U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film collects together the published essays of Stephen Lee Naish, into a narrative that explores the political and humanistic elements of modern cinema. With the rise of digital technology and the excessive use of CGI currently overwhelming cinema, realism and humanity have been dispensed with in favor of spectacle and illusion. It is the goal of U.ESS.AY to find within modern cinema contents that address the cultural and political landscape

Dennis Hopper (1936 2010) was one of most charismatic and protean figures to emerge from the American independent film movement of the 1960s and 70s, an incredibly compelling screen presence who helped give cult classics like Easy Rider and Blue Velvet their off-kilter appeal. But his artistic interests went far beyond acting, and this collection of essays is the first major work to take in Hopper as a creative artist in all his fields of endeavor, from acting and directing to photography, sculpture, and expressionist painting. Stephen Naish doesn t skimp on covering Hopper s...

Renowned film critic Roger Ebert said Dirty Dancing "might have been a decent movie if it had allowed itself to be about anything." In this broadly researched and accessible text, Stephen Lee Naish sets out to deconstruct and unlock a film that has haunted him for decades, and argues that Dirty Dancing, the 1987 sleeper hit about a young middle-class girl who falls for a handsome working-class dance instructor, is actually about everything. The film is a union of history, politics, sixties and eighties culture, era-defining music, class, gender, and race, and of course features one of the...