Suite for Barbara Loden

Suite for Barbara Loden PDF Author: Nathalie Léger
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 0997366605
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
The second in Nathalie Léger’s acclaimed genre-defying triptych of books about the struggles and obsessions of women artists. “I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.” It is perhaps this “miracle”—the seeming collapse of fiction and fact—that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Rewriting Indie Cinema

Rewriting Indie Cinema PDF Author: J. J. Murphy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549598
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 507

Book Description
Most films rely on a script developed in pre-production. Yet beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the recent mumblecore movement, key independent filmmakers have broken with the traditional screenplay. Instead, they have turned to new approaches to scripting that allow for more complex characterization and shift the emphasis from the page to performance. In Rewriting Indie Cinema, J. J. Murphy explores these alternative forms of scripting and how they have shaped American film from the 1950s to the present. He traces a strain of indie cinema that used improvisation and psychodrama, a therapeutic form of improvised acting based on a performer’s own life experiences. Murphy begins in the 1950s and 1960s with John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, William Greaves, and other independent directors who sought to create a new type of narrative cinema. In the twenty-first century, filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, the Safdie brothers, Joe Swanberg, and Sean Baker developed similar strategies, sometimes benefitting from the freedom of digital technology. In reading key films and analyzing their techniques, Rewriting Indie Cinema demonstrates how divergence from the script has blurred the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Showing the ways in which filmmakers have striven to capture the subtleties of everyday behavior, Murphy provides a new history of American indie filmmaking and how it challenges Hollywood industrial practices.

On Women's Films

On Women's Films PDF Author: Ivone Margulies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501332481
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand's Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden's Wanda; Valie Export's Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women's films to embrace, shape and question the world.

The Melancholia of Class

The Melancholia of Class PDF Author: Cynthia Cruz
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers — including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more — and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to “become someone,” only to find that they lose themselves in the process. Part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist assimilation, uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us, as we break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.

Women and New Hollywood

Women and New Hollywood PDF Author: Aaron Hunter
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978821816
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
The 1970s has often been hailed as a great moment for American film, as a generation of “New Hollywood” directors like Scorsese, Coppola, and Altman offered idiosyncratic visions of what movies could be. Yet the auteurist discourse hailing these directors as the sole authors of their films has obscured the important creative roles women played in the 1970s American film industry. Women and New Hollywood revises our understanding of this important era in American film by examining the contributions that women made not only as directors, but also as screenwriters, editors, actors, producers, and critics. Including essays on film history, film texts, and the decade’s film theory and criticism, this collection showcases the rich and varied cinematic products of women’s creative labor, as well as the considerable barriers they faced. It considers both women working within and beyond the Hollywood film industry, reconceptualizing New Hollywood by bringing it into dialogue with other American cinemas of the 1970s. By valuing the many forms of creative labor involved in film production, this collection offers exciting alternatives to the auteurist model and new ways of appreciating the themes and aesthetics of 1970s American film.

Still Life

Still Life PDF Author: Anna Backman Rogers
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 195303568X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
"There is indeed a "miracle" in the 1970 film Wanda. This film has survived, despite decades of neglect, to emerge into the fuliginous light of an era that may just be ready to strain at grasping its harsh and brutal truths -- truths that reveal the imbrication of the psychic in the social and the experiential in political structures. Barbara Loden's film dares to suggest that the social and ethical functions of art should not necessarily be redemptive - that salvation is a cheap and spurious form of consolation that few can afford in this world. This film, made by a woman who knew all too well what it means to be defined through and by her material circumstances (and her relationships to men), and that is so relentlessly ferocious in its refusal to assuage and comfort the viewer, has always been a form of future feminism. Wanda does not brook the comforts of positivity, of aspiration, or even the luxury of selfhood. This film, Still Life contends, is so radical in its feminist-anti-capitalist politics of refusal that we are still struggling to keep up with it. It delineates precisely how the personal is political and why this matters now more than ever. Wanda, a film about a woman who refuses to be saved or to save herself, who lacks the means and energy to alter anything in her life, who lives in a permanent state of blockage, impasse and failure is, as this publication suggests, the film of our contemporary moment." --back cover of book

The White Dress

The White Dress PDF Author: Nathalie Léger
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1948980061
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
The third in Nathalie Léger’s acclaimed genre-defying triptych of books about the struggles and obsessions of women artists. The White Dress is the third in Nathalie Léger's award-winning triptych of books about women who “through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery” (ELLE). In Exposition, Léger wrote about the Countess of Castiglione, the most photographed woman of the nineteenth century; in Suite for Barbara Loden she took up the actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden; here, Léger grapples with the tragic 2008 death of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hiking from Italy to the Middle East in a wedding dress to promote world peace. A harrowing meditation on the risks women encounter, in life and in art, The White Dress also brings to a haunting conclusion Léger's personal interrogation—sustained across all three books—of her relationship with her mother and the desire for justice in our lives.

A Light in the Dark

A Light in the Dark PDF Author: David Thomson
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593318153
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film--an essential work on the preeminent, indispensable movie directors and the ways in which their work has forged, and continues to forge, the landscape of modern film. Directors operate behind the scenes, managing actors, establishing a cohesive creative vision, at times literally guiding our eyes with the eye of the camera. But we are often so dazzled by the visions on-screen that it is easy to forget the individual who is off-screen orchestrating the entire production--to say nothing of their having marshaled a script, a studio, and other people's money. David Thomson, in his usual brilliantly insightful way, shines a light on the visionary directors who have shaped modern cinema and, through their work, studies the very nature of film direction. With his customary candor about his own delights and disappointments, Thomson analyzes both landmark works and forgotten films from classic directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as contemporary powerhouses such as Jane Campion, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. He shrewdly interrogates their professional legacies and influence in the industry, while simultaneously assessing the critical impact of an artist's personal life on his or her work. He explores the male directors' dominance of the past, and describes how diversity can change the landscape. Judicious, vivid, and witty, A Light in the Dark is yet another required Thomson text for every movie lover's shelf.

Spanish Cinema Against Itself

Spanish Cinema Against Itself PDF Author: Steven Marsh
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253046327
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
“An extraordinary philosophical exploration of the political potential and continued political commitment of cinema today . . . An essential read.” —Patricia Keller, Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Cornell University Spanish Cinema Against Itself maps the evolution of Spanish surrealist and politically committed cinematic traditions from their origins in the 1930s—with the work of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, experimentalist José Val de Omar, and militant documentary filmmaker Carlos Velo—through to the contemporary period. Framed by film theory this book traces the works of understudied and non-canonical Spanish filmmakers, producers, and film collectives to open up alternate, more cosmopolitan and philosophical spaces for film discussion. In an age of the post-national and the postcinematic, Steven Marsh’s work challenges conventional historiographical discourse, the concept of “national cinema,” and questions of form in cinematic practice. “In this exhilarating counter-history of experimental filmmaking in Spain, Steven Marsh takes up the politics of form, the trouble with film history, and the theoretical potential of haunting, discontinuity, and absence . . . Spanish Cinema Against Itself is an important intervention in Spanish film studies and, indeed, in the scholarship on world cinema.” —Rosalind Galt, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London
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