Great Depression, they were quick on the uptake and hardly ever downbeat. They seemed to know what to say and when to say it. They weren't afraid of slang nor shy of the truth. In their fast and breezy talk seemed to lie the secret of happiness, but also the key to reality.

Profound transformations in our digital society have brought many enterprising women to social media platforms—from blogs to YouTube to Instagram—in hopes of channeling their talents into fulfilling careers. This book draws much-needed attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose “passion projects” amount to free work for corporate brands. The book offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. It connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor, offering a lens through which to understand, anticipate, and critique broader transformations in the creative economy. At a time when social media offers the rousing assurance that anyone can “make it”—and stand out among freelancers, temps, and gig workers—the book asks us all to consider the stakes of not getting paid to do what you love.

Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current-day digital drudges called servers? This book explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.

Journalism, television, cable, and online media are all evolving rapidly. At the nexus of these volatile industries is a growing group of individuals and firms whose job it is to develop and maintain online distribution channels for television news programming. Their work, and the tensions surrounding it, provide a fulcrum from which to pry analytically at some of the largest shifts within our media landscape. Based on fieldwork and interviews with different teams and organizations within MSNBC, this multi-disciplinary work is unique in its focus on distribution, which is rapidly becoming as central as production, to media work.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. The task of the new regime, and of the media that served it, was to reshape the old world in revolutionary form, to transform the vast, ungraspable space of the Russian Empire into the mapped territory of the Soviet Union. This text shows how Soviet cinema encouraged popular support for state initiatives in the years between the Revolution and World War II, helping to create a new Russian identity and territory—an imaginary geography of Sovietness. The book offers a cultural history of the early Soviet period. In particular, it shows how films projected the new Soviet map on to the great shared screen of the popular imagination.