Download or read book Orson Welles Shakespeare and Popular Culture written by Michael A. Anderegg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anderegg considers Welles's influence as an interpreter of Shakespeare for twentieth-century American popular audiences, drawing on his knowledge of the abundant, lowbrow popularity of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. Welles's three film adaptations of Shakespeare, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, are examined.
Download or read book Orson Welles on Shakespeare written by Orson Welles and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1990-12-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating work will prove valuable for collections in film, theater history, and Shakespearean production. . . . The book includes fascinating production photos and helpful notes in which the original acts and scenes are identified, thus showing the extent to which Welles rearranged Shakespeare by shuffling acts and scenes, dropping characters, and by merging related narratives. . . . Recommended for all libraries. Choice This volume contains the fully annotated playscripts of Orson Welles' celebrated adaptations of three Shakespearean plays. Texts for the Voodoo Macbeth and the modern dress Julius Caesar are stage managers' working copies used by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) and the Mercury Theatre; the version of Five Kings, Welles' compilation of the history plays and his theatrical masterpiece, is the oldest surviving text, and is the fullest and most inclusive. This is the first publication of these materials, which were originally produced by Welles between 1936 and 1939. Orson Welles' New York directorial debut was made in 1936 with his production of the Voodoo Macbeth. Richard France's introduction provides invaluable background information that relates the three plays and their productions to the contemporary social, historical, political, and economic climate of the 30s, in discussions that touch not only on the W.P.A., but also on the effect of the American Communist Party ideology on theatre arts and criticism, on the composition of theatre audiences, and on the expectations of such fervently liberal or leftist audiences. France contends that Welles, in his W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre productions, presided over a unique marriage of art and the highly politicized popular culture of the day. These productions ensured Welles' enormous success and have earned him an important niche in American social and cultural history. Following the general introduction, the volume is divided into three sections. A preface to each of the scripts contains further biographical and background data relevant to that play, as well as critical materials, production photos, and facsimile pages. Information about the creation and production of Voodoo Macbeth (1936), Julius Caesar (1937), and Five Kings (1939) was gathered in numerous interviews with Welles' W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre collaborators. Each playscript is proceeded by production credits and a cast list and followed by a section of notes that contains Welles' own directorial marginalia. This singular and very focused volume will be a distinguished addition to courses in American Drama, American Studies, Play Production, and in courses that explore idiosyncratic productions of Shakespeare.
Download or read book Weyward Macbeth written by S. Newstok and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weyward Macbeth, a volume of entirely new essays, provides innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the various ways Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' has been adapted and appropriated within the context of American racial constructions. Comprehensive in its scope, this collection addresses the enduringly fraught history of 'Macbeth' in the United States, from its appearance as the first Shakespearean play documented in the American colonies to a proposed Hollywood film version with a black diasporic cast. Over two dozen contributions explore 'Macbeth's' haunting presence in American drama, poetry, film, music, history, politics, acting, and directing — all through the intersections of race and performance.
Download or read book The Playbook written by James Shapiro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over a thousand productions in 29 states that were seen by thirty million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its helm was an unassuming theater professor, Hallie Flanagan. It employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft. It was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic, bringing Shakespeare to the public, alongside modern plays that confronted the pressing issues of the day—from slum housing and public health to racism and the rising threat of fascism. The Playbook takes us through some of its most remarkable productions, including a groundbreaking Black production of Macbeth in Harlem and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here that opened simultaneously in 18 cities, underscoring the Federal Theatre’s incredible range and vitality. But this once thriving Works Progress Administration relief program did not survive and has left little trace. For the Federal Theatre was the first New Deal project to be attacked and ended on the grounds that it promoted “un-American” activity, sowing the seeds not only for the McCarthyism of the 1950s but also for our own era of merciless polarization. It was targeted by the first House un-American Affairs Committee, and its demise was a turning point in American cultural life—for, as Shapiro brilliantly argues, “the health of democracy and theater, twin born in ancient Greece, have always been mutually dependent.” A defining legacy of this culture war was how the strategies used to undermine and ultimately destroy the Federal Theatre were assembled by a charismatic and cunning congressman from East Texas, the now largely forgotten Martin Dies, who in doing so pioneered the right-wing political playbook now so prevalent that it seems eternal.
Download or read book Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects written by Marguerite H Rippy and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects. Author Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography. Building a bridge between auteur and postmodern theories, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment. Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance written by James C. Bulman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespeare specialists. Each of these volumes is edited by one or more internationally distinguished Shakespeareans; together, they comprehensively survey the entire field. Shakespearean performance criticism has firmly established itself as a discipline accessible to scholars and general readers alike. And just as performances of the plays expand audiences' understanding of how Shakespeare speaks to them, so performance criticism is continually shifting the contours of the discipline. The 36 contributions in this volume represent the most current approaches to Shakespeare in performance. They are divided into four parts. Part I explores how experimental modes of performance ensure Shakespeare's contemporaneity. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do. Part III addresses the ways in which technology has revolutionized our access to Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording and through digitalization. Part IV grapples with 'global' Shakespeare, considering matters of cultural appropriation in productions played for international audiences. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today
Download or read book Shakespeare on screen Macbeth written by Sarah HATCHUEL and published by Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 1084 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This addition to the Shakespeare on Screen series reveals the remarkable presence of Macbeth in the global Shakespearean screenscape. What is it about Macbeth that is capable of extending beyond Scottish contexts and speaking globally, locally and “glocally”? Does the extensive adaptive reframing ofMacbeth suggest the paradoxical irrelevance of the original play? After examining the evident topic of the supernatural elements—the witches and the ghost—in the films, the essays move from a revisitation of the well-known American screen versions, to an analysis of more recent Anglophone productions and to world cinema (Asia, France, South Africa, India, Japan, etc.). Questions of lineage and progeny are broached, then extended into the wider issues of gender. Finally, ballet remediations, filmic appropriations, citations and mises-en-abyme of Macbeth are examined, and the book ends with an analysis of a Macbeth script that never reached the screen. Ce nouvel ouvrage de la série « Shakespeare à l’écran » révèle la présence remarquable de Macbeth dans le paysage filmique shakespearien à l’échelle mondiale. Comment expliquer qu’une pièce dont l’intrigue est ancrée dans une nation, l’Écosse, ait pu être absorbée par des cultures aussi diverses ? Les multiples adaptations de Macbeth suggèrent-elles, de manière paradoxale, une moindre pertinence de la pièce originelle ? Après avoir exploré la représentation des éléments surnaturels (les sorcières et le fantôme), le volume revisite les films américains « canoniques », les productions anglophones plus récentes et les versions d’autres aires culturelles (Asie, France, Afrique du Sud, Inde, Japon, etc.) Les questions de lignée et de descendance sont abordées, puis prolongées dans des articles sur la représentation du genre. Les versions dansées, les appropriations, les citations et les mises en abyme de Macbeth sont ensuite analysées, et ce parcours mène à un étrange objet – un scénario non filmé.
Download or read book Orson Welles written by Randy Rasmussen and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orson Welles, a self-conscious storyteller who often invited his audience to question the methods and veracity of what they see and hear. He was that rare magician who both pulled the wool over our eyes, for our delight, and unravelled the wool before our eyes, encouraging us to ponder the nature of the magic itself. Many of the characters in Welles's movies can also be seen as magicians of a sort, creating impressions intended to manipulate other characters, or even themselves, in one direction or another. But unlike Welles, few of them voluntarily expose their tricks to the scrutiny of their victims. Six major Welles films--Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, The Trial, and Chimes at Midnight--receive a scene by scene analysis in this critical study. From a viewer's perspective it illuminates the dramatic rhythms of each film as they unfold on screen and from the soundtrack. Frequent analogies to other movies and pertinent quotations from the impressions of other commentators broaden the text, but always within the scene by scene progression dictated by the film under discussion.
Download or read book The Reel Shakespeare written by Lisa S. Starks and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection models an approach to Shakespeare and cinema that is concerned with the other side of Shakespeare's Hollywood celebrity, taking the reader on a practical and theoretical tour through important, non-mainstream films and the oppositional messages they convey. The collection includes essays on early silent adaptations of 'Hamlet', Greenway's 'Prospero's Books', Godard's 'King Lear', Hall's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Taymor's 'Titus', Polanski's 'Macbeth', Welles 'Chimes at Midnight', and Van Sant's 'My Own Private Idaho'.
Download or read book Shakespeare the Illusionist written by Neil Forsyth and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth reviews the history of Shakespeare’s plays on film, using the basic distinction in film tradition between what is owed to Méliès and what to the Lumière brothers. He then tightens his focus on those plays that include some explicit magical or supernatural elements—Puck and the fairies, ghosts and witches, or Prospero’s island, for example—and sets out methodically, but with an easy touch, to review all the films that have adapted those comedies and dramas, into the present day. Forsyth’s aim is not to offer yet another answer as to whether Shakespeare would have written for the screen if he were alive today, but rather to assess what various filmmakers and TV directors have in fact made of the spells, haunts, and apparitions in his plays. From analyzing early camera tricks to assessing contemporary handling of the supernatural, Forsyth reads Shakespeare films for how they use the techniques of moviemaking to address questions of illusion and dramatic influence. In doing so, he presents a bold step forward in Shakespeare and film studies, and his fresh take is presented in lively, accessible language that makes the book ideal for classroom use.
Download or read book It s All True written by Catherine L. Benamou and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-03-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an extremely rigorous, thorough piece of superior scholarship on one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. Benamou introduces a wealth of material on the production process and the repercussions of this project in Latin America, which have been entirely missing from earlier, auteur-centered accounts; this alone makes it a book of great importance. We can't ask for a more definitive, groundbreaking study than the one Benamou has given us."—Bill Nichols, author of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde
Download or read book Orson Welles in Focus written by James N. Gilmore and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderful and distinct addition to the Welles canon . . . these pieces explore key elements of Welles’s career, personality, and political beliefs.” —Library Journal Through his radio and film works, such as The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Orson Welles became a household name in the United States. Yet Welles’s multifaceted career went beyond these classic titles and included lesser-known but nonetheless important contributions to television, theater, newspaper columns, and political activism. Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts examines neglected areas of Welles’s work, shedding light on aspects of his art that have been eclipsed by a narrow focus on his films. By positioning Welles’s work during a critical period of his activity (the mid-1930s through the 1950s) in its larger cultural, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts, the contributors to this volume examine how he participated in and helped to shape modern media. This exploration of Welles in his totalityilluminates and expands our perception of his contributions that continue to resonate today. “Anyone who thinks they know Welles will have their eyes opened [by this book].” —Paul Heyer, author of The Medium and the Magician “This is a fascinating collection, several of the contributions making the reader wish for more.” —Film International “A team of scholars has examined the many facets of Orson Welles’ amazing life—theatrical innovator, radio star, celebrated filmmaker, newspaper columnist and progressive activist.” —Wellesnet
Download or read book The Magic World of Orson Welles written by James Naremore and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prodigy. Iconoclast. Genius. Exile. Orson Welles remains one of the most discussed figures in cinematic history. In the centenary year of Welles's birth, James Naremore presents a revised third edition of this incomparable study, including a new section on the unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind. Naremore analyzes the political and psychological implications of the films, Welles's idiosyncratic style, and the biographical details--both playful and vexing--that impacted each work. Itself a historic film study, The Magic World of Orson Welles unlocks the soaring art and quixotic methods of a master.
Download or read book Discovering Orson Welles written by Jonathan Rosenbaum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-05-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the dozens of books written about Orson Welles, most focus on the central enigma of Welles's career: why did someone so extravagantly talented neglect to finish so many projects? Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has long believed that to dwell on this aspect of the Welles canon is to overlook the wealth of information available by studying the unrealized works. Discovering Orson Welles collects Rosenbaum's writings to date on Welles—some thirty-five years of them—and makes an irrefutable case for the seriousness of his work, illuminating both Welles the artist and Welles the man. The book is also a chronicle of Rosenbaum's highly personal writer's journey and his efforts to arrive at the truth. The essays, interviews, and reviews are arranged chronologically and are accompanied by commentary that updates the scholarship. Highlights include Rosenbaum's 1972 interview with Welles about his first Hollywood project, Heart of Darkness; Rosenbaum's rebuttal to Pauline Kael's famous essay "Raising Kane"; detailed essays and comprehensive discussions of Welles's major unfinished work, including two unrealized projects, The Big Brass Ring and The Cradle Will Rock; and an account of Rosenbaum's work as consultant on the 1998 re-editing of Touch of Evil, based on a studio memo by Welles.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film written by Russell Jackson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays are increasingly popular and now figure prominently in the study of his work and its reception. This lively Companion is a collection of critical and historical essays on the films adapted from, and inspired by, Shakespeare's plays. An international team of leading scholars discuss Shakespearean films from a variety of perspectives: as works of art in their own right; as products of the international movie industry; in terms of cinematic and theatrical genres; and as the work of particular directors from Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles to Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh. They also consider specific issues such as the portrayal of Shakespeare's women and the supernatural. The emphasis is on feature films for cinema, rather than television, with strong coverage of Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. A guide to further reading and a useful filmography are also provided.
Download or read book Shakespeare on Screen Othello written by Sarah Hatchuel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date survey of the key themes and debates surrounding screen adaptations and productions of Shakespeare's Othello.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare s Poetry written by Jonathan Post and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.
