Theater of cruelty : art, film, and the shadows of war / Ian Buruma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Buruma, Ian.

Series:

New York Review Books collection

New York Review books collections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

World War, 1939-1945--Motion pictures and the war.

World War, 1939-1945.

War and motion pictures.

World War, 1939-1945--Art and the war.

World War, 1939-1945--Literature and the war.

War films--History and criticism.

War films.

National socialism in motion pictures.

Violence in motion pictures.

War in art.

National socialism in art.

Violence in art.

Genre:

Art and the war.

Art.

Physical Description:

xiii, 423 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York Review Books, 2014.

Summary:

Theater of Cruelty has three main themes that frequently overlap: war, film, and the visual arts. Many of the movies discussed are about war and violence, often related to World War II, and more specifically deal with the two nations that unleashed the war, Germany and Japan: why they did what they did, and how they came to terms with it afterward or didn't. Other essays in the collection, about the diaries of Harry Kessler and Anne Frank, the bombing of German cities, Japan's kamikaze pilots further explore these themes. Many of the artists discussed by Buruma were German or Japanese, including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Tsuguharu Foujita, as were the filmmakers Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, all of whom were affected in one way or another by fascism and its terrible consequences. Theater of Cruelty is less about war itself than the way people deal with violence and cruelty, in the arts and in life.--Amazon.com.

Contents:

Introduction

1. The Joys and Perils of Victimhood

2. Fascinating Narcissism: Leni Riefenstahl

3. Werner Herzog and His Heroes

4. The Genius of Berlin: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

5. The Destruction Germany

6. There's No Place Like Heimat

7. The Afterlife of Anne Frank

8. 0ccupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel

9. The Twisted Art of Documentary

10. Ecstatic About Pearl Harbor

11. Suicide for the Empire

12. Eastwood's War

13. Robbed of Dreams

14. The Catty Chronicler: Harry Kessler

15. The Believer

16. The Last Bengali Renaissance Man

17. The Way They Live Now: Mike Leigh

18. The Great Art of Embarrassment

19. The Invention of David Bowie

20. Dressing for Success

21. The Circus of Max Beckmann

22. Degenerate Art

23. George Grosz's Amerika

24. Mr. Natural

25. Obsessions in Tokyo

26. A Japanese Tragedy

27. Virtual Violence

28. AsiaWorld

Sources

ISBN:

9781590177778

1590177770

OCLC:

875674756