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Across his directorial films, American filmmaker Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative, signpost the era in which the films were made, and delineate the characters'place within American culture. This book explores five of Hopper's films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds of his films in ways that influenced other filmmakers and foreshadowed the advent of the music video format.The author traces Hopper's distinctive approach to the use of music through films from 1969 to 1990, including his innovative use of popular rock, pop, and folk in Easy Rider, his blending of diegetic performances of folk and Peruvian indigenous music in The Last Movie, his use of punk rock in Out of the Blue, incorporation of hip-hop and rap in Colors, and commissioning of a jazz/blues soundtrack by Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker for The Hot Spot. Uncovering the film soundtrack as a vital piece of the narrative, this concise and accessible book offers insights for academic readers in music and film studies, as well as all those interested in Hopper's work.

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 best love stories set to film. Using scene-by-scene analyses, personal interpretation, and comparative study, it's time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.

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