Bernard F. Dukore – författare

One of the greatest film directors America has produced, Sam Peckinpah revolutionized the way movies were made. In this detailed and insightful study, Bernard F. Dukore examines Peckinpah's fourteen feature films as a coherent body of work. He investigates the director's virtuosic editing techniques, thematic preoccupations that persist from his earliest to his last films, and the structure of his dramatic depiction of violence. He also addresses Peckinpah's cognizance of existentialism and the substantial traces this interest has left in the films.  At the heart of Dukore's study is an extensive and detailed examination of Peckinpah's distinctive editing techniques. Focusing on representative sequences--including the breakout from the bank and the final battle in The Wild Bunch, the half-hour siege that concludes Straw Dogs, the killing of the title characters of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and combat sequences in Cross of Iron--Dukore provides a shot-by-shot analysis that illuminates Peckinpah's mastery of pacing and mood.  Sam Peckinpah's Feature Films demonstrates that Peckinpah's genius as a director and editor marks not only The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and other classics but also his lesser-known feature films, even those that suffered substantial cuts at the hands of studio producers. Dukore's organic approach to the feature films reveals a highly unified body of work that remains a pointed commentary on power, violence, affection, and moral values.

‘You see madam,’ Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘I am not a dreamer who doesn’t understand the practical exigencies of the stage. …’ The remark was an understatement: Shaw not only understood the practical aspects of play production; he had a great deal of experience with them as well. For thirty years following the 1894 production of Arms and the Man, which he directed, Shaw staged virtually every production of his own plays in London. Directing plays, he consistently maintained, is as crucial a part of a playwright’s profession as writing them, and the author, he believed, is the most desirable director of his own play.Originally published in 1971, this first full-length treatment of Shaw as director is important for several reasons: first, because Shaw was one of the few major playwrights who frequently directed his own works; second, because he was a good director; and third, because he is an early example of the modern idea of the director as guiding artist in the production of a play.After an initial chapter examining Shaw’s background and experiences in the theatre before he began to direct plays, Dukore explores various aspects of Shavian directorial theory and practice. He shows that, while Shaw’s basic concern was with the actor, he was also involved in all the minute considerations that make up a successful production, including pre-rehearsal planning, casting, cutting and changing the script (though Shaw forbade other directors to cut his plays, he himself did so), conducting rehearsals, acting, scenery, lighting, and costuming. Throughout his analysis, the author makes use of previously unpublished material, particularly Shaw’s rehearsal notes, written in the auditorium when he staged his plays, and letters to actors.This is a readable book, essential for anyone interested in Bernard Shaw’s plays.

Bernards Shaw’s plays have delighted and stimulated audiences since their first appearances. Their author’s satiric view of conventions, institutions, and behavior continues unfailingly to amuse while it provokes doubts about the honesty of the social and political attitudes that underlie them.Originally published in 1973, Dukore discusses the theory of drama that is the basis of Shaw’s comedies, which present his views of mores and follies. That Shaw’s theory was coherent and comprehensive Dukore shows in Part One of this book, with supportive references to Shaw’s critical works, letters, speeches, and plays.In Part Two, using such familiar works as Candida, Pygmalion, and Back to Methuselah as well as less-known plays like “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days” to reinforce his points, Dukore analyses the discussion play – according to Shaw, the watershed of the “new drama.” Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan, along with other plays, illustrate Shaw’s use of the prologue or prologuelike first act to create the play’s social and psychological foundations. Man and Superman and The Apple Cart are among those which exemplify the play whose frame is both detachable from its centerpiece and also functionally integrated with it. Dukore also considers at length Shaw’s reworking of other men’s plays – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Trebitsch’s Frau Gittas Sühne – as well as his own Major Barbara. These revisions bring into sharp focus Shaw’s perception of human nature and his principles of dramaturgy.Among others of Shaw’s plays, Dukore presents Too True To Be Good and Heartbreak House as examples of his protoexistentialism – his apprehension of the absurd and the existential as forces in life. Throughout Shaw’s plays – major and minor – Dukore sees the influence of the playwright’s socialism and supports this observation with precise examples from the works.In sum, Dukore proposes fresh perspectives from which to regard Shaw’s works for the theatre – works that were arrestingly relevant and immediate to the time.

Originally published in 1980, each of the three playwrights discussed in this lively book was a radical in his own way, concerned with the moral and social implications of capitalism. In addition, as Dukore, author of several previous books on Shaw and other modern dramatists, shows in the first chapter, there is a clear chain of influence from Ibsen to Shaw to Brecht. The book is structured around the ways the three writers treat similar issues and themes. The chapters focus on particular subjects involving money, politics, or both. They isolate particular viewpoints from which each playwright treats capitalist society. One chapter, a discussion of A Doll House, Pygmalion, and Mother Courage and Her Children, centers on money; another focuses on politics with reference to Rosmersholm, On the Rocks, and The Mother. In between fall discussions of plays in which both money and politics are central issues, first among the lower classes and women (Ghosts, Mrs Warren’s Profession, and The Good Person of Szechwan), then among professionals (The Master Builder, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Life of Galileo), then among the upper classes (Pillars of Society, Heartbreak House, Puntila and Matti), then a discussion of money and morality (An Enemy of the People, Major Barbara, and Saint Joan of the Stockyards). In his concluding essay, the author examines the relationship between ideology and artistry, showing that any interpretation of the work of these three dramatists will profit from an awareness of their radicalism.

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was already highly acclaimed in 1988, when this book was originally published, and went on to become one of the most influential modern British dramatists, with a career that spanned over 50 years.This study reveals Pinter’s dramatic and theatrical stratagems and his place in contemporary drama at the time. Five of its eight chapters are devoted to his plays and their performances. Chapter 1 introduces them through short quotations from his plays, each followed by how they show his methods. A biographical survey is next. Chapter 3, “Menace and the Absurd,” treats his early plays, including The Room and The Birthday Party, as “comedies of menace,” a pun on “comedies of manners,” and as theatre of the absurd. Following this, “Toward Greater Realism” explains common features of such plays as The Caretaker. “Struggles for Power” features The Collection and The Homecoming. In “Memory Plays,” Old Times is prominent. “Recapitulations and Fresh Starts” analyses No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska. Stage productions are a vital part of these discussions of his plays. Finally, “The Place of Pinter” summarizes his oeuvre and his position in English drama.

“Dukore’s style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic.”- Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). "This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century.” -          - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, IrelandA fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship – of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others – he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called “disgusting,” “immoral", and "degenerate.” Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.

“Dukore’s style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic.”- Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). "This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century.” -          - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, IrelandA fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship – of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others – he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called “disgusting,” “immoral", and "degenerate.” Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw: ‘The Capitalism of the Proletariat’ is the first book to treat Bernard Shaw—socialist, dramatist, public speaker and union member—in relation to unions and strikes.

This book presents him in the context of his contemporaries and his world, inviting readers to view crimes and punishments in their context, history, and relevance to his ideas in and outside his plays, plus the relevance of his ideas to crimes and punishments in life.