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Axe Bahia examines the unique cultural role played by Salvador, the
coastal capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia. An internationally
renowned center of Afro-Brazilian culture, Salvador has been a
vibrant and important hub of African-inspired artistic practices in
Latin America since the 1940s. This volume represents the most
comprehensive investigation in the United States of Bahian arts to
date and features essays by eighteen international scholars. While
adding to popular understandings of core expressions of African
heritage, such as the religion Candomble, the essays explore in
depth the complexities of race and cultural affiliation in Brazil
and the provocative ways in which artists have experienced and
responded creatively to prevailing realities of Afro-Brazilian
identity in Bahia. Lavishly illustrated, the book features works by
artists ranging from modernists, among them Mario Cravo Neto, Rubem
Valentim, and Pierre Verger, to contemporary artists Rommulo Vieira
Conceicao, Caetano Dias, Helen Salomao, Ayrson Heraclito, and
others-including a stunning array of sculpture, painting,
photography, video, and installation art. The exhibition was part
of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.
Do social classes really exist? Is disinterested action really
possible? What do the family, the church, and the intellectual
world have in common? Can morality be founded on hypocrisy? What is
the "subject" of action? In this new volume, one of France's
foremost social thinkers of our time responds to these major
questions and to others, thus tracing the outlines of a work that
could be called "Pierre Bourdieu by himself."
In these texts, the author tries to go to the essential, that is,
the most elementary and fundamental, questions. He thereby explains
the philosophical principles that have led to his social science
research and the idea of the human that guides his choices there.
With the lucidity allowed by retrospect, Bourdieu brings out the
fundamental theories of his greatest books, notably "Outline of a
Theory of Practice" and "The Logic of Practice" (Stanford, 1990),
and, with an eye to the future, presents the first results of his
most recent work on the state, the anthropological moorings of the
economy, and male domination.
Bourdieu's theory is both a philosophy of science dedicated to
revealing the objective relations that shape and underpin social
life, and a philosophy of action that takes account of agents'
dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they
act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of
key concepts--habitus, field, capital--and it is defined by the
two-way relationship between the objective structures of social
fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus.
All in all, this book should be an indispensable introduction to
Bourdieu's work, not only to students and scholars in sociology,
anthropology, political science, and philosophy, but throughout the
social sciences and humanities generally.
From the documentary to the cinema novo and cannibalism, from
Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Vidas Secas to music in the films of
Glauber Rocha, this third, revised edition is a century-spanning
introduction to the story of a medium that flourished in one of the
most developed of 'underdeveloped' nations.
Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, Lonely
Woman dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains
Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional
realization of her concept of "loneliness." Her fiction typically
features a woman for whom dreams and fantasies, crime, madness,
sexual deviance, or occult pursuits serve as a temporary release
from her society's definitions of female identity. The combination
of surrealist, feminist, and religious themes in Takahashi's work
makes it unique among that of modern Japanese women writers.The
five individually titled short stories that constitute Lonely Woman
are linked by certain characters, themes, and plot elements. In the
first story, "Lonely Woman," a series of arson incidents in her
neighborhood causes a nihilistic young woman to become fascinated
with the psychology of the person who perpetrated the crimes. Her
fantasies of the euphoric pleasure of setting a fire heighten her
awareness of her own violent tendencies. "The Oracle" portrays a
young widow who becomes convinced, through several disturbing
dreams, that her late husband was unfaithful to her. She devises a
cruel, ritualistic act as a strategy for defusing her sense of
helpless rage. In "Foxfire," a store clerk has a series of
encounters with sly, seductive youngsters and is revitalized by her
discovery of the criminal and sexual impulses that lurk beneath
their innocent facades. In "The Suspended Bridge," a bored
housewife's passion is rekindled when a man with whom she once had
a sadomasochistic relationship reenters her life. "Strange
Affinities" recasts crime, madness, and amour fou as catalysts of a
process of spiritual enlightenment: an old woman searches for an
elusive man who seems to embody the bliss of self-renunciation.
With such stunning films as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Bye Bye
Brazil, and Pixote, Brazilian cinema achieved both critical acclaim
and popular recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming the
premier cinema of Latin America and one of the largest film
producers in the western world. But the success of Brazilian film
at home and abroad came after many years of struggle by filmmakers
determined to create a strong film industry in Brazil. At the
forefront of this struggle were the filmmakers of Cinema Novo, the
internationally acclaimed movement whose flowering in the 1960s
marked the birth of modern Brazilian film. Cinema Novo x 5 places
the success of Brazilian cinema in perspective by examining the
films of the five leaders of this groundbreaking
movement—Andrade, Diegues, Guerra, Rocha, and dos Santos. By
exploring the individuality of these masters of contemporary
Brazilian film, Randal Johnson reveals the astonishing stylistic
and thematic diversity of Cinema Novo. His emphasis is on the films
themselves, as well as their makers’ distinctive cinematic vision
and views of what cinema should be and is. At the same time, he
provides a wealth of valuable background information to enhance
readers’ understanding of the historical, cultural, and economic
context in which Cinema Novo was born and flourished.
Looking back through the prism of the severe economic crisis for
filmmaking in the 1980s, The Film Industry in Brazil explores the
unusual relationship between the state-supported industry, which
often produced politically radical films, and the authoritarian
regime that had held sway for twenty years. To ground his analysis,
Johnson covers the early years of the film industry, 1898-1930;
attempts at industrialization during the 1930s and 1940s; film
industry congresses and government film boards, 1950-1966; the
National Film Institute, 1966-1975; and the expansion of the
state's role from 1969 through 1980.
Well-conceived, carefully researched and documented, Johnson's
study fills a major gap in film studies by tracing the development
of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its
relationship to the state.
Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer
With a career spanning over seventy years, Portuguese film
director Manoel de Oliveira may be the oldest active filmmaker in
the world today. Known for his distinctive formal techniques and
philosophical treatment of themes such as frustrated love,
nationhood, evil, and divine grace, the director's work has run
consistently against the mainstream. Focusing primarily on his
feature films, Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive oeuvre,
locating his work within the broader context of Portuguese and
European cinema. He also examines multiple aspects of Oliveira's
conception of film language, ranging from early concerns with
cinematic specificity to hybrid discourses suggesting a tenuous
line between film and theater on the one hand, and between fiction
and documentary on the other.
"A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by
James Naremore"
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