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This book highlights the so far unappreciated merit of the Syrian playwrights, Durayd Lahham and Muhammad al-Maghout, whose plays are representative of the new wave of Arab theatrical realisation in general and Syrian protest plays in particular. "Ghawwar", the famous character type created by Lahham, combines art with politics, the past with modern times, lower class-consciousness and identity with Pan-Arab nationalism, and East with West. He also symbolizes a poetical link between the "bitter cup" of a miserable present, and the "holy rain" of a better future. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Disappointing look at a romantic genius
Rachel Dwyer spend many months interviewing Yash Chopra and his circle, accompanying him on film shoots, and meeting his extended family and the crew that has served him so well over many years.In a way, to use White House parlance, she has become "embedded" with her subject, to disappointing results.She seems unable to utter a single negative thing about "Yashji," perhaps due to this artificial, extended closeness, and her critical pronouncements suffer from a similar vagueness of effect.I am left unpersuaded that Yash Chopra's genius lies in his ability to reinvent himself a la Picasso for succeeding generations, or is it that (again like Picasso) he just has stayed around for longer than anybody else?Dwyer is far from helpful--just the reverse.Her book seems designed to confuse and delude the reader.There are several beautiful photographs among the pages, but you could practically visit Bollywood yourself for the price of this insanely overpriced volume.Instead, rent a few of Yash Chopra's movies and you'll feel the difference between a tenuous analysis and a life-changing artistic experience. ... Read more

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Until recently, when satellite television changed viewing habits, Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) could boast the remarkable distinction of having been constantly in distribution in India since its first release. Nargis, one of India's great screen stars, plays Radha, an industrious and strong-willed peasant woman who faces a series of tribulations. Her husband is maimed in a farming accident and flees the family home. She is in thrall to a malevolent moneylender, who lusts after her. Tempests destroy her crops and her home. Of the two sons who survive with her, one grows up to be traditionally obedient while the other rages against his life in the village. Radha's final test comes when she must decide between her love for her son and her commitment to the community.Based on new research into the Mehboob studio archives Gayatri Chatterjee outlines the film's eventful production history and the ambitious vision of its director. She illuminates many aspects of Mother India-performance styles of its cast, its reception and reputation, the film's mythological underpinnings, and its many references to the history of a country in transition.Illustrated ... Read more

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This important collection critically interrogates colonialism and nationalism in the context of the "invention" of South India's performing arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on the tension between modernity and tradition produced in the context of the metropolitan discourse. ... Read more

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The book proposes an ambitious new framework for understanding the distinctiveness of Indian cinema within a global context dominated by Hollywood. With its sudden explosions into song-and-dance sequences, half-time intermissions, and heavy traces of censorship, Indian cinema can be seen as a "cinema of interruptions." To the uninitiated viewer, brought up on the seamless linear plotting of Hollywood narrative, this unfamiliar tendency toward digression may appear random and superfluous. Yet this book argues that in the hands of imaginative directors, the conventions of Indian cinema become opportunities for narrative play and personal expression in such films as Sholay (1975), Nayakan (1987), Parinda (1989), Hathyar (1981), and Hey Ram! (1999).

Central to this study is the relationship Indian cinema shares with its audience, and an understanding of the pleasures it offers the cinephile. In articulating this bond, Gopalan presents a fresh framework for understanding popular Indian cinema and an important new contribution to film genre studies. ... Read more

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A comedy about a group of refugees who fled Sind at the time of the partition and now live in an apartment block in Bombay. ... Read more

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Blending a flair for textual nuance with theoretical engagement, Theaters of Desire not only contributes to our understanding of the most influential form of early Chinese song-drama in local and international cultural contexts, but adds a Chinese perspective to the scholarship on print culture, authorship, and the regulatory discourses of desire. The book argues that, particularly between 1550 and 1680, Chinese elite editors rewrote and printed early plays and songs, so-called Yuan-dynasty zaju and sanqu, to imagine and embody new concepts of authorship, readership and desire, an interpretation that contrasts starkly with the national and racially-oriented reception of song-drama developed by European critics after 1735 and subsequently modified by Japanese and Chinese critics after 1897. By analyzing the critical and material facets of the early song and play tradition across different historical periods and cultural settings, Theaters of Desire presents a compelling case study of literary canon formation.
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This is the first history of Japan's avant-garde underground theatre (angura) in a time of its most intense, creative, and original productions, viz. 1960-2000. It closely investigates the interrelationship of aesthetics and politics and explores contrasting examples of contemporary performance in relation to social context and cultural history. Part one considers the 1960s era of protest and theatrical invention. The second part examines theatre in the 1980s, a time of unprecedented economic boom. The final section considers the work of four of the most important companies of the 1990s and explores how they are grappling with manifold new political and artistic challenges. ... Read more

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Shyam Benegal is the best -known and most prolific contemporary filmmaker from India's arthouse or "New Cinema" tradition. From Benegal's first film Ankur (1974) through to the recent hit Zubeidaa (2000), his films have explored the contradictions and tensions of a society in rapid transition with a uniquely powerful focus on female protagonists.

Sangeeta Datta traces Benegal's career with its beginnings in political cinema and its realist aesthetic. She demonstrates how the struggles of women and the marginalized in Indian society have found an eloquent expression in films. The book also traces Benegal's work with collaborators including many of the biggest names in commercial cinema--Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, and more recently Karishma Kapoor, Govind Nihalini, A. and R. Rahman--developing a style and ethos uniquely his own.

In this first major overview of the director's work, Datta explains how Benegal presents both a stark contrast to Bollywood and yet also maintains many creative continuities both with commercial cinema and his distinguished predecessor Satyajit Ray. She shows how no other director has come close to painting such a compelling and vivid portrait of modern India. ... Read more

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Kegan Paul proudly introduces a collection of five of Ahmed Fagih´s works intended for the stage -translated from their original Arabic into English. Gazelles, the central play within the book, contains many of Fagih´s common themes. The story of Jabar, a Bedouin desert guide, and two westerners, Victor and Helena, the play examines many of the issues involved in the complex and delicate relationship between eastern and western cultures. All the plays published in this collection have already appeared in theatre productions. Filled with the same imagery and poetic fancy Fagih´s prose works are renowned for,will appeal to theatre aficionados and general readers alike. ... Read more

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First staged in 1892, the South Indian play Girls for Sale (Kanyasulkam) is considered the greatest modern work of Telugu literature and the first major drama written in an Indian language that critiqued British colonialism's effects on Indian society. Filled with humor, biting social commentary, parody, and masquerade, the plot revolves around a clever courtesan, a young widow, and a very old man who wants to buy as his wife a very young girl. Velcheru Narayana Rao has prepared the first idiomatic English translation, with notes and a critical essay. Itself a masterpiece of Indian literature in translation, this edition makes Apparao's work available to new audiences. ... Read more

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Any discussion that incorporates two such very different cultural institutions as the Jewish-Israeli theatre and the Palestinian theatre, must of necessity entail separate approaches, while at the same time also encompass the inherent ties between the two cultures. The Jewish-Israeli theatre is a complex and developed system in which the dispute with the Palestinians constitutes just one of the important components in its repertoire; while the Palestinians theatre, both within and outside of Israel, is still in the initial stages of consolidation. Dan Urian brings together these two approaches in the introduction of this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, by relating to the Palestinian theme as it appears in the Jewish-Israeli theatre and by attempting to characterize the Palestinian theatre in general. ... Read more

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The enchantment of the figure of the "male dan"--female impersonator--remains a residual element in the cultural imagination of many contemporary Chinese societies. To discuss "mistaken identity" and gender issues that relate to cross-dressing on the Chinese operatic stage, this book examines traditional dramatic texts, modern literary writings, critical writings, opera paintings, and contemporary movies. ... Read more

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Puppets of Nostalgia is the first major work in any Western language to examine the ritual origins and religious dimensions of puppetry in Japan. In a lucid and engaging style accessible to the general reader, Jane Marie Law describes the "life, death, and rebirth" of awaji ningy shibai, the unique form of puppet theater of Awaji Island that has existed since the sixteenth century. Puppetry rites on Awaji helped to maintain rigid ritual purity codes and to keep dangerous spiritual forces properly channeled and appeased. Law conducted fieldwork on Awaji, located in Japan's Inland Sea, over a ten-year period. In addition to being a detailed history and ethnography of this ritual tradition, Law's work is, at a theoretical level, a study of the process and meaning of tradition formation, reformation, invention, and revitalization. It will interest scholars in a number of fields, including the history of religions, anthropology, cultural studies, ritual and theater studies, Japanese studies, and social history. Focusing on the puppetry tradition of Awaji Island, Puppets of Nostalgia describes the activities of the island's ritual puppeteers and includes the first English translation of their performance texts and detailed descriptions of their rites. Because the author has lived on Awaji during extended periods of research, the work includes fine attention to local detail and nuanced readings of religious currents in Japan that affect popular religious expression. Illustrated throughout with rare photographs, the book provides an in- depth view of a four-hundred-year-old tradition never so thoroughly revealed to Western readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A much needed, study of the revival of Japanese folk a art
Travellers to, and scholars of, Japan have always marvelled at the wonderfully intricate and romantic Bunraku puppet theatre tradition.

However, few writers in the English language have ever gone beyond the form of the art which is known to us today to look at the root and branch of puppet tradition in Japan. Yet, though the Bunraku tradition can be said to be the ultimate evolved form of Japanese puppet art as a whole, in ignoring the traditions which gave raise to it students of the art are unable to appreciate some of the aspects of the art to their fill extent. This is why this work by professor Law is of such great import to the world of Japanese theatre arts. In deconstructing a single puppet theatre tradition - the Awaji Island school (possibly the oldest in Japan and probably the branch of the art from which most if not all later schools emerged) - right down to its most basic elements, the reader is made acutely aware of the fact that puppet arts did not spring into being, whole and immaculate, in the nineteenth century as some descriptions of the rise of Bunraku might have it, neither were they the product of the partnership of Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the Takemoto Theatre as other schools of thought maintain. Professor Law shows her audience quite clearly how and (the probable reasons) why puppet arts became important to the Japanese people and - which is more - why they retained their popularity long into the Early Modern era when such arts were being almost universally discarded or marginalized on the continent. She reminds us of the socio religious aspects of the art which have become so divorced from the very touristy puppet theatre traditions which form the of the Bunraku Association and presents to the reader physical evidence of the survival of other, older traditions which are equally deserving of study as the monotheistic National Puppet theatre (and, one might argue, which are far more deserving of recognition because of the way in which some of these traditions even now teeter on the brink of oblivion - driven there by the academic indifference of a century and more).

In brief then. A most marvellous book, which has opened up the world of Japanese puppet arts in a way never attempted before.

Clearly the most important work in this area of study for many decades. ... Read more

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Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge ("The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride"), universally known as DDLJ, opened to huge popular acclaim in India in 1995. Audiences flocked back to see it again and again. Directed by first-time filmmaker Aditya Chopra, it has since become the longest-running film in the history of Indian cinema and has changed the face of Bollywood. DDLJ was the first contemporary Hindi film to focus on Indian residents abroad (specifically, in this case, London). It's a heady cocktail of European locations, flashy cars, gorgeous mansions--a feast for a newly liberalized nation--and the hearty, rustic traditions of Punjab. DDLJ has spawned numerous imitations and epitomizes popular Indian cinema today. But, as Anupama Chopra points out, it's a paradoxical film that affirms old-fashioned values of premarital chastity and family authority, underlining the idea that Westernization need not affect an essential Indian identity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Nice.
Its nice. Interesting information about the making of a film that has acquired a cult like status amongst fans, Thus reading about it was nice. Not a bad buy at all.

Very helpful book, particularly for non-Indian Bollywood fans
As an American who only recently discovered Bollywood movies, I absolutely loved the classic Hindi movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge so much that I bought this book about it. The book is intended to be used as a college textbook for critical studies of the film in the context of motion pictures as an art and entertainment medium in contemporary culture. While I am not a student, I am interested in movies as a medium of art, and I am very interested in the Indian film industry in particular. This book helped satisfy those interests.

I found this book very helpful in understanding the movie's effect on Indian people, both those who have dispersed to other countries and those who remain in India. It also gave me insight to the actual making of the film and some history of Indian cinema and the careers of the cast and crew who made the film. Most importantly, it gave me greater understanding of Indian movies in general and the meaning of metaphors typically used in those films.

I would recommend this book to 1) students studying films and the film industry, 2) Bollywood enthusiasts, and 3) fans of Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and director Aditya Chopra.

My Favorite Bollywood Movie
This movie is beautiful. It is a long movie, but you will never know it because you become so engrossed in the story. The actress is beautiful and you really feel for her character.The gentleman who plays her father is great! The singing, dancing, and clothing are wonderful. I watch this one as often as I can.

The only thing I did not like - the special features did not have English captions, so you really couldn't enjoy them.

I also purchased the soundtrack to this movie.It is excellent and has more songs that were used in the movies. ... Read more

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Director in Action is the first book-length study on Johnnie To, whose art-house action hits include A Hero Never Dies (1998), The Longest Nite (1998), Running out of Time (1999), The Mission (1999), PTU (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), and Election 2 (2006). The book provides a comprehensive overview of To's career, concentrating on his action films. ... Read more