Karel Reisz (British Film-Makers) - Softcover

Gardner, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719085667 ISBN 13: 9780719085666

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2011

Synopsis

This critical analysis of the Czech-born, British director, Karel Reisz uses recent interdisciplinary methodologies to explore the crisis of political commitment and historical displacement in the context of the 1960s and '70s counter-culture.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara

From the Back Cover

Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema 'movement' which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz's first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

As the import of Free Cinema rapidly dissipated during the 'Swinging London' era, Reisz confronted the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and 1970s with a series of ambivalent films that critique the anarchic free spirit of the times, including Morgan (1966), Isadora (1968), The Gambler (1974) and Dog Soldiers (1978).

Drawing on Reisz's early film criticism for Sequence and Sight and Sound, as well as interdisciplinary methodologies, this first career-length study explores Reisz's personal brand of character-based realism, offering the spectator a privileged insight into an artist's developing response to subjective and historical dislocation. The book should thus prove invaluable to film scholars, cultural historians and the Reisz aficionado.

From the Inside Flap

Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema movement which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz s first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). As the import of Free Cinema rapidly dissipated during the Swinging London era, Reisz confronted the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and 1970s with a series of ambivalent films that critique the anarchic free spirit of the times, including Morgan (1966), Isadora (1968), The Gambler (1974) and Dog Soldiers (1978).Drawing on Reisz s early film criticism for Sequence and Sight and Sound, as well as interdisciplinary methodologies, this first career-length study explores Reisz s personal brand of character-based realism, offering the spectator a privileged insight into an artist s developing response to subjective and historical dislocation. The book should thus prove invaluable to film scholars, cultural historians and the Reisz aficionado.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719085667
• ISBN 13: 9780719085666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316