by Greil Marcus Michael Goodwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 1972
Two efforts at uniting art and revolution. The first, an extended interview with French director Jean-Luc Godard and his associate Jean Gorin who discuss the goals of their recently constituted film group; the second, a film script ("written to be read not filmed") of the Soledad Brothers prison break and the life and death of Jonathan Jackson. Neither venture succeeds beyond stylized oddity. Godard, intent on demystifying his work and his status as an important "new wave" director, offhandedly debunks his early films, including La Chinoise and Weekend, as hopelessly bourgeois ventures and fumbles toward an inchoate Marxist-Leninist cinema which will include "paying everyone equally, in order to end the hierarchy." Various revolutionary attempts — British Sounds, East Wind, and a work-in-progress on the al-Fateh (none currently accessible to American movie-goers) — are deemed partially successful efforts to "organize ourselves in a new way" but what it all boils down to in terms of financing, filming, and editing remains highly abstract. This Is It: The Marin Shoot-Out plays on the Yippie notion of revolution as theater ("it looked like a prison break movie") and features a Dostoevsky-inspired Detective who reads Malraux's Man's Fate while trying to decipher the significance of the event. O.K. as an experimental work-shop exercise but not for the average film-goer seeking entertainment. Actors recalcitrant, camera twitchy, story-line dim.
Pub Date: April 14, 1972
ISBN: 0876900740
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outerbridge & Lazard
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
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by Greil Marcus ; edited by Max Clarke
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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