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"Performing arts 20th century Biography."
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Sam Shepard : a life
\"With more than 55 plays to his credit, including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, Sam Shepard's impact on American theater ranks with the greatest playwrights of the past half-century. Critics have enthused that he \"forged a whole new kind of American play,\" while younger playwrights venerate him -- Suzan Lori Parks, herself a Pulitzer winner, calls Shepard her \"gorgeous north star.\" As an actor who's appeared in more than 50 feature films, Shepard possesses an onscreen persona that's been aptly summed up as \"Gary Cooper in denim.\" He earned an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, and his screenplay for Paris, Texas helped that now-classic film sweep the top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite these accomplishments and more -- five collections of prose, writing songs with Bob Dylan, making films with Robert Frank and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as romantic relationships with rocker Patti Smith and actress Jessica Lange -- Shepard seems anything but satisfied. Sam Shepard: A Life details his lifelong bouts of insecurity and anxiety, and delves deeply into his relationship with his alcoholic father and his own battle with the bottle. Also examined for the first time in-depth are Shepard's tumultuous relationship with Lange, and his decades-long adherence to the teachings of Russian spiritualist G.I. Gurdjieff. Throughout this new biography, John J. Winters gets to the heart of the enigma that is Sam Shepard, presenting an honest and comprehensive account of his life and work\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The demons of modernity
Ingmar Bergman's films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman's relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman's critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman's films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through \"his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy.\"
eBook
American rhapsody : writers, musicians, movie stars, and one great building
\"Biographical profiles of some of the most iconic American artists and creations of the twentieth century\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Shadow Woman
Kansas-born Pauline Benton (1898-1974) was encouraged by her father, one of America's earliest feminist male educators, to reach for the stars. Instead, she reached for shadows. In 1920s Beijing, she discovered shadow theatre (piyingxi), a performance art where translucent painted puppets are manipulated by highly trained masters to cast coloured shadows against an illuminated screen. Finding that this thousand-year-old forerunner of motion pictures was declining in China, Benton believed she could save the tradition by taking it to America. Mastering the male-dominated art form in China, Benton enchanted audiences eager for the exotic in Depression-era America. Her touring company, Red Gate Shadow Theatre, was lauded by theatre and art critics and even performed at Franklin Roosevelt's White House. Grant Hayter-Menzies traces Benton's performance history and her efforts to preserve shadow theatre as a global cultural treasure by drawing on her unpublished writings, the recollections of her colleagues, the testimonies of shadow masters who survived China's Cultural Revolution, as well as young innovators who have carried on Benton's pioneering work.
eBook
Wolf : the lives of Jack London
Award-winning western historian James L. Haley paints a vivid portrait of Jack London--adventurer, social reformer, and the most popular American writer of his generation.
Book
See Me Naked
Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure.They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women's lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.
eBook
Like a bomb going off : Leonid Yakobson and ballet as resistance in Soviet Russia
\"Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as \"like a bomb going off.\" Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written biography brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Boro, L'île d'amour
There has been a recent revival of interest in the work of Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk, a label-defying auteur and \"escape artist\" if there ever was one. This collection serves as an introduction and a guide to Borowczyk's complex and ambiguous body of work, including panoramic views of the director's output, focused studies of particular movies, and more personal, impressionistic pieces. Taken together, these contributions comprise a wide-ranging survey that is markedly experimental in character, allowing scholars to gain insight into previously unnoticed aspects of Borowczyk'soeuvre.
eBook
By women possessed : a life of Eugene O'Neill
\"Not a peep show or a celebrity gossip fest, this book is [an] ... investigation of the emotional knots that ensnared one of our most important playwrights ... O'Neill was the flame women were drawn to--all, that is, except his mother, who never let him forget he was unwanted. [The book] follows O'Neill through his great successes, the failures he was able to shrug off, and the long eclipse, a twelve-year period in which ... nothing he wrote was produced. But ahead lay his greatest achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. Both were ahead of their time and both received lukewarm receptions. It wasn't until after his death that his widow ... began a ... campaign to restore his reputation\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Martin Scorsese and the American Dream
More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed. This book is the first study of Scorsese's profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.
eBook