The impact of significant loss has exerted a powerful influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers . The Melancholy Lens offers a detailed look at biographical and psychological factors discernible in the art of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr with an aim toward a greater understanding of their work.
The prevalence of loss and mourning, and of charged relationships with parents or parental figures has had a surprising influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers' work. To date, however, little attention has been given to these themes. In The Melancholy Lens, author Tony Pipolooffers a detailed look at the significant role of underlying biographical and psychological factors in specific works by leading avant-garde filmmakers. Covering a range of filmmakers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr, The MelancholyLens takes a sensitive approach to understand the motivations of each filmmaker as related to a given work. Pipolo argues, for example, that the work of Deren and Brakhage lends itself to a more aggressive appreciation of psychoanalytic principles.The Deren films studied-Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time-are read as varying responses to the death of her father, with whom she had a strained relationship. Tortured Dust-the final film Brakhage made about his first family-was, by his own account, a work ofcontention and desperation. The elusiveness of Gregory Markopoulos' The Mysteries cannot conceal its naked obsession with death any more than it can diminish the film's poignancy. Robert Beavers' Sotiros is an especially rich and vivid exposure of a vulnerable chapter in the filmmakers's life. Inthe final two chapters on Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr, Pipolo looks outward for artistic motivation to show how both filmmakers' fascination with the history of film and video manifests as a melancholic view of greater history in their work. In the afterword, the author considers later figures whosework is kindred to the theme of this book, among them Nathaniel Dorsky, Phil Solomon, David Gatten, and Lewis Klahr.
A nuanced psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles. Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the President’s character and his leadership. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health. Shenk draws on seven years of research from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of Lincoln’s unhappiness. In the process, Shenk discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post Book World, Atlanta Journal-Constituion, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette As Featured on the History Channel documentary Lincoln “Fresh, fascinating, provocative.”—Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle “Some extremely beautiful prose and fine political rhetoric and leaves one feeling close to Lincoln, a considerable accomplishment.”—Andrew Solomon, New York Magazine “A profoundly human and psychologically important examination of the melancholy that so pervaded Lincoln's life.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., author of An Unquiet Mind
