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Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love
affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry,
it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing
some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders
deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and
reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a
student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts
of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British
Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar
landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange
nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film
by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in
Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in
W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. This book blends deeply personal writing
with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an
unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an
astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining
autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the
magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for
London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and
eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the
real and the imaginary.
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Salesman (Paperback)
J.M. Tyree
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R396
R328
Discovery Miles 3 280
Save R68 (17%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant
American films ever made, Salesman (1966-9) is a landmark in
non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to
Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows
a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts,
Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant
entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan.
Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema'
movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the
first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte
Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones
documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films
drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood
extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary
feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film
was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and
presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking
heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and
experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the
Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated
narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree
suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of
non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and
performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural
context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its
critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style
of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and
immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and
working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree's insightful
study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about
the film.
Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to
general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and
remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of
'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling
alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of
deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such
remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to
rise? The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best
performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned
Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken
for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in
trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly
convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and
threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his
bowling commitments. In part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond
Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big
Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful
references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby
Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los
Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes,
phonies and poseurs with put-on identities. Like many Coen films,
the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and
the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that
rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting
with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed
ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the
value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling. In their
foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's
cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle
non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world.
The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens,
revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.
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