Writing Himself Into History is an eagerly anticipated analysis of the career and artistry surrounding the legendary Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. With the exception of Spike Lee, Micheaux is the most famous--and prolific--African American film director. Between 1918 and 1948 he made more than 40 "race pictures," movies made for and about African Americans. A man of immense creativity, he also wrote seven novels.

Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence concentrate here on the first decade of Micheaux's career, when Micheaux produced and directed more than twenty silent features and built...

Though wildly popular, daytime soaps are arguably the most denigrated and parodied of any contemporary entertainment form. For this reason, even the most devoted soap opera fans are often reticent or even secretive about the shows they love. Watching Daytime Soap Operas is a meditation on the pleasures--and displeasures--of watching and talking about daytime soap operas. In this multidisciplinary study, Louise Spence talks to 25 women about their mostly solitary viewing practices and observes many Internet chat rooms. Over 20 years in the making, the book explores the varied critical and...

Documentaries such as Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born into Brothels, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound, along with March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth have achieved critical as well as popular success. Although nonfiction film may have captured imaginations, many viewers enter and leave theaters with a nanve concept of "truth" and "reality"-for them, documentaries are information sources. But is truth or reality readily available, easily acquired, or undisputed? Or do documentaries convey illusions of truth and...