Colin MacCabe

The Butcher Boy is perhaps the finest film to have come out of Ireland. Although it marks a clear break with the more banal canons of realism, it is nonetheless the most realistic of Irish films. It engages with the society and culture of modern Ireland with a wit and ferocity that denies the viewer any easy moral position. Cinema is often thought of as a purely visual art, but this film is adapted from a novel by a filmmaker who is himself a writer of prose fiction. In this study, Colin McCabe examines the process by which fiction becomes film, and writing becomes image.

The Butcher Boy

The Keywords Project

Holly Yanacek

Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand our contemporary world. From nature to cultural appropriation and from market to terror, the most important words in political and cultural debate have complicated and complex histories. This book sketches these histories in ways that illuminate the political bent and values of our current society. Written by The Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who have spent more than a decade on this work, Keywords for Today updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. It updates some 40 of Williams's original entries and adds 86 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. Whether it is demonstrating the only recently-acquired religious meaning of fundamentalism or the complicated linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today will intrigue and enlighten.

A 21st Century Vocabulary

Keywords for Today

Kathleen Murray

Rick Warner

Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already published book, dramatic work, or comic as their source material. If the original is well known, then for most spectators the question of whether these adaptations are "true to the spirit" of the original is central. The recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses the question of fidelity as irrelevant, mistaken, or an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The essays gathered here, mixing the field's top authorities (Andrew, Gunning, Jameson, Mulvey, and Naremore) with fresh new voices, take the question of correspondence between source and adaptation as seriously as do producers and audiences. Spanning examples from Shakespeare to Ghost World, and addressing such notable directors as Welles, Kubrick, Hawks, Tarkovsky, and Ophuls, the contributors write against the grain of recent adaption studies by investigating the question of what fidelity might mean in its broadest and truest sense, what it might reveal of the adaptive process, and why it is still one of the richest veins of investigation in the study of cinema.

Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity

True to the Spirit

The hugely acclaimed biography of one of history's greatest directors, Jean-Luc Godard 'MacCabe's book is in a league of its own ... this is a rich, rewarding and essential read for anyone seriously interested in the intellectual, cultural and cinematic history of Europe since World War II' Sight and Sound 'Godard fans, practitioners of cinema and anyone interested in the intellectual and artistic life of the second half of the twentieth century should read this important and entertaining book' Observer Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the Superbrats of Hollywood to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in l968 he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of André Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Godard - together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol - hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swapped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Hugely prolific in his first 10 years - A Bout de Souffle, Le Petit Soldat, Le Mepris, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, Made in USA and many others all appeared in the 1960s - Godard became and remains one of the most adventurous and enigmatic film-directors at work in the world today.

A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

Godard

"In this highly original homage, Adam Bartos' exquisite photographs of Marker's studio, a workspace both extraordinarily cluttered and highly organized, appear alongside a moving reminiscence of his friend by the film theorist and practitioner Colin MacCabe."--

Remembering Chris Marker

Studio

Adaptation persists as a major area of inquiry in both film and literary studies. Over the past two decades, scholars have extended the debate well beyond George Bluestone's influential Novels into Film (1957) by taking into account such concerns as intertextuality and different forms of narrative enabled through new media. A dominant trend has been to dispense straight away with questions of fidelity and "faithfulness," the assumption being that such views are naÃ¯ve, moralistic, and rooted in a cultural prejudice against the audiovisual. While acknowledging the merits of this position--namely its complication of the one-way "page-to-screen" perspective--this collection seeks to put the question of fidelity back into play. The essays explore the ways in which the newer, more sophisticated approaches can still accommodate forms of fidelity between two or more texts without having to reinscribe untenable distinctions between "original" and "copy," and without having to argue from a strict media essentialist position that stages an impasse between linguistic and cinematic means of articulation. In addition, the scholars in this volume seek to recognize and account for fidelity's cultural currency among filmmakers and audiences alike, no matter how impossible fidelity might be in a literal sense. The selected essays offer an opportunity to showcase both well established adaptation scholars (Laura Mulvey, Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning and James Naremore) and emerging voices in the field.

Analysing Popular Television and Film

High Theory/low Culture

James Joyce was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. This book explores his novels and short stories, and analyses the literary traditions and social factors influencing his distinctive complex style. Interweaving Joyce's life and history with his books, it also shows how Joyce celebrated his own experiences in Dublin.

James Joyce: a Very Short Introduction

T.S. Eliots's life took him from the United States to England, from philosophy to poetry and from modern scepticism to traditional Christianity. Colin MacCabe's study places Eliot's poetry in the context of these journeys and uses Eliot's life to illuminate his poetry. This poetry, although very modest in quantity, remains one of the great artistic triumphs of the English language. In his ironic accounts of adolescent desire in 'The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock' and 'Portrait of a Lady', he performs masculine self-doubt with a pathos and wit that has yet to be surpassed in poem, book or song. But these early poems can seem like mere exercises beside the astonishing achievements of 'Gerontion' and 'The Wasteland', poems which defined a generation and which broke the mould in English verse to allow a symphony of despairing voices to bear witness to the destruction in Europe. Finally, in 'Four Quartets' he forges an original form and a compelling tone to hymn both religious belief and national destiny

T.S. Eliot

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

Essays on Film and Literature

Perpetual Carnival

Distinguished Professor of English and Film Colin Maccabe

Lee Grieveson

In these two volumes of original essays, scholars from around the world address the history of British colonial cinema stretching from the emergence of cinema at the height of imperialism around the turn of the century to the separate moments of decolonization, the ending of formal imperialism, in the post-Second World War period. The books explore the interplay of political control and cultural representation in the late colonial period. Collectively, the authors gathered together here trace out the various ways cinema was used in projects of colonial governance and show how cinema became important to the setting in place of ideological and affective structures that continue to resonate in the world of today. At its height, after 1919 when swathes of German East Africa fell to the UK in the form of the League of Nations Mandates, the British Empire claimed 58 countries, 400 million subjects, and 14 million square miles of ground. Cultural work would be central to the maintenance and governance of this diverse political space. The production, distribution, and exhibition of film was quickly aligned with this task, and was utilized by State and industrial and philanthropic institutions to further colonial projects, to shape the subject positions of colonizer and colonized, to demarcate between 'civilzed' and 'uncivilized' and codify difference, and to foster a political economy of imperialism that was predicated on distinctions between core and periphery. The first volume, Film and Empire, concentrates on the years 1895-1939 that encompass, broadly speaking, the enmeshing of cinema and the expansion and consolidation of empire. It begins with two essays that offer new perspectives on the conceptual and historical terrain of colonial cinema. Authors then address the emergence of cinema in the context of an imperial world system; the establishment and consolidation of State financed documentary cinema; philanthropic and educational formations of colonial cinema; industrial sponsored film; amateur and missionary production; and aspects of fictional cinema's engagement with empire.

Empire and Film

'... (MacCabe is) the most lucid, least blinkered expounder of the post-structuralist mysteries I have ever come across. This is an important, challenging book, which no Joycean can afford to ignore.'' David Lodge '... (this is) the most exciting and original book on Joyce to have appeared for many years ...' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman

Colin MacCabe

Books

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