Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, cinema, film, film criticism, Frankfurt school, left, modernism, narrative, politics
“Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—who have lived and worked together since the 1950s—may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.
Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Hölderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.”
Publisher University of California Press, 1995
Open access
ISBN 0520089081, 9780520089082
xiii+303 pages
Reviews: Ulrich Kriest (Medienwissenschaft 1997, DE), Margret Eifler (The German Quarterly 2000).
Comment (0)Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (1970–) [DE, EN, ES, PT]
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, commodity fetishism, economics, epistemology, Frankfurt school, knowledge, labour, marxism, philosophy, production, real abstraction, value
In this book, the economist and philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel attempts to “establish the relationship between the capitalist commodity form and the origin of the distinction between manual and intellectual labor. His theory of knowledge is constructed after an elaborate consideration and criticism of two schools of thought. On the one hand, he criticizes the effort of bourgeois science to assert the independent nature of science and to formulate ahistorical laws of the development of knowledge in terms of non-empirical, metaphysical characteristics of Reason. On the other hand, he also challenges orthodox Marxist theories of ideology in which knowledge is viewed as mechanistically derived from activity in the economic base.” (from a review by Gilda Zwerman, Theory and Society, 1982)
German edition
First published by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1970
Revised and expanded edition published by VCH, Weinheim, 1989
ISBN 352717690X
226 pages
via discofiasko
English edition
Publisher Macmillan, 1978
ISBN 0333230450
216 pages
via jlw
Commentary: Alberto Toscano (2005), N Pepperell (2007), David Black (2009), David Black (2013), Joseph Belbruno (2012), Ross Wolfe (2014).
New English edition in preparation
Geistige und körperliche Arbeit (German, revised ed., 1970/1989)
Intellectual and Manual Labour (English, 1978, 7 MB, OCR’d version added on 2014-5-4 via Marcell Mars)
Trabajo intelectual y trabajo manual (Spanish, 1979)
Trabalho espiritual e corporal (Portuguese, trans. Cesare Giuseppe Galvan, HTML, undated, unpaginated)
Lucien Goldmann: Cultural Creation in Modern Society (1971/1976)
Filed under book | Tags: · Frankfurt school, marxism, mass media, philosophy, proletariat, sociology
These six essays offer an excellent overview of Goldmann’s philosophy and sociology. They include not only some of his last writings on mass media and mass culture, new forms of literary creativity, and avant-garde theatre and cinema, but also some of his last thoughts on the problems of social change and political organization in advanced capitalist society. (from the Introduction)
Also included are commentaries on Goldmann’s work by Jean Piaget and Herbert Marcuse.
Originally published as La Création culturelle dans la société moderne, Denoel, Paris, 1971
Introduction by William Mayrl
Translated by Bart Grahl
Bibliography and Appendices compiled by Ileana Rodriguez and Marc Zimmerman
Publisher Telos Press, St. Louis, MI, 1976
ISBN 0631182209
173 pages
via fading aesthetic
Commentary (Miriam Glucksmann, New Left Review, 1969)
PDF (updated to an OCR’d version on 2014-5-8 via Marcell Mars)
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