Bert Cardullo

"Recognized as a master of Italian and world cinema, Vittorio De Sica is considered one of the major proponents of neorealism, an Italian movement that forever altered the content and style of the cinema worldwide.". "This work covers De Sica's entire career as a stage and screen actor, director, and screenwriter. It begins with a chronology of his life and work. A lengthy essay discusses biographical and career information in detail. Special attention is given to the years following the war when De Sica directed Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. - films that made him famous.". "Stage acting credits, screen acting credits, a filmography of De Sica's directorial work, selected credits related to De Sica's neorealism films, and a filmography of De Sica's work as a screenwriter are included. Two interviews with the master provide additional insights. A bibliography of works by and about De Sica in the English language completes the book."--BOOK JACKET.

Far too often young theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from film to theater without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. Starting with a history of the relationship between theater and film, the collection includes essays from a variety of writers, directors, and theorists by examining the differences between working in, and creating for, drama and film. The playwright Bernard Shaw looks at the differences between the two industries, audiences, and writing processes affect the author's artistic control. Critic-theorists like Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag consider the similarities and differences that arise from the intrinsic qualities of each medium, touching on structure, technique, and dialogue, as well as audience experience. Professor Cardullo's collection provides a theoretical and practical foundation for understanding the effect that film and drama have had, and continue to have, on each other's development.

It is the aim of this book to chronicle the vitality of international film art between the years 1987 and 1992. Countries represented in this collection include England, France, Sweden, the United States, Germany, India, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Spain, China, Holland, Japan, and Finland. The review/essays contained herein are acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic senses of those words; they are neither theoretical musings nor scholarly tracts. As such, Film Chronicle can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists.

In addition to producing lasting works of drama, some of avant-garde theatre's most creative practitioners-directors, playwrights, performers, and designers-also offered profound insights into their art. Their writings, spanning most of the twentieth century and reaching back into the nineteenth, have been gathered together in this uniquely wide-ranging selection. In Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre: A Casebook from Kleist to Camus, commentary by such seminal figures as Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Alfred Jarry, Luigi Pirandello, August Strindberg, and others are featured here. Their writings illuminate a desire to wrench dramatic art out of all of its old habits and create a new, distinctive, and freestanding theatrical vocabulary. This collection provides direct access to the thinking behind some of the most stimulating performance and playwriting the modernists had to offer, as well as guidelines to the contemporary theatre's current, most adventurous developments. Setting theory beside practice, this collection brings alive a number of vital and continuing concerns, and provides enlightening perspectives on the theatrical history of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre is not only an essential and versatile handbook for students at all levels but also offers a feast of ideas for anyone interested or engaged in theatre. Representing the twentieth century's radical shift in the aesthetics of theatre and drama, these essays provide a valuable contribution to the literature of the avant-garde and should be of great interest to scholars and theatre lovers alike.

Robert Cardullo's 'On a Dramatic Note: Short Essays on Multiple Plays, from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Moliére to Mamet' consists of analysis and criticism of such well known plays as Oedipus Tyrannos, Hamlet, King Lear, Tartuffe, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, Major Barbara, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Riders to the Sea, The Homecoming, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Loot, Dutchman, Plenty, Saved, Glengarry Glen Ross, Buried Child, and A Soldier's Play - among a number of other important works. From the short essays included in this book, one will quickly discover that the author's preoccupations as a critic are not theoretical. He is, rather, a ''close reader'' committed to a detailed yet relatively objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of a play. As someone who once regularly worked in the theater as a dramaturg, moreover, he is concerned chiefly with dramatic analysis that can be of benefit to directors, designers, and even actors - that is, with analysis of character, action, dialogue, and setting that can be translated into concepts for theatrical production, or that can at least provide the kind of understanding of a play with which a theater practitioner could fruitfully quarrel. Many of the plays considered are regularly produced, especially by university theaters, and these explicatory essays and notes may in some small way make a contribution to future stagings. A number of these dramas are also routinely treated in high school and college courses on dramatic literature, so the short pieces contained in 'On a Dramatic Note' may also serve students as models for the writing of play analyses.--

"... Full texts of sixteen important plays, each preceded by a historical-critical introduction and followed by an essay, often written by the playwright, that elaborates on the dramatic and aesthetic issues raised by the play."--Cover.