Search results for ""Author Paul Arthur""

A census conducted in 1901 indicated the existence of some 209 producers of pottery in France, employing a total of around 5,800 full-time labourers. This great activity stimulated a parallel development in the arts, including the search for new expressions in art pottery, giving birth to l'art nouveau, a great and eclectic synthesis of a number of other art styles. Largely through British arts and crafts, and the work of artists like the Manxman Archibald Knox, it reached far back into the prehistory of Celtic art. To this were added later medieval elements, through the gothic revival championed by William Morris. The need for renewal, breaking away from the neo-Classical and academia, which was the realm of the upper-class culture, was largely theorised by John Ruskin, who searched elsewhere for inspiration. Thus did British art nouveau also partake of Chinese and Japanese styles, though never in so forceful a manner as did the French aesthetic. France, on the one side, looked back to the swirling and frivolous eighteenth century Rococo, primarily through the influence of the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, influential aesthetes of the mid-nineteenth century. The book focuses especially on artists working stoneware or gres, faience, and terracotta. It aims to provide a general survey of the many artists working in these areas, and includes brief accounts of the ceramics work of sculptors and painters whose wider output is already well known.

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For three decades, Paul Arthur has been a leading observer and critic as well as a direct participant in America’s avant-garde cinema. In A Line of Sight, he provides a sweeping new account of the extravagant energies of American experimental cinema since 1965. Balancing close analysis of both major and lesser-known films with detailed examinations of their production, distribution, and exhibition, Arthur addresses the avant-garde’s cultural significance while offering a timely reconsideration of accepted critical categories and artistic options. Rather than treating American avant-garde cinema as a series of successive artistic breakthroughs, A Line of Sight emphasizes the importance of social and institutional networks, material exchanges, and historical disruptions and continuities. Throughout, Arthur pays close attention to themes and visual practices neglected or underrepresented in previous studies, scrutinizing portraiture as a vehicle for projecting dissident identities, highlighting the essay film and the contemporary city symphony, and assessing the contributions of regional and African American filmmaking to the avant-garde. He also explores thematic and formal questions that have been central to the avant-garde achievement: experimental film's relationship with mainstream narrative cinema and postwar American painting as well as the legacy of sixties’s counterculture; the uses and theoretical implications of found footage and the allegorizing of technology; and the schism between a poetic, expressive cinema and the antisubjective, rationalist bias of structural filmmaking. Amid the current resurgence of experimental filmmakers and the emergence of a new audience for their work, A Line of Sight reaffirms the extraordinary breadth and diversity of the avant-garde tradition in America.

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This second edition of Northern Ireland since 1968 provides a concise, thematic overview of the Northern Ireland conflict and its proposed solutions from the beginnings of the 'Troubles' up to the present day. Updated and expanded to include coverage of recent developments such as the publication of the Joint Declaration of 1993 and the Framework Documents of 1995, the book offers a clear analysis of the latest initiatives in the peace process and the local and international contexts within which these have evolved. The new edition includes an updated chronology of events and guide to further reading as well as an expanded list of dramatis personae making it the ideal introduction to the history of this most troubled region. It will be essential reading for students of contemporary history, politics and international relations.

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