The Altering Eye

The Altering Eye covers a "golden age" of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, the author develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figures as Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, and the work of major Cuban filmmakers. Kolker's book has become a much quoted classic in the field of film studies providing essential reading for anybody interested in understanding the history of European and international cinema. This new and revised edition includes a substantive new Preface by the author and an updated Bibliography.

A guided tour through the National Gallery of Art’s historic photography collection, from early experimental photographs to contemporary pieces In 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe chose the National Gallery of Art as the custodian of nearly 1,600 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, the Key Set as it has become known. With the formation in 1990 of the Gallery’s department of photographs under Sarah Greenough, the collection has grown to 14,000 works of art, an assemblage that both charts the development of the medium and reveals the beauty and dynamic versatility of photography over its course of more than 175 years. This elegant book presents some of the most significant and compelling photographs acquired over the years, ranging from experimental photographs made in the earliest years of the medium’s history to key works by major twentieth-century figures and contemporary pieces that reset the ways in which photography shapes our experience of the modern world. The guides on this enlightening walk through the history of the medium are members of the extraordinary curatorial team that established the National Gallery’s international reputation for photography exhibitions and publications over the past twenty-five years, ever advancing the recognition of photography as a fine art.

The author shares her struggles with infertility on the road to motherhood.

Can you imagine not being able to speak or communicate? The silence, the loneliness, the pain. But, inside you disappear to magical places, and even meet your best friend there. However, most of the time you remain imprisoned within the isolation. Waiting, longing, hoping. Until someone realises your potential and discovers your key, so your unlocking can begin. Now you are free, flying like a wild bird in the open sky. A voice for the voiceless. Jonathan Bryan has severe cerebral palsy, a condition that makes him incapable of voluntary movement or speech. He was locked inside his own mind, aware of the outside world but unable to fully communicate with it until he found a way by using his eyes to laboriously choose individual letters, and through this make his thoughts known. In Eye can Write, we read of his intense passion for life, his mischievous sense of fun, his hopes, his fears and what it's like to be him. This is a powerful book from an incredible young writer whose writing ability defies age or physical disability - a truly inspirational figure. Foreword by Sir Michael Morpurgo A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Jonathan Bryan's charity, Teach Us Too. http://www.teachustoo.org.uk/

After enduring a vicious bear attack in the Russian Far East's Kamchatka Peninsula, a French anthropologist undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that forces her to confront the tenuous distinction between animal and human. In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear. In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.

This is not a hoax. Jim Theis was a real person, who wrote The Eye of Argon in all seriousness as a teenager, and published it in a fanzine, Osfan in 1970. But the story did not pass into the oblivion that awaits most amateur fiction. Instead, a miracle happened, and transcribed and photocopied texts began to circulate in science fiction circles, gaining a wide and incredulous audience among both professionals and fans. It became the ultimate samizdat, an underground classic, and for more than thirty years it has been the subject of midnight readings at conventions, as thousands have come to appreciate the negative genius of this amazing Ed Wood of prose.