Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar

Author: Carlos J. Alonso

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-06-13

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780521452106

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A 1998 collection of essays on the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.


How to Blow Up a Pipeline

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Author: Andreas Malm

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1839760257

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Property will cost us the earth The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.


The Autonomous Image

The Autonomous Image

Author: Armando J. Prats

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0813149347

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Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors—Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup—Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.


Detonate

Detonate

Author: Geoff Tuff

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1119476178

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Reinvent best practices that have become bad habits Without meaning to, and often with the best of intentions, most organizations continually waste precious time and money on processes and activities that don't create value and no longer make sense in today's business environment. Until now, the relatively slow speed of marketplace evolution has allowed wasteful habits to continue without consequence. This reality is ending. Detonate explains how organizations built up bad habits, identifies which ones masquerade as "best practices," and suggests alternatives that can contribute to winning in the marketplace. With a focus on optimism and empowerment, it focuses on an approach and mindset which are critical to successfully compete in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty. • Core themes challenge how you think about and approach problems • Case studies illustrate the challenges you face and how to overcome them • Recommendations are pragmatic and steer clear of suggesting a brand-new, complicated wiring diagram • Actionable advice provides the first steps down an evolutionary path If you want to compete differently in today’s marketplace and to challenge the things your company does which you have a nagging feeling are actually just a waste of time – and maybe value-destroying – Detonate gives you what you need to ignite change.


Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World

Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World

Author: Seymour Chatman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0520907663

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Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great visual artists of the cinema. The central and distinguishing strength of Antonioni's mature films, Seymour Chatman argues, is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things and a rejection of explanatory dialogue. Though traditional audiences have balked at the "opacity" of Antonioni's films, it is precisely their rendered surface that is so eloquent once one learns to read it. Not despite, but through, their silences the films show a deep concern with the motives, perceptions and vicissitudes of the emotional life. This study covers films not dealt with in any other book on the great director, including Il mistero di Obertwald (1980) and Identificazione di una donna (1982), which have not yet been seen in the U.S. Its coverage of the early documentaries and features, when Antonioni was forging his new and original stylistic "language," is especially full. In a free-ranging analysis of the evolution of Antonioni's style that quotes liberally from Antonioni's own highly articulate writings and interviews, Chatman shows how difficult it was for the filmmaker to liberate his art from the conventional means of rendering narrative, especially dialogue, conventional sound effects, and commentative music. From his first efforts to his triumphant achievements in the tetralogy of L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, Antonioni's acute sensibility struggled to achieve the mastery that has won him a secure place in film history. Chatman's study is the only complete account of Antonioni's work available in English. Its novel visual approach to the films while attract not only film scholars but also readers interested in painting and architecture—both important elements of Antonioni's work.


Visual Paranoia in Rear Window, Blow-Up and The Truman Show

Visual Paranoia in Rear Window, Blow-Up and The Truman Show

Author: Eva Schwarz

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-27

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 3838258126

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Against the backdrop of recent postmodern discourse on cultural theory, Eva Schwarz provides a gripping analysis of the concept of what she describes as visual paranoia. Her study is based on a detailed analysis of three films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (USA, 1954), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (GB, 1966) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (USA, 1998). The starting point of all three analyses is the representation of the postmodern media and information age as an incisive culture of the visual, which coincides with the general socio-political trend of cultural paranoia, the roots of which are to be found in American politics and society of the late 1940s and which has since permeated Anglo-American culture.The discourse on the truthfulness of images, the reality of visual representations and the visual as such forms the context out of which the theory of the development of visual paranoia arises. While other paranoia films, usually thrillers or science fiction films, concern themselves with the sociopolitical manifestation of cultural paranoia, the three films chosen for Schwarz's study focus on the fundamental crisis of the visual as such, from scopophilic paranoia in Rear Window to photographic paranoia in Blow-Up, culminating in the scopophobic manifestation of visual paranoia in The Truman Show.The once valid saying, "seeing is believing", can no longer be taken for granted. In postmodern times, the visual cannot be trusted any more.


Reel Photos

Reel Photos

Author: Wendy Sterba

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-02-26

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1442245247

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Even in an age when the photograph has changed from a physical object into a data file that can be easily manipulated, we tend to believe what we see. But photographs can and do lie. As an object in a film, a photograph’s meaning and function can be even more malleable and deceiving, as new developments in technology are altering how we perceive reality. In Reel Photos: Balancing Art and Truth in Contemporary Film, Wendy Sterba examines the use of photographs in cinema to explore issues of objectivity, subjectivity, fabrication, and fact. This study first looks at the traditional use of the photograph in films such as Blow-Up and then considers similar issues as they relate to the search for truth in detective films like Along Came a Spider, The Bone Collector, and Forgotten. Subsequent chapters explore ambivalence and photographic objectification in films about art photography, including The Governess, Fur, and Closer. Other movies discussed include Inception, Paparazzi, Under Fire, and Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture. By examining the function of the photograph in movies rather than the role of film photography as art, Sterba provides an innovative approach to cinema studies. Utilizing theory in an intelligent but easily understandable way, this book allows readers to re-examine the role of authorship and the value of authentic art. Reel Photos will appeal to students and scholars of cinema, as well as anyone interested in the aesthetics of art and truth in film.


In Search of Snow

In Search of Snow

Author: Luis Alberto Urrea

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780816520152

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In the hot Arizona desert of the late 1950s, Mike McGurk comes of age in one big, riotous gush. Trapped pumping gas at a desolate roadstop, he yearns for things he has never known: love, hope, and the soft, white calmness of snow. Mike's world is filled with a menagerie of quirky characters, who cope with the weight of their unfulfilled dreams with bravado, humor, and violence. Mike trades snappy insults with his macho father, Texaco Turk McGurk, a moustachioed amateur boxer and self-proclaimed war hero who is unable to talk about love. Mike lusts after Lily, his seductive, poem-writing cousin. He cowers before and then confronts the vicious Ramses, grandson of Mr. Sneezy, the wisecracking Apache. And he is rescued by his best friend, Bobo, who delivers him into the care of the loving and generous Mama and Papa Garcia. In Search of Snow is an explosive coming-of-age adventure, full of hilarious episodes and still, poignant moments. Like a blue-collar Don Quixote, Mike must blow up his windmills before he can set off to find the things he lacks, especially the snow that will temper the passion he has just set aflame.