Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico!

Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico! PDF Author: Harry M. Geduld
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Que viva Mexico (Motion picture)
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico!

Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico! PDF Author: Harry M. Geduld
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Que viva Mexico (Motion picture)
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description


Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico!

Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: the Making & Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico! PDF Author: Harry M. Geduld
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Que viva Mexico (Motion picture)
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description


Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair

Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253049087
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This fascinating study presents for the first time the full story of Eisenstein's disastrous attempt to make a great film in Mexico, a motion picture "symphony" of Mexican life, history, culture, and the perpetual Mexican fiesta of death. It clarifies the relationship between Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, the American novelist who financed the picture, and reveals the causes and consequences of Sinclair's withdrawal of financial backing. Eisenstein was at the height of his creative powers when he began working on the Mexican film. The fiasco that ended the project was to leave a permanent mark on his life and work, while Sinclair was to be vilified on both sides of the Atlantic as the desecrator of the most important film of the world's greatest motion picture director. The book presents the story of these events in a unique manner by embedding the actual correspondence of the main participants in a commentary by Professors Geduld and Gottesman, who have endeavored to tell the truth about a tragic episode in the history of the cinema.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein PDF Author: Mike O'Mahony
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189449X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A major influence on such filmmakers as Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini, and Scorsese, Sergei Eisenstein left an enduring legacy that was deeply informed by the political realities of early-twentieth-century Soviet Communism. In Sergei Eisenstein, Mike O’Mahony uses this historical lens to examine the richly diverse films, writings, and artwork of one of the foremost filmmakers of the twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive archive of Eisenstein’s published and unpublished writings, O’Mahony situates his oeuvre in the social and political context of the first three decades of Communist rule in the Soviet Union. The book analyzes his most influential films—including Battleship Potemkin, October, and Aleksandr Nevskii—as well as his uncompleted film projects, pioneering theories and methods, and copious archive of writings and drawings. O’Mahony examines how Eisenstein’s projects were generated or constrained by his volatile and complex personality, ongoing political events, and the conflict between his beliefs the Stalinist regime and his beliefs as a Bolshevik artist. The arcs of success and defeat in Eisenstein’s career, the book ultimately reveals, are inextricably intertwined with these fraught political and personal circumstances. An in-depth and thoughtful biographical treatment, Sergei Eisenstein gives us a new, richer understanding of this standard-bearer in modern filmmaking, making this an accessible and essential read for historians, scholars of film history, and movie buffs alike.

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair PDF Author: Anthony Arthur
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307431657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative. An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung. Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health. In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd. Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy. Sinclair’ s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly for professional recognition and awards as he did for government reform. As the tenor of his work would suggest, Sinclair was supremely human. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur offers an engrossing and enlightening account of Sinclair’s life and the country he helped to transform. Taking readers from the Reconstruction South to the rise of American power to the pinnacle of Hollywood culture to the Civil Rights era, this is historical biography at its entertaining and thought-provoking finest.

Fear and the Muse Kept Watch

Fear and the Muse Kept Watch PDF Author: Andy McSmith
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620970791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In this dazzling exploration of one of the most contradictory periods of literary and artistic achievement in modern history, journalist Andy McSmith evokes the lives of more than a dozen of the most brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Taking us deep into Stalin's Russia, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch asks the question: can great art be produced in a police state? For although Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history, under him Russia also produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense and lasting power—from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf, the film Alexander Nevsky, and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago. For those artists visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them, it was Stalin himself who decided whether they lived in luxury or were sent to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police, to be tortured and sometimes even executed. McSmith brings together the stories of these artists—including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many others—revealing how they pursued their art under Stalin's regime and often at great personal risk. It was a world in which the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose bright yellow tunic was considered a threat to public order under the tsars, struggled to make the communist authorities see the value of avant garde art; Babel publicly thanked the regime for allowing him the privilege of not writing; and Shostakovich's career veered wildly between public disgrace and wealth and acclaim. In the tradition of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth and Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch is an extraordinary work of historical recovery. It is also a bold exploration of the triumph of art during terrible times and a book that will stay with its readers for a long, long while.

The Film Sense

The Film Sense PDF Author: Sergei Eisenstein
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156309356
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A renowned Soviet director discusses his theory of film as an artistic medium which must appeal to all senses and applies it to an analysis of sequences from his major movies.

The Eisenstein Reader

The Eisenstein Reader PDF Author: Sergei Eisenstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 183871877X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
For the first time in one volume, this book presents in concise, chronological form, Sergei Eisenstein's most significant work, including his famous theories of montage and articles on subjects as diverse as sound, film language and Russian history. The selection ranges from early writings on his silent masterpieces The Strike, October and The Battleship Potemkin, to later works, hatched in the hostile and paranoid environment of Stalin's Soviet Union. Drawn from the acclaimed four-volume Selected Works, this collection, which includes a new introduction and explanatory notes by Richard Taylor as well as many illustrations, further illuminates the startling originality, diversity and power of the greatest and most flamboyant of all Russian film-makers. Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein has emerged as cinema's most influential theorist and author of some of the most important aesthetic writings of the twentieth century.

Eisenstein on the Audiovisual

Eisenstein on the Audiovisual PDF Author: Robert Robertson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857712349
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundation's And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, "Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein PDF Author: Ronald Bergan
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1628726261
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Now back in print, this acclaimed biography reassesses a titan of early cinema based on new material released after the fall of the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict tells the dramatic story of one of world cinema’s towering geniuses and principal theorists. Ronald Bergan details Eisenstein’s life from his precocious childhood to his explosion onto the avant-garde scene in revolutionary Russia, through his groundbreaking film career, his relationships with authors and artists such as James Joyce and Walt Disney, and his untimely death at age fifty. Eisenstein’s landmark films, including The Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, are still watched, admired, and taught throughout the world. Drawing upon material recently released from the Soviet archives after the breakup of the USSR and from Eisenstein’s personal letters, diaries, and sketches, Bergan shines a new light on the influence of Eisenstein’s early life on his work, his homosexuality, and his keen interest in the West. This book is the definitive biography of an influential director who saw film as the synthesis of all the arts and whose work displayed a passionate and profound grasp of art, science, philosophy, and religion.