Dekalog 2


Book Description

On December 8, 2008, the Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira will celebrate his 100th birthday. This special issue of Dekalog pays homage not only to the world's oldest living filmmaker but also to an outstanding artist who has both captivated and bewildered audiences throughout his career. The first British publication on the filmmaker, this issue of Dekalog will enhance the study of Oliveira's work in the West. It unites researchers from Brazil, Germany, Portugal, and the United States who have devoted much of their scholarship to an analysis of the filmmaker's work.




The Decalogue in Jewish and Christian Tradition


Book Description

This collection of papers arrives from the eighth annual symposium between the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies of Tel Aviv University and the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Ruhr, Bochum held in Bochum, June 2007. The general theme of the Decalogue was examined in its various uses by both Jewish and Christian traditions throughout the centuries to the present. Three papers deal with the origin of the Decalogue: Yair Hoffman on the rare mentioning of the Decalogue in the Hebrew Bible outside the Torah; E. L. Greenstein considers that already A. ibn Ezra doubted that God himself spoke in the Ten Commandments and states that more likely their rhetoric indicates it was Moses who proclaimed the Decalogue; A. Bar-Tour speaks about the cognitive aspects of the Decalogue revelation story and its frame. The second part considers the later use of the Decalogue: G. Nebe describes its use with Paul; P. Wick discusses the symbolic radicalization of two commandments in James and the Sermon on the Mount; A. Oppenheimer explains the removal of the Decalogue from the daily Shem'a prayer as a measure against the minim's claim of a higher religious importance of the Decalogue compared to the Torah; W. Geerlings examines Augustine's quotations of the Decalogue; H. Reventlow depicts its central place in Luther's catechisms; Y. Yacobson discusses its role with Hasidism. The symposium closes with papers on systematic themes: C. Frey follows a possible way to legal universalism; G. Thomas describes the Decalogue as an "Ethics of Risk"; F. H. Beyer/M. Waltemathe seek an educational perspective.




Dekalog 4


Book Description

East Asian cinema has become a worldwide phenonemon, and directors such as Park Chan-wook, Wong Kar Wai, and Takashi Miike have become household names. Dekalog 4: On East Asian Filmmakers solicits scholars from Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, North America, and the U.K. to offer unique readings of selected East Asian directors and their works. Directors examined include Zhang Yimou, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Rithy Panh, Kinji Fukasaku, and Jia Zhangke, and the volume includes one of the first surveys of Japanese and Chinese female filmmakers, providing singular insight into East Asian film and the filmmakers that have brought it global recognition.




The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski


Book Description

Since his death in 1996, Krzysztof Kieslowski has remained the best-known contemporary Polish filmmaker and one of the most popular and respected European directors, internationally renowned for his ambitious Decalogue and Three Colors trilogy. In this new addition to the Directors'Cuts series, Marek Haltof provides a comprehensive study of Kieslowski's cinema, discussing industrial practices in Poland and stressing that the director did not fit the traditional image of a "great" East-Central European auteur. He draws a fascinating portrait of the stridently independent director's work, noting that Kieslowski was not afraid to express unpopular views in film or in life. Haltof also shows how the director's work remains unique in the context of Polish documentary and narrative cinema.




Wonder, Horror, Mystery


Book Description

Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What's it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick's To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier's Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski's Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book's three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.




Screening the City


Book Description

In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse selection of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and the changing urban experience in Europe and the United States since the early 20th century.




The Process of Authority


Book Description

The authority of canonical texts, especially of the Bible, is often described in static definitions. However, the authority of these texts was acquired as well as exercised in a dynamic process of transmission and reception. This book analyzes selected aspects of this historical process. Attention is paid to biblical master-texts and to other texts related to the “biblical worlds” in various historical periods and contexts. The studies examine particular texts, textual variants, translations, paraphrases and other elements in the process of textual transmission. The range covered spans from the Iron Age, through the Old Testament texts, their manuscripts and other texts from Qumran, the Septuagint, down to the New Testament, Apocrypha, Coptic texts, Patristics, and even modern translations of the Bible. The book is particularly intended for those interested in the history of reception and transmission of biblical texts and in the textual criticism.




The New Biographical Dictionary of Film


Book Description

For almost thirty years, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film has been not merely “the finest reference book ever written about movies” (Graham Fuller, Interview), not merely the “desert island book” of art critic David Sylvester, not merely “a great, crazy masterpiece” (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian), but also “fiendishly seductive” (Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone). This new edition updates the older entries and adds 30 new ones: Darren Aronofsky, Emmanuelle Beart, Jerry Bruckheimer, Larry Clark, Jennifer Connelly, Chris Cooper, Sofia Coppola, Alfonso Cuaron, Richard Curtis, Sir Richard Eyre, Sir Michael Gambon, Christopher Guest, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Spike Jonze, Wong Kar-Wai, Laura Linney, Tobey Maguire, Michael Moore, Samantha Morton, Mike Myers, Christopher Nolan, Dennis Price, Adam Sandler, Kevin Smith, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlize Theron, Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, Lew Wasserman, Naomi Watts, and Ray Winstone. In all, the book includes more than 1300 entries, some of them just a pungent paragraph, some of them several thousand words long. In addition to the new “musts,” Thomson has added key figures from film history–lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more. Here is a great, rare book, one that encompasses the chaos of art, entertainment, money, vulgarity, and nonsense that we call the movies. Personal, opinionated, funny, daring, provocative, and passionate, it is the one book that every filmmaker and film buff must own. Time Out named it one of the ten best books of the 1990s. Gavin Lambert recognized it as “a work of imagination in its own right.” Now better than ever–a masterwork by the man playwright David Hare called “the most stimulating and thoughtful film critic now writing.”




The Decalogue Through the Centuries


Book Description

An exploration of how the Ten Commandments have been understood throughout history.




Krzysztof Kieslowski


Book Description

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s untimely death came at the height of his career, after his Three Colors trilogy of films garnered international acclaim (and an Oscar nomination), and he had been proclaimed Europe’s most important filmmaker by many critics. Born in 1941, he was only fifty-four years old when he died. Kieslowski himself tried to tell the story of his life and career in the 1993 book Kieslowski on Kieslowski. This collection, by contrast, reveals the shifting voice of a filmmaker who was initially optimistic about his social and cultural role, then felt himself buffeted by the turbulent politics and events of the People’s Republic of Poland. As described in the chronology in this book, he found himself subject to the “economic censorship” of post-Communist filmmaking. How Kieslowski responded at each moment of his life, what he tried to achieve with each of his films, is finely detailed in thirty-five selections. These pieces bring together his thesis from the famous Lodz film school, a manifesto written just before the dark days of martial law in Poland, diary entries from the first time he was working outside Poland, and numerous rare interviews from Polish-, French-, and English-language sources.




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