Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism

Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism PDF Author: Kenneth H. Marcus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316445224
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Schoenberg is often viewed as an isolated composer who was ill-at-ease in exile. In this book Kenneth H. Marcus shows that in fact Schoenberg's connections to Hollywood ran deep, and most of the composer's exile compositions had some connection to the cultural and intellectual environment in which he found himself. He was friends with numerous successful film industry figures, including George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, David Raksin and Alfred Newman, and each contributed to the composer's life and work in different ways: helping him to obtain students, making recordings of his music, and arranging commissions. While teaching at both the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg was able to bridge two utterly different worlds: the film industry and the academy. Marcus shows that alongside Schoenberg's vital impact upon Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions and texts, he also taught students who became central to American musical modernism, including John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism

Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism PDF Author: Kenneth H. Marcus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316445224
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Schoenberg is often viewed as an isolated composer who was ill-at-ease in exile. In this book Kenneth H. Marcus shows that in fact Schoenberg's connections to Hollywood ran deep, and most of the composer's exile compositions had some connection to the cultural and intellectual environment in which he found himself. He was friends with numerous successful film industry figures, including George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, David Raksin and Alfred Newman, and each contributed to the composer's life and work in different ways: helping him to obtain students, making recordings of his music, and arranging commissions. While teaching at both the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg was able to bridge two utterly different worlds: the film industry and the academy. Marcus shows that alongside Schoenberg's vital impact upon Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions and texts, he also taught students who became central to American musical modernism, including John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Continental Strangers

Continental Strangers PDF Author: Gerd GemŸnden
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231166796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertold Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinneman’s Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.

The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture

The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture PDF Author: Paul Arthur Cantor
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081314082X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America -- particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order -- with the Marxist understanding of the "culture industry" and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.

The Sun and Her Stars

The Sun and Her Stars PDF Author: Donna Rifkind
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590517229
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
National Jewish Book Award Finalist The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She combined great worldliness with great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight.

Exiled in Paradise

Exiled in Paradise PDF Author: Anthony Heilbut
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520414365
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
A brilliant look at the writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars—ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang—who fled Hitler's Germany and how they changed the very fabric of American culture. In a new postscript, Heilbut draws attention to the recent changes in reputation and image that have shaped the reception of the German exiles. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983 with a paperback in 1997.

Understanding Erich Maria Remarque

Understanding Erich Maria Remarque PDF Author: Hans Wagener
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780872497405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In this book, Wagener presents the life and work of the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, whose antiwar and exile novels have sold millions of copies worldwide. The author tells of Remarque's fascinating life as a child in the Westphalian city of Osnabruck, as a soldier in World War 1 as a newspaper editor in Hannover and Berlin, as the famed author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and as a German living in exile in Switzerland and the United States. Wagener then provides an in-depth analysis of Remarque's novels, placing them in the context of 20th century history. A discusssion of their aesthetic merits as well as their reception in the United States and in Germany is also included.

Driven to Darkness

Driven to Darkness PDF Author: Vincent Brook
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548330
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
From its earliest days, the American film industry has attracted European artists. With the rise of Hitler, filmmakers of conscience in Germany and other countries, particularly those of Jewish origin, found it difficult to survive and fledùfor their work and their livesùto the United States. Some had trouble adapting to Hollywood, but many were celebrated for their cinematic contributions, especially to the dark shadows of film noir. Driven to Darkness explores the influence of Jewish TmigrT directors and the development of this genre. While filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Edward G. Ulmer have been acknowledged as crucial to the noir canon, the impact of their Jewishness on their work has remained largely unexamined until now. Through lively and original analyses of key films, Vincent Brook penetrates the darkness, shedding new light on this popular film form and the artists who helped create it.

The Promised Land

The Promised Land PDF Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448138264
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The final, previously unpublished novel by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front - a dreamlike, powerfully moving account of an emigrant's experience of New York during World War II. From the detention centre on Ellis Island, Ludwig Somner looks across a small stretch of water to the glittering towers of New York, which whisper seductively of freedom after so many years of wandering through a perlious, suffering Europe. Remarque's final novel, left unfinished at his death, tells of the precarious life of the refugee – life lived in hotel lobbies, on false passports, the strange, ill-assorted refugee community held together by an unspeakable past. For Somner, each new luxury - ice cream served in drugstores, bright shop windows, art, a new suit, a new romance - has a bittersweet edge. Memories of war and inhumanity continue to resurface even in this peaceful promised land.

Exiles in Hollywood

Exiles in Hollywood PDF Author: David Wallace
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879103293
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
(Limelight). Fleeing Nazi persecution, half of Europe's creative talents, including screen legend Greta Garbo and composer Igor Stravinsky, were, in Arnold Schoenberg's words, "driven into paradise," settling in Los Angeles. It was the greatest flight of European cultural and intellectual talent in history, and for a time made Los Angeles a cultural capital. Their presence, enabling the evolution of film noir, also changed American movies forever. In Exiles in Hollywood, David Wallace, author of the national bestseller Lost Hollywood and whom columnist Liz Smith has called "the maestro of entertainment history," tells their dramatic stories. His profiles of refugees include filmmaker Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann, the screenwriter Salka Viertel and her controversial relationship with Greta Garbo, the deeply conflicted actor Charles Laughton, and many more. The result is a rich, page-turning look at an era, its triumphs and tragedies, its gossip and hidden facts, and its colorful personalities.

From Caligari to Hitler

From Caligari to Hitler PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191344
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer’s scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts.