Synopses & Reviews
Post-war Cinema and Modernity explores the relationship between film and modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with essays analyzing new post-war forms of film narrative and responses to the filmic innovations of the 1960s and the question of modernism. Pasolini's landmark polemic on the cinema of poetry is a vital springboard for the later critiques of time and the image, subjectivities and their narrative transformation, and the topical question of film and postmodernity. A discussion of changes in film technology and cinematic perception extend to the questions of film documentary. Finally, there is a focus on cinematographers and their filmic collaboration.
The second section, International Cinema, places filmmaking and filmmakers in a social and a national context. It brings together landmark essays which contextualize feature films historically, yet also highlight their aesthetic power and their wider cultural importance. Filmmakers discussed include Ozu, Welles, Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, Egoyan, Fassbinder and Zhang Yimou.
Contributors include: Nestor Almendros, Jacques Aumont, Andre Bazin, Noel Burch, Scott Bukatman, Michael Chapman, Rey Chow, Terry Comito, Timothy Corrigan, Angela Della Vacche, Gilles Deleuze, Peter Harcourt, Frederic Jameson, Bruce Kawin, Krzystof Kieslowski, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Teresa de Lauretis, Colin MacCabe, Christian Metz, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, Bill Nicholls, John Orr, David Pascoe, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Duncan Petrie, Donald Richie, Larry Salvato, Dennis Schaefer, Paul Schrader, Susan Sontag, Andrei Tarkovsky, J.P. Telotte, Paul Virilio, Peter Wollen, Ismail Xavier, Denise Youngblood.
Synopsis
In
Crazy Water: Six Fictions, Lori Baker pushes the boundaries between truth and reality with curious, tragi-comic results. The imagination is Baker's terrain, and in these stories, pleasant suburban childhoods, family drives, seaside vacations, and an academic's quest for tenure all are strangely warped, yet nonetheless still mirror a world we thought we knew. In these brief pages, boys become dogs, students hide in the molluscan places, and mothers do their best to rescind their unsatisfying children.
"I say things smugly as if I understand them, muses one of Baker's narrators. Indeed, characters and readers alike are undermined in these deft and quirky fictions. Exposing and imploding all of our expectations, Baker shows us how menacing (and funny) the apparently ordinary can be.
About the Author
Lori Baker is a 1986 Trans Atlantic Review Award Winner who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband, the poet Gale Nelson, and their cat Carlotta. She is currently hard at work on her first novel.
Table of Contents
Grace -- The drive -- Crazy water -- Tenure track -- Romulus -- Mother-in-law.