Results by title
1726 books match the query 'Film' and 53 start with l
Luis Buñuel
The Red Years, 1929–1939Román Gubern
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause.
Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Buñuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism.
Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Buñuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.
Lulu In Hollywood
Expanded EditionLouise Brooks
University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Essential writings by this icon of the silent era—rereleased in print and now available as an e-book 100 years after Louise Brooks arrived in Hollywood
Lulu in Hollywood is an intimate collection of eight autobiographical essays by Louise Brooks, silent film darling and icon of the flapper era. Ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, G. W. Pabst, and others, Brooks’s writing offers a rare glimpse into her extraordinary life. Including her revelatory “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs,” Lulu in Hollywood also features Kenneth Tynan’s 1979 essay “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” which revived interest in Brooks’s work and was the best discussion of her film work to appear in her lifetime.
Lyric Personhood
On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the WestDan Wang
University of Chicago Press, 2025
What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it means to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of Western culture.
It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people's expectations for life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.