Bryn Mawr Authors

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike.

Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics--indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order.

Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses--the crowd scenes--in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater.

The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.

A bilingual edition of Leonid Schwab's poetry with an introduction by Maria Stepanova.

Leonid Schwab is an integral figure for the understanding of Russian contemporary poetry; he's also one of its least conforming members. While remaining singularly unique, Schwab has had a liberating effect on a number of Russophone poets during the past two decades. In his strange poems, elimination of the lyric subject and heightened narrativity unite with masterfully measured lines to create worlds that remain perpetually beguiling.

The verses trace the contours of something along the lines of happiness, they delineate its momentary trajectories, indicate the direction--until a new shift exposes the next, still uninhabited tract of invisible territory. This strange, dazzling, twilit universe--inhabited by bison, electricians, and short circuits--is something like a promise that you cannot not believe: Schwab knows what he's talking about.--Maria Stepanova

Borges tells of imperial cartographers attempting to construct a map of the empire that was the size of the empire. Discolored tatters of the abandoned project still exist in the desert; beggars and animals live in them. He might have been talking about the poetry of Leonid Schwab. Schwab's astonishing semilegible living pictures, poetic tatters of imperial dreams, studies in slowed-down, polyphonic time, remnants of an unwritable, strangely male epic are among the most hauntingly beautiful poems written in Russian today. I love them but I could never set them to music, a composer friend says, 'they are music'--Eugene Ostashevsky

Leonid Schwab is a poet who creates worlds that oscillate between past and present, stillness and passage, mystery and nightmare. His poems travel far and wide, taking the reader on unexpected visits to Chkalov, Hebron, Chicago, Poland, Manchuria, and even the Moon. Schwab's poetry transcends rigid cultural frames and national allegiances by engaging in dynamic experiments with border-crossing, diasporic aesthetics, and homelessness.--Alex Moshkin

Poetry.

Lead smarter. A handbook for your brain at work.

High pressure. High conflict. High stress. Today, too many leaders believe that these states are not just natural, but inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Using his skills as a medical doctor and his knowledge from many years in executive positions in the biotech pharmaceutical industry, in Five Brain Leadership, executive coach Carlos Davidovich walks you through the latest breakthroughs in the burgeoning fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and cognitive behavior to help you better understand your multilayered, magical mind, and how to work with it instead of against it in leading your team and building relationships.

Neuromanagement is at the intersection of neuroscience and daily life in the business world. It is leadership that is based on a full understanding of all five of our interlocking brains-our reptilian, emotional, rational, and, yes, even our heart and gut "brains." Through practical tools and exercises, you'll learn how to build your capacity in each of these control centers, and to recognize all the ways they are at play in how humans operate, interrelate, and react to change.

Five-Brain Leadership is your pathway toward turning good leadership into great leadership, and reaching new levels of success in all of life's domains.