Looking For Muriel: A Journey Through and Around the Alain Resnais Film PDF Download

Author: Darren Arnold
Publisher: BearManor Media
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Muriel, or The Time of Return was director Alain Resnais’ first color feature, and its film stock immediately set it apart from many other French movies of the early 1960s. Appearing hot on the heels of Resnais’ arthouse smashes Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel failed to attract the same attention as its predecessors, and the film’s initial domestic release yielded indifferent box office results. This lukewarm response could perhaps be attributed to Muriel’s probing of the still fresh wounds inflicted by the Algerian War, as the French public of the time held little appetite for further discussion of what was widely viewed as a messy, dispiriting conflict. Yet time has allowed Muriel to slowly emerge as Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, and its exquisite distillation of its director’s preoccupations marks it out as the quintessential Resnais film. Looking for Muriel examines both the film and its setting of Boulogne-sur-Mer, and also delves into numerous related areas, including the Algerian War, the French New Wave cinema movement, the Second World War, and the wider careers of both Alain Resnais and Muriel’s incomparable star, Delphine Seyrig. Muriel’s intricate editing and complex script are also discussed, as are other films which touch on similar themes. Darren Arnold is a film critic and author of Devil’s Advocates: The Devils and The Pocket Essential Spike Lee. He lives near London with his family.

Author: Emma Wilson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526141140
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Alain Resnais, director of 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) and 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad' (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a concise account of critical discussions of his work in France and beyond. Yet it also offers a highly personal and detailed engagement with individual images and scenes in Resnais' films. A passionate and partial defence of Resnais' work, old and new, this volume stands apart in its attention to the more tangible and moving pleasures of his films, their pathos, rigour and visual beauty.

Author: Sam Pickering
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142276
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Ten essays on literature, competition, curiosity, enthusiasm, and truth from the teacher who inspired "The Dead Poet's Society" reveal the joys of teaching and the power of innovation over stale formalism.

Author: Giuliana Bruno
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178663323X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1133

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Book Description
Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that "sight" and "site" but also "motion" and "emotion" are irrevocably connected. In so doing, Giuliana Bruno touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Message, the film making of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Author: Lynn A. Higgins
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833953
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Among the most innovative and influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, Alain Resnais (1922–2014) did not originally set out to become a director. He trained as an actor and film editor and, during the sixty-eight years of his working life, delved into virtually every corner of filmmaking, working at one time or another as screenwriter, assistant director, camera operator and cinematographer, special effects coordinator, technical consultant, and even author of source material. From such award-winning documentaries as Van Gogh and Night and Fog to the groundbreaking dramas Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Muriel, Resnais’s films experiment with such themes as consciousness, memory, and the imagination. Distinguishing himself from associations with the French New Wave movement, Resnais considered his films to be “anti-illusionist,” never allowing his spectators to forget they were watching a work of art. In Alain Resnais: Interviews, editor Lynn A. Higgins collects twenty-one interviews with the filmmaker, twelve of which are translated into English for the first time. Spanning his entire career from his early short subjects to his final feature film, the volume highlights Resnais’s creative strategies and principles, illuminates his place in world cinema history, and situates his work relative to the New Wave, American film, and experimental filmmaking more broadly. Like his films, the interviews collected here reveal a creator who is at once an intellectual, a philosopher, an entertainer, a craftsman, and an artist.

Author: Jill Nelmes
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415262682
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
An Introduction to Film Studies has established itself as the leading textbook for students of cinema. This revised and updated third edition guides students through the key issues and concepts in film studies, and introduces some of the world's key national cinemas including British, Indian, Soviet and French. Written by experienced teachers in the field and lavishly illustrated with over 122 film stills and production shots, it will be essential reading for any student of film. Features of the third edition include: *full coverage of all the key topics at undergraduate level *comprehensive and up-to-date information and new case studies on recent films such as Gladiator, Spiderman, The Blair Witch Project, Fight Club, Shrekand The Matrix *annotated key readings, further viewing, website resources, study questions, a comprehensive bibliography and indexes, and a glossary of key terms will help lecturers prepare tutorials and encourage students to undertake independent study. Individual chapters include: *Film form and narrative *Spectator, audience and response *Critical approaches to Hollywood cinema: authorship, genre and stars *Animation: forms and meaning *Gender and film *Lesbian and gay cinema *British cinema *Soviet montage Cinema *French New Wave *Indian Cinema

Author: Laure Astourian
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253069602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Ethnographic Optic traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Moi, un Noir, La jetée, and Muriel, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

Author: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1556529937
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Is the cinema, as writers from David Denby to Susan Sontag have claimed, really dead? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, films are better than ever—we just can't see the good ones. Movie Wars cogently explains how movies are packaged, distributed, and promoted, and how, at every stage of the process, the potential moviegoer is treated with contempt. Using examples ranging from the New York Times's coverage of the Cannes film festival to the anticommercial practices of Orson Welles, Movie Wars details the workings of the powerful forces that are in the process of ruining our precious cinematic culture and heritage, and the counterforces that have begun to fight back.

Author: Ben Francis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350281824
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Stephen Sondheim is one of the best-known and most-loved musical theatre composers, but also one of the most misunderstood, often being labelled as 'distant' or 'cynical'. Careful the Spell You Cast instead argues that Sondheim firmly belongs to the Broadway aspirational tradition, in that many of his characters are defined by their dreams: to abandon one's dream (as Ben does in Follies, Frank does in Merrily We Roll Along, and Addison does in Road Show) is to lose one's soul. Rather than take the established view of Sondheim as a cynic, this book contends that throughout Sondheim's work, letting go of one's illusions is a process that his characters need to go through, that they must cast off illusions and false dreams, without becoming cynical and destroying their genuine dreams in the process. In turn this view aligns Sondheim's work as being aspirational and a logical continuation from the work of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II. Following the trajectory of Sondheim's career, Careful the Spell You Cast shows how Sondheim has dramatized this process throughout his writing life alongside different collaborators. From his work as a lyricist with the musicals Gypsy and West Side Story through to his later collaborations with Hal Prince (Company, Follies) and James Lapine (Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George), this book reframes the established view through lyrical and structural analysis in relation to the characters within each of these celebrated works of musical theatre, arguing that Sondheim is, in the popular sense of the word, a romantic within the tradition of the Broadway musical.

Author: H. Ford
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283521
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A unique study of four major post-war European films by four key 'auteurs', which argues that these films exemplify film modernism at the peak of its philosophical reflection and aesthetic experimentation.