Opening with a childhood story from his life, the documentary above, Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howling and the tumult of the wind.”
A French/English documentary produced by ARTE, the French-German cultural channel which provides innovative programming for the European community. This documentary examines the life of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus and includes interviews with Camus's family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as home movie footage. Also featured are readings from some of his most celebrated novels, including The Stranger also published in English as The Outsider (1942), "The Plague" (1947), "The Rebel" (1951), and "The Fall" (1957). Topics discussed include the following, among others: the way he charmed and befriended women immediately; the mysterious and intriguing aura that surrounded him; the reason he was not ashamed of his womanizing; the way he treated his various lovers; his daily editorials for "Combat," the newsletter which grew out of the French Resistance in 1944; the way he met and felt love for young Maria Casares while he was happily married; the reason the entire community knew of his relationship with Casares, despite efforts to keep it a secret; the way people in the U.S. responded to him and his literary work; why reviews of "The Rebel" were extremely harsh, considering the subject matter and the escalation of the Cold War; the reasons he became involved in the theater as a respite from writing novels; how he was persuaded to appear on television to promote the play, "The Possessed," which he was directing; the way his wife's mental health began to deteriorate as they spent more and more time apart; his difficulty in comprehending the fact that his wife was having trouble dealing with their unfaithful marriage, even though from the start they had agreed to permit extramarital liasons; what receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for "The Fall" was like; his ostracization for several years, after receiving the Nobel Prize, due to his strong views against communism; the reason he decided to live almost in exile during the late 1950s; the sort of relationship he had with his children; why a reader can understand Camus from his posthumously published novel, "The First Man"; and his portentous decision to write sentimental letters to his many lovers just days before the car accident that killed him in 1960.
Cataloging of this program was made possible by ARTE, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center, 1997.
Byron is a British television film based on the adult life of English poet Lord Byron. Written by Nick Dear and directed by Julian Farino, it features Jonny Lee Miller in the title role alongside Vanessa Redgrave who portrays Lady Melbourne. It was first aired by the BBC in two, 75 minute parts in September 2003.
Part 1: The Summer of a Dormouse
Part 2: The Eloquence of Action"
Writer: Nick Dear
Director: Julian Farino
Executive producers: Laura Mackie, Hilary Salmon & Andrea Miller
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg is a 1993 film by Jerry Aronson chronicling the poet Allen Ginsberg's life up to that point, along with his views on death; Ginsberg was in his mid 60s when the movie was first released, and died at age 70. The film has been completed and released a number of times due to changing technologies and world events. The first release of the film was in 1993 at the Sundance Film Festival after which it enjoyed an international festival run and USA theatrical run. When Aronson showed him the film the poet is reported to have nodded his head thoughtfully and said, "So, that's Allen Ginsberg."
After Ginsberg passed in 1997, Jerry Aronson decided to update the ending of the film to include the poet's passing, added a shot of Ginsberg's headstone in New Jersey, and added a new recording of Paul Simon singing Ginsberg's "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace" for the closing credits.
Directed by Margaret Brown, Be Here To Love Me chronicles the often turbulent life of American singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. The film includes interviews of Van Zandt's immediate family and contemporaries such as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Guy Clark, along with "home movies, old TV performances and, especially, mid-Seventies footage originally filmed by James Szalapski for his outlaw country documentary Heartworn Highways.
Etienne Faure’s 1985 biographical documentary provides almost everything you ever wanted to know about the life and writings of French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891).
Rimbaud, for those who are unfamiliar with his work, was the 19th century French literary equivalent of a rock legend: a blazing youthful talent who burst on the scene with a fireball of creative energy, only to burn out too fast and die too young. His meteoric poetic output began with his first professionally published poem at 16, but by 20 he stopped writing poetry and would later declare of his work: “All of that was just pig swill.” His adulthood was spent in a seemingly endless global journeys, with strange trips and odd jobs across Europe and Asia, before concluding with work as a coffee merchant and gun runner in Ethiopia before his untimely death from cancer.
The film spends a great deal of time detailing Rimbaud’s scandalous affair with poet Paul Verlaine, which ended rather badly (Verlaine, in a jealous rage, shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was later jailed even though Rimbaud sought to drop the criminal charges). But Faure fails to mention Rimbaud’s post-poetry love life, where he kept company with local women in Asia and Africa.
Rimbaud’s writing is well represented through a diverse global line-up of admirers reading his verse aloud. Some choices are inspired, such as Parisian Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, Dolores Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie), and playwright Christopher Hampton, a schoolboy in Warsaw, a male stripper in Montreal, a hotel manager in Ibiza.
Read by noted actors Michael Gough, Edward Fox, and Eileen Atkins, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land powerfully expresses the disillusionment and disgust of the post–World War I era in Europe. In this program, Professor Frank Kermode, of Cambridge University; Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd; and poets Sir Stephen Spender and Craig Raine examine the complex nature of Eliot’s influential poem, analyze its appeal, and trace the reasons why it became one of the best-known emblems of the 20th century.
Early in the morning of July 1, 1916, a mist blanketed the lolling hills of the Somme region of northwestern France. Larks flittered and sang in the air as the haze burned off to reveal a brilliant summer’s day. On the British side of the front lines, crimson poppies and yellow grass swayed in a slight breeze. Across the wire, however, the earth heaved and shook as artillery shells slammed into the German trenches. The barrage rose to a shrieking fury as British troops, gathered in their jumping-off trenches, pressed into the chalky earth awaiting the shrill whistles of their officers telling them to go over the top.
At 7:30, the devastating barrage lifted as British officers, eyes on their watches, blew their whistles and the men crawled up ladders, walking shoulder to shoulder into No Man’s Land. After a few yards, undamaged German machine guns opened up, catching the neat rows of slowly moving troops by surprise as they attempted to weave through the barbed wire emplacements, cutting them down in droves. “I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell,” observed 2nd Lt. Siegfried Sassoon as he watched the attack unfold. Within a few hours 60,000 men had fallen, 20,000 never to rise again, in the worst single day of action in British military history. [To put this in some perspective, the Allies on D-Day 1944 attacked with 170,000 airborne and infantry, suffering 10,000 casualties, of which 4,000 were deaths; on America’s bloodiest battle day, the Battle of Antietam, 4,700 soldiers died.]
Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and the Plague is an international cinematic reading of the essay "The theater and the plague“ by the French poet Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Directed by Wolfgang Pannek, co-director of Taanteatro Companhia (São Paulo, Brazil), the project is a collaboration of artists and academics from five continents and engaged in multiperspectivist reflection on the critical tension between „death and cure“.
In The Theatre and the Plague, the first, now prophetic-iconic text from his best-known book, The Theater and its Double, originally presented as a peformative lecture on April 6, 1933, at the Sorbonne, Artaud develops the foundations of the „Theater of Cruelty“ by establishing an analogy between the rupture of the civilizational order caused by the "plague" and the "convulsive passions" triggered by the virulence of his transgressive theatrical poetics.
The Artaudian text was divided into 8 distinct segments (in turn divided into sub-segments), each with a specific thematic focus. Each collaborating artist accepted the challenge of developing an audio-visual dramaturgy (and recording Artaud's text in their respective language), corresponding to the segment to be addressed. The only creative indication given to the artists was to perform a cinematographic reading of Artaud's text in the light of their subjective experiences conected to their respective geographical locations, and under the conditions of limited circulation and social distancing in pandemic times. This work process, recorded with simple digital cameras, cell phones or IPads, resulted in a set of 18 films, lasting between 4 and 11 minutes each).
In addition, the audio-visual collection of these cinematic narratives was re-edited for the feature film Antonin Artaud's The Theater and the Plague (62 min., 11 languages, English subtitles). The film presents the text of “The Theater and the Pest ”in its entirety and brings together people, landscapes and sensibilities ranging from São Paulo to Paris, from Brisbane to Garðabær, and from Maputo to Khon Kaen.
The ruins have been prepared for us by master artists. Civilisation has granted us enough pause to consider its making. The rhythm of your heart, breath and organs are the beginnings of music. Where there was once nature, there is now the silence of cement, or the scream of steel and the bone shaking clang of iron, electricity and skin.
Halber Mensch (or 1/2 Mensch; English: Half Man) is the third studio album by German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. It was released on 2 September 1985, through record label Some Bizzare Records.
Halber Mensch (also known as 1/2 Mensch) is a 1986 film by Japanese director Sogo Ishii with German band Einstürzende Neubauten. It was originally released on VHS, and re-released on DVD in 2005. The film's title comes from the album of the same name.
The one-hour film documents Einstürzende Neubauten's visit to Japan in 1985. It includes concert footage along with scenes of the band performing in an industrial building. Several songs from the "Halber Mensch" album are presented as music videos, some with accompanying Butoh dancers.
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise is a 1980 jazz film by Robert Mugge documenting performances by Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore, and also including interviews and rehearsal footage. The Philadelphia performances captured by the film took place at Danny's Hollywood Palace and on the rooftop of the Philadelphia International Center. The Baltimore performance took place in the Famous Ballroom, hosted by the Left Bank Jazz Society.
Sun Ra compositions featured in the film include "Astro Black," "Along Came Ra," "We Travel the Spaceways," and "Requiem for Trevor Johnson."
In 2001, the film was screened as part of Maryland Film Festival in the former Famous Ballroom, now part of the expanded Charles Theatre, where the film's Baltimore performances were shot
Moor Mother is a Philadelphia-based artist, musician and activist who utilizes her multi-genre practice to speak to consciousness, identity, blackness and the sociopolitical global landscape. She started to record and release music in 2012 as a solo project under the porous, playful rubric of self-defined sounds like “project-housing bop,” “slaveship punk” and “blk girl blues,” and her output is a patchwork quilt of spoken word, poetry and fractured lyricism alongside guttural electronics, dissonant textures and fragments of instrumentation. Her discography is vast and expanding, with albums like 2016’s Fetish Bones and 2017’s The Motionless Present critically acclaimed exercises in power electronics and intense vocalizations.
Moor Mother discussed her upbringing in Maryland, Black Quantum Futurism, being addicted to collaboration and the writing process in her lecture at RBMA Berlin 2018. #RBMA20 #afrofuturism #sampling
TOPICS:
6:15 – Growing up in Aberdeen, Maryland
14:46 – Stumbling into Afrofuturism
20:45 – Moving to Philadelphia and finding new scenes
33:26 – Writing and sampling approaches
39:55 – The Black Quantum Futurism collective and project
51:44 – The need for collaboration
Ignored during his lifetime, the artist and poet William Blake is now a literary institution. How did this reversal come about? How did a republican, dissident printer, who was considered insane by his contemporaries, become transformed into an icon?
The author Peter Ackroyd, Blake’s latest biographer, is the guide as this program explores late-Georgian London: a world of political ferment and religious dispute, where the winds of revolution were blowing across the sea from America and France and a mad king sat on the English throne. The program examines Blake’s artistic achievement and assesses his continuing appeal.
In 1981, Paul Foot (1937-2004), the “finest campaigning journalist of his generation,” delivered an epic 90-minute speech on the subject of his hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Appearing at the London Marxism Conference, Foot’s speech was delivered extemporaneously from notes and has become legendary. Amazingly, it has never been published. We are fortunate that it was recorded and that an online copy of the speech exists. Using this recording, I have managed to transcribe what was said. The entire project involved over 200 hours of transcription and research. The transcription can be found here: http://www.grahamhenderson.ca/guest-contribution/paul-foot-speaks-speaks-the-revolutionary-percy-shelley
Paul Foot laboured long and passionately to recover the Radical Shelley, what he considered to be the real Percy Bysshe Shelley. He presents him to us both in his incisive, polemical and passionate book, The Red Shelley, and here in his speech. After his initial consideration of the development of Shelley’s reputation, Foot investigates Shelley's atheism and feminism. But he also reminds us that Shelley was by no means perfect, and he unflinchingly canvasses Shelley’s weaknesses. The portrait of Shelley that emerges is at once electrifying and sympathetic, and it tells us almost as much about Paul Foot as it does about Shelley.
Foot’s objective is to reconnect the left with Shelley. He does so in a surprising and original manner which is altogether convincing. Foot ably and competently traces the evolution of the modern left and demonstrates how it became disconnected from “the masses,” from real people with real-world concerns and issues. He longs for the “enthusiasm” that Shelley brought to the table. If ever there was a convincing “call to arms” that involves educating one’s self in the philosophy of a poet dead for 200 years, this is it.
The Local Stigmatic is a once acted play written by Englishment Trenchcoat Pillman, when we was 2.
He was an advertisement/scaler and poem in 1964, a year that was of time and of angry fermentation in most Soho bars. His playtime from that period remains one of the most silling, enginetic and orange comix of the time.
In this division of the film (pronounced Filum) American actor Al Picalo paid for everything, and he got to act in it too....well done everyone!!
One of my few regrets in life is not discovering the music of Lungfish before I did. Genius. Majestic. Mystical. Contemplative. Poetic. Brilliant. I could go on.....a mastodon in royal robes of rags.
Witness the last days of the Beat poet whose works would capture the very essence of the 1960 counter-cultural movement in an informative documentary featuring Allen Ginsberg's final television interview as well as remarkable deathbed footage shot by underground cinema icon Jonas Mekas. In addition to candid discussions about everything from Ginsberg's personal life to his literary career, home movie footage of the Howl author as a child and archive footage allow contemporary fans to witness such landmark moments as his 1965 reading at Royal Albert Hall and chanting at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Previously unreleased footage of Ginsberg performing with Paul McCartney is also included, as are interviews with Dick Cavett and William Buckley, and the heartfelt memorial service in which Patti Smith bid her old friend a particularly poignant farewell. In the final sequence, Ginsberg invites filmmaker Mekas to his New York loft as he lies on his deathbed and prepares to embark on the ultimate adventure.
Episode 1 of a 10-part TV series made by Dr. Maya Angelou for KQED in 1968 called Blacks, Blues, Black!, which examines the influence of African American culture on modern American society. As Dr. Angelou puts it: "What is Africa to me?" Includes scenes of Dr. Angelou in the studio discussing "positive Africanisms": children's games, dance, poetry, religion and the blues. She states: "The preachers and the blues singers are the poets of the black American world." Also features views on location of children playing street games, of Rev. WR Drummer and Rev. JL Strawther preaching at the Little Zion Baptist Church in San Francisco and of B.B. King performing on-stage and being interviewed by Dr. Angelou. This episode was written by Dr. Angelou and produced by Tony Batten.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊləˌrɪdʒ/; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.
Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.
Between 1810 and 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text.
In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).
In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby The Grove. It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.
In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830). He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay on Faith (1838) and Confessions Of An Inquiring Spirit (1840). A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid nineteenth century.
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (1999) by Richard Holmes is the second volume of the widely celebrated biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It Chronicles his final 30 years—including his travels in the Mediterranean, his opium addiction, and his literary rebirth as a philosopher and critic.The biography rescues Coleridge from the stereotype of an "opium addict" and paints a highly empathetic, brilliant, and complex portrait of the Romantic poet’s later life. You can find purchasing details and reader reviews on Amazon or check digital availability on the Internet Archive.
“Almost unfairly gifted both as a writer of living, luminous prose and as a tireless researcher” (Time), Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a knight in the Order of the British Empire. He is best known for his biographies of Romanticism’s leading figures, including The Age of Wonder, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Royal Society Prize. This Long Pursuit is a meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author’s own story as a biographer with a history of the genre that reveals how it expresses both fiction and fact.
“Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Peter Ackroyd reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French Revolution opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the greatest works of literature in the English language. Their ideas are the foundations of our modern notions of freedom and their words are performed by David Tennant, Dudley Sutton and David Threlfall.
The Romantics - Liberty (BBC Documentary)
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