The Complete Guide To The Quiet Man

John Ford's Oscar-winning film The Quiet Man (1952), based on the story by Maurice Walsh, is one of the best-loved and most popular of all time, and currently also one of the best-selling videos. This new paperback edition of The Complete Guide To The Quiet Man is a celebration of every aspect of the film - the background, the stars, the shooting, the screenplay, the influences, and the many legends and stories that have grown up around it. This book could just as easily have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Quiet Man" - the shooting locations with dozens of detailed maps; a very comprehensive cast and crew list; hundreds of photographs taken by both amateurs and professionals; an in-depth analysis of every word of the dialogue; video timings of all the scenes; and above all the inside story and a thorough discussion of the whole Quiet Man phenomenon, which have all led to one of the greatest cult movies of all time. Book jacket.

Ang Lee (b. 1954) has emerged as one of cinema's most versatile, critically acclaimed, and popular directors. Known for his ability to transcend cultural and stylistic boundaries, Lee has built a diverse oeuvre that includes films about culture clashes and globalization (Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994, and The Wedding Banquet, 1993), a period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a martial arts epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a comic book action movie (Hulk, 2003), and an American western (Brokeback Mountain, 2005). The Philosophy of Ang Lee draws from both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to examine the director's works. The first section focuses on Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist themes in his Chinese-language films, and the second examines Western philosophies in his English-language films; but the volume ultimately explores how Lee negotiates all of these traditions, strategically selecting from each in order to creatively address key issues. With interest in this filmmaker and his work increasing around the release of his 3-D magical adventure The Life of Pi (2012), The Philosophy of Ang Lee serves as a timely investigation of the groundbreaking auteur and the many complex philosophical themes that he explores through the medium of motion pictures.

This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores the cultural work done by these sites, why recognition of “Making of” sites as adaptations matters, and why our conception of adaptation matters. Part one focuses on the adaptive domain presented by the “Making of” John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Part two attends to “Making of” Gone with the Wind sites, and concludes with “Making of” The Lord of the Rings texts as the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in earlier chapters.

This book analyzes a film that drew much attention when it was released in 1952.

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture offers a compelling series of essays on changing images of Ireland from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It seeks to understand the various ways in which Ireland has been thought about, not only in fiction, poetry and drama, but in travel writing and tourist brochures, nineteenth-century newspapers, radio talk shows, film adaptations of fictional works, and the music and songs of Van Morrison and Sinéad O’Connor. The prevailing theme throughout the twelve essays that constitute the book is the complicated sense of belonging that continues to characterise so much of modern Irish culture. Questions of nationhood and national identity are given a new and invigorated treatment in the context of a rapidly changing Ireland and a changing set of intellectual methods and approaches.

A comprehensive and in-depth examination of the role of rural space in the cinema, contributing needed analysis to existing work on space, place, and identity in film.

John Ford's "The Quiet Man" (1952) is the most popular cinematic representation of Ireland, and one of Hollywood's classic romantic comedies. For some viewers and critics the film is a powerful evocation of romantic Ireland and the search for home; for others, it is a showcase for the worst stereotypes of stage-Irishry. Much of Irish cinema since the development of an indigenous film industry in the 1980s has set its face firmly against these mythic images of Ireland, but no film has yet attained the enduring appeal of "The Quiet Man". In this radical reappraisal of Ford's Oscar-winning film, Luke Gibbons traces its development from Maurice Walsh's original story (1933) and argues that its romantic excesses are a symptom of much darker undercurrents in the literary text, and the displacement of trauma that often underlies nostalgia. Moreover, Gibbons ably demonstrates how the film, rather than indulging in escapism, actually questions its own romantic illusions and the dream of returning to an Irish paradise lost.