by Peter Cowie ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004
More a notebook than a vital history. (62 b&w illustrations)
A bland account of a pulsating time in film history.
At a London cinema in 1958, Cowie watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The film stunned Cowie and shaped his career: as a journalist and the author of several books on film (Coppola, 1990, etc.), he went on to cover the “New Wave” of filmmakers who made going to the movies more adventuresome than ever before or since. It was a turbulent, exciting time—Cowie himself feared he might not be able to get out of Cannes when protestors rioted there at the 1968 festival. But he never captures the fervor of the period. In sweeping arcs, he moves from country to country—from Italy to France to Eastern Europe, Great Britain, and the US—as he surveys the films and directors whose work defines the period: Antonioni, Truffaut, Polanski, Godard, and many other auteurs. But as the innovative films of this time used the jump-cut to move without transition from one scene to another, Cowie also jumps from one director, one film, one country to another, often without making the kinds of connections that would give cohesion to his work. He offers, for example, interesting primary material (transcripts of his interviews with the period’s major filmmakers) but merely drops their remarks into the text verbatim, adding little comment. He covers many significant films, but often too briefly—he terms Deliverance a “masterpiece,” but devotes only a half-sentence to it. Anyone who has never seen the film, or the several others he glosses over, will not comprehend their influence. And his pedestrian prose fails to mirror the revolutionary style of the times. Hollywood exerts its “siren call,” movements begin “with a vengeance,” and Pier Paolo Pasolini lives “at the cutting edge of scandal.”
More a notebook than a vital history. (62 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-571-20903-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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 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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