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Research paper topic: Arthur Miller And Tennessee Williams, Including A Streetcar Named Desire - 4340 words

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Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, film, 1951) and Death of a Salesman (1949). He directed the Academy Award-winning films Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and On The Waterfront (1954), as well as East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and The Last Tycoon (1976). His two autobiographical novels, America, America (1962) and The Arrangement (1967), were turned into films in 1963 and 1968. Bibliography: Koszarski, Richard, Hollywood Directors, 1941-1976 (1977). Jolson, Al -------------------------------- (johl'-suhn) The singer Al Jolson, b.

Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, c.1886, d. Oct. 23, 1950, immigrated with his family to Washington, D.C., around 1895. After a long apprenticeship as a singer in burlesque, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, he won (1911) his first important role in the Broadway show La Belle Paree. Jolson's style was notable for its vigor and volume, its blatant sentimentality, and for his use of blackface, a leftover theatrical convention from the already moribund minstrel show.

His work--especially his film roles, beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927), the first major sound picture--won him a large audience during his lifetime. Jolson was awarded the Congressional Medal of Merit posthumously for his many overseas tours of wartime army camps, the last at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Bibliography: Friedland, Michael, Jolson (1972). Discography:Best of Al Jolson: Steppin' Out and California, Here I Come (1911-29). Duchamp, Marcel -------------------------------- (doo-shahm') Marcel Duchamp, b. July 28, 1887, d. Oct.

2, 1968, was a French painter and theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential figures of avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was influenced chiefly by Paul CEZANNE and Fauve color (see FAUVISM), Duchamp developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version of facet CUBISM (similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted successive movements of a single body. It closely resembled the multiple exposure photography documented in Eadward MUYBRIDGE's book The Horse in Motion (1878). In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which caused a scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same year he developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and inscribed a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship.

Duchamp's ready-mades are ordinary objects that are signed and titled, becoming aesthetic, rather than functional, objects simply by this change in context. Dada aimed at departure from the physical aspect of painting and emphases in ideas as the chief means of artistic expression. In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York City, where he was befriended by Louise and Walter Arensberg and their circle of artists and poets, which constituted New York Dada. That same year he began his major work, The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a construction of wire and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent glass. In 1918 he completed his last major painting, Tu m', a huge oil and graphite on canvas, a unique combination of real and painted objects and illusionistic and flat space. Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting (1923) after 20 works and devoted himself largely to the game of chess. Nevertheless, by 1944 he had secretly begun sketches on a new project, and between 1946 and 1949 created his last work, the Etant Donnes (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

BARBARA CAVALIERE Bibliography: Alexandrian, Sarane, Duchamp (1977); d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and McShine, Kynaston, eds., Marcel Duchamp (1973); Duchamp, Marcel, From the Green Box, trans. by George H. Hamilton (1957); Golding, John, Duchamp (1973); Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2d ed. (1970); Tomkins, Calvin, The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966). Renoir, Jean -------------------------------- (ren-wahr') One of the greatest and best-loved of all French filmmakers, Jean Renoir, b. Sept.

15, 1894, d. Feb. 13, 1979, the second son of the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, exercised a major influence on French cinema for almost 50 years. From his beginnings in the silent era, aspects of his mature film style were apparent: a love of nature, rejection of class values, and a mixture of joy and sorrow. Some of his earliest films were made with his wife Catherine Hessling as star, among them an interpretation of Zola's Nana (1926), and The Little Match Girl (1928). During the 1930s Renoir was at the top of his form in two celebrations of anarchy, La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) and Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932). A new social concern appeared in Toni (1935), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), and especially La Vie est a nous (People of France, 1936), made for the French Communist party during the heyday of the Popular Front.

Renoir's reputation, however, rests mainly on A Day in the Country (1936, completed 1946), based on a bittersweet de Maupassant story; a free adaptation of Gorki's The Lower Depths (1936); and the widely acclaimed Grand Illusion (1937). Two very different masterpieces written and directed by Renoir, the tightly structured The Human Beast (1938) and the largely improvised Rules of the Game (1939)--which perfectly captured the mood of France before its collapse in 1940--crowned this prolific period. Renoir spent the war years in Hollywood, but even the best of his films made in the United States, such as The Southerner (1945) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), lack the excitement of his prewar work. He found a new approach and a new philosophy in India, where he made his first color film, The River (1950), before returning to Europe to make the colorful and relaxed films of his maturity: The Golden Coach (1952), French Can Can (1954), and Paris Does Strange Things (1956). Always an innovator, Renoir used television techniques in the 1959 filming of Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier and Picnic on the Grass, the latter strongly evocative of the sun-filled landscapes beloved by his father.

For his last film, The Elusive Corporal (1962), set in World War II, he returned to themes earlier explored in Grand Illusion and The Lower Depths. Renoir's considerable influence on the French New Wave directors of the late 1950s can be seen especially in the films of Francois Truffaut. ROY ARMES Bibliography: Bazin, Andre, Jean Renoir, ed. by Francois Truffaut (1973); Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir--The World of His Films (1972); Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir (1974); Gilliatt, Penelope, Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, and Reviews (1975); Renoir, Jean, My Life and My Films (1974). Melies, Georges -------------------------------- {may-lee-es'}^A major contributor to the development of world cinema in its formative years, the Frenchman Georges Melies, b. Paris, Dec. 6, 1861, d.

Jan. 21, 1938, began his career as a conjurer. He was attracted to the cinema immediately after seeing the first Lumiere showings in 1895 and soon developed his own distinctive studio-based style. Melies was fascinated by the spectacle and trickery possible in the cinema, and his hundreds of little films, mostly dealing with fantastic subjects, are full of dancing girls and acrobatic devils, awe-inspiring disasters and miraculous transformations. For 10 years after 1896, Melies's Star Film company was a dominant force in the film industry, producing such inventive and amusing short subjects as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and New York-Paris by Automobile (1908).

His production methods and conception of film action as a sequence of tableaux, however, gradually became outdated. He ceased production in 1912 and was reduced to poverty. ROY ARMES Bibliography: Hammond, Paul, Marvellous Melies (1974). neorealism -------------------------------- Neorealism as an Italian literary movement can be said to have begun in 1929 with Alberto MORAVIA's Time of Indifference (Eng. trans., 1932), a novel that unflinchingly addressed highly sensitive moral, social, and political issues during the early repressive years of Mussolini's dictatorship. The movement developed slowly, however, until the overthrow of the fascist regime in 1943.

Neorealist novels of the next 12 years by such disparate writers as Vasco PRATOLINI, Domenico Rea, and Italo CALVINO focused on the plight of working-class people and thus represented a break with the elitist tradition that had characterized Italian literature for centuries. Neorealism, both as a style and as a political outlook, became even better known internationally through the 1940s and postwar films of Italian directors Luchino VISCONTI (Ossessione, 1942; La Terra Trema, 1948), Roberto ROSSELLINI (Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1947), and Vittorio DE SICA (Shoeshine, 1946; The Bicycle Thief, 1948; Umberto D., 1952). SERGIO PACIFICI De Sica, Vittorio -------------------------------- (day see'-kah) The Italian film director and actor Vittorio De Sica, b. July 7, 1901, d. Nov.

13, 1974, achieved international recognition after World War II for his important contributions to Italian neorealistic cinema as well as for his numerous, mostly comic, starring roles. Trained in the 1920s for the stage, De Sica won success as a film actor in the 1930s and directed his first film, Rose Scarlette, in 1940. The Children Are Watching Us (1942) marked the beginning of his long collaboration with the screenwriter and theorist of neorealism Cesare Zavattini. Fame came with Shoeshine (1946), a harsh social commentary on war-ravaged Italy that exemplified the neorealist style. This was followed by Bicycle Thieves (1948), the story of an unemployed man's search for work; the fantasy Miracle in Milan (1951); and Umberto D (1952), a haunting portrayal of a poor and hopeless old man.

During the 1950s, De Sica appeared in more than 50 films, playing his most memorable role as the scoundrel-turned-hero of General della Rovere (1959). In the 1960s he concentrated on commercial successes, two of which--Two Women (1960) and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)--won Academy Awards. With The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), about the plight of Jews in Fascist Italy, De Sica returned to the social commentary, but not the style, of his earlier films. His last picture was A Brief Vacation (1973). GAUTAM DASGUPTA Losey, Joseph -------------------------------- {loh'-zee}^Although forced to abandon his career in the United States when blacklisted in the 1950s, Joseph Losey, b.

La Crosse, Wis., Jan. 14, 1909, d. June 22, 1984, went on to become an important director in the British film industry. After extensive stage experience, Losey made his first feature film, The Boy with Green Hair, in 1948. This was followed by several taut melodramas--The Lawless (1950), The Prowler (1951), M (1951; a remake of Fritz Lang's classic), and The Big Night (1951)--that some still consider his best work. In 1952, during a period in which he was forced to work pseudonymously, he moved to London.

There Losey gained international recognition with The Servant (1963), a film that marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with playwright Harold PINTER, later resumed in Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971). The charged atmospherics of these films also characterized such subsequent Losey efforts without Pinter as The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Mr. Klein (1977). WILLIAM S. PECHTER Bibliography: Hirsch, Joseph, Joseph Losey (1980); Leahy, James, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (1967); Losey, Joseph, Losey on Losey, ed. by Tom Milne (1968).

Visconti, Luchino -------------------------------- An aristocrat by birth and a Marxist by inclination, Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, b. Nov. 2, 1906, d. Mar. 17, 1976, is known both for his contributions to NEOREALISM and his frank aestheticism. After working with Renoir, he directed his first film, Ossessione (1942), an antecedent, and arguably one of the masterpieces, of neorealist cinema.

In the film self-destructive sexual passions are played out against a landscape of extraordinary beauty. Visconti used documentary techniques in his next film, La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), to describe the lives of peasants in a Sicilian fishing village. One of his favorite themes was the tension between family solidarity and the destructive power of family relationships, best expressed in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Damned (1969). Visconti's first film in color, Senso (1953), brilliantly portraying political and sexual conflicts during the Austro-Italian war of 1866, displayed the lavish attention to detail and love for period reconstructions that would become his hallmarks in such literary adaptations as The Leopard (1963), The Stranger (1967), Death in Venice (1971), and The Innocent (1978). GAUTAM DASGUPTA Bibliography: Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti (1973); Stirling, Monica, Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti (1979). Fellini, Federico -------------------------------- {fel-lee'-nee, fay-day-ree'-koh}^Federico Fellini, Italy's most famous filmmaker, b. Jan.

20, 1920, has worked with equal enthusiasm and undiminished energy as an exponent of neorealism, as the creator of symbolic fantasies, and as a popularizer of the flamboyant and grotesque. His personal signature is nowhere more evident than in the cinematic classics La Strada and La Dolce Vita.^After starting in Rome as a cartoonist and sketch writer, Fellini turned in 1939 to script writing, collaborating with Roberto Rossellini on such neorealist films as Open City (1945) and The Miracle (1948)--in which he also acted--before emerging as a director on his own. The White Skeikh (1952), his first solo effort, showed his inventiveness as a comic director, and I Vitelloni (1953), an evocation of the Rimini of his youth, demonstrated his insight into the provincial bourgeoisie. La Strada (1954), starring his wife Giulietta Masina, secured his position as a major director and won a 1956 Academy Award as the best foreign film. With its comedy and pathos, stunning visual effects, and haunting musical score, it prodded the viewer into an awareness of the quixotic nature of life that remains for Fellini a central truth.

This mood was continued in Nights of Cabiria (1956).^In later films Fellini began to explore more fully the relationship between reality and dream. La Dolce Vita (1960), a sensational indictment of the indolence and decadence of modern Rome, was followed by the more openly symbolic 81/2 (1963), in which Fellini used Pirandellian techniques to comment on his creative problems as an artist, and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). Critics were less happy with the exaggerations and thematic repetitiveness of Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), and Casanova (1976). All Fellini's strengths--and few of his excesses--coalesced in Amarcord (1974), a brilliantly nostalgic portrait of his boyhood in Rimini during the early years of the fascist era. This and his television film, The Clowns (1970), reveal the essentially autobiographical wellsprings of Fellini's art. City of Women (1981) returned to his dream theme.

His later films include And the Ship Sails On (1984) and Ginger and Fred (1986), which reunited Fellini and Masina on the screen. Bibliography: Bonadella, Peter, ed., Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism (1978); Fellini, Federico, Fellini on Fellini, trans. by Isabel Quigley (1976); Murray, Edward, Fellini the Artist (1976); Rosenthal, Stuart, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (1976). Antonioni, Michelangelo -------------------------------- {ahn-toh-nee-oh'-nee, mee-kel-ahn'-jel-oh}^Michelangelo Antonioni, b. Sept. 29, 1912, is an Italian director best known for a trilogy of films begun in 1959 that created a sense of despair through the juxtaposition of haunting visual imagery, elliptical, mysterious plots, and the portrayal of neurotic, empty lives. He began his career in the cinema as a film critic and scriptwriter and, after working with Roberto Rossellini and Marcel Carne, made his debut as a director in 1943 with the documentary Gente del Po (The People of the Po Valley).

Cronaca di un Amore (Chronicle of a Love, 1950), his first feature, represented a break with the neorealist tradition. Two later films, Le Amiche (The Friends, 1955) and Il Grido (The Cry, 1957), were slow-paced and deliberately obscure in narrative structure. Antonioni's distinctive style reached its highest expression in the trilogy L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1959), La Notte (Night, 1960), and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). In these films, and in the machine-dominated Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964), his first color film, mystery and eroticism merge in landscapes of compelling beauty. Antonioni's subsequent English-language films, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1975), and Identification Of A Woman (1982) had less success with the critics despite their stylistic interest. Bibliography: Cameron, Ian, and Wood, Robin, Antonioni (1969); Sarris, Andrew, ed., Interviews with Film Directors (1968). Wertmuller, Lina -------------------------------- {wairt'-muhl-ur}^A highly original and controversial Italian filmmaker, Lina Wertmuller, b.

c.1926, specializes in melodramatic tragicomedies characterized by an idiosyncratic blend of wit, irony, socialist dialectics, and sheer grotesquerie. She has taken on such themes as economic exploitation and the inability of the striving worker to rise above it in The Seduction of Mimi (1972), an anarchist's abortive attempt to assassinate Mussolini in Love and Anarchy (1973), the subordination of natural love to class interests in Swept Away (1975), and the insanities to which chauvinism--male or national--can lead in Seven Beauties (1976). In 1977 she directed her first English language film, The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in A Night Full of Rain. Her other films include Blood Feud (1978), A Joke of Destiny (1983), and Sotto Sotto (1985). She directed an off-Broadway play entitled Love and Magic in Mama's Kitchen (1983) and wrote the novel The Head of Alvise (1982).

Wertmuller has demonstrated rare ingenuity in mixing the tragic with the farcical but is more successful in communicating her love for human nature than any political message. ELEANOR M. GATES Bibliography: Ferlita, Ernest, and May, John R., Parables of Lina Wertmuller (1977). Guinness, Sir Alec -------------------------------- (gin'-es) Alec Guinness, b. Apr.

2, 1914, is an English stage and screen actor known particularly for his character roles and comic impersonations. He was a respected member of the Old Vic when roles in film adaptations of two Dickens novels--Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946) and Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948)--brought him a larger public. He became better known through bravura performances in such British film comedies as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). Guinness received an Oscar for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and was knighted in 1959. Guinness subsequently gave distinguished dramatic performances in Tunes of Glory (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Star Wars (1977).

Since 1980, Guinness has made several television appearances that further attest to his versatility as a character actor, including his highly acclaimed performances as George Smiley in the television miniseries "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1980) and its sequel, "Smiley's People" (1981)--both based on John LECARRE novels. Bibliography: Tynan, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: An Illustrated Study of His Work for Stage and Screen, 3d ed. (1961). Kurosawa, Akira -------------------------------- {koo-roh'-sah-wah, ah-kee'-rah}^The best-known Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa, b. Mar. 23, 1910, first achieved international recognition with Rashomon (1950)--a brilliant study of a crime of violence told from four different points of view--which won the 1951 Venice grand prize. His reputation within Japan, however, was based on a series of chambara (sword-fight) epics set in feudal times, such as Sugata Sanshiro (1943), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Yojimbo (1961).

Kurosawa has also dealt sensitively with contemporary themes in Ikiru (1952), about a lonely old man dying of cancer; High and Low (1963), a taut crime drama set in modern Yokohama; and Red Beard (1965), an indictment of social injustice. Known for his use of multiple cameras, extended takes, and tight editing, Kurosawa has made screen adaptations of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1951), Gorky's The Lower Depths (1957), and Shakespeare's Macbeth (Throne of Blood, 1957). Dersu Uzala (1976), which won an Academy Award, was made in the USSR. With Kagemusha (1980), he returned to Japan and to the medieval drama he has exploited so successfully in the past. His samurai adaptation of King Lear, Ran (1985), was both a critical and popular success.

Kurosawa's reminiscenses (Something Like an Autobiography, trans. by Audie E. Bock) were published in 1982. Bibliography: Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema (1975); Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965). Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema (1982). Pinter, Harold -------------------------------- {pin'-tur}^Harold Pinter, b.

Oct. 10, 1930, one of England's leading contemporary playwrights, studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began his theatrical career as an actor. He wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957, but first established himself as a highly original talent in 1960 with The Caretaker, a characteristic Pinteresque drama in its evocation of terror amid farcical "business" and sometimes fanciful dialogue. Typically, Pinter's solipsistic characters seek security, self-identification, and verification of truth but find communication virtually impossible. Instead, there are pathetic games, cliches, long silences, and sinister threats, all presented in suspenseful yet comic plots. Akin to the theater of the absurd, Pinter's plays have more accurately been called "comedies of menace."^In Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), for instance, two gangsters interrogate and terrorize a nervous young pianist. The Caretaker (1960) centers on an old derelict who intrudes on two mysterious brothers and is ultimately thrown out by them.

Pinter's reputation as an allusive and controversial dramatist grew significantly with The Homecoming (1965), in which a married couple visits the lower-class father and brothers of the husband, now a philosophy professor in the United States, and the wife finally remains in England to serve the family as a prostitute. Two later plays, Old Times (1971) and No Man's Land (1975), deal, respectively, with a middle-aged couple, their mysterious visitor (who once knew the wife), and the power of memory to wound; and the curious relationship between two elderly men of letters, one a success, the other a failure.^A less typical, lyrical Pinter double bill consists of the solitary reminiscences of a sentimental wife and her bluff but unimaginative mate (Landscape, 1968) and of a woman and two men with whom she once kept company (Silence, 1969). More characteristic of Pinter are the one-act plays The Dumb Waiter (1960), The Lover (1963), Tea Party (1965), and The Basement (1967).^Pinter has written screenplays for his own The Caretaker (1962) and The Birthday Party (1969) as well as for three films directed by Joseph Losey: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971). The controversial screenplay for the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981; John Fowles's novel) was also by Pinter. He also adapted Russell Hoban's novel Turtle Diary (1985) for the screen.

Since 1967 Pinter has also directed such plays as Simon Gray's Butley (1971; film, 1973) and Otherwise Engaged (1975). His most recent plays are Betrayal (1979; film, 1983, from Pinter's screenplay), and Family Voices (1981). In 1985 he directed Lauren Bacall in a London production of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. MYRON MATLAW Bibliography: Dukore, Bernard F., Where Laughter Stops: Pinter's Tragicomedy (1976); Esslin, Martin, The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (1970); Gale, Steven H., Butter's Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter's Work (1977); Hayman, Ronald, Harold Pinter (1973); Hinchliffe, Arnold, Harold Pinter (1975). Mizoguchi, Kenji -------------------------------- (mee'-zoh-goo-chee, ken'-jee) The Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi, b.

May 16, 1898, d. Aug. 24, 1956, is best known for his jidai-geki, or "period dramas," with their portrayal of the horrors of war, the lives of courtesans, and male-female relationships. His films (about 80) are wrought with a beauty and clarity unparalleled in Japanese cinema. Early productions dealt with the sufferings of women; his later efforts, such as Saikaku Ichidai Onna (The Life of Oharu, 1952), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954), reflect his meditative style, which is characterized by long takes, a virtually immobile camera, few close-ups, and slow dissolves. GAUTAM DASGUPTA Bibliography: Anderson, Joseph L., and Richie, Donald, The Jap anese Film (1959).

Ray, Satyajit -------------------------------- {ry, suht'-yuh-jit}^Satyajit Ray, b. May 2, 1922, is India's foremost film director. A versatile craftsman who has worked in several film genres, Ray is known best outside India for his moving depictions of Indian family life. His acknowledged masterpiece, the neorealist trilogy made up of Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959), lyrically chronicles the day-to-day activities of a rural Bengali family and the coming of age of the boy Apu. Two other outstanding Ray films, Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), deal with the changing nature of contemporary Indian life, whereas Charulata (1964) is a graceful adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's classic portrait of the Indian middle classes in the Victorian era.

In later films such as Aranyer din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), and Seemabadha (Company Ltd., 1971), Ray has focused on political and social themes without losing his humanistic perspective. He composed the music for many of his films, including the Ghare baire (Home of the World, 1984), based on Tagore's novel about the Bengal in the early 20th century. GAUTAM DASGUPTA Bibliography: Seton, Marie, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (1971). Bergman, Ingrid -------------------------------- Ingrid Bergman, b. Aug.

29, 1915, d. Aug. 29, 1982, was a popular stage and film actress in her native Sweden before going to Hollywood, where she made an English-language version of her Swedish hit Intermezzo (1939). Bergman was probably best known for her roles in Casablanca (1942); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943); Gaslight (1944), for which she received her first Academy Award; The Bells of St. Mary's (1945); and two Alfred HITCHCOCK films, Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). She returned to Europe after the scandalous publicity surrounding her affair with Italian director Roberto ROSSELLINI (whom she later married and divorced) during the filming of Stromboli (1950). But she returned to Hollywood and triumphed in Anastasia (1956), for which she received another Oscar.

She received a third for her role in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). She also starred in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). Her last role was in the television film A Woman Called Golda (1981). Bibliography: Bergman, Ingrid, and Burgess, Allan, Ingrid Bergman: My Story (1980); Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Ingrid Bergman (1970; repr. 1975).

Bergman, Ingmar -------------------------------- Ingmar Ernst Bergman, b. July 14, 1918, is a major Swedish filmmaker who for over 20 years has sustained a reputation as an artist of international stature. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Bergman attended Stockholm University and began his directing career in the theater, where he continues to work as extensively as he does in films. He wrote the screenplay for the director Alf Sjoberg's internationally acclaimed Torment in 1944, and the next year he directed his first film, Crisis.^Although Bergman's Illicit Interlude (1950) was moderately successful and the lighthearted Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) even more so, it was only after The Seventh Seal (1957), which made an extraordinarily powerful impression with its despairing philosophy and stark medieval imagery, that a widespread interest developed in such earlier Bergman films as The Naked Night (1953) and A Lesson in Love (1956). With The Seventh Seal, Bergman definitively established the theme that was to characterize virtually all his subsequent work--the individual's quasi-religious search for faith in a context of anguished doubt. This is central to such varied films as Wild Strawberries (1957), The Magician (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), and his "chamber" trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963).^By the mid-1960s Bergman had assembled a group of actors into a now familiar stock company, among them Max VON SYDOW, Liv ULLMANN, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Ingrid Thulin. In 1966 he undertook a greater formal experimentation with Persona, an intriguing psychological study of two women that is considered by many one of his most important works.

This was followed by a less successful Gothic exercise, Hour of the Wolf (1968); an antiwar allegory, Shame (1968); and a more realistic film, The Passion of Anna (1969). In the searing Cries and Whispers (1972), Bergman again used Gothic and dreamlike elements, this time in an intense exploration of the relationship among three sisters, but that film was followed by the naturalistic simplicity of Scenes from a Marriage (1974), a great popular success. Critics were less pleased with some of Bergman's later work, findin ...

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