The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge Film Classics)

Book Description

The Films of Joseph Losey examines the career of the expatriate director through a close analysis of five of his most important and challenging films. When his leftist politics made him a target of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities in 1951, the blacklisted Losey left America and continued his film career in England. Concerned mainly with the use and abuse of power inherent in intimate relationships, Losey also examined these issues as manifested in institutions and social classes. His finest films attack the injustices and hypocrisy rooted in the privileges of the English class system and frequently depict the moral failure of characters who betray their best instincts. The Films of Joseph Losey also examines Losey's close working relationships with playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter and actor Dirk Bogarde, his experimental form of storytelling, the psychological complexity of characters acting as narrator of their own stories, and the intricate handling of time in the structure of his films. Close studies of King and Country, The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between, and The Romantic Englishwoman confirm Losey's stature as a director of powerful and compelling films of both moral importance and great formal complexity.

Customer Reviews:

Time for a Losey renaissance, and this is your best bet!.......2006-06-30

Let this book on the key films of Losey's career be your first stop in the journey to discovering Losey's work. Joseph Losey is due for a major rediscovery, a well-deserved renaissance. For too long he has been relegated to the more esoteric shelves. To watch and study and enjoy his many movies is a real treat, to the dark, scary humor of The Servant to the resonating life lessions unveiled in The Go-Between (my favorite Losey film), to the harrowing, grimy, heartbreaking depths of King and Country is to become submerged in the provocative, moving work of a great artist. If you saw The Boy With The Green Hair as a child, it's unlikely that you'll ever forget it. Author Michael Riley and the others write with insightful acuity and illuminate several of Losey's major films to the point that you'll be rushing to the video store or searching on-line to experience for yourself the too neglected works of this master director.

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A ferocious battle

Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life
David Caute
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Criminal

ASIN: 0195064100

Book Description

Renowned for his mastery of light, texture, and pace, Joseph Losey was one of our most innovative and controversial directors--and perhaps our most star-crossed. Blacklisted during the McCarthyite fifties, Losey fled to Britain, where he achieved international acclaim with his 1963 film The
Servant, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles. That film marked the beginning of Losey's remarkable collaboration with the playwright Harold Pinter; it was followed by Accident, regarded by many as Losey's finest film, and The Go-Between, awarded the Palm d'Or at Cannes. It appeared that the
Hollywood exile would enjoy a long reign as the savior of British cinema. But his gifts ultimately failed him, limited by his bleak vision of life and the battle between the sexes.

Ranging from Losey's beginnings with experimental theatre in New York to his death in 1984 at the age of 75, author David Caute provide a compelling portrait of a hugely driven talent, whose creative generosity, alcohol addiction, and often brutal egotism continue to elicit fierce and wildly
divergent reactions. Drawing on candid interviews with Losey's associates and members of his casts and crews, Caute sheds important light on Losey's personal life, especially his ambivalent relationship with his mother Ina, a manipulatively flirtatious woman whom Caute believes inspired the lifelong
hostility towards women which surfaces unrelentingly in Losey's 31 films, as it did throughout his four marriages and countless affairs. Caute includes a provocative chapter probing Losey's turbulent relationships with his female stars, from Jeanne Moreau to Jane Fonda. Losey emerges as a man whose
life and career grew increasingly marred by deep contradictions. On the one hand, Losey was the first director to stage a Bertolt Brecht play in English, and at great personal risk accompanied the German playwright to his appearances before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Nonetheless,
the same Losey refused to fly without a seat in first class, and loved to flaunt his Cartier watch, a gift from Elizabeth Taylor. Tracing the growing excess that crept into Losey's personal and professional life following the success of his films with Pinter, Caute reveals how the increasingly
baroque style of Losey's later work, coupled with his corrosive pessimism, disappointed many who had admired not only his innovative camera work, but the austere social messages of his early films.

London's Sunday Express calls A Revenge on Life "meticulously researched, beautifully written....An object lesson in biography...among the very best works in this genre." And Dirk Bogarde, who collaborated with Losey on five of his best films, said of the book's treatment of Losey, "It has left me
with jaw agape. This is the old friend that I did not know but always suspected might be lurking about." Raising important questions about talent, ambition, and the art of film-making, A Revenge on Life is as illuminating as it is absorbing.

Customer Reviews:

A ferocious battle.......2007-08-30

David Caute paints a very fair political, psychological and professional portrait of the movie director Joseph Losey.

Losey was a child of the Great Depression. The dire straits of so many people turned him into a convinced leftist. It cost him dearly: he was blacklisted by Hollywood for being a `communist'.
He found work in Europe and the convinced leftist changed his attitude into `being on the left is already enough'.
He was an ambitious, energetic, tenacious person, who was also self-absorbed, self-destructive (alcoholism) and frustrated. In fact, he was never really happy. He was torn between, on the one hand, his Puritan morality (a work alcoholic desperate for work, shooting even commercials) and his rigid sense of responsibility and, on the other hand, the hedonistic existence of international show business.
Professionally, he was not a `movie author', but a writer's director, relying heavily on his screenwriters, e.g. Harold Pinter and David Mercer. He was a cinematographer, not an actor's director. Notwithstanding being a leftist, he didn't believe in message films, though, on the contrary, believed strongly in the star system.
His movie career was a long ferocious fight for and with projects, between Art and Profit. Once the budget was there, a continuous dirty battle with scripts, rights, actors, crew and producers (the money men) followed. And once the movie was finished and screened, a fierce exchange of arguments with movie critics, distributors and their marketing budgets turned into endless nightmares and an endless letter mails. Lack of box office success was one of the main reasons for the animosities.
He got also involved in battles between the super-egos of superstars (D. Bogarde: `What are you doing for the Welsh bastard (R. Burton)?')
His style is characterized by vacated space, track shots, separation of overheard conversation and image and clean cuts.

This book gives an extremely lively picture of the exhausting film business and is a must read for all movie fans.

The Proust Screenplay: a la Recherche du Temps Perdu

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Surprisingly convincing
Pinter takes a stab
Too bad this was never made into a movie.

The Proust Screenplay: a la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Harold Pinter , Joseph Losey , and Barbara Bray
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 080213646X

Book Description

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written. With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

Customer Reviews:

Surprisingly convincing.......2006-10-21

Summarizing Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is often seen as a hopeless endeavour, an undertaking so absurd it fit in perfectly with Monty Python humour and the reader must still be content with extracts of some passage or another unless he dares conquer the whole seven-volume masterpiece. In 1972, Nicole Stephane, who held the film rights to Proust's work, asked Joseph Losey if he would like to work on a film version. Losey turned to Pinter to write the screenplay, and THE PROUST SCREENPLAY was written over the following year.

The screenplay covers all of the Recherche, Pinter rejected any attempt to select one or two volumes as the center. The dramatic arc is twofold: on one hand the narrator moves toward disillusion in his personal life, but on the other hand all that has been lost (ultimately Time itself) is regained and then preserved permanently in the narrator's writing. The screenplay consists of 455 scenes, and just to give an idea of how compressed the narrative must be, the entire opening of "A la cote du chez Swann" up to "Un Amour de Swann" is represented in just fifteen pages of sparse script. But even with such trims, it is said that a film resulting from the screenplay would be about five hours long.

The action shifts among eras from scene to scene. Marcel sees M. Vinteuil's daughter and her lover in 1893, and in the next scene Albertine is telling him in 1901 of her esteem for the couple. Many scenes are single images. Scenes 134 and 135 are only of Saint-Loup looking at a photograph, 136 is only of an empty dining room in a hotel, and then 137 is of a band of girls on a cliff top in Balbec. However, there is a considerable amount of substantial dialogue here, especially in the tortured relationship of Marcel and Albertine. Of course, as this is a dramatic work by Pinter, we find the infamous "Pinter pause", but generally the voice is that of Proust, not the grim English playwright.

What a pity this film was never made. Although the common cinephile who has never read the Recherche wouldn't know the backstory of all characters and events, the film would still be a moving experience. For lovers of Proust's masterpiece, the screenplay is an opportunity to consider several portions of the novel in a new light due to Pinter's often relevatory telescoping of the story. At least the screenplay was printed and made widely available. If you've never read Proust, read him! And if you like the Recherche and are curious about a dramatization, do check out Pinter's creation.

Pinter takes a stab.......2003-10-30

Harold Pinter's screenplay of Proust's novel is commendable. It does not try to cram too much in, but instead relies on a more imagistic adaptation. Raoul Ruiz's recent movie "Time Regained" wasn't dissimilar--although named after the last volume, it really drew from the whole work. However, I have to feel that even so, it was of little interest to those not familiar with the novel. I think a movie based on Pinter's screenplay, as good as the screenplay is, would suffer the same fate. It would be a visual tone poem for the Proust fan, capturing one thing but leaving out a dozen others. The meat of the novel is in the narration, and I'm afraid the best way to translate it to the screen would be through a miniseries, even a regular series. It's the only medium that stands a chance at duplicating the scope of the novel. One has to remember that its great length is no accident, it helps constitute the very nature of the story. Pinter ought to expand his screenplay, like Proust expanded his early drafts of the recherche, to give a greater impression of the time lost, and give it to the BBC or something.

Too bad this was never made into a movie........2001-10-16

A screenplay of Proust's In Search of Lost Time sounds like a hopeless project. In the most recent translation, Proust's novel ran to over 4,000 pages. Reducing this to a screenplay would seem to require cuts of such magnitude that nothing of the novel would be left. Indeed, those movies that have been made of the novel usually are of a small part, like the Swann in Love section of Swann's Way. Pinter, however, managed to pull off the impossible. He concentrated on key events in the novel, and even more on key images. It is hard to say whether this would have worked with someone totally unfamilar with the material. However, presenting Proust's novel in any literal fashion would be impossible, and probably contrary to what he attempted to accomplish in his novel. Pinter's screenplay, for anyone who has read the novel, is a tremendous success. Unfortunately, it was never made into a movie.

The cinema of Joseph Losey (International film guide series)

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The cinema of Joseph Losey (International film guide series)
James Leahy
Manufacturer: A.S. Barnes
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0006D63JI

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The Cinema of Joseph Leahy.
Joseph]. Leahy, James. [LOSEY
Manufacturer: London & NY: A. Zwemmer/A.S. Barnes
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000UG7HWS

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Conversations with Losey
Michel Ciment
Manufacturer: Law Book Co of Australasia
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Dialog in Roman und Film: Untersuchungen zu Joseph Loseys Literaturverfilmungen "The go-between" und "Accident" (Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik)

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Dialog in Roman und Film: Untersuchungen zu Joseph Loseys Literaturverfilmungen "The go-between" und "Accident" (Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik)
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I luoghi della memoria: Harold Pinter sceneggiatore per il cinema di Losey (Ombra sonora)

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I luoghi della memoria: Harold Pinter sceneggiatore per il cinema di Losey (Ombra sonora)
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Invito al cinema di Joseph Losey (Invito al cinema)

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Invito al cinema di Joseph Losey (Invito al cinema)
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Joseph Losey
Edith De Rham
Manufacturer: Trafalgar Square
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Puzzle-loving kids will find big a-MAZE-ment on every one of these elaborately illustrated pages. Not only does every spread have a full-size, enjoyably challenging maze, but it often includes additional, smaller puzzles to increase the solving fun. Imagine: a wonderfully detailed maze set in a Hollywood studio: not only do you have to help two workers find their way out of the complex stage set they've built, but you also have to retrieve the movie star's poodle and locate a cable to plug in her hair dryer. And that's only on the left-hand page; the right side offers three more mini-mazes of varying difficulty. Plus, have a good time searching for the name of Conny the Parrot, hidden somewhere in every image.

Mega Australia Activity Book (Discover & Learn Collection)

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Mega Australia Activity Book (Discover & Learn Collection)

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Activities include Puzzles, Mazes, Wordsearches, Boardgames, Colouring, Bookmarks, Doorhangers, Crosswords, and Games.

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Ready for some unusual puzzle-solving fun? When you solve each of these 50 mind-bending mazes, the correct answer creates a picture. So grab a pencil and enjoy your visit to the Mega Maze Factory!

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Ready to explore some cool puzzles? When you solve each of these brain-bending mazes, the correct answer creates a picture. So grab a pencil and enjoy your journey through the Mega Maze Machine!

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Saban's Power Rangers Lost Galaxy Mega Maze & Puzzle Book
Dalmatian Press
Manufacturer: Dalmatian Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Book Description

A thoroughly revised second edition of the leader's concise guide to the process of creating and managing an organisation, no matter how complex, that will achieve unique competitive advantages and be poised to respond effectively and rapidly to customer demands.

In this book executives, managers, and consultants will find the concrete tools they need to select and implement an efficient design that creates superior and more competitive performance. In addition to analysing the four key forces shaping today's organisations -- buyer power, variety, change, and speed -- this new edition addresses the concerns of new economy by expanding on the section on the Flexible Organization and includes a new section on organising around the customer. The book:

Describes what leaders can do to effect the change process
Addresses the concerns of new economy companies
Contains rich examples from successful companies

Customer Reviews:

applied the knowladge.......2006-02-23

i have read this book with a great deal of intrest. it was a great help in implementing change and designing a organization structure that is able to deliver on the new strategy.

excellent resource.......2003-09-06

Really good intro to ideas and concepts needed to redesign an organization in terms of its structure. Best if you already have some degree of experience in do it so you can really apply the concepts.

Guide to the factors that shape organizational design.......2002-12-28

Jay R. Galbraith is an internationally recognized expert on organization design. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and Professor Emeritus at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. This book is a updated/revised edition of 'Designing Organizations' which was originally published in 1995. It is split up into 10 chapters.

Chapter 1 - Introduction - really sets the stage for the rest of the book. It discusses the six main organization shapers: the increase buyer power; increase in the number of products and services; the Internet; multiple dimensions (functions, products, and geography, but also customer segments, solutions or offerings, and channels and processes); the requirement for a capacity to change; and speed (in bringing products and services to the market).

The following two chapters discuss how companies have to shape their organizational design, strategy, and structure in order how to deal with these organization shapers. Galbraith introduces his copyrighted Star Model (Strategy, structure, people, rewards, and processes), which looks AND sounds very similar to McKinsey's 7-S framework. Chapters 4 and 5 build on these chapter and discuss how organizations have to link their processes to coordination needs and integrate group processes. Then, in Chapter 6 discusses the easily changeable or reconfigurable organization based on the Star Model, which, according to Galbraith, results from the skilled use of three capabilities: (1) forming teams and networks across organizational departments; (2) the use of internal prices, markets, and marketlike devices to coordinate the complexity of multiple teams; and (3) the forming of partnerships to secure capabilities that it does not have. Each of these capabilities are discussed in detail.

The Chapters 7 to 10 are all very current and fashionable. They discuss the organizing around the customer, customer-focused structures, the design of the virtual corporation, and organizing the continuous design process. Although the subjects discussed are important, some of the examples are too long and take up most of the chapters. Some of the examples also do not really apply to every company/organization but are too specific. Still, these are issues that should not be forgotten about, especially organizing around the customer remains important.

I must admit that I am somewhat disappointed with this book, which is written by a leading authority in the field of organizational design. I believe it is especially the title that lets the book down. It is not so much a guide into strategies and structures; it more discusses the organization shapers and the possibilities that companies/organizations have to tackle the organization shapers. I believe that the book is especially weak in discussing organizational design and structures. Galbraith discusses his own Star-model (which reminds me of McKinsey's 7-S framework) and his reconfigurable organization (the learning organization?), but leaves all other models/designs/structures untouched. I have not been generous, the book really deserves a 3.5-star rating. The author uses simple business US-English.

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Designing Organizations: An Executive Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process Revised
Jay R. Galbraith Jay R. Galbraith
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MUDMX0

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