Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Polish Film
When the Lumiere brothers introduced the motion picture in 1895, Poland was a divided and suffering nation--yet Polish artists found their way into the new world of cinema. Boleslaw Matuszewski created his first documentary films in 1896, and Poland's first movie house was established in 1908. Despite war and repression, Polish cinema continued to grow and to reach for artistic heights. The twentieth century closed with new challenges, but a new generation of Polish filmmakers stood ready to meet them. Here is a complete history of the Polish cinema through the end of the twentieth century, with special attention to political and economic contexts.
"Singing a Different Tune"
A beneficiary of the pioneering incorporation of sound and synchronicity into cinema, the Hollywood musical became the most popular film genre in America’s thirties and forties. Its eastward migration resulted in a barrage of Polish screen musicals that relied on the country’s famous cabaret stars, while in the Soviet Union it inspired the audience-pleasing kolkhoz musicals of Ivan Pyr’ev and their urban counterpart, directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Like Stalin, Slavic moviegoers delectated tuneful melodies, mobile bodies in choreographed dance numbers, colorful costumes, and the notion that “all’s well that ends well.” Yet Slavic versions of the musical elaborated scenarios that differed from the Hollywood model. This volume examines the vagaries of this genre in both countries, from its early instantiations to its contemporary variations almost a century after its dramatic birth.
Andrzej Wajda
The work of Andrzej Wajda, one of the world's most important filmmakers, shows remarkable cohesion in spite of the wide ranging scope of his films, as this study of his complete output of feature films shows. Not only do his films address crucial historical, social and political issues; the complexity of his work is reinforced by the incorporation of the elements of major film and art movements. It is the reworking of these different elements by Wajda, as the author shows, which give his films their unique visual and aural qualities.
Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures
Investigating the genesis of the prosecuted "crimes" and implied sins of the female performing group Pussy Riot, the most famous Russian feminist collective to date, the essays in Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to Blasphemous examine what constitutes bad social and political behavior for women in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, and how and to what effect female performers, activists, and fictional characters have indulged in such behavior. The chapters in this edited collection argue against the popular perceptions of Slavic cultures as overwhelmingly patriarchal and Slavic women as complicit in their own repression, contextualizing proto-femi...
Conrad on Film
This book offers the first comprehensive, international survey of more than eighty films and videos based on the life and work of Joseph Conrad. Essays by leading film and literary scholars examine the films, both in the context of film history and technology, and in terms of the theoretical and practical problems facing directors - including Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola and Andrzej Wajda - who have attempted to put Conrad on film. Conrad was the first major English author to adapt his work for the screen, and the story of his unpublished 'film-play' is told in an important chapter. The challenges of finding visual analogues for Conrad's narrative irony and filmic equivalents for his narrators are also examined. The volume is well illustrated and includes a detailed filmography and film bibliography, making it a landmark study of Conrad films and film adaptations in general.
The Life and Works of Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991)
Sir Andrzej Panufnik was born in Warsaw and studied in the newly independent Poland in the 1930s, as well as in Vienna and Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the German occupation he formed a piano duo with his friend and fellow composer Witold Lutoslawski, and they performed in cafaround Warsaw. After the war, Panufnik quickly established himself as a leading Polish composer, and as a conductor he played a significant role in the re-establishment of first the Kraknd then the Warsaw Philharmonic. Although he was considered Polands leading composer for some years after the war, Panufnik was subsequently put under intolerable pressure both musically and politically....
The Law of the Looking Glass
Polish cinema has produced some of Europe's finest directors, such as Krzysztof Kie´slowski, Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda, and Krzysztof Zanussi, but little is known about its origins at the turn of the twentieth century. In The Law of the Looking Glass, Sheila Skaff analyzes the early years of Polish cinema. She looks at local film production, practices of spectatorship, clashes over language choice in intertitles, and the controversies surrounding the first synchronized sound experiments before World War I. Skaff discusses the creation of a national film industry in the newly independent country of the interwar years; silent cinema; the transition from silent to sound film, including the passionate debates in the press over the transition; and the first Polish and Yiddish “talkies.” The Law of the Looking Glass places particular importance on conflicts in majority-minority relations in the region and the types of collaboration that led to important films such as Der dibuk.
