PAJ books

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This volume brings together twenty-four of Frank O'Hara's plays, from one act dramas to brief "eclogues." While several were produced in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, most are intended as poetic works cast in dramatic form. With his interest in camp, collage, and dramatic and verse forms, O'Hara created characters that range from classical allusions (Daphnis and Chloe) to historical figures (Benjamin Franklin and a thinly disguised General Douglas MacArthur) to his own contemporaries (Jackson Pollack, Ted Berrigan, and others). Like collections of his poetry, Amorous Nightmares of Delay captures the irreverent voice and joyful lyricism of one of America's great authors. An introduction by O'Hara's longtime friend Joe LeSueur places the works in the context of New York's art and literary scene of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Appearing after the reunification of the two Germanys, DramaContemporary: Germany offers a politically charged view of German drama in the years immediately preceding and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The volume includes plays by the internationally renowned authors Heiner Muller, Botho Strauss, and George Tabori, as well as works by other German-language authors who deserve a wider audience, among them Georg Seidel of the former East Germany and Elfriede Jelinek of Austria. The spectrum of subjects and styles represents the great number of new plays that have premiered in German theaters between 1985 and 1995. In the best German dramatic tradition, these plays range from poetic, highly imagistic work to realism and melodrama, and to virtuosic wordplay. They are often outspoken in criticism of contemporary reality and the German past. Heiner Muller's "Mommsen's Block" was one of the first plays written after the historic changes in Germany to take as its theme the political and economic consequences of unification "The Beautiful Stranger," by Klaus Pohl, offers an uncompromising view of the aggressive violence and brutality directed at foreigners in Germany. George Tabori, in "Mein Kampf," situates the young Hitler in a Vienna flophouse. Elfriede Jelinek's "Totenauberg" is a satirical treatment of Martin Heidegger's crypto-fascist theories and the relationship between Hannah Arendt and the philosopher which is now the subject of an international controversy.

"For over four decades, Stanley Kauffmann's skilled, cultivated, and impassioned film reviews in the New Republic have guided filmgoers and charted the development of the cinema arts. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has been an independent voice in film criticism, challenging preconceptions, skewering pretensions, and championing a wide diversity of films, from Hollywood blockbusters to over-looked gems.". "In his latest collection of film writings, Kauffmann discusses the most influential, exciting, and innovative films released since 1993, as well as less successful - sometimes disastrous - efforts. From major films by established Hollywood directors (Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Oliver Stone's Nixon) to works from the iconoclastic world of independent American film (Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and David O. Russell's Spanking the Monkey) to the best of world cinema (Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry and Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels), Kauffmann offers his lively and considered views of over sixty films. In other essays, he compares cinematic adaptations of Mozart's operas, explores changing public attitudes toward film as an art form, assesses the possibilities of accurately dramatizing the Holocaust, and recalls the careers of such important figures in film history as David Lean, Billy Wilder, and Akira Kurosawa. A model of provocative writing about the liveliest art, Regarding Film will delight ardent movie lovers everywhere."--BOOK JACKET.

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's A Year of Thirteen Moons, the camera watches the prostitute Red Zora as she watches Fassbinder in a television interview. The actress is Ingrid Caven, the director's former wife and the woman with whom he claims to have his most important "elective affinity." At once provocative and revealing, the scene illustrates Fassbinder's interest in blurring the boundaries between art and life, between fiction and autobiography. His public comments - like his films and plays - were occasions for aesthetic experimentation rich in irony and drama. The Anarchy of the Imagination collects Fassbinder's most important interviews, essays, and working notes - nearly all presented here for the first time in English. They are an indispensable record of the self-understanding and self-stylization of this major artist, one of the most influential cultural figures to emerge from postwar Germany. Fassbinder's essays and other writings commanded a degree of public attention rarely achieved by film makers in the United States. His articles appeared in major newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau and Die Zeit, where they both influenced the cultural scene and intervened in the acrimonious debates on terrorism and anti-Semitism that swept West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whether Fassbinder is reflecting on his own work or writing about fellow film makers, whether he is describing his discovery of actress Hanna Schygulla or speaking out in favor of political film making, his perspective is radical, subjective, and challenging. The writings in this volume are not only about films, but about love, longing, dependency, repressed wishes, and dreams. They are an essential part of Fassbinder's legacy, the remarkable body of work in which present-day German reality finds brilliant expression.