Search results for ""author james r. russo""

A Russian Jew who spent most of his life in England and America, Alexander Bakshy (1885-1949) was a theater critic and literary translator. He was also an innovative theorist who applied to theater the discourse of self-reflexive modernism, prizing anti-illusionist medium-awareness. Indeed, he was something of a pioneer in the area of "spectatorship" and medium-awareness, going so far as to argue in favor of the modernist idea of overt presentationalism on stage as opposed to disingenuous representationalism. One can see this presentational, or anti-illusionist, argument at work in a number of pieces in Drama According to Alexander Bakshy, 1916-1946—an edited collection that also includes a lengthy contextualizing introduction and a comprehensive bibliography of this Russian émigré's writings.Alexander Bakshy's writings deserve to be better known, for his sound critical-theoretical approach remains relevant to contemporary aesthetic debate. Like many performance-minded scholars today, Bakshy had a daredevil willingness to assess the theater seriously and to encourage the kind of experimentation that promised to advance the expressiveness of dramatic art. Yet surprisingly, the full applicability of many of his pioneering ideas about the drama has yet to be tested—a disheartening state of affairs that, one hopes, the present volume will help to remedy.

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This first comprehensive English collection of the interviews of Jacques Rivette (19282016) documents his career through chronology, filmography, bibliography, and image stills. A comprehensive introduction places this work in the wider context of twentieth-century social change. Rivettes films, like many of the works of the French New Wave, seem to have avoided the aging process entirely, remaining as playful, fresh, and quietly spectacular as the day they were made. Indeed, his body of work may be the most impressive of the French New Wave. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) has been recognized as possibly the best film to emerge from the post-New Wave era, even as Paris Belongs to Us (1961) is one of the best pictures to emerge from the New Wave itself. Rivette was hardly the most prolific director, however, and the length of his films has often counted against him. Nonetheless, his clinical, self-reflexive essays in film form reveal him as a cinematic purist whose commitment to the celluloid muse hardly diminished from the heady days of the early 1950s to the end of his career in 2009. Beyond inspiring the New Wave movement and continuing to reflect, and reflect on, its central tenets, Rivettes enduring contribution to the history of film is unquestionably evident in his sensitive treatment of the histories and destinies of women, especially through strong roles for actresses. During the six decades of his career, nonetheless, he struck a subtle balance not only between female and male characters, but also between political and personal obsession, between myth and fiction, between theater and cinema, in films that, in addition to having influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Claire Denis, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas, and David Lynch, continue to redefine the art of cinema around the world.

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William Troy (1903-1961) was a highly regarded literary critic during the 1930s and 1940s. Among his contemporaries, he ranked with Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, and F. O. Matthiessen. Indeed, in the preface to the posthumous, 1968 publication of his Selected Essays, which won a National Book Award, Allen Tate placed Troy among the handful of the best critics of this century. Troy's criticism was informed by an intelligence so balanced that, where many theoreticians took up positions in logical traps, he easily avoided them. At the very moment when scholars and critics were either treating literature like polemics or investigating ideas as if belles-lettres were a sub-category of history or philosophy, Troy acknowledged both the centrality of literary ideas and their distinction from ideas in other forms. When confronted with a text, he analysed it with a firm sense of its inherent meaning and of its cultural implications, in a style that expresses seriousness of commitment precisely and clearly. The Bookman presents a selection of Troy's remaining writings on such major literary figures as Henry James, e. e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Willa Cather, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Emile Zola. Troy produced a body of work that is timeless, permanent, and exemplary -- perhaps as much as, if not more so than, the work of such other critical contemporaries of his as the Anglo-Americans Yvor Winters, I. A. Richards, William Empson, George Jean Nathan, and R. P. Blackmur. Published in conjunction with Film Nation: William Troy on the Cinema, 1933-1935 (ISBN 978-1-78976-173-3), The Bookman is clear evidence of Troy's role as one of the foremost critics of his age. Inclusion of a substantive index makes the work an essential and accessible gateway to a wide range of literary criticism.

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André Bazin (1918-58) was renowned for almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as for being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951, Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, the most influential critical periodical in the history of cinema. Five of the film critics whom he mentored at that magazine later became the most acclaimed directors of the postwar French cinema: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Bazin is also considered to be the principal instigator of the highly influential auteur theory—the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator or "author" of its unique cinematic style.In his relatively brief lifetime, Bazin wrote some 2,600 articles and reviews, only about 200 of which are accessible in anthologies or edited collections—and most of these are theoretical pieces.The Practical Critic: André Bazin on Film, 1945-1958 offers critical reviews of notable individual films: Scarface, Citizen Kane, The Seven Samurai, The Great Dictator, It's a Wonderful Life, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without A Cause, Aparajito, Miracle in Milan, Touch of Evil, East of Eden, Ivan the Terrible, The Best Years of Our Lives, La Strada, High Noon, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Practical Critic also features a contextual introduction to Bazin's life and work, a Bazin bibliography, a selection of film stills, and a comprehensive index. This book represents a major contribution to film studies and a testament to the continuing influence of one of the world's pre-eminent cultural critics.

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Robert Hatch's critical life spanned five decades. Starting in 1947 and continuing until 1984, he wrote about drama (and film) for The New Republic, The Nation, Theatre Arts, The Reporter, and Horizon. Along with John Simon, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman, and Stanley Kauffmann, Hatch was one of the most potent, influential authors in the New York school of twentieth-century American arts criticism. With style and erudition Open Hatch discusses plays and productions from the following countries: England, the United States, France, Russia, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Greece, and Australia. Among the many works discussed are The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen; The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams; The Bourgeois Gentleman, by Molière; The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill; Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare; The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht; Exiles, by James Joyce; Endgame, by Samuel Beckett; The Blacks, by Jean Genet; The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Dutchman, by LeRoi Jones; and Leonce and Lena, by Georg Büchner. Also included in Open Hatch are articles on the following subjects: the idea of repertory; the Living Theatre; the Actors' Studio; Broadway and Off-Broadway; melodrama; and scene design. In addition, one may find in this rich collection bio-critical pieces on such figures as Tyrone Guthrie, Orson Welles, and John Arden. The precision, wit, and wisdom of Hatch's writing chime in Open Hatch, as he reveals his sense of cultural mission - and love of all the arts - by applying to theater and drama the same high standards that are applied to fiction, poetry, art, and music.

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Analyzing Film: A Student Casebook is a film textbook containing fifteen essays about sixteen historically and artistically significant films made between 1920 and 1990. This casebook is geographically diverse, with sixteen countries represented: Germany, Russia, Spain, France, the United States, Denmark, Japan, India, England, Italy, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Hungary, Australia, and China. The essays in Analyzing Film are clear and readable—sophisticated and weighty, yet not overly technical or jargon-heavy. The book's critical apparatus features credits, images, and bibliographies for all films discussed, filmographies for all the directors, a chronology of film theory and criticism, a glossary of film terms, a guide to film analysis, and a list of topics for writing and discussion, together with a comprehensive index.

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