Browse Books

Embodying the Artificial examines how dance creation unfolds in dialogue with generative AI and related technologies. Grounded in ethnographic research, the book focuses on the kinesthetic dimensions of human–AI interaction to explore how generative systems reshape the creation and performance of dance. Through analyses of choreographic practices involving AI avatars and other intelligent technologies, the author interrogates the ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions that arise when machines become creative partners—challenging established notions of dance, embodiment, and creativity.

Bridging theory and practice, this research offers conceptual and methodological foundations for understanding human–AI interaction in dance. It introduces a clear framework for categorizing interdisciplinary creative processes with various kinds of machines and provides choreographers and movement artists with tools to navigate, design, and reflect on co-creative processes with artificial agents.



Thoughtfully conceived and comprehensive in scope, this book is poised to make a significant and enduring contribution across multiple fields, including dance and performance studies, media and digital studies, and interdisciplinary research. Comparable work in this area is limited – Embodying the Artificial is a thorough and authoritative survey of the topic, presented in a manner that is both engaging and accessible.

Hyper-imaging: New Languages for Art, Media and Communication describes a condition in which images are processes and no longer end points; relays of action instead of representations. In turn, this redefines curating as a form of active mediation between human attention and the invisible systems shaping it. Throughout the book, Dr. Cramerotti weaves theoretical perspectives with case studies drawn from his curatorial experience and deep engagements with artists and thinkers whose work interrogates these shifting dynamics.

It offers a compelling argument that images are shifting from static representations to active practices, using the author’s curatorial experience to illustrate this transformation with clarity and depth. Thoroughly supported by scholarship and professional insight, the book shows how images circulate, shape our responses, and position artists and curators as key figures in evolving media theory.

This is a book about how images function: how they move, mutate, and co-author meaning with machines, publics, and institutions. The goal is to equip curators, artists, scholars, and readers to better navigate this terrain: to engage critically, act creatively, and think infrastructurally. In the age of hyper-imaging, what is seeing is not the point; it is the system of seeing that must be curated.

This is the first English-language handbook of the cinema of Central Asia, covering the key films from the Soviet era and independence.



The volume contains ca. 150 entries on individual films, as well as introductions to the film histories of the five republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.



Introductory chapters highlight the key moments of the cinematic development, film studios and festivals, and production histories for the five Central Asian republics. The entries are written by specialists on the film histories of the republics from US and UK, as well as the republics.

A critical study of the theories of Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), considering how his concepts can offer valuable new approaches to interpreting visual art.



This work is the first to propose a cohesive methodology for applying Bakhtin’s thought to visual art, drawing on intermediary frameworks developed by Susanne Langer, Norman Bryson, Vygotsky, Pavel Florensky, Philip Rawson, Michael Baxandall, and Gilles Deleuze. Bakhtin’s philosophical and linguistic insights are examined in relation to works by Giotto, Riemenschneider, Velázquez, Cézanne, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Marlene Dumas, Bontecou, Caro, and Ghenie.

Punk and the Animal: Ethos, Ethics, and Aesthetics, gives contemporary insight into critical interspecies debates from an analytical perspective through the lens of punk.



It explores the synergies, crossovers, and alignments of punk thinking, together with punk ideologies and influences in contemporary animal studies. The volume includes contributions from leaders in the punk movement who engaged in exemplary practices that helped forge ongoing connections between punk and animal studies. In addition, it includes chapters by artists, scholars of visual and popular culture, animal studies specialists, and others in artistic and art-affiliated disciplines who have found their way into animal studies from one of the many manifestations of punk and who see punk’s ethos, ethics, and aesthetics as formative to their own work.



This volume complements current interest in the subjects of punk studies and animal studies while helping cement the important insights to be gained through examining the intersection of these fields.

Wasteful Theatre reimagines live performance through the lens of economy, value, excess, and waste, asking what it means to lavish resources—material, sensory, and symbolic—on audiences beyond utilitarian calculation. It examines how waste operates within the theatrical relationship between audience, performer, genre, and space, focusing on excessive deployments of value.



Drawing on scholarship in theatre studies, economics, philosophy, and performance practice, the book develops the Wasteful Theatre Equation, distinguishing waste as surplus that amplifies experience rather than squandered loss. Case studies span immersive environments, haunted attractions, escape rooms, site-specific productions, and traditional proscenium theatre, demonstrating how space, participation, sensation, and fear operate as sites of wasteful excess.



Key chapters pose practical questions for makers, reframing contracts of performance, proximity, and risk as tools for creating singular experiences. Across examples from Robert Wilson to Punchdrunk, Grand-Guignol to theme parks, the book positions waste as both disruptive and generative, showing how performance transforms by amplifying horizons of possibility.



Ultimately, it argues that wasteful excess enchants, reorienting theatre toward presence, wonder, and transformative exchange.

DesignWISE challenges the linear logic that has long shaped design practice. Too often, we move from brief to solution without pausing to understand the wider consequences of our choices or the systemic relations they affect. In doing so, we overlook opportunities for deeper, regenerative change.



This book introduces DesignWISE as a 360-degree alternative—a circular decision-making tool grounded in design thinking, systemic leadership, and indigenous wisdom traditions. Rather than progressing step by step, DesignWISE invites designers, leaders, and teams into a continuous cycle of reflection, evaluation, and renewal.



At the centre of the method is a wheel: a structure inspired by the medicine wheel, encouraging holistic awareness, multiple perspectives, and a stronger connection between inner intention and outer impact. Each phase of the wheel opens a space for introspection, imagination, and responsibility, helping us understand how our decisions resonate across people, organisations, and the planet.



DesignWISE ultimately argues that meaningful transformation begins within. By cultivating presence, curiosity, and mindfulness, we can unlock new sources of insight and move beyond conventional approaches to design. This book offers both a conceptual framework and a practical guide for anyone seeking to design with greater wisdom, depth, and planetary awareness.

The DesignWISE Collective brings together designers, thinkers, and changemakers who believe in design as a force for systemic transformation. We’re here to co-create a new paradigm for design—one that begins not with the user, but with the planet.

DesignWISE challenges the linear logic that has long shaped design practice. Too often, we move from brief to solution without pausing to understand the wider consequences of our choices or the systemic relations they affect. In doing so, we overlook opportunities for deeper, regenerative change.



This book introduces DesignWISE as a 360-degree alternative—a circular decision-making tool grounded in design thinking, systemic leadership, and indigenous wisdom traditions. Rather than progressing step by step, DesignWISE invites designers, leaders, and teams into a continuous cycle of reflection, evaluation, and renewal.



At the centre of the method is a wheel: a structure inspired by the medicine wheel, encouraging holistic awareness, multiple perspectives, and a stronger connection between inner intention and outer impact. Each phase of the wheel opens a space for introspection, imagination, and responsibility, helping us understand how our decisions resonate across people, organisations, and the planet.



DesignWISE ultimately argues that meaningful transformation begins within. By cultivating presence, curiosity, and mindfulness, we can unlock new sources of insight and move beyond conventional approaches to design. This book offers both a conceptual framework and a practical guide for anyone seeking to design with greater wisdom, depth, and planetary awareness.

The DesignWISE Collective brings together designers, thinkers, and changemakers who believe in design as a force for systemic transformation. We’re here to co-create a new paradigm for design—one that begins not with the user, but with the planet.

This is the Second Edition of the Danish-language book first published in 2024 and now out of print.

From the perspective of sublating Eastern and Western cultures and civilizations, this approach argues for the urgency of industrial civilization's transformation; based on the dimension of civilization, it explores the future trajectories of humanity, the world, and human civilization; it puts forward for the first time the concepts of “global civilization” and “great civilization” as two forms of advanced future civilizations for humanity, elucidating their core significance and practical approaches; it advocates integrating the values of global civilization into the practice of sustainable development and has devised futures research methodologies such as “China 2050 and Early Warning Systems.”



This very significantly revised new edition includes approximately 30% new or updated content. A substantially expanded chapter addresses major contemporary topics in artificial intelligence and the role of AI in education, referencing current data and theories. A new 40,000-word appendix outlines the “six waves of futures studies”, bringing together contributions from 100 thinkers and futurists from thirty-five institutions, across different periods and regions. The book retains its 26 illustrations, with 8 updated, resulting in a more comprehensive and current edition.

From a physical point of view, stone is the oldest and most persistent material and support of information in the history of humanity. 



This volume of collected essays, theoretical articles, case-studies, artistic texts and artwork portfolios aims to open a field of thought in which stone is not questioned as a materia prima of artistic work, but rather as a carrier of information.

Stone explores stone as more than a material, presenting it as a carrier of meaning and information across cultures and historical periods. It examines how contemporary artists decode, interpret, and creatively engage with stone, blending artistic practice, cultural studies, and experimental approaches. Highlighting the intersections between art and anthropology, contributions consider how human interaction with natural materials has evolved over time. It investigates the dynamic, almost living presence of stone in art, illuminating the rich interpretive potential of natural materials and the ways our current era reimagines and engages with them.

Systems Play: Art, Design and the Future of Humankind explores how contemporary artists and designers are reimagining the world in an age defined by complexity, uncertainty, and systemic interdependence. The book argues that the most compelling creative practices today engage in systems play, strategies that work with emergent patterns, multiplicity, and interconnection to make large-scale systems more legible and more open to change.

It offers an engaging look at how systems play and speculative design can illuminate social challenges and support collective action for the good of humans, animals, and plants. Idea-driven rather than practical, it presents a rich set of multidisciplinary examples that will inspire researchers and artists alike.

Through richly illustrated case studies across fields such as speculative design, immersive installation, and interactive media, it examines how creative work can: expand human perception beyond biological limits; challenge anthropocentric assumptions; reconceive personhood as relational and distributed; rethink family, community, and care as dynamic systems; and reframe our experience of time. Each chapter situates these practices within broader cultural, technological, and ecological contexts, showing how they resist reductive narratives and open space for alternative futures.

Blending critical theory with accessible storytelling, Systems Play positions experimental art and design as more than cultural commentary, providing intellectual and practical blueprints for navigating complexity. It is both a survey of emergent creative approaches and a call to take their insights seriously as tools for reimagining our shared, uncertain world.

The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border, and released on a tiny independent record label, became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this ‘socialist’ country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world?

Gloucester, England, 1981; multi-racial, teenage street-punk band, Demob, recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song, No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived, punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set, the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice, a wail at the loss, or a love-song to an era.

More than three decades later, the author – and Demob’s bass player in 1981 – set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era, through the disintegration and wars, forced displacements and permanent exiles, to today’s turbulent ‘reconstruction. Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?

An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists.

The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.

Helmbrechts Walk, 1998-2003 is a memorial testament to the forced march of 580 female Jewish prisoners at the end of the Second World War. The march began on April 13th, 1945 in order to evacuate Helmbrechts, a small satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp.



This work is a visual representation of the 225 miles that the prisoners were forced to march from the camp in Germany into the occupied portion of Czechoslovakia, then known as the Sudetenland. Susan Silas set out to retrace the path of these women—22 days in Germany and the Czech Republic, on the 53rd anniversary of the march. Silas documented this journey on video, in still images and in writings, including this book, which contains 48 archival color plates.

The images are contextualized by a diary of the author's own experiences juxtaposed with news clips drawn from the front pages of The New York Times on the same days in 1998—thus drawing a connection between the violent events of the past and those being witnessed in the present.

In addition to the originally unbound artwork, this book includes a survivor interview with Halina Kleiner, a preface by the Holocaust scholar Brett Ashley Kaplan, and a remembrance of the women who died during this march.

Inclusive Musical Theatre is a comprehensive guide that presents a research-backed curriculum and strategies for creating an inclusive and accessible musical theatre rehearsal and performance process at the high school level. It draws on the author's doctoral research and over a decade of teaching experience to provide practical tools, assessments, and process modifications to support students of all learning needs and backgrounds.

The book begins by exploring the historical context and legal frameworks surrounding special education in public schools, as well as the intersection of drama education and disability studies. It then delves into an in-depth analysis of traditional actor training methods, highlighting their ableist origins and the need for adaptations to foster radical inclusion.

The core of the text outlines a 29-week rehearsal and performance curriculum, broken into three distinct phases, that is designed to scaffold skill development, promote ensemble collaboration, and empower diverse learners. Accompanying the unit plans are detailed assignments, assessments, and grading rubrics that align with national and state arts standards. Additionally, the author provides a wealth of supporting documents, such as student contracts, production resources, and a sample warm-up guide. By championing inclusive practices rooted in the principles of Universal Design for Learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, Inclusive Musical Theatre equips drama educators with the tools to create transformative theatrical experiences for all students.

 An exciting new interdisciplinary and intercontinental volume that brings together scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and digital media.

Space in the Image focuses on cinematic and photographic portrayals of the built environment, from individual buildings to entire cities. It addresses a timely and relevant topic, reflecting the prominence of urbanization and the widespread use of digital audiovisual media in architecture, planning, and design. The work engages with both contemporary practice and current debates in the field.

In light of the growing ubiquity of media platforms and the immediacy of digital representation, the contributors critically examine the evolving relationship between spatial experience and its mediated forms. These inquiries are situated within the broader context of accelerating urbanization, making the book timely for architects, urban designers, planners, and media theorists alike. Rather than treating images as static records of the past, the volume interrogates their role as active participants in shaping contemporary urban life, identity, and memory.



Space in the Image offers a compelling reflection on the dynamic interplay between experience and representation at the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Lines of Inquiry: Multi-disciplinary Methodologies in Drawing and Education is a collection of essays written by researchers, scholars, and artists from nine countries around the world.



The multi-disciplinary contributors include teachers, artists, architects, psychotherapists, museum educators and curators who bring their distinct positions and experiences of using drawing in collaboration with others, in classrooms, in the community, in private practice, and as researchers interpreting and analyzing the experiences of others.The collection is organized in a way that takes the reader through a journey of what drawing is and can be; whether that is through a mapping of one’s daily route, a marking of territory, an expression of an experience, a problem-solving equation of arrows and lines, a comic, or a concept of imagined lines that demarcate power. Some contributions speak to the embodiment that drawing allows, some to learning and knowledge construction, and some to an age-old way of communicating.



The international roster of contributors provides suggestions for developing new ways of knowing, for developing empathy toward things that may lie outside our own experiences, and for seeing alternative perspectives through drawing.

Cutting Up Books - A Writing Method In Critical Thinking is an experimental exploration of writing, creativity, and knowledge-making through the radical act of cutting up books. Blending theory, practice, and art, it proposes textrapolation: a method of critical composition that uses destruction as a form of discovery.



Drawing on traditions of the cut-up, collage, and automatic writing, the book turns the materiality of text into a thinking tool, showing how breaking and reassembling language can generate new modes of understanding.



Thematically, it connects literary experimentation with philosophy, media theory, and the crisis of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. It reconsiders authorship, education, and the function of books in a culture increasingly defined by templates, automation, and cognitive fatigue. Combining academic reflection with poetic fragments and visual-textual compositions to move between the scholarly and the personal, the analog and the algorithmic.

Over six months, Ania Malinowska dismantled over 400 books, reframing their content into 111 poetic epigrams and combining conscious methodical experimentation with the spontaneity of automatic writing. Cutting Up Books addresses the crisis of creativity in contemporary academic and cultural practices while responding to

contemporary challenges, including the crises in education and the perceived threat posed by large

language models. 

The result is both a manifesto and a manual: a hybrid text that invites readers to become practitioners. It encourages intellectual play, intuition, and embodied experimentation as ways of reanimating writing and thought. At once critical and performative, the book demonstrates how cutting up can be a method of thinking, creating, and living differently.

What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.

For centuries, folds and folding have captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origami, amid the simplest acts of pedestrian life, within the philosophical turnings of the mind, and in art, design, architecture, performing arts, and linguistics around the world. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold figures into embodiment, into our very impulse to create.

This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for inter/trans/postdisciplinary artistic research, whether for the performative, for product realization, or simply to enliven body, mind, and spirit. Destined for artmaking—for making any art—the f/old practice etches into the very fabric of embodiment. As such, the f/old reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into nice areas that embrace the unknown, with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities. In conceiving of art made differently, two seasoned facilitators Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their insights, they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute, each a veteran artist of a diverse genre.

Featuring a wide variety of practice samples and images, this book reflects on a current and unique somatic-oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and practice.

The field of digital heritage, definable in the most elementary terms as the application of digital technologies to the practices of conservation and heritage practices, has exploded in recent years.



Today it is typical to see 3D modelling, augmented reality, virtual tours and mobile apps as part and parcel of the heritage sector in a whole variety of ways. This has been reflected in academia with a growing number of conferences and publications dedicated to these questions.



The objective of this book is to offer an interdisciplinary examination of such practices which, it is expected, will reveal more of the nuances, interplays and a wider range of interests than is found in the current literature. To that end, the book offers chapters from international scholars in several disciplines: architectural conservation, archaeology, cultural tourism, urban studies and photography; heritage, film, game, museal studies, and scenography.



Their work deals with three broad areas of activity in the digital heritage field that this book defines as the ‘digital politics of conservation’; technology as a heritage ‘storytelling’ device; and digital technologies as tools to create ‘virtual models of the past’.

The book argues that both the Republican and the Democrat political parties are responsible for the decline of democracy in the United States. It premises objective evidence of how the current political crisis in the U.S. in particular, and in the West in general, is a result of the disregard of the Greeks by the U.S. Constitution as well as the gradual withdrawal of the Classics from our educational system. The book concludes that the current state of affairs leads to a new form of totalitarianism.

The core argument of this book is that the current political unrest in America and the West is ultimately traceable to the utter failure of Western education. The purging of the Greeks from our schools with the masquerade that was modernity, combined with a constitutional anti-intellectualism in America, has bred generations of Western citizens who cannot think. In the absence of human thought market ideologies have enjoyed a long leash to establish as incontestable the idea that any existential proposition alternative to their own is nothing but an arrogant desire to redesign life itself. In our “Age of Trumpism,” where President Trump is summoned to check uncritical progressivism, and where technoligarchs have availed themselves to either side, stupefied electorates must choose from either a preanthropic or a metanthropic future.



In the absence of any anthropic constancy, either one of the alternatives are served by unfettered encroaching technologies that entail forms of totalitarianism as never before. It may be already too late, this book argues, but to bring back human thought towards the possibility of democracy and freedom, is to assess our situation out of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the metaphysical objectivity of Greek tragic art.

Human Theatre: The Energetic Alchemy of the Performer is a practice-based, interdisciplinary exploration of embodied performance, presence, and the energetic body. Drawing from physical theatre, somatics, trauma-informed practice, and voice-body integration, the book introduces Human Theatre, a method centered on the DEE cycle—Dynamis (potential), Energeia (action), and Entelecheia (transformation). It invites performers to move beyond imitation and toward energetic authenticity through breath, movement, and vulnerability.

The book weaves theory, testimony, and exercises to support actors, dancers, and educators seeking deeper connection with their bodies and audiences. It engages traditions from Lessac Kinesensics, flamenco, clown, Commedia dell’Arte, and contemporary somatic techniques. Core themes include embodiment, presence, dissociation, trauma, and the poetic role of silence and gesture in storytelling.

Written with both artistic rigor and emotional honesty, Human Theatre is a vital resource for performers, theatre-makers, and researchers interested in the intersection of performance, healing, and human truth. It affirms that performance is not only an artistic act but a deeply human one—an alchemical space where energy becomes expression and transformation begins.

This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art, it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.

The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art, architecture, and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African, Islamic, and modern arts and visual cultures, the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope, it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent, home to nearly half a million Muslims, or a third of the global Muslim population.



Furthermore, it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage, as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such, the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression, thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.

A comparative study of the politics and production processes of television drama in France and in Britain during a formative historical moment for communication systems. This juxtaposition reveals surprising similarities in the intentions and achievements of practitioners in this expanding television field in Britain and France during the 1950s and 1960s.



The post WW2 era marked a substantial shift in socio-political structures and organisation in both countries within a context of change and possibilities for innovative approaches. This study reveals internal struggles within the French and British institutions controlling broadcasting as crucial determinants in the background decision making which constitutes the focus of the study. Analysis of those events indicates how creative initiatives with a social class perspective can penetrate the threads of communication control in a new system, prior to the consolidation of all the determinants of prevalent bureaucratic structures.



This book foregrounds how socially conscious communication practitioners deployed methods intended to retain control of style and meaning in productions in the face of management scepticism and, in some cases, direct interference. The text draws upon oral history contributions plus research documentation and archive material from within the Institutions. Case studies are presented across national and cultural boundaries. These are reinforced by authentic voices and testimonies from personal interviews which I carried out with directors and writers in both Britain and France.



The book provides a unique insight into active engagement, and socio/political judgements used by writers, editors, producers, and directors in reaching out to what was a rapidly expanding audience.

What can post-catastrophe films tell us about our current real-world circumstances?

This book proposes that a new sub-genre of film called ‘post-catastrophe’ is emerging that displays narratives directly analogous to our current predicament of runaway climate disruption. Post-catastrophe film sits in the space between blockbuster disaster movies that use scenes of destruction to blow the world up and disrupt the flow of humanity and post-apocalyptic films where a version of society has formed in the ashes of the disaster.

In these narratives, the characters are thrown into a world of unsettling circumstances in which they have to adapt and strive for survival and reimagine the world as it changes around them. We face a similar predicament."

More than half a century after his death, Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Rou remains a cinematic icon across Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ‘King of the Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Main Storyteller of the Country’, Rou revolutionized Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a remarkable directorial career spanning from 1938 to 1972.

Deftly navigating the shifting ideological landscapes of the Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, Rou created an idiosyncratic succession of weird, witty and wonderful films that celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of appreciative young audiences. In English-speaking countries, by contrast, Rou’s films remain relatively little known. With streaming platforms now increasing their accessibility to western viewers, this book provides a timely introduction to his unique and exhilarating blend of mirth and magic.

'This book takes us on a journey through the fairy-tale films of Alexander Rou, one of the Soviet Union's most prolific and inventive filmmakers of the genre. Deborah Allison's always engaging and enjoyable writing provides the cultural and technical contexts as she reveals the features that make up Rou’s personal style, whilst also highlighting the narratives, actors and special effects in Rou's work. To put it in fairy-tale language: this is a beautifully woven carpet, whose intricate pattern emerges as we read and takes us on a flight into Rou’s fairy-tale world.'

–Birgit Beumers, Professor emerita in Film Studies, Aberystwyth University