The Hidden and the Unspeakable: On Theatrical Culture, Oscar Wilde and Ernst Lubitsch‘s Lady Windermeres Fan

Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Musser
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
Fundamental Feature ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Theatrical Culture

The cinema is as much a theatrical form of entertainment as performance on the stage, a fact that is crucial to a full appreciation of Ernst Lubitsch‘s Lady Windermere‘s Fan (Warner Brothers, 1925). Particularly in the cinemas silent era (1895-1925), when motion picture exhibition relied on numerous performance elements, theatrical performance and film exhibition interpenetrated. This underscores a basic conundrum: cinema has been integral to, and an extension of, theatrical culture, even though it has also been something quite different - a new art form. Indeed, the unity of stage and screen was so well established that critics, theorists, historians and artists expended large amounts of intellectual energy distinguishing the two forms while paying little attention to what they held in common. One fundamental feature of theatrical practice that carried over into many areas of filmmaking was adaptation. For Lubitsch, adaptation was a central fact of his artistic practice. This article looks at the history of adaptations of Lady Windermere‘s Fan on stage and screen making reference to textual comparisons, public reception, painting, symbolism and queer readings.

An Army of Theaters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Melnick
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Early Growth ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Formation ◽  
Digital Projection ◽  
The U.S

This chapter, by Ross Melnick, examines the history of the Army Motion Picture Service (AMPS) and the intricate relationship between the U.S. Army and motion picture exhibition during both war and peacetime. Focusing on the industrial, logistical, and economic formation of AMPS, this chapter focuses on three key periods in the history of U.S. Army film exhibition. It argues that AMPS’s early status as independent of Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation created unique challenges that hindered its early growth on U.S. Army bases and ultimately led to its withering amid the coming of digital projection and other contemporary challenges.

‘I remember little. Almost nothing’. Participatory theatre as a means to access subjugated memories

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802098204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Niziołek
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
First World ◽  
Crucial Part

The article presents and discusses the interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory research project Bieżenki. Thematically, the project is devoted to the history of the so-called bieżeństwo – a migration of people from eastern Poland during the First World War, forced by the retreating Russian Army, when the Germans broke through the eastern frontline in 1915. The stories of those refugees, among whom were a number of Rus’ peasants, and within that group, women with children (the term bieżenki signifies female war refugees), make up a crucial part of the regional history that has been largely absent from public knowledge and historical discourse. Methodologically, the project is based on participatory theatre that engages non-artists both as content providers, and on-stage performers. Theatrical practice has been used to collect the marginalised memories of bieżeństwo (as they are often kept and transmitted within family circles), and present them to the wider public in the form of theatrical performance. The project has also resulted in a theoretical concept of the assemblage of memory, inspired by and grounded in the creative process, which is briefly sketched out at the end of the article.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHY AND THEATRE IN THE CENTURY OF ENLIGHTENMENT

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Luciano da Silva Façanha ◽  
Zilmara de Jesus Viana de Carvalho ◽  
Maria Olilia Serra ◽  
Helderson Mariani Pires ◽  
Márcio Junior Montelo Tavares ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Powerful Means ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Practice

The theatrical performance has always been a continual concern during all the history of humanity, because it performs an art where people have certain stories that arouse many feelings and insights to the spectators. It highlights the fact that the theatrical performance has special importance for philosophical reflection, especially in the characteristic illustration of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. In this context, several thinkers participated intensely of the political reality of this time, using the theatrical practice on several occasions, both for the contribution to the intellectual framework and to portray the daily life of the rising class, namely the bourgeoisie. Among these thinkers, this paper will highlight the Voltaire conceptions of representation of the aristocratic theater, establishing it as a powerful means of education; Diderot about the genesis of the drama, where art had the function of refining and instructing individuals, representing the aspirations of the bourgeoisie. Since the conception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the theater, unlike the two mentioned thinkers, says the educational role of the theater is illusory, as the theatrical representation only reflects the passions of their audience. Thus, it is emphasized that the Genevan thinker followed a contrary understanding to the thinkers of the period.

‘A disoriented vision of … fact’: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Zosia Kuczyńska
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Faith Healer ◽  
Brian Friel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Composition Process

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.

Saving Abstraction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Spiritual Orientation ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Religious Sensibility ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spiritual Intervention ◽  
Musical Modernism

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.

From Cerisy to Oubapo

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40
Author(s):  
Thierry Groensteen
Keyword(s):  
Media Environment ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Bande Dessinee ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Exploration

Thierry Groensteen’s memoir recalls the intellectual ferment of colloquia held at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, subsequently the venue for two conferences organised by Groensteen himself. The first, the ground-breaking Bande dessinée, récit et modernité [Comics, Narrative and Modernity] in 1987, was a key moment in the history of the theorisation of comics as art form. Groensteen’s own presentation explored the threshold of narrativity in comics, and other noteworthy contributions included those of the philosopher Henri Van Lier and Marc Avelot, whose reading of Martin Vaughn-James’s La Cage rescued this masterpiece from obscurity. This conference also laid the foundations for the Oubapo movement, the production of comics under constraint, whose later development Groensteen chronicles. The second, ‘La Transécriture’, in 1993, was an early exploration of comics as part of a cross-media environment.

Glorious Apollo: Poetic and Political Themes in the First Opera

1979 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Russano Hanning
Keyword(s):  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Early Opera

Historians of early opera have occasionally noted the appropriateness of Orpheus’ appearance as artistic spokesman for the new art form. Poet-singer par excellence of antiquity, whose music shook the very depths of the universe as he retrieved Eurydice from the Underworld, Orpheus surely appealed to the early opera composers and their humanist program—to recreate the moving power of an entirely sung drama by forging a new union of poetry, music, and gesture.In the history of opera, however, primacy of place must be given to the god Apollo, for the legend of Apollo and Daphne was the subject of the first favola per musica, La Dafne, written by Ottavio Rinuccini, with music composed by Jacopo Corsi and Jacopo Peri, and first performed in 1598 at Corsi's home in Florence.

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