Author : Elizabeth K. Rosen
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 50,54 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739117910
Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.
Author : Peter Marks
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 24,57 MB
Release : 2017-06-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 152612551X
Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.
Author : Carol Dover
Publisher : DS Brewer
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 22,26 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780859917834
The early thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is the first comprehensive volume devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and its medieval legacy. The twenty essays in this volume, all by internationally known scholars, locate the work in its social, historical, literary, and manuscript contexts. In addition to addressing critical issues in the five texts that make up the Cycle, the contributors convey to modern readers the appeal that the text must have had for its medieval audiences, and the richness of composition that made it compelling. This volume will become standard reading for scholars, students, and more general readers interested in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, medieval romance, Malory studies, and the Arthurian legends. Contributors: RICHARD BARBER, EMMANUELE BAUMGARTNER, FANNI BOGDANOW, FRANK BRANDSMA, MATILDA T. BRUCKNER, CAROL J. CHASE, ANNIE COMBES, HELEN COOPER, CAROL R. DOVER, MICHAEL HARNEY, DONALD L. HOFFMAN, DOUGLAS KELLY, ELSPETH KENNEDY, NORRIS J. LACY, ROGER MIDDLETON, HAQUIRA OSAKABE, HANS-HUGO STEINHOFF, ALISON STONES, RICHARD TRACHSLER. CAROL DOVER is associate professor of French and director of undergraduate studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Author : Bob McCabe
Publisher : Orion
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 17,74 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN :
Covering all of Gilliam's work from Monty Python's Flying Circus to the 1998 big screen version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book is fabulously illustrated featuring many previously unseen photographs, storyboards and drawing from Gilliam's private archive. Each chapter features an interview with Gilliam which gets his take on the work. Chapters include Early Years: childhood and early collaborations with John Cleese and Woody Allan; Monty Python - for the first time Gilliam talks about the creation of the cultiest of cult TV shows; Python and the Holy Grail first attempt at directing includes interviews with John Cleese and Terry Jones; Jabberwocky, includes interviews with Michael Palin; Time Bandits; Brazil including the inside story of the infamous ad war with Universal, interview with co-writer Tom Stoppard; The Budget fiasco which was Baron Munchausen; Fisher King includes interview with Robin Williams; Twelve Monkeys includes an interview with Bruce Willis; Fear and Loathing Hunter S. Thompson talks about Gilliam's adaptation. Also includes the abandoned projects A tale of Two Cities with Mel Gibson and Defective Detective with Nicholas Cage, as well as work in progress on Time Bandits II.
Author : Schuy R. Weishaar
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 27,43 MB
Release : 2012-10-16
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1476600600
The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their employment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. The author argues that interpreting these directors' films through the lens of the grotesque allows us1to situate both the auteurs and the films within a long history of the grotesque in art and aesthetics. This cultural tradition effectively subsumes the contribution of any artist or1genre that intersects it but also affords the artist or genre--the auteur and the genre filmmaker--a pantheon and an abundance of images, themes, and motifs through which he1or she can subversively represent the world and our place in it.
Author : Jeff Birkenstein
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 16,39 MB
Release : 2013-04-09
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0231165358
Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this volume analyses a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus (2009). This collection argues that when Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention.
Author : Laurie N. Ede
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 12,89 MB
Release : 2010-03-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0857711091
"British Film Design" is about the things that you see when you close your eyes and think of British cinema: "Dr. No's Hideaway", the buffet of "Brief Encounter", Vera Drake's parlour, "Hogwarts School"...and a thousand other visions of British films. This book is also about the people who have created those visions. The physical environments of films are made by Production Designers/Art Directors. Their efforts have tended to go unnoticed by cinema audiences. "British Film Design" offers the first comprehensive historical survey of British art direction. It takes a chronological journey through British film design, starting with the efforts of the film 'primitives' of the silent era and ending with the modern day purveyors of part built/part computer generated 'blended design'. Certain themes recur en route. These include British cinema's obsession with realism; the Production Designer's continual struggle for recognition; influence from European artists and the benefits - and perils - of American finance. The book succeeds in expressing the joy of looking at films from inside out; seeing beyond the stars to recognise sets as silent players in the action.
Author : Paul McAuley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 25,49 MB
Release : 2019-07-25
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1838714650
Widely believed to be Terry Gilliam's best film, Brazil's brilliantly imaginative vision of a retro-futuristic bureaucracy has had a lasting influence on genre cinema. Exploring its complex history and relationship with other dystopias, Paul McAuley explains why this satire on the unchecked power of the state is more relevant than ever.
Author : Daniel Boscaljon
Publisher : James Clarke & Company
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 29,83 MB
Release : 2015-02-26
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0227903900
At present the battle over who defines our future is being waged most publicly by secular and religious fundamentalists. 'Hope and the Longing for Utopia' offers an alternative position, disclosing a conceptual path toward potential worlds that resist a limited view of human potential and the gift of religion. In addition to outlining the value of embracing unknown potentialities, these twelve interdisciplinary essays explore why it has become crucial that we commit to hoping for values that resist traditional ideological commitments. Contextualized by contemporary writing on utopia, and drawing from a wealth of times and cultures ranging from Calvin's Geneva to early twentieth-century Japanese children's stories to Hollywood cinema, theseessays cumulatively disclose the fundamental importance of resisting tantalizing certainties while considering the importance of the unknown and unknowable. Beginning with a set of four essays outlining the importance of hope and utopia as diagnostic concepts, and following with four concrete examples, the collection ends with a set of essays that provide theological speculations on the need to embrace finitude and limitations in a world increasingly enframed by secularizing impulses. Overall, this book discloses how hope and utopia illuminate ways to think past simplified wishes for the future.
Author : Darl Larsen
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 33,49 MB
Release : 2020-06-29
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1538115972
This reference identifies and explains the cultural, historical, and topical allusions in the filmMonty Python’s Meaning of Life, the Pythons’ third and final original feature as a complete group. In this resource, virtually every allusion and reference that appears in the film is identified and explained —from Britain’s waning Empire through the Winter of Discontent to Margaret Thatcher’s second-term mandate, from playing fields to battle fields, and from accountant pirates to sacred sperm. Organized chronologically by scene, the entries cover literary and metaphoric allusions, symbolisms, names, peoples, and places; as well as the many social, cultural, and historical elements that populate this film, and the Pythons’ work in general.
