A widescreen frame in cinema beckons the eye to playfully, creatively roam. Such technology also gives inventive filmmakers room to disrupt and redirect audience expectations, surprising viewers through the use of a wider, more expansive screen. Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century. Exploring the relationship between aspect ratio and subject matter, Playful Frames shows how directors make puckish use of widescreen technology. All four of these distinctive filmmakers reimagined popular genres (such as melodrama, slapstick comedy, film noir, science fiction, and horror cinema) through their use of the wide frame, and each brings a range of intermedial interests (painting, performance, and music) to their use of the widescreen image. This study looks specifically at the technological underpinnings, aesthetic shapes, and interpretive implications of these four directors’ creative use of widescreen, offering a way to reconsider the way wide imagery still has the potential to amaze and move us today.

Do you find yourself wanting more out of life? It’s time to bring play to your every day Play is not just for kids! There are many reasons we need play in our lives. The Playful Life shows you why and how to bring more playfulness to all aspects of your life. You’ll explore how to create meaningful, relevant, and fun experiences for yourself and others through both a playful mindset and playful behaviors. Through research and 20+ years of teaching children and adults, authors Dr. Julie Jones and Jed Dearybury have found that play is not only fun, it’s essential to a full life. In this book, they share their knowledge and inspire you to reflect on the need for connection and joy for healthy living through play. This book will equip you with new definitions, ideas, and ways of thinking about play for your daily life. With a relaxed tone, comical banter, and real talk, the authors encourage new understandings about what play is and empower you to make more playful choices. If you strive to find balance, overcome stress, and enjoy each day through play—The Playful Life is a must read for your life journey! Learn what play means and why it’s so essential to our everyday lives—at every age Discover the incredible benefits of play to your physical and mental health Get ideas for incorporating play into your everyday life at work, at home, or when you’re out and about Begin healing past traumas and grow into the person you are meant to be—through play and playful living! Building on the popular book The Playful Classroom, this is a new and exciting take on what play does for all of us-- physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively.

A Playful Path, the new book by games guru and fun theorist Bernard De Koven, serves as a collection of ideas and tools to help us bring our playfulness back into the open. When we find ourselves forgetting the life of the game or the game of life, the joy of form or the content, the play of brain or mind, body or spirit, this book can help us return to that which our soul is heir.

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.