Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501319922

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings offers, for the first time in English, a substantive selection of the Italian screenwriter's writings across two volumes. Through translation and detailed cultural and contextual commentary, translator and editor David Brancaleone traces not only Zavattini's theory of the screen, but also his experimentation in new film practices, including the flash-film (film lampo), the inquiry film (film inchiesta), cinema as encounter (cinema d'incontro), the diary film (film diario), the confessional film (film-confessione), and the grass-roots community film (cinema insieme or cinema di tanti per tanti).

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1011
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501319930

Volume 1 makes available for the first time in English thirty-nine scenarios and two treatments. Each text is preceded by an introduction, providing an essential frame of reference to make these writings entirely accessible to the reader. While nearly all these texts belong to the post-war period, including the stories for major post-war classics, there are also seven pre-war raccontini, the narrative source of Zavattini's Modernist magical realism, several fictional interviews and faux reportage, tinged with irony aimed at Hollywood, complemented by several pre-war scenarios. The book also features scenarios for Luchino Visconti's Bellissima, Alessandro Blasetti's First Communion, De Sica's The Roof and texts encompassing Zavattini's ethnographic vision, from the redactions of Italia mia, interviews for Un paese, illustrated with Paul Strand's photographs, to the scenarios for investigative documentaries, including Why?, The Mysteries of Rome, The Guinea Pig, the Free Newsreel Revolution, and the lucid Before, During After, tackling Aldo Moro's assassination by the Red Brigades. The book includes Zavattini's last word on cinema and society, the testamentary satire La veritàaaa (1982), written, directed and acted by Zavattini himself. Each text is preceded by an introduction, providing an essential frame of reference to make these writings entirely accessible to the reader. Volume 2 brings to the fore Zavattini's ever-evolving internal dialogue between diary writer, screenwriter, narrative writer, and political activist. Essential to trace the origin of Zavattini's ideas on cinema and understand his theorization of Neo-realism is the inclusion of a selection of the filmmaker's pre-war writings. Most of the book provides a substantial anthology of texts translated from Neorealismo ecc. (1979), comprising Zavattini's major essays, conference papers, unpublished production papers, interviews, and vital excerpts from his correspondence and published cinematic diary. Through translation and detailed cultural and contextual commentary, translator and editor David Brancaleone traces not only Zavattini's theory of the screen, but also his experimentation in new film practices, including the flash-film (film lampo), the inquiry film (film inchiesta), cinema as encounter (cinema d'incontro), the diary film (film diario), the confessional film (film-confessione), and the grass-roots community film (cinema insieme or cinema di tanti per tanti). Each text is preceded by an introduction, providing an essential frame of reference to make these writings entirely accessible to the reader.

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings

Cesare Zavattini: Selected Writings
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781501317187

This unprecedented collection of Cesare Zavattini's writings in English translation offers the first glimpse into the screenwriter's theoretical, political, and cultural ideas of cinema.

Cesare Zavattini

Cesare Zavattini
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2021
Genre: Filmmaking
ISBN: 9781501317088

"Volume two brings to the fore Zavattini's ever evolving internal dialogue between diary writer, screenwriter, narrative writer, and political activist since 1944. Bringing together both letters previously published in Italian and hitherto uncollected ones, this volume reveals Zavattini's relationship to producers (Guarini and Ponti), filmmakers (Rossellini, De Santis, Antonioni, De Sica, Pasolini, Blasetti, Grifi, and Paul Strand) to writers (including Vittorini, Attilio Bertolucci, Umberto Saba, Salvatore Quasimodo), film critics, and international filmmakers. Also documented is Bazin's relationship with Zavattini, with the inclusion of an exchange of sixteen letters between the two. The critical and contextual study which introduces this volume explicates underlying logic of Zavattini's many interventions in disparate fields, documented by the translation of primary sources."--

Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea

Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501317008

How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini's idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Author: Pauline Kael
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 1186
Release: 2011-10-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1598531719

A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

America in Italian Culture

America in Italian Culture
Author: Guido Bonsaver
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2024-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 019884946X

When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.

A Writer of Our Time

A Writer of Our Time
Author: Joshua Sperling
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786637413

"This engaging intellectual biography traces Berger’s creative evolution, analyzes highlights from his vast output ... and situates them within his empathetic Marxism." –The New Yorker The first intellectual biography of the life and work of John Berger John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. “Far from dragging politics into art,” he wrote in 1953, “art has dragged me into politics.” He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017.Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger’s development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s—when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic—to Berger’s reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left. Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.

Un Paese

Un Paese
Author: Cesare Zavattini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN:

Interviews with villagers and descriptions of daily life accompany photographs of the people and town of Luzzara.

The Writing of Elena Poniatowska

The Writing of Elena Poniatowska
Author: Beth E. Jörgensen
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292784996

Elena Poniatowska is one of Latin America's most distinguished and innovative living writers. Advocacy of women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, denunciation of the repression of that struggle, and a tendency to blur the boundaries between conventional literary forms characterize her writing practice. Asserting that Poniatowska's writing has been uniquely shaped by her experience as a journalist and interviewer, Beth Jörgensen addresses four important texts: Palabras cruzadas (interviews), Hasta no verte Jesús mío (testimonial novel), La noche de Tlatelolco (oral history), and La "Flor de Lis" (novel of development). She also treats related pieces, including Lilus Kikus (short fiction), De noche vienes (short stories), Fuerte es el silencio (chronicles), and several of Poniatowska's essays. Her readings incorporate a variety of critical approaches within a feminist framework.