I’ve loved cinema since I was 9 years old growing up in New York City and my grandmother took me to see The Ten Commandments at the Paradise Theater, Loew’s magnificent flagship theater in the Bronx. The theater’s famous canopy of twinkling stars on the ceiling was the perfect magical venue, and I was thunderstruck not only by the epic sweep of the movie but also by the opulence of the theater, which mirrored the monumental pyramids that Ramses constructs in the film. Ever since, my passion for movies has been as all-consuming as DeMille’s jello sea was for the infidel Egyptians who doubted the power of special effects and cinematic illusion.
I wrote...
Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman
Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of the work of Frederick Wiseman, the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. The updated edition adds new material exploring Wiseman’s work since the 1990s and discusses every film in Wiseman’s remarkable sixty-year career. Grant examines the core concerns running across Wiseman’s work from the early films, which focus on documenting institutional failure, through an expanding interest in cultural institutions and ideology, to a blossoming embrace of democracy in later films. Particular attention is paid to Wiseman’s strategies for involving and implicating the spectator in the institutional processes the films document. Grant also places Wiseman within the history of the documentary and other traditions of American art and considers the relationship between documentary film and authorship.
Kesey’s great American novel shares with Frederick Wiseman’s first and most controversial film, Titicut Follies, a view of the nation as a mental institution.
Like Wiseman’s films, the novel resonates with American mythology, from the falsely mute Native American narrator, chief Bromden, to the boisterous protagonist, Randall Patrick McMurphy, who sports underwear with images of whales on it.
In the book, Chief Bromden refers to “The Combine” as a combination of the military-industrial complex and dominant ideology, the same phrase the governor of the Canal Zone uses to describe the political and economic control of Zonian life in Wiseman's Canal Zone. It is no coincidence that Milos Forman, the director of the award-winning 1975 film adaptation of Cuckoo’s Nest, had his cast and crew watch Titicut Follies multiple times before beginning production.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them…
A spellbinding mystery wrapped in an outlandish Hollywood history, Flicker was written by an author who obviously knows movie culture.
Allusions to films and filmmakers abound in the book, and readers will delight in teasing out the references, especially to the devastating portrait of the influential critic Pauline Kael. The book’s engaging play with movie history is similar to Wiseman’s frequent cinematic references, such as shots that invoke the western and John Ford in the opening of Meat and the sly references in Basic Training to such Sad Sack service comedies as Chaplin’s Shoulder Armsand Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates.
The novel’s plot, which involves secret societies and subliminal messages in movies, hinges on the illusory capabilities of the image, which Wiseman also explores in Model and The Store.
From the golden age of art movies and underground cinema to X-rated porn, splatter films, and midnight movies, this breathtaking thriller is a tour de force of cinematic fact and fantasy, full of metaphysical mysteries that will haunt the dreams of every moviegoer. Jonathan Gates could not have anticipated that his student studies would lead him to uncover the secret history of the movies—a tale of intrigue, deception, and death that stretches back to the 14th century. But he succumbs to what will be a lifelong obsession with the mysterious Max Castle, a nearly forgotten genius of the silent screen…
Based on the boyhood memories of author Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the best portraits of small-town American life in the 19th century.
Centered around the coming-of-age of George Willard, the 22 stories in the book provide numerous character sketches of people in the fictional town of Winesburg. Anderson writes in a plain style that suits the world he describes.
The book pioneers an approach to fictional portraiture also taken up by Wiseman in his later Our-Town cycle of films that focus on individual rural communities—Aspen, Belfast, Maine, In Jackson Heights, and Monrovia, Indiana—and adopt a seemingly similar straightforward style. Like those films, the book features a series of glimpses that together add up more than just the sum of its parts.
Anderson profoundly changed the American short story, transforming it from light, popular entertainment into literature of the highest quality. His art belonged as much to an oral as a written tradition, and, as this collection shows, the best of his stories echo the language and the pace of a man talking to his friends. They explore with penetrating compassion the isolation of the individual and capture the emotional undercurrents hidden beneath ordinary events.
Another book with an episodic structure, The Confidence-Man concerns an assorted group of Mississippi steamboat passengers whose individual hypocrisies are confronted by the mysterious character of the title.
Melville’s ship of fools features a variety of types, some of whom are caricatures of American literary figures including Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The book was published in 1857 on April Fool’s Day, an irony equal to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on Valentine’s Day, and a gesture that Wiseman, himself a great ironist, surely would appreciate.
Certainly, it is no surprise that Wiseman has referred to The Confidence-Man as his favorite novel. One might even find Melville’s elaborate prose style analogous to Wiseman’s careful editing and his ability to confront spectators with their own biases and preconceptions, as the eponymous confidence-man does in the book.
On April Fool's Day in 1856, a shape-shifting grifter boards a Mississippi riverboat to expose the pretenses, hypocrisies, and self-delusions of his fellow passengers. The con artist assumes numerous identities — a disabled beggar, a charity fundraiser, a successful businessman, an urbane gentleman — to win over his not-entirely-innocent dupes. The central character's shifting identities, as fluid as the river itself, reflect broader aspects of human identity even as his impudent hoaxes form a meditation on illusion and trust. This comic allegory addresses themes of sincerity, character, and morality in its challenge to the optimism and materialism of mid-19th-century America.…
John Barth’s first novel, originally published in 1956 and later significantly revised, is a darkly comic philosophical novel whose main character, Todd Andrews, is contemplating suicide.
The novel, along with Barth’s second, The End of the Road, is written in a relatively realistic style, different from the metafictional turn that the author would later take in his subsequent fiction.Nevertheless, these two early books are in some ways consistent with later works like Giles Boat Boy and Lost in the Funhouse, particularly in the passages about metaphor in life and art.
Barth’s musings about metaphors in the real world are relevant to Wiseman’s ability to wrest metaphoric implications from real-world events and objects. Indeed, Wiseman’s films are a veritable floating opera of signifiers.
The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road are John Barth's first two novels. Their relationship to each other is evident not only in their ribald subject matter but in the eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone of the narratives. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on the emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama. Together they illustrate the beginnings of an illustrious career.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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