Portrait Of A Director

The Definitive Study Of The Life And Work Of India S Greatest Filmmaker Satyajit Ray Was India S First Filmmaker To Gain International Recognition As A Master Of The Medium, And Today He Continues To Be Regarded As One Of The World S Finest Directors Of All Time. His First Film Pather Panchali, Made When He Was In His Thirties, Catapulted Him Into The Forefront Of Young Directors Worldwide When In 1956 The Cannes Film Festival Honoured It As The Best Human Document Of The Year. Several Other Films By Ray, Like Aparajito, Jalsaghar, Charulata, Nayak, Aranyer Din Ratri, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Ghare Baire And Agantuk, Made Over A Career Spanning Five Decades, Are Considered Classics Of Contemporary Cinema. In 1992, Ray Was Awarded The Oscar For Lifetime Achievement By The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Science And, In The Same Year, Was Also Honoured With The Bharat Ratna. First Compared With Robert Flaherty For His Lyrical Use Of Nature And Locations, Ray Is Now Regarded As One Of The Great Neo-Realist Directors. From The Beginning He Rejected The Established Path Of Indian Film Production, Declaring At The Age Of Six: I Ll Go To Germany And Come Back And Make Films. He Absorbed A Remarkably Broad Culture From His Family Which Had Interesting Literary, Artistic And Musical Inclinations. With His Extraordinary Persistence And Capacity For Work, He Simultaneously Equipped Himself With Such Thoroughness That He Was Able To Create A Masterpiece In His Very First Film. Marie Seton S Classic Study Of Ray, The Product Of Thorough Research And A Long And Close Association With The Ray Family, Is The Most Detailed Examination Available Of Ray S Work As Musician, Scenarist And Director. First Published In 1971, It Was Last Updated In 1978, Some Fourteen Years Before Ray Passed Away. This New And Revised Edition Includes Unpublished Pieces From The Author S Further Writings On Ray, And An Afterword That Takes The Story Forward To Ray S Last Film. It Will, Hopefully, Re-Introduce The Genius Of Ray To A Whole New Generation Of Readers And Film Aficionados.

Drawing on previously untapped archival materials including letters, interviews, and more, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Columbia Pictures, from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company, through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and ending with a vivid portrait of today's corporate Hollywood. The book offers unique perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia's unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, and From Here to Eternity. Following the author's highly readable studio chronicle are fourteen original essays by leading film scholars that follow Columbia's emergence from Poverty Row status to world class, and the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for its transformation. A new essay on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood rounds out the collection and brings this seminal studio history into the 21st century. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures is the first book to integrate history with criticism of a single studio, and is ideal for film lovers and scholars alike.

Patti Hansen: A Portrait gives supermodel Patti Hansen’s short but incredibly influential career serious critical attention for the first time, following her transformation from a teenage model on the cover of Glamour to her reign as a dominating force in the pages of Vogue and on 12 covers. This luxe book catalogs the changing era of 1970s fashion and culture, documenting how Hansen served as muse to a crop of new, up-and-coming photographers including Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier while making influential editorial images with already well-established photographers such as Helmut Newton. A foreword by Karlie Kloss and contributor essays discuss Hansen’s cultural impact and assess her influence, analyzing the new cultural norms and ideologies that allowed models to be seen as strong, independent, and sexually empowered. With new insight into Hansen’s private life and gorgeous, exclusive images, Patti Hansen: A Portrait is a comprehensive tribute to a model and decade beloved by fashion fans and industry professionals alike.

Behind the scenes at the world's major art museums, the life of a curator can be thrilling, amusing, disappointing--but never boring. In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger. Pepall's stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity. Archival black and white photographs and colour plates--including Edwin Holgate's Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted--make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.

This book is a study of an eighteenth-century portrait of a youth in Polish dress, owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London since 1922, but never publicly displayed. Two inscriptions claim that it is a portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, popularly known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. The Gallery has always doubted its authenticity and leading experts on Stuart portraiture have dismissed the identification. This study, by a historian of Poland-Lithuania, is the first detailed attempt to research the painting properly. Based on archival sources, it examines its provenance and the connections of its first known owner with the Kinlochmoidart MacDonalds, who fought for the Prince in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. It considers a considerable body of evidence to suggest that it is very possible that the portrait is indeed a genuine depiction of the Prince.

"Published ... on the occasion of "The network" by Lincoln Schatz being acquired and unveiled by the National Portrait Gallery"--Colophon.

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of People's top 10 books of 2021 • An instant New York Times bestseller • Named a best book of the year by NPR and Time A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges—some of the worst largely unknown until now—by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four consecutive hit plays, won back-to-back Tonys, ushered in a new era of Hollywood moviemaking with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and followed it with The Graduate, which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-five, he lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse, drove a Rolls-Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Avedon as friends. Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he was sent along with his younger brother to America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and ostracized--an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless--and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe--the acute powers of observation that first made him famous; the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships, most enduringly with May; his unquenchable drive; his hunger for security and status; and the depressions and self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York to Chicago to Hollywood, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people Harris interviewed: Elaine May, Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Lorne Michaels, and Gloria Steinem. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art.