Mike Leigh Whitehead, Tony
2007., 20130719, 2013, 2007, 2007-05-01
eBook
Mike Leigh may well be Britain’s greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the ...cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, this is the first study of his work to challenge the critical privileging of realism in histories of the British cinema, and place the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humour: of jokes and their functions, of laughter as a survival mechanism, and of characterisations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of ‘realism’. Striving for the all-important quality of truth in everything he does, Leigh has consistently shown how ordinary lives are too complex to fit snugly into the conventions of narrative art. Developing characters and narratives through meticulous processes of improvisation in preparation and rehearsal, Leigh has led his collaborators in creating a body of work that is utterly distinctive. From the bittersweet observation of Life is Sweet or Secrets and Lies, to the blistering satire of Naked and the manifest compassion of Vera Drake, he has demonstrated a matchless ability to perceive life’s funny side as well as its tragedies, establishing a unique niche in the British cinema as both humorist and humanist.
The state of police staffing during 1943-1944 is revealed, its peculiarities related to the course of the German-Soviet war are identified. The staffing problem in the police during the war was ...extremely acute. The mobilisation of police officers to the army, their deaths in combat, and evacuation to the east significantly worsened the staffing potential of this law enforcement body. The situation with recruitment in 1943–1944 changed somewhat compared to the first stage of the war. This process became more manageable and lost the main elements of chaos and situationalism that were characteristic of the initial period of the war. In the regions of Ukraine liberated from the Nazis, NKVD operational groups immediately began recruiting police officers. There were several sources of this formation: pensioners, women, demobilised soldiers and partisans, as well as officers seconded from other regions of the USSR. The educational level of newly recruited police officers was very low at the time. Thus, of those recruited to the state police, only 7.6 % had special training, 3.1 % had military education, and 10.6 % had a secondary education. A significant proportion of police officers had little work experience. For example, 45 % of the state police had less than 1 year of service, and almost 69 % of the departmental police had less than 1 year of service. By the end of 1944, the total percentage of police personnel reached 70.4%. The ethnic composition of the police was as follows: Ukrainians – 47.8%, Russians – 36.5 %, Jews – 15.4 %, and others – 0.3%. Due to the shortage of people, large deviations from the mandatory conditions and rules for staffing the police were allowed. People who did not meet the requirements for police personnel in terms of age, health, education and generally did not meet the requirements for police personnel were recruited. This resulted in numerous official misconducts and crimes. The qualitative shortage of staff led to a significant turnover of personnel. To overcome the difficulties, this police staff learnt the basics of police service on the job, combining service with training. In addition, police officers received the necessary knowledge at various seminars and advanced training courses.
For this new edition, Miller has updated the text to reflect the growth of the mindfulness movement, new research into the brain, and his years of experience teaching and practising contemplation in ...teacher education.
Die Panzerschlacht bei Kursk im Sommer 1943 war eine der größten Schlachten der Kriegsgeschichte, an der etwa drei Millionen Soldaten mit mehr als 10.000 Panzern und Selbstfahrlafetten sowie 8.000 ...Flugzeugen teilnahmen. Obwohl Kursk bis heute als eine der Entscheidungsschlachten des Zweiten Weltkriegs gilt und schon zahlreiche Bücher darüber geschrieben wurden, gibt es über zentrale Entscheidungen im Vorfeld der Schlacht und über die Kämpfe im Sommer 1943 erstaunlich viele falsche Informationen und Legenden. Roman Töppel beschreibt in seiner Studie vor allem Entwicklungen und Begebenheiten der Kursker Schlacht, die bislang kaum bekannt sind oder denen nur wenig Beachtung geschenkt wurde. Er präsentiert dem Leser neue, zum Teil überraschende Forschungsergebnisse und setzt damit der noch heute anhaltenden Legendenbildung um diese Schlacht gründlich recherchierte Fakten entgegen.
After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a
global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics
(the government of life through individuals and the general
population) ...and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics
of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in
texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje.
Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational
experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in
these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces
and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths
to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for
becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant,
biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist,
and anti-war.
Despite a career spanning over forty years, filmmaker Alan Rudolph has flown largely under the radar of independent film scholars and enthusiasts, often remembered as Robert Altman’s protégé. Through ...a reading of his 1985 film Trouble in Mind, Caryl Flinn demonstrates that Rudolph is long overdue for critical re-evaluation. Exploring Trouble in Mind’s influence on indie filmmaking, Rudolph’s dream-like style, and the external political influences of the Reagan era, Flinn effectively conveys the originality of Rudolph’s work through this multifaceted film. Utilizing archival materials and interviews with Rudolph himself and his collaborators, Flinn argues for this career-defining film’s relevance to American independent cinema and the decade of the 1980s. Amply illustrated with frame enlargements and set photographs, this book uncovers new production stories and reception contexts of a film that Flinn argues deserves a place in the limelight.
Prof. Ramesh, with his thorough knowledge of the Western and Indian poetics, as well as the culture of the land is the right person to explain and interpret the poems of T. Vasudeva Reddy's Fleeting ...Bubbles. This collection of poems holds a mirror as it were to the existing social situations in India.
This memoir describes the journey of John (Jack) Miller. The book explores how his personal journey is related to the work he has done in holistic education, contemplative education, and spirituality ...in education. In holistic education the personal and professional are connected. Professor Miller's journey includes events, books, teachers, and the many factors in his life that have contributed to his work, which includes more than 20 books and extensive travel around the world. An example of the relationship between the personal and the professional is that Jack began meditating in 1974 and this practice has provided the foundation for much of his teaching and writing. Professor Miller's book, The Holistic Curriculum, first published in 1988 along with the publication of the Holistic Education Review have been seen as the beginning of holistic education as a field of study. Since his journey has been connected with so many other holistic educators, this book can serve as one perspective on how the field has unfolded over the past 35 years. Besides this historical perspective the book includes a chapter on his meditation practice as well his beliefs. There is also a chapter on his teaching and how he attempts to embody holistic education in his classroom
In this much needed examination of Mike Leigh, Sean O'Sullivan reclaims the British director as a practicing theorist--a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative ...dimensions. In contrast with Leigh's prevailing reputation as a straightforward crafter of social realist movies, O'Sullivan illuminates the visual tropes and storytelling investigations that position Leigh as an experimental filmmaker who uses the art and artifice of cinema to frame tales of the everyday and the extraordinary alike._x000B_ _x000B_O'Sullivan challenges the prevailing characterizations of Leigh's cinema by detailing the complicated constructions of his realism, positing his films not as transparent records of life but as aesthetic transformations of it. Concentrating on the most recent two decades of Leigh's career, the study examines how Naked, Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and other films engage narrative convergence and narrative diffusion, the tension between character and plot, the interplay of coincidence and design, cinema's relationship to other systems of representation, and the filmic rendering of the human figure. The book also spotlights such earlier, less-discussed works as Four Days in July and The Short and Curlies, illustrating the recurring visual and storytelling concerns of Leigh's cinema. With a detailed filmography, this volume also includes key selections from O'Sullivan's several interviews with Leigh.
