Hobart writes about the first 45 years of her life, including her childhood in New York, the start of her theatrical career in Chautauqua, her adventures as a Hollywood actress, the demise of three marriages, and her efforts to clear her name after being blacklisted in Hollywood. Of special interest is the sane perspective that Hobart, now 89, brings to her story and her attention to the connections that pull these seemingly disjointed events together into a coherent story of a life. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Amelie Hastie rethinks female authorship within film history by expanding the historical archive to include dollhouses, scrapbooks, memoirs, cookbooks, and ephemera.

Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry American poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.

In Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future. Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.

The anti-Communist hysteria that began in the 1930s was further empowered in 1938 when the House of Representatives established the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Soon thereafter, the creation of the blacklist in the late 1940s brought the Hollywood film and television community into the fold. Provocatively capturing the controversy and sentiments surrounding this period of political imbalance, Actors on Red Alert explores the repercussions of the blacklist through career interviews with five prominent actors and actresses.

Edward Bernds came to Hollywood in 1928 to help United Artists make the transition to sound. He worked with some of the most notable directors in Hollywood including Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and Howard Hawks. Though Bernds loved sound work, he had higher aspirations, and hoped to become a writer and director. His first breakthrough came during the mid-1940s on Columbia shorts starring the Three Stooges. Bernds worked with Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, and company for over twenty years as the Stooges' favorite director. A second breakthrough came when he wrote and directed feature length films, among them the science fiction classics: World Without End, Return of the Fly, Spacemaster X7, and Zsa-zsa Gabor's Queen of Outer Space. Edward Bernds witnessed all of the profound changes that Hollywood underwent from the advent of sound to the start of the Easy Rider era. Fortunately for students and fans of film, he tells his story in this fascinating and vivid account of his life in Hollywood.

Becker reminiscences about his work on the sets and in the dressing rooms of Hollywood personalities, providing glimpses into the private lives of a stellar array of actors and actresses. Besides these and other stars, Becker also discloses fascinating details of working with world-famous directors John Huston, William Wyler, Nicholas Ray, Anatole Litvak, René Clément, and Vittorio de Sica.