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The article features poet Vachel Lindsay and his works. Topics discussed include an assessment of the "Arts and Artists" lecture of poet Walt Whitman, the influence of Whitman's lecture on Lindsay, the characteristics traits of the two poets, and Lindsay's view on the literary works of Whitman in the book "The Litany of Washington Street."

This article presents information about various books related to the criticism of Chinese cinema. The accomplishments of Chinese cinema in the last quarter century have been enormous. Rey Chow's stated objective in her book "Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema" is to produce a theory of film that accounts for the relation of film to its sources and the relation between original and receiving cultures. The book states that the appearance of film and photographically based mass media poses a powerful challenge to the thinking and writing that has historically taken place in China. Dai Jinhua's collected writings were first published in English in the year 2002 in a book titled "Cinema and Desire." Dai says that securing foreign investment and winning the attention of foreign festivals became necessary for directors working in the art mode. The book "China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity," by Sheldon Lu substantially reframes the questions that constitute cross-cultural exchange in many ways.

Investigates the literary style of American litterateur, Walt Whitman. Knowledge about the rudimentary conventions of fiction; Range of sources about the rhetoric and formative structures of popular narrative; Influence of personal experiences to the use prose and plot devices; Understanding about the relationship between the poet, the poetic subject and the reader.

Discusses the history of film theory in the U.S. with reference to Sergei M. Eisenstein, a prominent film-maker and critic, during the period from 1926 to 1930. Reception of Eisenstein's film 'Potemkin,' in the U.S.; Main features of film theory in the U.S. during mid-1920s.

This article profiles the violence that occurs in the films that compose the most popular (top-grossing) genres of 1994: comedy, drama, and action. The critical features used to describe film violence are intentionality, frequency, seriousness, consequences, explicitness, and severity (damage to the body of the recipient). Scales for seriousness, explicitness, and severity were systematically applied to the films using frame-by-frame analysis. Although the initiators of violence in American films employ lethal violence in nearly half the violent events, depiction of any consequences to the recipient' s body occurs in 1 out of 10 cases. Throughout, the effects of violence on the victim's body are mystified by a form of narrative that occults and minimizes consequences arising from clearly depicted intentional assaults. So far as violence is concerned, the Hollywood body is an impossible one, merely a dramaturgical figure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses contemporary cinema. Poststructuralist theory decisively transformed the structuralist project of elaborating the specific codes of the language of film. The place of contemporary film as a narrative form is, in a society transformed by television. The formalist project is one of preservation of stability of psychological causality as the basis for the representation of human action in an ideal fiction called the fabula. It is an effort to preserve this classic moment of film through the transcendental categories of Kantian epistemology and aesthetics vested finally in the figure of the ideal spectator.

The article focuses on the reflections of the film "The Rules of the Game," on the theater of history. "The Rules of the Game," provides an historical and critical perspective both on the society it pictures and on the principal means by which that society represents itself, theater. The forms of eighteenth century comedy that give structure and shape to the social order theater becomes a metaphor for that order are subjected by the film to a form of scrutiny. By summing up, revising, and breaking with nearly a decade of previous work, film-maker perspective in the film places the depicted society, the filmmaker, and the audience.

The article focuses on the film making style of David Wark Griffith. The problem of Griffith and of "Broken Blossoms" is not explained nor even adequately posed. Ordinarily the explanation of the phenomenon of cinema, and of Griffith in particular, is treated as an extension of the realist tendency in the nineteenth-century novel and its conjunction with melodramatic theater. The effect and force of many early Biograph films is not to render the action spectacular as in the stage machinery of late Victorian melodrama, but rather, to render the subjectivity of a response within and toward the general situation of a character in a family.

The article discusses Cahiers du Cinéma's text on the film "Young Mr. Lincoln." The text is directly interesting today, not just for historical reasons, but both for its formulation of method, and for its brilliant if sometimes obscure account of the functioning of what is often called the classical Hollywood text. Given the Cahiers declared ambition to set forth a method of "reading" appropriate to the "writing" of a certain body of films, their text on Young Mr. Lincoln and on Hollywood cinema more generally, assumes a special place within the field of textual analysis. These Cahiers du Cinéma texts claim readers' attention as the most rigorous mode of textual analysis that seeks to understand film within its social and historical contexts.

Presents an introduction to articles related to Beverle Ann Houston's work on television and video, published in the July 1992 issue of the journal "Quarterly Review of Film & Video."

The article discusses various reports published within the issue concerning on the analysis of several films created by Italian-American film director Frank Capra.

The article discusses the general relation of a work to its cultural context. While it often describes the general relation of a work to its cultural context, conventional film history, with a few notable exceptions, has seldom sought to examine or interrogate this relation. In some instances, demonstrating "determination" of the context on the structure or function of the text has proved to be too exacting a model of explanation at this moment in the history of the discipline. The essays discussed in this article undertake to re-present the film in its formal, thematic, and historical perspective.

Presents an introduction to the articles published in the journal "Quarterly Review of Film Studies."

Abstract: Many informatics tools have emerged to process the voluminous and complex data generated by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The interpretation of fMRI exams is largely determined by these tools. However, their performance is hard to evaluate because there is no independent means of calibration. A novel fMRI calibration system called SmartPhantom has been developed to simulate functional blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) imaging. SmartPhantom contains a quadrature radio frequency coil, comprising two perpendicular planar loops that can be externally activated or deactivated. The system is able to produce reasonably uniform signal enhancements in a calibration sample surrounded by the two loops during an MRI scan. The enhancement is controlled well in both magnitude and predefined timing and produces BOLD-like signals. Characteristics of SmartPhantom are discussed in detail, followed by a comparison of fMRI informatics tools. Two fMRI data sets are acquired with the SmartPhantom. One with high signal-to-noise ratio provides the calibration. Another with lower SNR is input into three software packages (BrainVoyager, FSL and Statistical Parametric Mapping 2) for data preprocessing and statistical analysis. Results from the three packages are compared in both sensitivity of detecting the activation and correlation between the predicted activation and calibration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]