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Vanity Fair: Bringing Thackeray's Timeless Novel to the Screen by
Mira Nair (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebooks: Newmarket Press) (Hardcover)
150 color photos The full-color companion to the new film version of the
Thackeray novel starring Reese Witherspoon and directed by Mira Nair
(Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!).
Reese Witherspoon stars as Becky Sharp, one of the
greatest female characters ever created. Born into the lower class,
Becky can rely only on her wit, guile, and sexuality as she makes her
way up through London society circa 1820, alongside her best friend
Amelia. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of
Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought, fortunes made
and lost.
In addition to the complete screenplay by
Oscar®-winner Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and Matthew Faulk & Mark
Skeet (NBC's Jason and the Argonauts), this Newmarket Pictorial
Moviebook features over 150 full-color illustrations, extracts from
Thackeray's novel, interviews with the cast and crew, notes by director
Mira Nair, and sidebars on the film's costume, set, and production
design.
Vanity Fair: Bringing Thackeray's Timeless Novel to
the Screen is an excellent book for anyone who has seen the film
and wants to delve in to what went in to making it. The film itself, an
adaptation of Thackeray's classic novel, is a sumptuous feast of vibrant
colors, deliciously wicked dialogue, great acting, and skillful
direction by Mira Nair. Reese Witherspoon sparkles as classic
heroine/anti-heroine Becky Sharp, the social climber in 1800's England.
The rest of the film is well cast and the supporting cast turns in some
terrific performances. That being said, this book is packed with details
that will enhance your viewing of the film. I particularly found the
correspondence section between director Mira Nair and writer Julian
Fellows to be quite entertaining. it gave me an idea of some of the
process that goes in to the writing of the screenplay. Development of
characters, set locations, and the casting of the actors are some of the
topics that Fellows and Nair discuss. Nair also talks about some of the
problems the arose during the pre-production phase like having to move
the shooting to Ireland instead of where the novel is set in England.
She also had to scrap some of her original plan to shoot scenes in
certain areas of India due to budget concerns. The rest of this book
deals with other areas that went into making of the film. These areas
include costumes, art direction, music, cinematography. Also, included
is the complete final screenplay along with hundreds of color pictures
from the film. Going back to the screenplay, it is probably a little too
early to start talking about adapted screenplay Oscar nominations, but I
really thing Julian Fellows' screenplay is an early contender. I really
encourage everyone to see the film "Vanity Fair". If you really enjoy
it, I would encourage you to pick-up this book as well. It will really
give you a better appreciation of the film and what went into creating
it. I would also recommend getting the soundtrack, the music is really
great in this film. Mira Nair has created one of the better movies of
2004, and Julian Fellows has written a great script with some crackling
dialogue!
Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom by
Adrienne L. McLean (Rutgers University Press) (Hardcover)
Who was Rita Hayworth? Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, she spent her life
subjected to others’
definitions of her, no matter how hard she worked to claim her own
identity. Although there have been many "revelations" about her life and
career, Adrienne McLean’s book is the first to show that such
disclosures were part of a constructed image from the outset.
McLean
explores Hayworth’s participation in the creation of her star persona,
particularly through her work as a dancer—a subject ignored by most film
scholars. The passive love goddess, as it turns out, had a unique appeal
to other women who, like her, found it extraordinarily difficult to
negotiate the competing demands of family, domesticity, and professional
work outside the home. Being Rita Hayworth also considers the ways in
which the actress has been treated by film scholarship over the years to
accomplish its own goals, sometimes at her expense. Several of
Hayworth’s best-known star vehicles—among them Gilda (1946), Down to
Earth (1947), The Lady from
Shanghai (1948), and Affair in
Trinidad (1952)— are
discussed in depth.
Excerpt: My own labor in discussing these differences is organized as
follows. The book is divided into two sections, the first dealing
primarily with what might be called Hayworth's labor as a star away from
her films (her stardom off the screen) 69 and the second adding
extensive analysis of the embodied, performing, filmed Hayworth and the
various contexts, including academic film studies, in which she
signifies in certain of her best known or most successful star vehicles.
That the Hayworth films we know best now are not necessarily the same as
those most popular during her heyday is one of the issues in question.
My discussion will seem at times an uneasy mixture of history and
theory, but that cannot be helped. I want to present the evidence as I
find it, but at the same time I cannot remove from my work my interest
in the theoretical as well as historical contexts for this material—in
placing it into the theoretical frame-works that construct my own
subjectivity, as it were, as a scholar. With-out these preexisting
frameworks—those whose contours I believe this project might also
alter—the evidence would not speak at all.
In chapter 1 I consider the processes by which Margarita Cansino
be-came Rita Cansino and then Rita Hayworth and the ways in which this
transformation—and its discourses of ethnicity, authenticity, and
labor—continued to inflect her meaning as an all-American star. The
biographies and scholarly exhumations of Hayworth vary substantially in
their ac-counts of the role Hayworth's fabrication played in her appeal
to her con-temporary audiences. Barbara Learning claims that it struck a
particular nerve in 1940s America—that the notion that someone could be
"magically transformed" into a star "utterly enthralled" audiences of
the time. In his 1992 article about Hayworth William Vincent calls her
"the perfect example of the fabricated Hollywood star" but claims there
was "nothing new" in this (he quotes Carl Laemmle's assertion that
fabrication of stars is "the fundamental thing" in the film industry).
What Vincent misses completely is that, although fabrication of stars
was not new, the extent of the public's awareness of it in Hayworth's
case was quite unusual. Learning is closer to the mark in acknowledging
that the public was "enthralled" by Hayworth's transformation, but, as I
show, there was little that was magical about it. Hayworth was
frequently a contentious subject whose own feelings about her
transformation varied over time and whose professional labor, ending in
this chapter with the formation of her own production company, came to
be associated with a gradual independence from and rejection of that
process.
In chapter 2 I examine the ways in which Hayworth's actions in what
is so often called the domestic sphere—her childhood and family life,
her marriages, her relations with her children, the conflicts between
domesticity and career—were discussed in the popular press. To borrow
Joanne Meyerowitz's phrase, "the theme of nondomestic success was no
hidden subtext" in the stories about Hayworth, and neither Hayworth's
marriages nor the failures of her attempts at domesticity were
"prerequisites for [her] star status." In fact, Hayworth's
domestic failures became part of a very complicated negotiation of the
value of stars' labor and, in the case of Hayworth's relationship with
Aly Khan, her meanings as an American woman. Hayworth's divorce from Aly
Khan was represented to American audiences through a racist and
nationalist discourse that ended" up valorizing women's social and
economic equality to men in contradistinction to the "Moslem world" in
which women were figured as "less. valuable than men." From the failure
of her very first marriage to a much older father figure, Ed Judson, in
the early 1940s, Hayworth is named one of "Hollywood's unhappiest
stars," an inflection that continues through-out her career and the
final marriage I consider in depth, that to Dick Haymes in the
mid-1950s.
As mentioned, in many crucial ways the "real" Hayworth (the one
depicted in biographies such as Learning's) turns out not to be all that
different—in her behavior, her problems, her confused and confusing
actions, her responses to culture and its meanings—from the discursive
Hayworth produced in and by the "bad evidence" of popular culture. The
pressures of Hayworth's own history on the range of representations
circulated about her gave her image an agency born of her labor
struggles within Hollywood and her very public "private" struggles to
accommodate herself to postwar domestic ideology. Over time the
contradictions—the wiggling back and forth between alternately
valorizing marriage, motherhood, family, work—become too great for even
the conventional framework of fan discourse to bear. If only in a modest
way, Hayworth's image perhaps helped some women (and, one hopes, men) to
begin to articulate overtly feminist feelings of dissatisfaction,
frustration, and anger with the impossible double binds of their lives.
The book's second section continues my interest in the discursively
produced subjectivity of Rita Hayworth, but its three chapters also
focus on textual analysis of several of her major star vehicles—Gilda
(1946, produced [and substantially written] by Virginia Van Upp), Down
to Earth (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), and Affair in Trinidad
(1952, also written by Van Upp)—and discuss their production and
reception con-texts in addition to the scholarly contexts in which they
now circulate (or do not) within academic film studies. One of these
films is a generic musical, and the others are most often identified as
films noirs. In addition to considering the films as texts, however, I
consider them as commodities, looking for the ways, in Danae Clark's
terms, that the social relations of labor and subjectivity—the traces of
hegemonic "labor policies and labor discourses"—have been "embodied in
the textual terrain" of the film text itself. I also introduce and
explore a different kind of subjectivity, which dance scholar Jane
Desmond calls "kinesthetic subjectivity," in Hayworth's image as
well—the ways in which her embodiment in and of a variety of dance
styles and performance modes generates its own complex forms of agency,
signification, and meaning.
Chapter 3 is devoted to the backstage "women's musical" Down to
Earth, one of Hayworth's most successful but noncanonical musical films,
because the dominance of women in its narrative and numbers under-mines
the prevalent notion that the musical is by definition a conservative
genre, particularly in terms of female representation. Down to Earth
deals with the issue of women's agency and professional labor on several
levels: its narrative, in which a goddess is impersonating a human who
is impersonating a goddess and trying to exert her will in the face of
massive opposition from the show's [male] director and his best buddy;
its musical numbers, some of which are meant to be understood as badly
performed as against others that are "good"; and, finally, its
invisibility as a women's musical, because Down to Earth is interesting
primarily for the performances of the women in the film rather than as a
showcase for a male auteur (neither its male star [Larry Parks] nor its
director [Alexander Hall] nor its choreographer [Jack Cole] have been
granted auteur status by the academy and its canons). By concentrating
so extensively on the underlying structure or form of the musical, as
scholars such as Rick Altman have, rather than on its many modes of
performance, or by defining women's musical performances so frequently
as [heterosexual] male-directed erotic spectacle, we have blocked out
much of the ideological criticism that the genre and its stars are best
suited to make through performance (with performance here referring to
skill in execution, success in the accomplishment of difficult tasks,
demonstrated excellence in ability, and so forth). Many musical numbers
in many musical films, particularly those that star talented and
competent women, say, in effect, what the conventionally romantic
narratives in which they are embedded often cannot. Down to Earth, then,
foregrounds textually what is implied in all of the mass-market
discourse described in the first section of the book, namely the
difficulties that women faced in the postwar era in being recognized as
themselves, in being "seen and heard."
Musical numbers are also examined in chapter 4 but in a somewhat
different sense: namely, their production by and effects on Hayworth as
the textual protagonist of the films noirs Gilda and The Lady from
Shanghai. I explore how Orson Welles systematically works in The Lady
from Shanghai to subvert, taint, or demolish Hayworth's kinesthetic
subjectivity and what his success in doing so means for our
understanding of female "charisma" (Richard Dyer's term) both
theoretically and historically in classical Hollywood cinema." I trace
the ways in which film scholars, if un- f intentionally, have sometimes
helped Welles in this task in their accounts of Hayworth's function
within the diegesis of The Lady from Shanghai, as well as historically,
in terms of the making of the film and the context of its reception. My
goal, here as elsewhere, is to complicate prevalent assumptions about
the "flatness" of Hayworth's star image in the 1940s and 1950s, to
restore to her image the volume, effort, and expressiveness put there by
dance and her skills as an actor as well as by the discursive
contradictions and struggles explored in the first part of the book.
Chapter 5 focuses on the musical numbers in a third Hayworth film
noir, Affair in Trinidad, usually acknowledged to be a "rehash" of
Gilda, in order to consider the menace, both narrative and extratextual,
that they seemed to represent to several industrial and critical power
structures. Al-though Affair in Trinidad is largely unknown within the
academy, it islong overdue for scholarly scrutiny because, first, its
musical numbers were choreographed and directed by Valerie Bettis
(1919-1982), an important modern concert dancer and choreographer, and,
second, it caused a stir on its release because of the nature of the
female eroticism in those musical numbers, which were taken by film, but
not dance, critics to be "grotesque," "vulgar," and "unattractive." Much
of my analysis focuses on the film itself, as well as on the response of
its contemporary critics. But I also want to delineate as far as
possible the logistics of the film's production in order to relate the
extraordinary power of the musical numbers in Affair in Trinidad to the
material circumstances of their collaborative creation by Bettis and
Hayworth, including the pair's public battles with studio personnel over
the terms of Hayworth's visual representation. In concluding the chapter
I also consider similar issues in relation to Hay-worth's final three
nonmusical films at Columbia: Miss Sadie Thompson, Salome (also
choreographed by Bettis), and Fire Down Below (1957).
Among the major points of the second section, then, is to show how
Hayworth's labor as a star performing fictional roles in narrative films
intersects with, yet is not the same as, the labor required to be a
dancer and musical comedy star and that the passivity and
objectification with which Hayworth has been associated in academic film
studies is partly a result of a failure to consider this difference. My
attempts to elucidate these fundamental concerns engage, sometimes
explicitly but more often implicitly, a noticeable split in the
definition and theorizing of performance between acting- and dance-based
claims that "the body writes" and linguistically derived models of the
body as always already "written [upon]." Linguistically based models of
the gendered body and performativity tend to equate performativity with
enforced mimesis and repetition—such that performativity is understood,
as Judith Butler writes, "not as the act by which a subject brings into
being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of
discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains. "To
the dance theorist, on the other hand, the body is capable of performing
on many levels that themselves call into existence the discursive
frameworks in which the performances "make sense." The relevance of this
split for film studies is that it opens up a space in which to consider
performance and performativity as process as well as artifact.
And indeed, as Peter Lovell and Peter Krämer point out, much of the
work on gender and film has heretofore consisted of "discussions of a
fictional character" rather than in analyses of "how that character is
embodied (the work of an actor)." Textual analysis often tends to
valorize "objective" narrative concerns, such as dialogue, plot points,
and narrative closure, over more "subjective" issues of performance
style, mu-sic, and emotional affect. This emphasis is perfectly
reasonable on some levels—it is much easier to prove that someone said a
particular thing in a film, and when, than to prove how they said it.
Music and dance, conversely, are often relegated in film studies to the
arena of textual noise. Here their expressivity will become the focus,
as well as the ways in which different modes of discourse—singing and
songs, dancing and choreography, costuming and body type and stance,
makeup and facial expression, tone of voice and dialogue—vie for
dominance. The usefulness of both these approaches is that together they
can help us to understand the filmed, and therefore always historical,
body as both agent and object and, most important, to see and to hear
how that agency and objectification are accomplished. As Ann Daly
writes, the "gaze" as a "metaphor of representation" may not be well
suited to dance, whose "apperception is grounded not just in the eye but
in the entire body." To rework Danae Clark's formulation, singing and
dancing bodies are not that different from spectating bodies in terms of
their heterogeneous subjectivities, and clearly there is more at work in
spectatorship generally than merely meets the eye.
In summary, I believe that each image of Margarita Cansino, Rita
Hayworth, and Gilda (along with Elsa Bannister, Sadie Thompson, and all
of their sisters) is an active instigator rather than passive victim of
the ambivalence, the paradoxes, the complexity of the discourses they
all are rep-resented by. As I consider these women from my
embodied present (I was born in 1957), I am alternately bewildered,
cheered, offended, saddened, astonished by who they were and were
not—indeed, are and are not—able to be. The desire to know them all
better is what drives this study forward into the past.
Cinemas of the World: Film and Society in the Twentieth Century by
James Chapman (Reaktion Books) This broad-ranging book examines the
relationship between film and society in
the modern world, foregrounding the economic and cultural dominance of
Hollywood as well as the efforts of film makers of other cultures to
establish national cinemas that reflect their own societies. In
Chapman's highly readable survey, the perspective is truly global --
covering all major cinemas from around the world.
Cinema has the
distinction of being the first truly mass medium. Since its origins at
the end of the nineteenth century, it has grown from a cottage industry
into a global business enter-prise, established itself as a social
institution throughout much of the world and legitimated itself as a
popular art form. Cinema has been the pre-eminent form of popular
entertainment for people throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, its
appeal crossing boundaries of nation, gender, class, culture, language
and religion.
Histories of world
cinema have generally privileged the acknowledged masterpieces of film
art and have focused on culturally specific examples of national
cinemas. James Chapman offers a social history of film that considers
the nature of cinema-going in different cultures, the types of film that
have been most successful, the role of governments and censors in
determining the content of films and the differences in critical and
popular reception. Shifting away from a narrow focus on national cinemas
treated as discrete bodies of films, he argues instead for a broad-based
comparative approach to film history that takes into account
international trends and developments in the medium. And he asserts that
in order to appreciate the social significance of cinema we should take
account not only of critically respectable artistic traditions but also
of genres and cycles of popular film that have too often been
marginalized. In Cinemas of the World Chapman ranges widely across the
international history of cinema – from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the
efforts of early pioneers to the age of the blockbuster, from the
pleasures of popular genres to the political radicalism of the Third
World – in order to throw light on the complex relationships between
films and the societies in which they have been produced and consumed.
There have already
been many histories of world cinema; there will undoubtedly be many
more. The earliest film histories, such as Terry Ramsaye's A Million and
One Nights and Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, were written during the
middle and late 1920s when the medium had reached its thirtieth
birthday – regarded at the time as a point of maturity in its artistic
development. More recent works, such as Kristin Thompson and David
Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction and the encyclopedic Oxford
History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, cover the
first century of cinema – though by this time opinions differed as to
whether film was an essentially twentieth century phenomenon now
enjoying its dotage or whether it was an exciting new form of cultural
practice still in its infancy. As the second century of cinema is now
under way, summarizing over a hundred years of film history in one short
volume is a somewhat daunting task. This book does not purport to be a
comprehensive history of world cinema. Inevitably, for a study of this
length, much has been elided and even more has been omitted. I have
selected particular themes and issues that seem relevant to me; indeed
the book is best read as a series of related critical essays on film and
society rather than a pure narrative history of cinemas around the
world.
How does this book
differ from other film histories? In the first place, and in line with
the aims of the series of which this book is a part, it adopts a global
perspective on cinema. I have been concerned throughout to consider the
geographical spread of cinema across the continents of the world. I have
adopted, for the most part, a geographical rather than a chronological
structure, with sections focusing on Hollywood, European and world
cinemas. This differentiates the book from most other general film
histories, which usually follow a chronological structure, an approach
best exemplified by the Oxford History with its three sections on
`Silent Cinema 1895–1930', `Sound Cinema 1930–1960' and `The Modern
Cinema 1960–1995'. While few film historians would dispute the
significance of those dates in the history of cinema – thefirst public
film shows (1895), the institutionalization of sound cinema (c. 1930)
and the almost simultaneous break-up of the Hollywood studio system and
the emergence of an international `new wave' (c. 1960) – I wanted to
avoid writing another narrative history. Moreover, the geographical
structure allows more space for coverage of less familiar (to
Anglo-American and European readers) cinemas from around the world.
Another difference
between this and other general histories is that I have opted for a
broad-based comparative approach taking account of international trends
and developments, rather than writing discrete essays on individual
national cinemas. A point that struck me most forcefully whilst
preparing this book was the dearth of what could be considered
genuinely comparative film history. Most film histories tend to focus on
national cinemas, while specialist monographs rightly concentrate on
relatively discrete topics, usually within a national context. Yet a
comparative perspective is essential even in the study of national
cinemas, for only by establishing what one country's cinema has in
common with others, as well as how it differs, can its unique
characteristics be identified. With the exception of the section on
Hollywood, therefore – the dominant model against which all other
cinemas are judged and the one national cinema in the world that has a
truly global reach – I have tried to adopt throughout a comparative
analysis that places film in its global context.
A third difference
between this and other histories of world cinema is that my interest
focuses on the social and cultural history of cinema as an institution
rather than on the aesthetic development of the medium of film. Most
single-authored histories – such as David Cook's A History of Narrative
Film, Jack Ellis's A History of Film, David Robinson's World Cinema and
Basil Wright's The Long View – adopt a predominantly aesthetic approach
to the subject, discussing film as an art form and analysing its formal
and stylistic properties. Eric Rhode's A History of the Cinema from its
Origins to 1970 remains, still, the only thoroughgoing attempt to relate
films and filmmakers to the social and political circumstances of their
countries of origin. While historians no longer accept uncritically the
idea of films as a straightforward `reflection' of social reality, even
the most ardent formalist critic must surely accept that all films,
albeit perhaps some to a greater extent than others, are informed by and
respond to the societies in which they were produced. I should make it
clear that this is the basic assumption underlying my approach to film
history.
The Horror Film by Peter Hutchings (Inside Film: Longman) is an
in-depth exploration of one of the most consistently popular, but also
most disreputable, of all the mainstream film genres. Since the early
1930s there has never been a time when horror films were not
being produced in substantial numbers somewhere in the world and never a
time when they were not being criticised, censored or banned. The Horror
Film engages with the key issues raised by this most contentious of
genres. It considers the reasons for horror's disreputability and seeks
to explain why despite this horror has been so successful. Where
precisely does the appeal of horror lie? An extended introductory
chapter identifies what it is about horror that makes the genre so
difficult to define. The chapter then maps out the historical
development of the horror genre, paying particular attention to the
international breadth and variety of horror production, with reference
to films made in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.
Subsequent chapters explore: The role of monsters, focusing on the
vampire and the serial killer. The usefulness (and limitations) of
psychological approaches to horror. The horror audience: what kind of
people like them, etc.
Showdown at High Noon: Witch-Hunts, Critics, and the End of the Western
by Jeremy Byman (Filmmakers: Scarecrow Press) For more than fifty years,
High Noon has been a touchstone of popular imagination and a source of
endless controversy about film art. Upon its release, the film was
hailed as a masterpiece. However, some film historians and theorists
reviled it as pretentious "social realism' inspired by its
screenwriter's victimization by the House Un-American Activities
Committee.
Showdown at High Noon is the study of a film caught
between popular admiration and critical disdain. To understand how and
why the film has elicited such disparate reactions, Jeremy Byman
explores all of its elements, from its origins in the mind of
blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman to its continuing impact on
culture, American and otherwise. High Noon not only affected the
Westerns that followed it, but also changed filmmaking in fundamental
ways. By analyzing the film's political, cultural, and thematic
implications, Byman reveals how one film has had such a profound and
enduring influence, a long-lasting impact that cannot be easily
dismissed.
This is a biography of
sorts, the story of a film caught between popular admiration and
critical dismissal.
To ordinary,
nonspecialist audiences, High Noon has always been a masterpiece. But to
most film theorists, it is both beneath contempt and below the radar. It
is never even mentioned, much less analyzed, since it was barred from
the "canon" forty years ago—even before the canon was fully formed. The
inspiration for a full-length study of a film I had admired since
childhood came from discovering this remarkable disconnect while
attending the graduate cinema studies program at New York University.
For those caught up in
the battle between post-theorists and grand theorists—the adherents of
neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, structural, and semiotic
approaches—a struggle that was essentially over by 1962 must seem like
a flashback to prehistoric times. But it was a revealing—if
one-sided—dispute, and not only because the winners, those who thought
that only the director's vision counts, still control the way films are
analyzed and evaluated, judging by the sheer number of books and
university courses de-voted to directors alone.
These winners, the
auteurists, and their successors may have ignored High Noon, but others
have not. A great many people—typically, academics outside cinema
studies departments—have written about High Noon in books, journal
articles, and essays, and in this book I consider and contrast many of
their ideas and offer a few of my own. It is as though dozens of
clear-sighted people were examining an elephant so large they could see
only one part of it at a time. I like to imagine I have borrowed Fred
Zinnemann's crane and pulled back to see the elephant whole—though I
hope I'm not like Gary Cooper, finding out at the end of the crane shot
that I'm all alone.
For those who still
care about the issues raised in this long-ago battle, High Noon has
always been, as the film studies people say, a "site of
contestation"—political, stylistic, and thematic. The traditional view
of the film's importance has been that it reflects both the post-World
War II ideological battles between the political witch-hunters and the
Hollywood Left as well as the struggle for control of the Western genre
between the traditionalists and the makers of so-called anti-Westerns.
In film language, the
first of these battles is an argument about "context"—the assumption
that the social and political conditions under which the film was made
determine its meaning. The second is a claim about
"intertextualism"—that the evolution of the genre and changes in film
practice more generally determine its meaning. This book examines both
these disputes but also considers the "text"—the film itself, apart from
these alleged influences—on the chance that the filmmakers might have
made something new.
There seems to be no
agreement on any aspect of the film, especially its "meaning"—as though
it must have only one. As George Lipsitz notes of more conventional
Hollywood efforts, "successful commercial films often open up wounds and
air out social tensions in order to contain them. But they always run
the risk that the problems exposed will have more meaning to audiences
than the ways in which the film 'resolves' them. . . . The range of
positions presented in films allows viewers to experiment with many
different points of view."' High Noon was a successful commercial film,
but it was at-tempting not to "contain" social tensions but to expose
them.
Following Noel
Carroll's definition, this book is a work of film interpretation rather
than film theory. "Film theory," Carroll says, "speaks of the general
case, whereas film interpretation deals with problematic or puzzling
cases, or with the highly distinctive cases of cinematic masterworks.
Film theory tracks the regularity and the norm, while film
interpretation find its natural calling in dealing with the deviation,
with what violates the norm or with what exceeds it or what re-imagines
it."
Nevertheless, though I
make no theoretical claims, the book, focusing on a single movie, is,
broadly speaking, written in the tradition of the mid-level,
research-based work of Carroll and David Bordwell, who distinguish their
"neo-formalist" approach from the nonempirical approach of those who
rely on psychoanalytic, Marxist, or other overarching schema. In
adopting this stance, I have tried to combine thematic analysis with a
consideration of the historical background of the film and of the
constraints of filmmaking in Hollywood.
My hope is that I have
contributed to film theory by usefully applying several approaches to a
single case—something not often done in film studies, where, as Kristin
Thompson notes, the usual method in the study of single films is for the
analyst to select one approach—perhaps from literary studies, or
psychoanalysis, or linguistics, or philosophy—and "then select ... a
film that seems suited to displaying that method." The result is not a
test of the method but a confirmation of the method, as well as, often,
a reductive approach to the film to get it to fit the "pattern" required
by the approach. She urges an approach that "focuses on more of the
work's formal subtleties and tackles the work from more than one
standpoint." This is what I have tried to do.
High Noon, throughout
this book, is a film with many popular interpretations but one dominant
"meaning" that fits no one's easy approach. That is so because the
creators of the film, Carl Foreman, Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Kramer, and
Elmo Williams, played the "defamiliarization" game—they took what was
familiar and made it wholly new and disturbing.
Van Helsing: The Making of the Thrilling Monster Movie by Stephen
Sommers
(Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook Series) Newmarket) (Hardcover)
150 color illustrations.
I grew up with images of the old classic Universal monsters
dancing in my head, they were the friends of my pre-hipster rebellion. I
am sorry that parody became their fate and the old corny folklore now is
little more than fairy stories told to children in cartoons. This
invocation to the Universal monsters became too drunk on action genre
and computer generated special effects to fully embrace a haunting story
much less a horror. Well modern movies must succumb to box-office
conformity to justify the production costs. Now
Van Helsing the book is in many ways better than the movie
because you can enjoy the artistry of the images and characters who on
the screen seems to be moving at light speed most of the time. The
screenplay had possibilities if only it would actually develop character
and atmosphere rather than push to dream action immediately and nearly
unceasingly. Anyway it is rare that a screenplay is better than the
movies itself. Here it is.
From
the maker of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, the
long-awaited movie from Universal Pictures (May 2004) starring Hugh
Jackman as Van Helsing, the legendary monster hunter born in the pages
of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Stephen Sommers, the visionary filmmaker who revived Universal's classic
Mummy character in the massive blockbusters The Mummy and The
Mummy Returns, breathes new life into the most time-honored pantheon
of classic Universal monsters: Dracula, The Frankenstein Monster and The
Wolf Man. In Van Helsing, Sommers infuses these screen legends
with dimension, characterization and technological wonder in a way that
honors their legacy and propels them into the next generation of cinema.
Set in the late 19th century, the film finds fabled monster hunter Van
Helsing summoned to a distant European land on a quest to vanquish evil.
Starring Hugh Jackman (X2) as Van Helsing and Kate Beckinsale (Underworld,
Pearl Harbor)
as valiant Anna Valerious, and with awe-inspiring digital effects from
Industrial Light & Magic, Van Helsing will thrill moviegoers as
they are introduced to worlds never before imagined.
In addition to the complete screenplay, this spectacular Newmarket
Pictorial Moviebook features over 150 full-color illustrations,
including movie stills, creature and costume sketches, set designs, and
special visual effects stills. Sidebars include interviews with the
film's cast and crew, and details on the sweeping locations used to
create Van Helsing's visionary supernatural world, spanning from 19th
century London,
Rome, and Paris to Transylvania.
Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry
by Arthur De Vanyn (Routledge) (Hardcover)
Movies expected to perform well can flop, whilst
independent movies with low budgets can be wildly successful. In this
superb new book, De Vany casts his expert eye over all aspects of the
business and presents some intriguing conclusions.
Just how risky is the movie industry? Is screenwriter William Goldman's
claim that "nobody knows anything" really true? Can a star and a big
opening change a movie's risks and return? Do studio executives really
earn their huge paychecks? This text answers these and many other
questions by using powerful analytical models to uncover the wild
uncertainty that shapes the industry. The centerpiece of the analysis is
the unpredictable and often chaotic dynamic behavior of motion picture
audiences.
What do stars do for a
movie? Aside from earning a higher least revenue, a star movie has only
a slightly higher chance of making a profit than a non-star movie De
Vanyn shows. If the star's agent extracts the higher expected profit in
the star's fee, then the movie almost surely will lose money. This De
Vanyn calls the curse of the superstar.
Opening big and
leading at the box office is a momentary success. A movie has to attain
or sustain box-office dominance over many weeks to make major money. The
size of the opening does not predict how the ensuing battles will evolve
or how much money the film will take in. Why do executives compete so
strongly for stars when they can assure no more than a higher
expectation of a movie's least revenue? It seems to be based on a belief
that the opening predicts how much a movie will make. That turns out to
be false, as this study shows.
The articles are
grouped into four parts: dynamics, wild uncertainty, judges and lawyers
and extremes. There are three chapters in each of these parts. De Vanyn
writes a brief introduction to each part noting the main issues,
techniques and results of the papers contained therein. De Vanyn
has not sacrificed rigor or completeness; these are refereed articles,
published in scientific journals and their results have been
independently confirmed and replicated by other authors many times over.
De Vanyn also
provides a couple of new chapters that were not published previously.
One of these concerns artists, primarily actors and directors. It
examines how productive they are and how they are paid. De Vanyn
establishes the Price–Evans law of artists, estimate the half life of a
star and see if one can separate luck from talent in career patterns. In
another new work for this book, De Vanyn puts all this work into a more
complete model, a model that begins to bridge the gap between standard
management and economic models and the reality of the business.
In the Epilogue he
muses on how one might manage a business where nobody knows anything. It
is here that De Vanyn takes up the fundamental flaws his research
reveals about the way the modern corporate studio manages the movie
business.
Finally perhaps we
will see why conventional models fail spectacularly to explain the
movies and why De Vanyn had to invent a new kind of economics to come to
grips with this endlessly fascinating business. Perhaps De Vanyn has
built a consistent and fundamental model of the industry that is of
interest not just to scientists, but to movie fans and moviemakers, too.
And De Vanyn shows that these models can be applied to other industries
as well.
In science, as in the
movies, creativity takes you to unexpected places. This study is
exciting because we get unexpected and wonderful discoveries. It is hard
to imagine at the outset that by applying high-brow mathematical and
statistical science we end up proving Goldman's fundamental truth that,
in the movies, "nobody knows anything."
None of these results
is more surprising than finding out that, hard-headed science puts the
creative process at the very center of the motion picture universe.
There is no fool proof formula. Outcomes cannot be predicted. There is
no reason for management to get in the way of the creative process. Now
tell them that! Character, creativity and good story-telling trump
everything else. Now let’s see some fresh movies made!
Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film by Dean
W. Duncan (Communications and Media Studies, No. 9: Fordham University
Press) From Chaplin’s brilliant use of Wagner in The Gold Rush to the
Bach chorale closing Scorsese’s Casino, classical music has played a
fascinating role in movies.
Dean Duncan provides a fresh critical survey of the aesthetics of
classical music in film. Exploring tensions between high art and
commercial culture, Duncan examines how directors quote themes and
classical passages in genres ranging from the Soviet avant garde to
Hollywood romances. Drawing on film theory, musicology, and cultural
criticism, he clarifies the connections between two very different art
forms.
The positions, or at
least the received representations of these positions, are familiar.
Closer scrutiny will follow, but the standard versions bear repeating in
this introduction. The practitioners and theorist-historians who
together codified the conventions of classical film music accepted
certain institutional imperatives. As a rule golden age Hollywood
produced fairly simple narratives that provided, through numerous
straightforward cinematic means, a clear and unobjectionable experience
for the audience. Continuity editing and what has been called
Aristotelian structure—clear protagonism and antagonism, unambiguous
objectives—were some of the devices that became standard in studio
output, which was designed both for entertainment and profit and not to
overly tax the viewer. In exchange for these considerations it was hoped
the viewer would feel comforted and cared for, and that his patronage
would continue.
To safeguard this
relationship, the film music community did its part, adopting and
expanding the notion of parallelism, which is to say that it provided
movie music that charmed and soothed. To work as efficiently as the rest
of the cinematic apparatus, film scores were to be congruent with and
subordinate to the narrative; what you heard was dovetailed to what you
saw, though the correlation was to be quietly communicated and
subconsciously processed. Further, lest this correlation of music to
image, and more importantly of narrative to reality were to seem
strained and inadequate, it was determined that audiences were not to
know of the taming processes to which they were being subjected. And
for the most part they seemed not to recognize them: the subjugation was
successful, audiences were subdued, and Hollywood, industrially,
economically, and ideologically, prevailed.
This is a defensible
characterization—a usable quote—taken out of a more complicated context.
There is more to this story than Hollywood hegemony. Opposing production
alternatives arose to the film industry's guiding and smothering
devices, and in the stalls there were many who were able to read against
the intended industrial grain. At the core of the contrary reading was
the idea that commercial, conventional film's parallel processes and
straightforward representations may have been simple and comprehensible,
but they were not adequate to the complexity, richness, or direness of
art and experience.
So it was that the
musical community, when it condescended to take notice of film music,
consistently decried its subservient state. Musicians and musical
scholars believed and had a stake in the independence and integrity of
music, but they felt that these things were, and were likely to remain,
nonexistent within the confines of the film industry. Other voices, more
sympathetic to cinematic projects, nevertheless sided with the musicians
in their perpendicular relation to and their general rejection of film
musical parallelism. For film modernists of formalist persuasion the
effects of conventional film music were aesthetically impoverished. For
the ideologically and politically minded, these effects were even more
serious: the conventional devices of film music, and of commercial film
generally, had a dangerous influence on both spectators and citizens.
These films left audiences domesticated and enervated, with the result
that audience members were circumscribed in the expression,
apprehension, and exercise of freedom, and of freedom's
responsibilities.
A good deal of time
has passed since these first formulations were made, and a good deal of
more measured theoretical and practical activity has taken place. The
need for this more reason-able discussion has at least something to do
with the totalizing tendencies that inform the seminal film music
statements. We find in these a seemingly unwavering faith in commerce
(Holly-wood and its apologists), or in communism (the early statements
of the Soviet modernists), or in the ineffability of abstract music
(Romantic elements of the music community). The certainty in these
statements is undeniably appealing, and dangerous as well, and it is
still present in the trenches of media production and public perception.
As it was in the early debates, so it is some-times today; salesmen and
artists and their respective defenders can all be restricted by
platitudinous self-images, which not incidentally distort their notions
of the other side. And scholars, my-self included, are not immune, as
these last, slightly monolithic thumbnail sketches indicate. Our
antagonism, even our mild disinclination toward opposing positions can
blind us to some of the complexities of these positions, and to the
possibility that we are not in such opposition after all.
It need hardly be
pointed out that notwithstanding their many constraints and vulgarities,
Hollywood and other commercial centers have produced a great many
excellent films, full of nuance, subtlety, and beauty. Likewise the
classical film score has played a frequently beneficent part, providing
much of conviction and emotion even in its most conventional story
support. If on the other hand it is true that there is much that is
inadequate in commercial film production, then it might be argued that
the contrapuntal alternatives of the film modernists could be, in their
conceptual homogeneity and inflexibility, as limited as that which they
opposed. The standard accounts of the positions of various film music
communities are something like the quotes already discussed; these are
famous expressions and truncated ideas, essential and incomplete, in
need of interrogation and susceptible to real synthesis and even
reconciliation.
If a single quote can
signify more abundantly when we trace it to its source, then these broad
accounts can likewise benefit from contextualization and comparison. A
book about musical quotations in film is in some senses a very
particular, very specialized investigation. But in tracing the
consistently disapproving attitudes that firmly constituted and widely
diversified film music factions have had toward quotation, and by
outlining the nature of and the motivations behind these attitudes, this
book also be-comes an alternative history of film music itself. What is
perhaps new is that this alternative is both revisionist and
conciliatory; it reaches for and finally posits a kind of synthesis of
several very valid and ultimately incomplete positions. After the
history comes a contemplation of possibility, taken from the fragments
of things already partly said, and partly done.
This book is divided
roughly into three sections, corresponding to three important ways in
which serious music interacts with film and film culture. The first, as
portrayed in chapters one and two, is critical and cultural. In these
chapters we will find film music advocates squaring off against the
musical establishment over the subject of classical music in film. In
this debate each community will reveal much of its values, and much of
the social and historical context in which these values operate, and out
of which they emerge. We will also consider some of the more measured,
less factional scholarly accounts of the subject, some of which will
inform the direction of my own eventual argument.
The second point of
film-to-classical music contact is figurative. In chapters three and
four we will discuss film music analogies, metaphors that have
suggested, as well as a new one that will suggest, ways in which film
and music might actually have similar aims and effects. The first
analogy, the influential and confounding idea of film-musical
counterpoint, emerged out of the Soviet cinematic avant-garde. With its
bold prescriptions and refusals, this is a faction as surely as the
other two just mentioned. As such, and as might be expected, its
analogy, or at least the way in which it has most frequently been
wielded, is far from conciliatory. But the counterpoint analogy will
lead us to another, largely unmarked figure that encloses and gives
place to both film and classical music cultures, and which presents an
alternative to the largely divisive, pugnacious exchanges that have
tended to prevail on the subject.
This latter
film-musical analogy is built upon the institution of program music,
which reminds us that some kind of narrative, some set of assumptions or
expectations generally predates and informs almost every expression,
musical or otherwise. This informing can clarify, or it can be
incoherent, but in either case the results can be both interesting and
instructive, and they are at the least emblematic. Programs lead us
finally to the book's last section and the final way that film and
classical music have acted together—in actual practice, in the
production and the receiving, which practice has been and continues to
be most broad and varied. Films, and music, and the places where both
combine, may return us to the standard positions and analogies, but they
will allow us a refreshed look at and helpful alternatives to the
familiar paradigms.
Nicholas Slonimsky: Writings on Music, Volume One by Nicolas
Slonimsky, edited by Electra Slonimsky Yourke (Routledge)
Nicholas Slonimsky Writings on Music: Russian and Soviet Music and
Composers, Volume Two by Nicolas Slonimsky, edited by Electra
Slonimsky Yourke (Routledge)
Volume Three: Music of
the Modern Era (not seen)
Volume Four: Slonimskyana with CD (not seen)
Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995) was an influential
and celebrated writer on music. Born in St. Petersburg,
Russia in 1894, in his 101 years he taught and coached music; conducted
the premieres of several 20th century masterpieces; composed works for
piano and voice; and oversaw the 5th-8th editions of the classic Baker's
Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Beginning in 1926, Slonimsky
resided in the United States. From his arrival, he wrote provocative
articles on contemporary music and musicians, many of whom were his
personal friends. Working as a freelance author, he built a large file
of review, articles, and even manuscripts for books that were never
published. This collection brings together the cream of this material in
4 volumes.
Volume one: These 48
articles are among Slonimsky's earliest published writings, appearing at
irregular intervals in the legendary Boston Evening Transcript. Most
were timed for the visit of a composer to Boston or the performance of a
modern work by the Boston Symphony. They are especially revealing as
contemporary analyses of composers of emerging significance and
first-hand records of the world of new music in the I920s and '30s. They
show that, from the very beginning, Slonimsky was a rare treasure: a
critic, as astute as he was inimitable. Such figures as Bloch, Copland,
Cowell, Ives, Schoenberg, Sessions, Stravinsky, Toscanini, and Theremin
are discussed, as well as general trends and innovations in contemporary
music. Appearing unedited in their original form the articles have been
collected by Slonimsky's daughter, Electra Slonimsky Yourke.
Volume 2: Born and
educated in St. Petersburg, Slonintsky's knowledge of the development of
Russian music is unparalleled. In his life abroad after fleeing the
revolution, he observed and interpreted the political and artistic
forces shaping Soviet music during subsequent decades. At the same time,
through his personal and professional ties he looked below the surface
of' government-dominated artistic life, and met and wrote about the many
brilliant experimentalists eagerly absorbing Western concepts. This
dense volume includes thematic articles such as `Russian Folk Music
contemporary analyses of Soviet music under changing political
direction: studies of' figures like Glaztuiov, Rintsky-Korsakov,
Prokofiev Stravinsky. and especially Shostakovich: plus rich personal
reflections of his visits to Russia and eastern Europe from the 1930s to
the '60s. Images of pages from Slonimskys guest book testify to the
respect and affection he earned from many notable Russian composers and
performers.
Viola Sonata, op 40 by Dmitri Shostakovich, transcription for Viola
and Piano of the Cello Sonata, op 40 by Annette Bartholdy (Boosey &
Hawkes: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation) Composed Sonata for
Cello and Piano, op. 40 (1934) Dmitri Shostakovich studied with his
mother, a professional pianist, and then with Shteynberg at the
Petrograd Conservatory (1919-25): his graduation piece was his Symphony
no.1, which brought him early international attention. His creative
development, however, was determined more by events at home. Like many
Soviet composers of his generation, he tried to reconcile the musical
revolutions of his time with the urge to give a voice to revolutionary
socialism, most conspicuously in his next two symphonies, no.2 ('To
October') and no.3 ('The First of May'), both with choral finales. At
the same time he used what he knew of contemporary Western music
(perhaps
Prokofiev and Krenek mostly) to give a sharp grotesqueness and
mechanical movement to his operatic satire The Nose, while
expressing a similar keen irony in major works for the ballet (The
Age of Gold, The Bolt) and the cinema (New Babylon).
But the culminating achievement of these quick-witted, nervy years was
his second opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, where
high emotion and acid parody are brought together in a score of immense
brilliance.
Lady Macbeth was received with acclaim in Russia, western
Europe and the USA, and might have seemed to confirm Shostakovich as
essentially a dramatic composer: by the time he was 30, in 1936, he was
known for two operas and three full-length ballets, besides numerous
scores for the theatre and films, whereas only one purely orchestral
symphony had been performed, and one string quartet. However, in that
same year Lady Macbeth was fiercely attacked in Pravda,
and he set aside his completed Symphony no.4 (it was not performed until
1961), no doubt fearing that its
Mahlerian intensity and complexity would spur further criticism.
Instead he began a new symphony, no.5, much more conventional in its
form and tunefulness - though there is a case for hearing the finale as
an internal send-up of the heroic style. This was received favourably,
by the state and indeed by Shostakovich's international public, and
seems to have turned him from the theatre to the concert hall. There
were to be no more operas or ballets, excepting a comedy and a revision
of Lady Macbeth; instead he devoted himself to symphonies,
concertos, quartets and songs (as well as heroic, exhortatory cantatas
during the war years).
Of the next four symphonies, no.7 is an epic with an uplifting
war-victory programme (it was begun in besieged Leningrad), while the
others display more openly a dichotomy between optimism and
introspective doubt, expressed with varying shades of irony. It has been
easy to explain this in terms of Shostakovich's position as a public
artist in the USSR during the age of socialist realism, but the
divisions and ironies in his music go back to his earliest works and
seem inseparable from the very nature of his harmony, characterized by a
severely weakened sense of key. Even so, his position in official Soviet
music certainly was difficult. In 1948 he was condemned again, and for
five years he wrote little besides patriotic cantatas and private music
(quartets, the 24 Preludes and Fugues which constitute his outstanding
piano work).
Stalin's death in 1953 opened the way to a less rigid aesthetic, and
Shostakovich returned to the symphony triumphantly with no.10. Nos.11
and 12 are both programme works on crucial years in revolutionary
history (1905 and 1917), but then no.13 was his most outspokenly
critical work, incorporating a setting of words that attack
anti-semitism. The last two symphonies and the last four quartets, as
well as other chamber pieces and songs, belong to a late period of spare
texture, slowness and gravity, often used explicitly in images of death:
Symphony no.14 is a song cycle on mortality, though no.15 remains more
enigmatic in its open quotations from Rossini and Wagner. Extracted from
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music
Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800-2000, Revised
Edition by Mary A. Bufwack, Robert K. Oermann (Vanderbilt University
Press) Collaboratively compiled and expertly edited by cultural
anthropologist Mary A Bufwack and music journalist Robert K. Oermann,
Finding Her Voice: Women In Country Music 1800-2000 is an
information-laden, 624-page compendium of women's contributions to
country music down through the past two centuries. Black-and-white
photographs enliven the pages of this astute, well-researched, artfully
presented text. Finding Her Voice is a seminal work of music history
scholarship and a superb educational text and resource which is
especially recommended for American Music History academic reference
collections and to dedicated country music fans.
After its initial publication in 1993, Robert K.
Oermann and Mary A. Bufwack's Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in
Country Music quickly became an essential book for country music
scholars and fans. Now back in print, with updated material, an
additional chapter, and new photos, Finding Her Voice is poised to reach
a whole new generation of country music fans.
From country's earliest pioneers to its greatest
legends, Finding Her Voice documents the lives of the female artists who
have shaped the music for over two hundred years. Through interviews,
photos, and primary texts, Bufwack and Oermann weave a vast and complex
tapestry of personalities and talent. Long overlooked and
underappreciated by scholars, female country music artists have always
been immensely popular with fans. This book gets to the heart of the
special bond female artists have with their audiences. People seeking to
understand the context out of which mega-stars such as Shania Twain,
Faith Hill, and the Dixie Chicks emerged need look no farther than this
book.
25 Ways to Improve Your Solo Guitar Playing: Keep Your Music Sounding
Fresh with These Ideas for Ways to Expand and Improve Your Guitar
Playing with C by Jay Marks includes Audio CD (Centerstream
Publishing: Hal Leonard) Basic chords and tips on technique for novice
guitar-players.
Jazz in New Orleans by Charles Suhor (Scarecrow Press) provides
accurate information about, and a credible interpretation of, jazz in
New Orleans from the end of World War II through 1970. Suhor, relying on
his experiences as a listener, a working jazz
drummer, and writer in New Orleans during this period, has done a great
service to lovers of New Orleans music by filling in some gaping holes
in postwar jazz history and cutting through many of the myths and
misconceptions that have taken hold over the years. Skillfully combining
his personal experiences and historical research with the numerous
articles he wrote while covering the jazz scene during the 1960s, the
author writes with both authority and immediacy. The text, rich in
previously unpublished anecdotes and New Orleans lore, is divided into
three sections, each with an overview essay followed by pertinent
articles Suhor wrote for national and local journals-including "Down
Beat" and "New Orleans Magazine". Section One, "Jazz and the
Establishment," focuses on cultural and institutional settings in which
jazz was first battered, then nurtured. It deals with the reluctance of
power brokers and custodians of culture in New Orleans to accept jazz as
art-until the music proved itself elsewhere and was easily recognizable
as a marketable commodity. Section Two, "Traditional and Dixieland
Jazz," highlights the music and the musicians who were central to early
jazz styles in New Orleans between 1947 and 1953. Section Three, "An
Invisible Generation," will help dispel the stubborn myth that almost no
one was playing be-bop or other modern jazz styles in New Orleans before
the current generation of young artists appeared in the 1980s.
"No city lias received
more attention than New Orleans by writers and historians of American
jazz. Educator, musician, and writer Charlie Suhor from New Orleans's
Ninth Ward . . . is uniquely qualified to speak with his strong voice on
New Orleans jazz in these mid-century decades. Dr. Suhor advances his
reportage and ideas in three main themes—jazz and the establishment; the
traditional revival in jazz; and the mostly invisible early bebop and
avant-garde movements. Following an overview of each of these themes are
selected reprints of his articles published in the 1960s and early
1970s. Many of these are perfect gems. . . . The rich myriad threads of
mid-century jazz in New Orleans are all tied together in this book."
—Gilbert Erskine, jazz critic and co-founder, New Orleans jazz Club
Jazz in New Orleans attempts to provide accurate information about,
and a credible interpretation of, jazz in New Orleans from the end of
World War II (in August 1945) through 1970. It was written specifically
to counter what I believe are misconceptions about the jazz scene during
those years, errors that have hardened into orthodoxies in a
surprisingly short time.
Excerpt: The areas of
misunderstanding are set out in three key topics: the local
Establishment's views of jazz, from outright shame to belated pride;
the pro-fusion of "New Orleans revivals," including a local revival that
has been basically ignored; and modern jazz and its many pioneers in
postwar New Orleans. The introductory chapter explains the genesis of
this book in terms of my experiences as a listener, musician, and writer
in New Orleans during the postwar years. The text is then divided into
three sections, each exploring one of the main topics at length. An
overview essay begins each section and is followed by pertinent articles
I wrote for national and local journals, mainly Down Beat and New
Orleans magazines.
I might well have
grouped some of the articles in different sections, or even constructed
some of the main topics differently. In the real world everything is
wonderfully, complexly contextual to everything else, so choices must be
made about ways of configuring and presenting ideas. My groupings are a
convenience, then, a useful handle for imposing narrative coherence on
topics that are distinguishable yet highly interrelated. Indeed, the
topics are interwoven into the autobiographical chapter, and they appear
frequently throughout the book, brought into specific focus in the
overviews that begin each section. This results in occasional
repetition, but in each case the information or event recounted is
integral to the text in which it appears.
One extremely
important topic—racial politics and relations among black and white
musicians, jazz fans, and the general public—is not the focus of a
separate section. The fact is that the topic enters into innumerable
events described in this text. Abstracting racial themes from the
numerous contexts would not have been illuminating. In the
autobiographical chapter, the overviews, and the articles, I have
commented often and candidly on matters of race in connection with the
settings and events under discussion.
The inclusion of
actual articles and documents published during the postwar years,
modified only to correct misspellings or other minor errors, ensures
accountability to the viewpoints and information presented when those
materials were written. The overviews provide broader perspectives on
each topic, adding new materials as well as tracing relationships among
the articles and across the three topics. An overview typically cites
examples of current misconceptions about the topic; brings in diverse
opinions, including those counter to my own; shows intersection and
intersection relationships; and provides further commentary to fill in
gaps or raise new questions about a topic. The overviews rather than the
articles take precedence when there are factual or interpretive
disparities that I did not specifically address. I have avoided a
citation format that clutters the text with bibliographic detail.
However, the text always includes information easily referenced
alphabetically in the bibliography.
Fidelity to the texts
of the vintage articles will no doubt bring a little discomfort with
outmoded usages, terminologies, and slang. But it is important to
remember the times. In the early 1960s, "Negro" was the accepted term,
long since replaced by "black" or "African American." Sexist pronouns
(the universal "he") were coin of the realm. And terms like "groovy"
were .. . well, hip.
Section I, "Jazz and
the Establishment: From Flouting to Flaunting," focuses on some
cultural and institutional settings in which jazz was first battered and
then nurtured. It deals with the remarkable reluctance of power brokers
and custodians of culture in New Orleans to accept jazz as art—until the
music proved itself elsewhere and was easily recognizable as a
marketable commodity. The press and the education community, which might
have shown vision in advancing our rich native art, were among the chief
denigrators of jazz. A few mavericks with social and political
connections did agitate through groups like the National Jazz
Foundation and the New Orleans Jazz Club, and they scored partial
victories for preswing jazz styles. But ironically, many of the most
visible changes were not for jazz as a living art but for what might be
called significant mummifications—the Jazz Archive at Tulane, the Jazz
Museum, and belated tributes to individual artists, mainly funeral
obsequies. Not until Jazz-fest '68 did the Establishment follow through
wholeheartedly with major civic and financial support for jazz. But
numerous social and political problems had to be worked out before a
major festival could be mounted. There were three false starts and a
bevy of intrigues—concern about racism in the city, the dabblings of
eccentric amateurs, earnest protests from New Orleans jazz purists. I
covered some of the early misfires during the 1960s in Down Beat, but
the snippets are tied together here, hope-fully laying to rest the
oft-stated suggestion that the festival began, sans precedent or
gestation, in 1970.
Section II,
"`Revivals' Beaucoup: Traditional, Dixieland, and Revivalist Jazz,"
moves specifically to the music and the musicians. It highlights the
artists who were central in a significant but often-ignored popular
revival oftraditional and Dixieland jazz in New Orleans between 1947 and
1953. For reasons related in part to the early 1940s rediscovery and
recording of trumpeter Bunk Johnson and others, the hot little late
1940s revival that produced young second-liners like the Dukes of
Dixieland and Pete Fountain has been given short shrift or no shrift at
all. This section describes the growth and decline of the revival and
highlights its leading bands and promoters. In contrast, the
Preservation Hall revival that began in the early 1960s generated almost
immediate nationwide interest, spawning imitators both worthy and
bizarre. The record cries for some sorting out, and this section
attempts that. The perennial question of whether young players can or
will carry on the traditional New Orleans and Dixieland styles is also
discussed.
Section III, "An
Invisible Generation: Early Modern Jazz Artists," should help dispel the
stubborn myth that almost no one was playing be-bop or other modern jazz
styles in New Orleans before the current generation of young artists,
beginning with the gifted Wynton Marsalis, appeared in the 1980s. In the
postwar years a formidable cadre of creative modern jazz players was
performing, mainly in underground venues. Tragically, many died young.
The surviving pioneers—many of them no longer active—are at least in
their sixties. Their music was even less acceptable than traditional and
Dixieland jazz to local leaders and average citizens, and recognition of
their art and their struggle is past due. A symposium of early modern
jazz artists gathered in 1988 to shed light on the early pioneers, and a
transcript of their discussion is part of this section.
Appendix 1, "Four
Cross Sections," consists of survey articles done in 1965, 1966, 1968,
and 1970 for different publications. As New Orleans be-came widely
reestablished as a jazz mecca, articles that provided cross sections of
the local scene, tinged with boosterism and interspersed with critical
comments, were in demand. Read sequentially, they give a sense of how
things were evolving during a six-year span.
Appendix 2, "Early
Modern Jazz Musicians in New Orleans, 1945-1960," is a very long
footnote to section 3. It puts on record some 120-plus modern jazz
musicians who were known to be active in New Orleans in the postwar
years.
I believe that this
book provides the most comprehensive picture to date of jazz in New
Orleans from 1945 to 1970. I do not claim to be a professional
historian, but I hope that this book reflects my respect for accuracy
and my training as a researcher. I hope also that I have made fair use
of my life experiences as a jazz watcher, musician, and writer. I have
tried to ac-count responsibly for the viewpoints of others, using the
overviews in particular to extend the topics and critique certain
aspects of my earlier writings. I stand ready for response and
criticism. As Orleanian Dorothy Dix, the mother of all advice
columnists, once said, "Writing is like firing in the dark. You never
know whether you hit anything or not. And so it is good to hear the bell
ring every now and then."
Business and Legal Forms for Theater CD-ROM edition by Charles
Grippo (Allworth Press) This comprehensive, ready-to-use collection of
44 model business and legal forms will save anyone involved in the
performing arts thousands of dollars in legal fees! Written by an
entertainment lawyer and producer, Business and Legal Forms for Theater
includes samples for every aspect of theater law, including author
agreements, commissions, production license, play publishing, and more.
Artists, producers, directors, theatrical designers and even box office
managers will have everything they need to prepare their own contracts,
negotiate the best possible deal, and minimize legal risks. Accompanying
CD-ROM includes all forms, checklists, and contracts in both Mac and PC
formats.
Character & Conflict: The Cornerstones of Screenwriting by Mark
Axelrod (Heinemann Publishing) Character without conflict makes Jack
Nicholson a dull boy. These two screenwriting essentials are
inextricably linked, and irr Character and Conflict, Mark Axelrod
reveals how to integrate them in a new and refreshing way.
Starting with general principles, Character and Conflict takes you step
by step through every aspect of generating compelling characters and
gripping conflicts. Alluding to the work of Joseph Campbell and others,
Axelrod-offers extensive insight into:
- how a character's arc must progress
- how conflict shapes and is shaped by character
- how archetypes facilitate character creation and growth
- how rites of passage and other plot devices help conflict arise.
Unlike in other screenwriting texts, whose authors
tend to offer brief examples to support their assertions, Axelrod bores
deeply into the scripts of such feature films as Amélie, Good Will
Hunting, and Driven, revealing how to craft--and how not to
craft—rounded characters as well as the crises that bring them together
or set them at odds:
With exercises that sharpen the skills of both
beginning and advanced writers, examples that pull bock the curtains on
the writing process, plus Axelrod's theories and experience-honed
advice, reading Character and Conflict is like taking an advanced
seminar in screenwriting, without ever having to leave your writing
desk.
MARK AXELROD is a full professor of comparative
literature and film at Chapman University in Orange, California.
The Mind's Eye: Theatre and Media Design from the Inside Out by
Wayne Kramer (CD-ROM) (Heinemann Drama) In the performing arts, design
encompasses a wide array of possible forms and settings, including sets,
costumes, lighting, and digital environments for Broadway, Hollywood,
television, and the computer-gaming world. But all designs, no matter
how diverse, require a focused, interpretive, and creative vision that
brings an idea to vivid life.
In The Mind's Eye, design professional Wayne Kramer
guides you through the process of imagining and realizing effective
designs that are faithful to a source work's purpose. Beginning with a
script, treatment, or project description, Kramer shows you how to read
carefully for the author's intent and then apply a specific
element-by-element methodology that generates striking results in any
genre and for any audience. His tips, techniques, and useful background
information on every aspect of the design process already make The
Minds'Eye an indispensable tool, but with the addition of both a CD-ROM
that illustrates his points with digital clarity and case studies based
on inter-views with professionals that show how they meet a variety of
design dilemmas, Kramer moves his method, and your work, a giant step
forward.
The Mind's Eye is the perfect hand-held mentor. If you are new to
design, it will serve as an ideal model for your first forays into the
field; for the more experienced, Kramer's insight offers a professional
resource for reflection and growth. Read The Mind's Eye and be ready to
achieve your vision today, no matter what type of design challenge
awaits you.
Wayne Kramer teaches design at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts, where he is Dean of the School for Interdisciplinary
Arts. He has worked for Universal Studios and Columbia Studios as well
as for independent film and television producers. His theatre designs
have been seen in North America and Europe.
Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet
Theater by Ronald T. Simon (Chelsea Green Publishing) Peter Schumann
and his Bread & Puppet Theater are likely the most important, and surely
the longest-lasting, contributors to modern American theater history.
Since the early sixties Schumann and his puppeteers have been pouring
out work after work on every scale: political works, mysterious works,
grand works, modest works, works on the street and works in fields,
works to be played in every size theater on four continents, books,
prints, posters, and banners which live as show-and-tell in so many
homes.
Ronald T. Simon, a
remarkable photographer, and Marc Estrin, a long-time puppeteer, have
contributed in their own ways to the shows, recording and reflecting on
the events. Out of their experiences they have created Rehearsing with
Gods: Photographs and Essays on The Bread & Puppet Theater.
Far more than history
or documentation, they identify eight archetypes engaged repeatedly by
Peter Schumann and his crew. Their book consists of parallel meditations
unified and intertwined by the chapter themes of Death, Fiend, Beast,
Human, World, Gift, Bread, and Hope.
Altogether, this is a
collaboration that reflects their sixty odd man-years of personal
experience in, hidden narratives of, and speculative reflections on
Peter Schumann's projects, ever-more relevant to our times. This is a
book that will engage both fans and newcomers—an inside view of Peter
Schumann's political-artistic world.
From Publishers Weekly
The Bread and Puppet Theater, which
started in the early '60s on New York's Lower East Side, migrated some
years later to its present location in Vermont, and the wide open spaces
obviously serve its expansive, anarchic being well. Photographer Simon
has conducted a 20-year study of Theater founder Peter Schumann, and
Simon's 145 duotone photos show the influences of ancient theater and
religions, particularly in the gravity of the massive faces of the
puppets, made initially from straw, clay and, "according to some alleged
medieval German formula," beer. The book is organized around the eight
"archetypical" themes of Death, Fiend, Beast, Human, World, Gift, Bread
and Hope; however, like Bread and Puppet itself, which combines the
creative with the mysterious, themes eddy into other themes. Estrin (Insect
Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa) makes the strong social
activist component of the theater clear, in tones that are by turns
humorous and revealing, informational and awestruck (especially when it
comes to Schumann). But the stars here are the enormous, fantastical
creatures that enact possible freedoms each season. Copyright © Reed
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