Böcker av James Harvey

Where does the real history of anti-capitalism begin? Not with Karl Marx. Anti-capitalism has many dimensions and differs across national cultures and historiographies. From before the French Revolution to the skeptics of Twentieth Century globalization, I argue we should not see anti-capitalism as a monolithic idea but one of many different ideas, varying according to political circumstances and social environments. Given the rise of radical politics in our day, we should trace discontent with contemporary economic policy to its very roots, find what alternatives were proposed, the responses from their critics, and issuing our own. Anti-capitalism is not just speaking of alternative states or business models as so much of a different character altogether.

An intimate, thought-provoking exploration of the mysteries of "star presence" in cinema"'One does not go to see them act,' wrote James Baldwin about the great iconic movie stars Wayne and Davis and Bogart, 'one goes to watch them be' . . . Of course. It seems obvious . . . Where else besides the movies do you get to see other persons so intimately, so pressingly, so largely even? Where else such intense and close, such sustained and searching looks as you have of these strangers on the screen, whoever they really are? In life you try not to stare; but at the movies that's exactly what you get to do, two hours or more-safely, raptly, even blissfully."It's this sort of amplified, heightened, sometimes transcendent "seeing" that James Harvey explores in Watching Them Be. Marvelously vivid and perceptive, and impressively erudite, this is his take on how aura is communicated in movies. Beginning where Roland Barthes left off with the face of Greta Garbo and ending with Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, Harvey moves nimbly and expertly through film history, celebrating actors and directors who have particularly conveyed a feeling of transcendence. From Marlene Dietrich to John Wayne to Robert De Niro, from Nashville to Jackie Brown to Masculine Feminine and the implicitly or explicitly religious films of Roberto Rossellini and Carl Theodor Dreyer, this is one man's personal, deeply felt account of the films that have changed his life. They will also, Harvey suggests, change yours.

A masterly work of American film and cultural history by a critic who, "like Pauline Kael, has the gift of describing actors with terrific acuity."-New York Times

Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates and John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?

"In 1934 four movies-- It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, The Thin Man, and The Gay Divorcee --ushered in the golden age of the Hollywood romantic ("screwball") comedy. Slangy, playful, and "power"