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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
Adopting an innovative and theoretical approach, Greek Tragedy and
the Digital is an original study of the encounter between Greek
tragedy and digital media in contemporary performance. It
challenges Greek tragedy conventions through the contemporary
arsenal of sound masks, avatars, live code poetry, new media art
and digital cognitive experimentations. These technological
innovations in performances of Greek tragedy shed new light on
contemporary transformations and adaptations of classical myths,
while raising emerging questions about how augmented reality works
within interactive and immersive environments. Drawing on
cutting-edge productions and theoretical debates on performance and
the digital, this collection considers issues including
performativity, liveness, immersion, intermediality, aesthetics,
technological fragmentation, conventions of the chorus, theatre as
hypermedia and reception theory in relation to Greek tragedy. Case
studies include Kzryztof Warlikowski, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci,
Katie Mitchell, Georges Lavaudant, The Wooster Group, Labex
Arts-H2H, Akram Khan, Urland & Crew, Medea Electronique, Robert
Wilson, Klaus Obermaier, Guy Cassiers, Luca di Fusco, Ivo Van Hove,
Avra Sidiropoulou and Jay Scheib. This is an incisive,
interdisciplinary study that serves as a practice model for
conceptualizing the ways in which Greek tragedy encounters digital
culture in contemporary performance.
The rare woman director working in second-wave exploitation,
Stephanie Rothman (b. 1936) directed seven successful feature
films, served as the vice president of an independent film company,
and was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America's
student filmmaking prize. Despite these career accomplishments,
Rothman retired into relative obscurity. In The Cinema of Stephanie
Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, author Alicia Kozma uses
Rothman's career as an in-depth case study, intertwining
historical, archival, industrial, and filmic analysis to grapple
with the past, present, and future of women's filmmaking labor in
Hollywood. Understanding second wave exploitation filmmaking as a
transitory space for the industrial development of contemporary
Hollywood that also opened up opportunities for women
practitioners, Kozma argues that understudied film production
cycles provide untapped spaces for discovering women's directorial
work. The professional career and filmography of Rothman exemplify
this claim. Rothman also serves as an apt example for connecting
the structure of film histories to the persistent strictures of
rhetorical language used to mark women filmmakers and their labor.
Kozma traces these imbrications across historical archives.
Adopting a diverse methodological approach, The Cinema of Stephanie
Rothman shines a needed spotlight on the problems and successes of
the memorialization of women's directorial labor, connecting
historical and contemporary patterns of gendered labor disparity in
the film industry. This book is simultaneously the first in-depth
scholarly consideration of Rothman, the debut of the most
substantive archival materials collected on Rothman, and a feminist
political intervention into the construction of film histories.
Hollywood Independent dissects the Mirisch Company, one of the most
successful employers of the package-unit system of film production,
producing classic films like The Apartment (1960), West Side Story
(1961), The Great Escape (1963) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
as irresistible talent packages. Whilst they helped make the names
of a new generation of stars including Steve McQueen and Shirley
MacLaine, as well as banking on the reputations of established
auteurs like Billy Wilder, they were also pioneers in dealing with
controversial new themes with films about race (In the Heat of the
Night), gender (Some Like it Hot) and sexuality (The Children's
Hour), devising new ways of working with film franchises (The
Magnificent Seven, The Pink Panther and In the Heat of the Night
spun off 7 Mirisch sequels between them) and cinematic cycles,
investing in adaptations of bestsellers and Broadway hits,
exploiting frozen funds abroad and exploring so-called runaway
productions. The Mirisch Company bridges the gap between the end of
the studio system by about 1960 and the emergence of a new cinema
in the mid-1970s, dominated by the Movie Brats.
Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original
archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for
the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the
French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen
English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars
apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and
theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old
Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that
includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided
enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of
performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony,
illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space
gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the
cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly
from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that
reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the
islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European
theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the
eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an
increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus
illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new
tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in
the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore
the place of performance in representations of the Old Regime
Antilles, from the Haitian literary diaspora to contemporary
performing artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, as the stage
remains central to understanding history and identity in France's
former Atlantic slave colonies. Featuring contributions from Sean
Anderson, Karine Benac-Giroux, Bernard Camier, Nadia Chonville,
Laurent Dubois, Logan J. Connors, Beatrice Ferrier, Kaiama L.
Glover, Jeffrey M. Leichman, Laurence Marie, Pascale Pellerin,
Julia Prest, Catherine Ramond, Emily Sahakian, Pierre Saint-Amand,
and Fredrik Thomasson.
This book tells the story of German-language literature on film,
beginning with pioneering motion picture adaptations of Faust in
1897 and early debates focused on high art as mass culture. It
explores, analyzes and contextualizes the so-called 'golden age' of
silent cinema in the 1920s, the impact of sound on adaptation
practices, the abuse of literary heritage by Nazi filmmakers, and
traces the role of German-language literature in exile and postwar
films, across ideological boundaries in divided Germany, in New
German Cinema, and in remakes and movies for cinema as well as
television and streaming services in the 21st century. Having
provided the narrative core to thousands of films since the late
19th century, many of German cinema's most influential masterpieces
were inspired by canonical texts, popular plays, and even
children's literature. Not being restricted to German adaptations,
however, this book also traces the role of literature originally
written in German in international film productions, which sheds
light on the interrelation between cinema and key historical
events. It outlines how processes of adaptation are shaped by
global catastrophes and the emergence of nations, by materialist
conditions, liberal economies and capitalist imperatives, political
agendas, the mobility of individuals, and sometimes by the desire
to create reflective surfaces and, perhaps, even art. Commercial
cinema's adaptation practices have foregrounded economic interest,
but numerous filmmakers throughout cinema history have turned to
German-language literature not simply to entertain, but as a
creative contribution to the public sphere, marking adaptation
practice, at least potentially, as a form of active citizenship.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool
University Press website and the OAPEN library. As the prominence
of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish
theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can
foster social emancipation. This volume of essays uncovers a wide
range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory
role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish
culture and society, both historically and in more recent times.
The Gate's founders, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir,
promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an
explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about
gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During
Selina Cartmell's current tenure as director, cultural diversity
and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the
Gate's agenda, with various productions exploring issues of
ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique
model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as
cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the
complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised
societies. CONTRIBUTORS: David Clare, Marguerite Corporaal, Mark
Fitzgerald, Barry Houlihan, Radvan Markus, Deirdre McFeely, Justine
Nakase, Siobhan O'Gorman, Mary Trotter, Grace Vroomen, Ian R.
Walsh, Feargal Whelan
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a theatre director, writer of graphic
novels and comics, novelist, poet, and an expert in the Tarot. He
is also an auteur filmmaker who garnered attention with his
breakthrough film El Topo in 1970. He has been called a "cult"
filmmaker, whose films are surreal, hallucinatory, and provocative.
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky explores the ways
in which Jodorowsky's films are transformative in a psychologically
therapeutic way. It also examines his signature style, which
includes the symbolic meaning of various colors in which he clothes
his actors, the use of his own family members in the films, and his
casting of himself in leading roles. This total involvement of
himself and his family in his auteur films led to his
psycho-therapeutic theories and practices: metagenealogy and
psychomagic. This book is the only the second book in the English
language in print that deals with all of Jodorowsky's films,
beginning with his earliest mime film in 1957 and ending with his
2019 film on psychomagic. It also connects his work as a writer and
therapist to his films, which themselves attempt to obliterate the
line between fantasy and reality.
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