In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the ...early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love.Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of “Pacific Rim discourse" by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or “creaturely" sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.
This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan's modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of ...disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture.
At a time when the dominant mode of painting,Abstract Expressionism,emphasized expressive drama through bold brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns? paintings of the American flag, ...targets, numbers and the alphabet demonstrated a decided departure from convention.Despite being painted with obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable. ?It all began? with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn?t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows.That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I?ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear.Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.? Unlike most artists? statements in New York during the 1950s, Johns? remarks contained none of the familiar talk of doubt and angst, and his selection of subject matter appeared deliberate, thoughtful, and far removed from emotional attachments and desires.To younger artists his art seemed not so much cold and unfeeling as clear-eyed and honest after the excesses of Abstract Expressionism. Furthermore, in selecting recognizable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves - flags, targets, numbers - each possessed a vital characteristic of classic abstraction, namely, a flatness rendering them all but indistinguishable from the picture plane itself. This books underlines how Johns? work made the polarity between abstraction and representation that had dominated debates about modern art for decades seem suddenly obsolete, opening up other ways of thinking about art?s relation to the world. It also tries to understand why since his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, at the age of twenty-seven, he has remained one of the major artists of the contemporary artistic scene until today.
The indefatigable Clint Eastwood, the great old man of American film, is still controversial after all these years. Many of the critical essays in this collection focus on Eastwood's 2014 American ...Sniper, a particularly controversial film and a devastating personal account of the horrors of war. Additional essays within the collection address his films that deserve more recognition than they have received to date. The chapters vary by topic and identify themes ranging from aging, race, and gender to uses of Western conventions and myth to the subtleties of quieter themes and stylistic choices in Eastwood's body of cinematic work. As a collection, these essays show that none of these themes account for Eastwood's entire vision, which is multifaceted and often contradictory, dramatizing complex issues in powerful, character-driven narratives.
Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught ...through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.
The utopia of film Pavsek, Christopher
2012., 20130129, 2013, 2013-02-05
eBook
The German filmmaker Alexander Kluge has long promoted cinema's relationship with the goals of human emancipation. Jean-Luc Godard and Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik also believe in cinema's ...ability to bring about what Theodor W. Adorno once called a "redeemed world." Situating the films of Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge within debates over social revolution, utopian ideals, and the unrealized potential of utopian thought and action, Christopher Pavsek showcases the strengths, weaknesses, and undeniable impact of their utopian visions on film's political evolution. He discusses Godard's Alphaville (1965) against Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero (1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (1994), and he conducts the first scholarly reading of Film Socialisme (2010). He considers Tahimik's virtually unknown masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), along with Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1983); and he constructs a dialogue between Kluge's Brutality in Stone (1961) and Yesterday Girl (1965) and his later The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985) and Fruits of Trust (2009).
At the National Convention held in the last days of 1934 and in the first days of 1935, the Unión Cívica Radical(Radical Civic Union)decided to return to electoral competition, after more than three ...years of abstaining. This article analyzes both the speeches that were delivered at the Convention and the framework in which it took place. Sincethe attitude to adopt in the face of a device (the electoral one) that was constitutive of radicalism was discussed there (the party had arisen in 1890 to demand free suffrage), we consider that the 1934-35 Convention constitutes aprivileged setting to explore radical identity in the mid-1930s. The work takes as a source for the analysis the original minutesof the Convention, which provide the complete version (or,at least, the most complete available) of the speeches delivered in this party assembly that, for different reasons, had decisive consequences on the political evolution not only of radicalism, but of the country as a whole.
Na convenção nacional realizada nos últimos dias de 1934 e início de 1935, a União Cívica Radical decidiu retornar à competição eleitoral após mais de três anos de abstenção. Este artigo analisa tanto o contexto em que isto decorreu como os discursos aí pronunciados. Na medida em que ali se discutiu a atitude a ser adotada diante de um dispositivo (eleitoral) constitutivo do radicalismo (o partido havia surgido em 1890 para exigir o sufrágio livre), consideramos que a convenção de 1934-1935 se configura como um cenário privilegiado para explorar a identidade radical em meados dos anos trinta. O trabalho toma como fonte de análise as atas originais da reunião, que fornecem a versão integral (ou, pelo menos, a versão mais completa disponível) dos discursos proferidos nesta assembleia partidária que, por motivos diversos, tiveram consequências decisivas sobre o futuro político, não só do radicalismo, mas do país como um todo
En la convención nacional celebrada en los últimos días de 1934 y primerosde 1935,la Unión Cívica Radical decidió retornar a la competencia electoral luego de más de tres años de permanecer en la abstención. Este artículo analiza tanto el marco en que esta tuvo lugar como los discursos pronunciados. En la medida en que allí se discutióla actitud a adoptar frente a un dispositivo (el electoral) que era constitutivo del radicalismo (el partido había surgido en 1890 para reclamar por el sufragio libre), consideramos que la convención de 1934-1935 se erige como un escenario privilegiado para explorar la identidad radical a mediados de los años treinta. El trabajo toma como fuente para el análisis las actas originales de la reunión, estas proveen la versión completa (o, al menos, la más completa disponible) de los discursos pronunciados en esa asamblea partidaria que, por distintos motivos, tuvo consecuencias decisivas sobre el devenir político,no solo del radicalismo, sino del país en su conjunto.
Playing accompanying music for silent films was one of the most important sources of income for musicians in the late 1920s. This practice ceased to exist after the arrival of the sound film, and in ...Finland approximately three-hundred musicians faced unemployment. In Turku, for example, just before the changeover there were nine cinemas with approximately forty musicians playing for silent films, mainly on string instruments and piano. This article deals with how these musicians were understood as a group of professional performers, and how they survived a professional change that was made even more harsh by the concurrent world-wide economic crisis. The results show that the musicians who played this light classical music became a group that was forgotten both by the art music field and the emerging industry of popular music. New job opportunities were, however, found in cafeterias and restaurants. This became easier due to the tightening of legislation regarding foreign workers in 1930. The removal of the strict licensing rules in 1932 and the end of the economic depression also helped the situation.
With Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema, Daniel Morgan makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Jean-Luc Godard, especially his films and videos since the late 1980s, some of the ...most notoriously difficult works in contemporary cinema. Through detailed analyses of extended sequences, technical innovations, and formal experiments, Morgan provides an original interpretation of a series of several internally related films—Soigne ta droite (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), Nouvelle vague (New Wave, 1990), and Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (Germany 90 Nine Zero, 1991)—and the monumental late video work, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). Taking up a range of topics, including the role of nature and natural beauty, the relation between history and cinema, and the interactions between film and video, the book provides a distinctive account of the cinematic and intellectual ambitions of Godard's late work. At the same time, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema provides a new direction for the fields of film and philosophy by drawing on the idealist and romantic tradition of philosophical aesthetics, which rarely finds an articulation within film studies. In using the tradition of aesthetics to illuminate Godard's late films and videos, Morgan shows that these works transform the basic terms and categories of aesthetics in and for the cinema.
