Film school, Italian style

Guest post by Joseph Luzzi

On November 3, 1993, a throng of fifteen thousand poured into St. Mary of the Angels Basilica in Rome and the adjoining piazza to bid farewell to the recently deceased Federico Fellini, while millions more watched a live telecast of the ceremony. To many, it wasn’t just the funeral of a great director that was taking place: it was a somber ritual marking the passing of Italy’s cinematic golden age that Fellini was thought to embody. He had begun his career in the 1940s, working as a scriptwriter for man he called his cinematic generation’s version of the biblical Adam: Roberto Rossellini, whose film Rome, Open City (1945) heralded the birth of neorealism, a documentary-style film movement that emphasized the use of natural lighting, nonprofessional actors, long takes, and strong moral messages aimed at renewing the Italian spirit after two decades of Fascism and five years of World War II. After his neorealist apprenticeship, Fellini became the consummate Italian auteur in the 1950s and beyond, making the kind of deeply personal, idiosyncratic film that linked him with other auteurs including Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, a vastly eclectic group whose collective brilliance made Italian film the envy of the world. By the time of Fellini’s death, skeptics reasoned, such Italian eminence on the silver screen was a distant memory. So they came to bury Fellini and, with him, the nation’s cinematic glory.

Federico Fellini

This melancholic position is one I can empathize with, having written a book, A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), that celebrates what I call the “art film tradition” that began with Italian neorealism and extended into the auteur age. I argue that, in one way or another, many of the great films from this era—Rossellini’s Open City, Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Bertolucci’s Conformist (1970), Pasolini’s Decameron (1971), to name a few—were not just great films: they also offered profound meditations on aesthetic issues that transcended the film medium, sometimes on questions stretching back to antiquity. For example, despite Fellini’s training in the deeply allegorical films of neorealism—Open City ends with a shot of Partisan youths marching in full allegorical splendor toward St. Peter’s Basilica looming on the horizon and the ruined city of Rome below it, the spiritual and secular realms they must rehabilitate—he opted for more open, symbolic modes of filmmaking, recalling the ancient tensions between symbol and allegory, a key issue in the history of aesthetics. In La Strada, Fellini’s character the Fool comforts the beleaguered Gelsomina by claiming that her strongman husband, Zampanò, treats her badly for a reason—and that everything in the world has its purpose, even the lowly stone he picks up and shows her after Zampanò’s arrest. What does this stone “mean”? It’s impossible to say. Its openness to interpretation and ambiguity represents Fellini’s wish to move away from the sociopolitical doctrines of neorealism and into a more private, interior realm—what the great French critic André Bazin called Fellini’s “neorealism of the person.”

So did Italian cinema “die” when Fellini himself died? No, but something did go down into the coffin with him. His death, I believe, was the symbolic end of neorealism’s legacy, the movement that either created some of the nation’s most enduring classic cinema or shaped those young directors who would go on to define themselves against the movement when creating their own masterpieces. Antonioni began his career as a film critic and documentary filmmaker in the 1940s. Even though he would eventually make intensely artful, atmospheric films about a rebuilt Italian middle class in the 1950s and 1960s, he always believed he was pursuing that same elusive “real” that obsessed Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti and other neorealists of the 1940s. Even Pasolini, who described neorealism as a glorious failure that tried to remake Italy culturally when what it needed was socioeconomic renewal, began his career with gritty neorealist-inspired films about a Roman pimp (Accattone, 1961) and an aging prostitute (Mamma Roma, 1962), before moving on to the more stylized and nihilistic films from the time leading up to his murder (Porcile, 1969, and Salò, 1975). The connections to neorealism for many more distinguished Italian filmmakers are visceral and include such illustrious names as Ermanno Olmi, Francesco Rosi, Ettore Scola, and the Taviani brothers, who as recently as 2013 made a film about a group of inmates performing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a Roman maximum-security prison (Caesar Must Die, 2012). In A Cinema of Poetry, I call neorealism Italy’s preeminent “film school”: the training ground that gave young filmmakers more than just a technical education about the ins and outs of filmmaking. It infused them with a moral vision, the desire by pioneering neorealists like Rossellini to put cinema in the service of reimaging Italian life after the ravages of total war and the ethical compromises of life under Mussolini. Even when they diverged from the neorealist mandate of documentary-style scripts and shooting, Fellini and his auteur cohort were forever committed to this life-giving link between the call of art and the needs of their nation, as they sought to rifare l’Italia, remake Italy on screen.

Joseph Luzzi is an associate professor of Italian at Bard College and author of A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film and Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.

 

 

 

Blues, smoke, and shadows: jazz in “musical” noir films

Guest post by Sheri Chinen Biesen

The Society For Cinema & Media Studies hosts Sheri Chinen Biesen for presentation on this topic at the 2015 SCMS annual conference.

Jazz music flourished in “musical” noir films, which were distinctive for showing smoke, shadows, and bluesy nightclub performers. The music recalled Harlem’s Cotton Club, where, according to Aljean Harmetz’s obituary for Lena Horne,  the “customers were white, barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show, and the proprietors were gangsters.” Musical noir featuring jazz performances in murky cabaret joints evoked Jazz Age speakeasies and illicit affairs, challenging Hollywood censorship. Low-lit lounges, the enthralling minor key sounds of musicians, and blue film scores suggested censorable activity in after hours nightspots. Some especially notable examples of musical noir films featuring jazz and set in smoky, atmospheric nightclubs include Blues in the Night (1941), Jammin’ the Blues (1944, with Lester Young), Phantom Lady (1944), To Have and Have Not (1944, with Hoagy Carmichael), Gilda (1946), The Man I Love (1947), New Orleans (1947, with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday), Young Man With A Horn (1950, with Harry James), Sweet Smell of Success (1957, with Chico Hamilton), Elevator to the Gallows (1957, with Miles Davis score), Paris Blues (1961, with Duke Ellington score), and A Man Called Adam (1966, with Benny Carter score).

Harold Arlen, known for playing music infused with “the wail of the blues” and writing music for Harlem’s Cotton Club, composed jazz for Blues in the Night, which involves a musician who goes insane after tangling with a femme fatale singer. Warner Bros. wanted Duke Ellington for the film, but cast Jimmie Lunceford’s big band instead. In the film, Lester Young leads a jazz noir jam session. Meanwhile, censors believed that another film, Phantom Lady, implied that musicians jamming in a sexual jazz “jive” sequence were drug addicts. Hoagy Carmichael plays jazz in To Have and Have Not as Lauren Bacall sings and seductively entices men at the bar. In Gilda, Rita Hayworth sings the bluesy “Put the Blame on Mame,” dances, tosses her hair, and performs a striptease in a jazz nightclub. She peals off her gloves, inviting viewers to unzip her strapless gown—before she is yanked off stage and violently slapped by misogynist beau Glenn Ford. Jazz music conveyed the blues amid smoke and shadows in musical noir Blues in the Night, Jammin’ the Blues, To Have and Have Not, Gilda, The Man I Love and Young Man With A Horn, where femme fatale Bacall grabs a jazz musician’s hair in a torrid embrace as taglines clamor: “Put down your trumpet, jazzman–I’m in the mood for love!” Ellington’s somber blue tones in Paris Blues and Davis’ haunting jazz score in Elevator to the Gallows (Lift to the Scaffold/Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) evoke loneliness as a doomed femme fatale wanders late-night streets aimlessly searching for her illicit lover (who killed her husband for her). In A Man Called Adam, the titular character destroys himself performing to Benny Carter’s score as Nat Adderly plays. As postwar Hollywood shifted to color films, Arlen penned the moody after hours torch song “The Man That Got Away” for noir musical A Star Is Born (1954). In that film, director George Cukor reimagined the blues, smoke, and shadows of jazz musical noir in brooding color.

This piece grows out of research for my book, Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films, in which I examine the connection between jazz music, film noir, and Hollywood jazz musicals in noir musical cinema. I will be presenting a talk at the 2015 Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference in Montreal based on this research.

Sheri Chinen Biesen is associate professor of film history at Rowan University and the author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir and Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films.

*(Note: Quote from Aljean Harmetz, “Lena Horne,” New York Times, 9 May 2010, A1.)

Should we bring historians to the movies?

Guest post by Thomas Leitch

Why do otherwise intelligent and discriminating people routinely come away from movies like Selma, American Sniper, The Imitation Game, and The Theory of Everything under the impression that their fictionalizations of history are true? Can’t they tell the difference between real life and the movies?

In a word, no, they can’t, says Jeffrey M. Zacks. Zacks, a professor of psychology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Flicker: Your Brain on Movies, argues in a column in the 15 February issue of the New York Times that “our minds are well equipped to remember things that we see or hear—but not to remember the source of those memories”—because “our brain’s systems for source memory are not robust and are prone to failure.” Whether we read something in the newspaper, see footage of it on television or online, or watch it in a movie theater, we come away with much more vivid and precise memories of the content than the source. So we store memories from these very different sources in much the same way, and draw on them as equally authoritative when we search our memories for information.

So far, so illuminating. My only quarrel with Professor Zacks’s perceptive analysis of why people so routinely confuse movies with real life even if they know the movies are fictional concerns its last two sentences: “Having the misinformation explicitly pointed out and corrected at the time it was encountered substantially reduced its influence. But actually implementing this strategy—creating fact-checking commentary tracks that play during movies? always bringing a historian to the theater with you?—could be a challenge.”

The suggestion that bringing a historian along would protect me from indiscriminately remembering misinformation in movies implies that historians are uniquely qualified to pass judgment on factual accuracy. But in fact Professor Zacks’s whole column makes this assumption because it conflates history with what Professor Zacks calls “facts” and “the real world.” As police officers across the country agree, however, there’s a large and troublesome gap between even eyewitness testimony and the facts concerning real-world events. Sergeant Joe Friday was wrong: since the best testimony in the world is still testimony, not even the most reliable witness can give the police just the facts.

Historians are obviously more reliable than eyewitnesses in some ways. They’re more reflective, more disinterested, more likely to check their hypotheses against multiple sources. But since their testimony is always based on other people’s testimony, they’re less reliable than eyewitnesses in other ways. In addition, there are too many examples of biased histories (e.g., North Korean history textbooks, along with any number of textbooks produced around the world during wartime), racist histories (Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People), and factually inaccurate histories (Michael Bellesisles’s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture) to justify any such assumption. Since the main reason for writing history, in fact, is to correct earlier histories, it’s doubtful that even historians trust other historians quite as completely as Professor Zacks thinks the rest of us ought to do. If they did, there would be no need for any further histories, only periodic updates, and historians would vanish.

I’d certainly agree that historians and filmmakers adopt very different attitudes toward history, facts, and the real world. But I’d still want to make distinctions among those three different subjects. And although I’m happy to acknowledge that filmmakers often play fast and loose with the facts, even when they advertise their products as “inspired by true events,” I’m a lot less confident than Professor Zacks that historians are so disinterested, reliable, and authoritative that they have a monopoly on the truth. So the next time I take a historian to the movies, I’ll be sure to follow it with dinner—not so that the historian can set me straight, but so that we can talk over the movie as more or less equally intelligent adults. I’m all for watching movies with a critical eye, but I’m not ready to farm out that job to the historians unless they understand that I plan to keep an equally critical eye on them. Meanwhile, I wonder exactly who’s going to be producing those fact-checking commentary tracks Professor Zacks mentions, and what makes them so sure that they have a corner on the truth, too.

Thomas Leitch is a professor of English and the director of the film studies program at the University of Delaware. He is the author of  Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age and Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ” and is the coeditor of A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

 

 

Recommended Reading: Cinema Studies

With the Academy Awards set for this weekend, we want to aim a key light on our terrific books in film history and cinema studies. Call the gaffer!

A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film
by Joseph Luzzi

“Luzzi brings a set of powerful resources to his new study: a vast erudition, an ear finely attuned to inter-arts allusions, and an ability to discern the workings of poetic tropes within the language of cinema. The result is a deepened understanding of the category of the aesthetic as it relates to Italian film criticism and an affirmation of the riches that this body of canonical films offers to scholars and lay connoisseurs of the seventh art.”—Millicent Marcus, Yale University

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Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films
by Sheri Chinen Biesen

“The book nicely balances in-depth historical research and previous film noir scholarship with fresh ideas and a writing style that is both evocative and concise. The author doesn’t force the films into the model of her theory; instead the films guide the theory, a quality often lacking in film writing. Music in the Shadows ultimately succeeds on two levels, both in providing an entertaining and enlightening read, as well as an impetus to watch previously unseen films and rewatch familiar classics with a new perspective.”—Noir City

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Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream
by Mark Osteen

“Only a few of the many books on film noir are essential. This is one of them . . . A smart, clearly written book.”—Choice

“Mark Osteen manages to add something new and substantial to the discourse on film noir—an examination of the ways in which the American Dream is subverted, challenged, and ultimately discounted by the harsh realities of a noir universe, which more directly aligns itself with society than with the phantom hope of endless upward mobility.”—Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

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Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, by Paola Marrati, translated by Alisa Hartz
When Stories Travel: Cross-Cultural Encounters between Fiction and Film, by Cristina Della Coletta
Math Goes to the Movies, by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross
Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, by Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman

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Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ, by Thomas Leitch
The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II, by David Welky
Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, by John T. Irwin
Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, by Jonathan Rosenbaum

 

 

 

A passion for film noir and cinema heritage

Guest post by Sheri Chinen Biesen

I’m a bit of a nerd. I like digging around in Hollywood studio archives investigating classic cinema like you see on Turner Classic Movies with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I specialize in film noir, a series of 1940s–1950s American crime pictures noted for their moody, shadowy visual style of black-and-white photography and hard-hitting themes. Literally “black film” or “dark cinema,” the term film noir was coined by French critics in 1946 to describe brooding, cynical crime films produced in Hollywood during World War II when filmmakers adapted hardboiled fiction that had been censored for nearly a decade. I’m also fascinated by how film noir influences other genres, such as a dark strain of noir musical films noted for their shadowy jazz nightclubs.

As an archival film historian, I examine original studio records to explore how classic films were made. In my research, I look at actual documents from filmmakers when they were shooting the film—scripts, memos, letters from writers, directors, stars, producers, cinematographers, designers, censors and publicity—to piece together the history behind the making of classic films such as Double Indemnity, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Gilda, and The Big Sleep.

I got interested in film noir and noir musicals studying cinema at the University of Southern California. Noir cinematography was considered a lost art form, as Hollywood maestros were dying off. No one knew how to shoot or light black-and-white film anymore. Since then, noir style has become influential on all kinds of contemporary media, and “neo-noir” films pay homage to classic film noir.

I became a film historian and noir scholar after working as a technical writer in computer graphics. My colleagues encouraged me to teach future generations about film noir. When I was a film student, my lights blew out one night while I was shooting a movie, and my film suddenly became a film noir. When I tried to research another project, the archive was closed, so I had to find a different topic. I chose film noir, and accidentally stumbled upon filmmaking memos about the blackouts in Hollywood during World War II. This research became my first book, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. I continued my noir research and discovered a remarkable array of noir musical films, including Blues in the Night, Gilda, A Star is Born, The Red Shoes, and Round Midnight, which became the basis for my next book, Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films.

I’m passionate about film noir, classic cinema, noir musicals, and restoring classic films, as well as preserving and teaching future generations about our vibrant cinematic heritage.

Sheri Chinen Biesen is the author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir and Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is an is associate professor of radio, television, and film studies at Rowan University.

Oz and There’s No Place But Home

Guest post by Jerry Griswold

Margaret Hamilton’s life was irrevocably changed seventy-five years ago when MGM released The Wizard of Oz on August 15, 1939. Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the film, mentioned in the journal Children’s Literature how ever afterwards she was accosted in the street by fans and how she was often late for dentist appointments. Finally, after one more missed appointment, she decided at last to sit down and find “the answer to that question which had plagued and fascinated me for years: What is it that makes that picture so special?”

The answer, Hamilton suggests, has to do with the idea of “home.” “What that picture tells me,” she wrote in 1982, “coincides with the wonderful lesson Dorothy says she has learned at last, about feeling she has lost her home. Her answer to the Good Fairy is ‘If I have lost something and I look all over for it and can’t find it, it means I really never lost it in the first place.’ That is subtle, but finally I understood. If you can’t find it, it is still there somewhere—you still have it. I pondered over that for years. I used to think, ‘But I never really had it!’ Then I listened and thought and remembered, and then, one time, I knew. I had been there. And I still am.”

Hamilton’s gnomic remarks may suggest an alternate understanding of that classic film, beginning with its most well known line. When, near the end of the movie, Dorothy says,  “There’s no place like home,” that is commonly taken as an expression of the girl’s affection for the Kansas farm where she lives with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. But remember that in the beginning of the film, Dorothy wants to run away from home, escape to “somewhere where there isn’t any trouble,” somewhere where Miss Gulch isn’t trying to get her dog Toto, “somewhere over the rainbow.” When she is injured in the cyclone, her imagination answers her desires by remaking Kansas into Oz, the hired hands (Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory) into her companions (the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion), Professor Marvel into the Wizard, and Elvira Gulch into the Wicked Witch. All these transformations make a subtle point: Dorothy cannot escape her troubles by going elsewhere. The last words of the movie, “There’s no place like home,” really amount to “There’s no place but home.”

Following Hamilton’s lead, we can say that Dorothy discovers that this here-and-now is all there is to life and more than enough. Fantasizing, resemblance-making, daydreaming are symptoms of existential dis-ease. Instead of being at-home in this life, these failures of nerve and moments of escapism amount to an automobile covered with bumper stickers that read “I’d rather be windsurfing” or “I’d rather be anywhere else but here.”

We can understand this in terms of the Zen story about a samurai who came to his teacher and asked him to explain the Christian concepts of “heaven” and “hell.” The master began to insult the samurai and his family until the warrior could stand it no longer and reached for his sword, beginning to unsheath it. “Behold hell,” the teacher said. Stunned, the samurai paused and realized the point. Then he began to sheath his sword. “Behold heaven,” the teacher said.

Likewise, at the end of “The Wizard of Oz,” an awakened Dorothy is surrounded at bedside by those she knows and she witnesses their fantasy-world likenesses collapse and retreat to their source. As Margaret Hamilton explains, though she has hunted hither and yon for her heart’s desire, she never really lost it in the first place. She is at home and always has been.

 

Jerry Griswold is professor emeritus of literature at San Diego State University and former director of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. He is the author of seven books, including Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story and Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

 

On the Amish and Shunning

On Tuesday, February 4, PBS’s  American Experience will air The Amish: Shunned. In light of this documentary, we asked Karen Johnson-Weiner, one of the co-authors of Johns Hopkins University Press’s The Amish, to explain the practice of shunning.

Guest post by Karen M. Johnson-Weiner

In Lancaster County, a group of us ate dinner with an Amish couple who had two children and several grandchildren who were all no longer Amish. The pair showed us pictures of the wedding of one of their (no longer Amish) sons. For me, this brought home the diversity of ways in which Amish communities deal with those who leave. I once arrived at a Swartzentruber (ultraconservative Amish) home to find the mother in tears because her son had run away in the middle of the night. It was odd to be consoling my friend because her son had left to live like I do. My Swartzentruber friend would never have pictures of a child’s English wedding (English, as the Amish call them, are outsiders who speak English), much less show them to outsiders. Another Swartzentruber couple no longer mentions a married daughter who, with her family, joined a conservative Mennonite church; they haven’t seen the two grandchildren born since the daughter left their community.

For the Amish, excommunication (Bann) and shunning (Meidung) are community-wide tough love. When someone is baptized and joins an Amish church-community, that person makes a vow to God to embrace the Christian faith as practiced by that community, a congregation of those who have made this same promise. If someone breaks this vow by joining a different group or even leaving the Amish altogether, then others in the community are left with no option but to excommunicate and shun that person. To do otherwise would be to break their own vows to God. Church members hope that the shunning will help those who leave realize the seriousness of the step they are taking and recognize its eternal consequences. Furthermore, the discipline of shunning protects the integrity of the church-community.

How a church-community carries out the shunning of those who leave is a distinguishing characteristic, one that can put one Amish group at odds with others. For example, the Swartzentruber Amish trace their roots to a schism in the large Old Order Amish community in Holmes County, Ohio, over the unwillingness of the majority to excommunicate and shun members who joined an Amish congregation that was different from  the one in which they had been baptized. Nearly forty years later, in the 1950s, the Holmes County Old Order community experienced another schism when the majority of church members agreed not to excommunicate and shun members who left the church if they affiliated with another plain, Amish-related group. Again, more conservative-minded churches separated in order to keep “strong Bann,” a strict shunning.

Today, the Swartzentruber Amish and other very conservative Amish groups continue to shun members who leave the baptismal community for a different group, regardless of whether the group is plain, Amish, or Amish-related. There are several types of Swartzentruber congregations, and they don’t “fellowship” with each other (“dien” in Pennsylvania Dutch): in other words, ministers of one group will not preach at services of the other, and members of one group can’t marry members of the other. Thus, when a Swartzentruber joins a different Swartzentruber community, that person will be excommunicated and shunned. (Of course, having been baptized into one community, that person would not be welcome in another because the groups respect each other’s excommunications!) Only if errant church members come back to make confession in the church and rejoin the community are they again welcome. Otherwise, they are not invited to any family gatherings, nor are they welcome to visit their parents or siblings.

In contrast, a member of a less conservative Old Order church community noted that someone would be shunned if he or she left to join a Mennonite church, but not if he or she went to another Old Order Amish church, even if that other church was not one with which they “fellowshipped.” Furthermore, less conservative Amish, unlike the Swartzentrubers, may still be able to engage socially with those who have been excommunicated. One woman told me that her sister, who had left the Amish world entirely, could still eat with the family although she couldn’t sit at the same table.

The percentage of members that stays Amish fluctuates by group. In one group, it could be 60 percent; in another, 95 percent. Ninety percent is the gross national average. Ironically, the Swartzentrubers have the higher retention. The “new order” tend to have a lower retention rate. The closer someone is to the outside world, the easier it is for them to step over the line.

Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is a professor of anthropology at SUNY-Potsdam, coauthor of  The Amish, and author of Train Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools, published by the JHU Press, and New York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State. 

Interested in knowing more about the Amish now? Check out our two digital shorts taken from The Amish, From Rumspringa to Marriage and The Amish and Technology, for only $2.99 each.

For more information on the Amish and shunning click here.

A New Chapter for The American Experience

PBS’ The American Experience will re-air The Amish on Tuesday, January 28th at 8 p.m. Next week, PBS will premiere The Amish: Shunned on February 4th at 9 p.m.

The Amish draws on the expertise of numerous JHU Press authors, including Donald B. Kraybill, a leading authority on the Amish and editor of the Press’ highly regarded series in Anabaptist and Pietist studies. Filmed over the course of one year, this groundbreaking work features unprecedented access to Amish communities. The film’s producers claim that it is the first documentary to deeply penetrate and explore this attention-averse group.

JHU Press’ companion book, The Amish, is based on twenty-five years of research on Amish history, religion, and culture  by Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt. Donald Kraybill was one of the interview subjects in PBS’ original documentary, and producers consulted the companion book when filming both The Amish and The Amish: Shunned. 

Check back to the blog next week for Karen M. Johnson-Weiner’s explanation of the long-standing Amish practice of shunning.

Here are some notable and bestselling Amish and Anabaptist studies books.

The Amish

Amish Quilts: Crafting An American Icon

The Riddle of Amish Culture

Thrill of the Chaste:The Allure of Amish Romance Novels

Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia

Train Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools

Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identities

An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Community

The Amish and the Media

Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War

Growing up Amish: The Rumspringa Years second edition (May 2014)

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture (March 2014)

Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe

Pacifists in Chains:The Persecution of Hutterites during the Great War

Don’t forget to check out our digital shorts:

Amish and Technology

From Rumspringa to Marriage

Our MLA 2014 virtual exhibit is open

Attention humanities scholars and lovers of literature: We’re pleased to open the “doors” to our virtual exhibit in support of the 2014 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Simply click the banner below to enter and browse over 100 new, recent, and forthcoming books and our entire selection of academic journals. The books are 30% off and journals are 20% off.

Questions? E-mail Brendan Coyne or tweet him at @JHUPSales.

December news and new books

Happy Holidays from JHUP!

We’d like to extend our 30% discount to you on all books featured in this email. Enter code HDPD at checkout to receive a 30% discount on all books featured in this blog post or mention this code when calling in your order at 1-800-537-5487.

News and Notes / Praise and Reviews

Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon by Janneken Smucker was featured in The New York Times 2013 Holiday Gift Guide.

A Man’s Guide to Healthy Aging: Stay Smart, Strong, and Active by Edward H. Thompson, Jr., and Lenard W. Kaye was featured in The Wall Street Journal’s 2013 top guides to life after 50.

Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts  edited by Rebecca Chopp, Susan Frost, and Daniel H. Weiss was featured in an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer  and the editors were interviewed on WHYY’s Radio Times.

Hot off the Press

Over the River and Through the Wood $20.97 (reg. $29.95)

Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Poetry Rediscover nineteenth-century American children’s poetry with stunning period illustrations.

Living Safely, Aging Well: A Guide to Preventing Injuries at Home Nationally recognized safety expert Dorothy A. Drago spells out how to prevent injury while cooking, gardening, sleeping, driving—and just walking around the house.

The Other Four Plays of Sophocles: Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes Famed translator David Slavitt lends his distinctly contemporary voice to four lesser-known plays of Sophocles.

From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–1835 How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture.

The Myth of the Democratic Peacekeeper: Civil-Military Relations and the United Nations Arturo C. Sotomayor investigates how United Nations peacekeeping missions affect military organizations and civil-military relations as countries transition to a more democratic system.

New in Paperback!

Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream “Only a few of the many books on film noir are essential. This is one of them… A smart, clearly written book.”—Choice

The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief “This book exists… to explain matters of the heart using our knowledge of the mind… A host of professional students, clinicians, educators, and other well-read individuals will find this worthy of a close and careful read.”-Mark H. Fleisher, JAMA

The Sustainable University: Green Goals and New Challenges for Higher Education Leaders James Martin and James E. Samels have worked closely with college and university presidents, provosts, and trustees to devise best practices that establish sustainable policies and programs in the major areas of institutional operations.

The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic “A sophisticated analysis of sources that have long confused historians. Offering a thoughtful window onto the world of early American men, it demonstrates that sympathy and affection were important qualities for the founding fathers.”—John Gilbert McCurdy, New England Quarterly

Remember, enter code HDPD at checkout to receive a 30% discount on all books featured in this blog post.