Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order - Softcover

Klawans, Stuart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0304700541 ISBN 13: 9780304700547

Publisher: Continuum, 1999

Synopsis

As New A history and theory of going too far, "Film Follies" examines those rare pictures that are both cinematic landmarks and monuments to a director's hybris, from Griffith's "Intolerance" through to Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Carax's "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf". Seeming madness and wasteful extravagance, fantastic architecture and the haphazard structure of a musical revue: such are the landmarks of those improbably great (and greatly improbable) films Klawans calls "follies">

About this title

About the Author

Stuart Klawans was born on October 17, 1950 in Chicago, IL. Education: Yale, B.A. in English Literature, 1971. Expelled for helping to hold hostage the university business administrator, 1970. Besides writing a regular column for The Nation and the New York Daily News ("Museums"), Klawans has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement ("American Notes" column), NPR (commentaries on Fresh Air), The Village Voice, Grand Street, Threepenny Review, Entertainment Weekly, WBAI (film reviews on "Soundtrack"), the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times (once). He is represented in several anthologies, including The Best American Essays 1990 (Ticknor & Fields), edited by Justin Kaplan and Robert Atwan; Seeing Through Movies (Pantheon, 1990), edited by Mark Crispin Miller; and Foreign Affairs (Mercury House, 1991), edited by Kathy Schulz Huffins for the National Society of Film Critics. Klawans is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, and was a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival from 1992-95. Awards and honors: Arrested for trespass, Shoreham Nuclear Installation, 1979. Klawans's book Film Follies was nominated for a 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Reviews

Klawans, film critic for the Nation, looks at those over-the-top, beyond-extravagant films that are the consummate creation of one person. A "film folly" is not only overly ambitious but ruinously expensive to make, destroying careers and studios. It is an act of hubris or megalomania on the part of its creator, and the logical development of story line or characters isn't this type of film's strong point. Klawans examines some examples of this genre, among them Intolerance, Greed, Metropolis, Duel in the Sun, Fitzcarraldo, Cleopatra, I Am Cuba, and Apocalypse Now. Proceeding chronologically, he considers not only the film itself but the circumstances in the film industry at the time that made its creation possible. Aside from an overemphasis on the influence of Richard Wagner in the first third of the book, what Klawans has to say is interesting and far from dry. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.?Marianne Cawley, Charleston Cty. Lib., SC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0304700541
• ISBN 13: 9780304700547
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188