Bruce F. Kawin – författare

The story of the making of ""To Have and Have Not"" (1944) is an exciting one, ranging from the widely reported romance between its stars, Humphrey Bogart and the unknown nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall, to some of the more subtle aspects of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Batista regime in Cuba. Kawin's introduction leads us to a fuller appreciation of one of Hollywood's most memorable films. This is also a story of a collaboration among four important writers: Emest Hemingway, Howard Hawks, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner.

This engaging collection of Bruce F. Kawin’s most important film essays (1977–2011) is accompanied by his interviews with Lillian Gish (1978) and Howard Hawks (1976).  The Hawks interview is particularly concerned with his work with William Faulkner and their friendship. The Gish interview emphasizes her role as a producer in the 1920s. The essays focus on such topics as violence and sexual politics in film, the relations between horror and science fiction, the growth of video and digital cinema and their effects on both film and film scholarship, the politics of film theory, narration in film, and the relations between film and literature. Among the most significant articles reprinted here are “Me Tarzan, You Junk,” “The Montage Element in Faulkner's Fiction,” “The Mummy’s Pool,” “The Whole World Is Watching,” and “Late Show on the Telescreen:  Film Studies and the Bottom Line.” The book includes close readings of films from “La Jetée” to “The Wizard of Oz.”

This engaging collection of Bruce F. Kawin’s most important film essays (1977–2011) is accompanied by his interviews with Lillian Gish (1978) and Howard Hawks (1976).  The Hawks interview is particularly concerned with his work with William Faulkner and their friendship. The Gish interview emphasizes her role as a producer in the 1920s. The essays focus on such topics as violence and sexual politics in film, the relations between horror and science fiction, the growth of video and digital cinema and their effects on both film and film scholarship, the politics of film theory, narration in film, and the relations between film and literature. Among the most significant articles reprinted here are “Me Tarzan, You Junk,” “The Montage Element in Faulkner's Fiction,” “The Mummy’s Pool,” “The Whole World Is Watching,” and “Late Show on the Telescreen:  Film Studies and the Bottom Line.” The book includes close readings of films from “La Jetée” to “The Wizard of Oz.”

Horror films can be profound fables of human nature and important works of art, yet many people dismiss them out of hand. ‘Horror and the Horror Film’ conveys a mature appreciation for horror films along with a comprehensive view of their narrative strategies, their relations to reality and fantasy and their cinematic power. The volume covers the horror film and its subgenres – such as the vampire movie – from 1896 to the present. It covers the entire genre by considering every kind of monster in it, including the human.

Horror films can be profound fables of human nature and important works of art, yet many people dismiss them out of hand. ‘Horror and the Horror Film’ conveys a mature appreciation for horror films along with a comprehensive view of their narrative strategies, their relations to reality and fantasy and their cinematic power. The volume covers the horror film and its subgenres – such as the vampire movie – from 1896 to the present. It covers the entire genre by considering every kind of monster in it, including the human.

In this collection of his best poems, Bruce F. Kawin explores many aspects of love, from the romantic to the metaphysical and from sex to mourning. The breadth of voice and form is masterful, and the poems are bold and evocative. As complex as they are, they relate plainly to real life. The book includes a sestina about a harried woman, a sonnet sequence reimagined as a slide show, a menu of potential love stories, a lesbian epic set in modern Greece and reimagined versions of old horror films, all of them charged with startling, moving and convincing visions of love. With his unique tone and subject matter, his good stories, his striking insights and his fresh, vivid language, Kawin reinvents and revives the love poem.

From Moby-Dick to The Unnamable, from A Tale of a Tub to The Book of Questions, Bruce Kawin explores the nature of self-conscious fiction and compares its structure to that of human consciousness. Focusing on texts that confront their own limits by trying to name the unnamable, the ineffable self, Kawin draws on methods from literary criticism to systems theory to explain a variety of first-person works that "dance around the ungraspable subject."