Joseph Losey

by Colin Gardner

Overview

The career of Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey spanned over four decades and several countries. A self-proclaimed Marxist and veteran of the 1930s Soviet agit-prop theater, he collaborated with Bertholt Brecht before directing noir B-pictures in Hollywood. A victim of McCarthyism, he later crossed the Atlantic to direct a series of seminal British films such as "Time Without Pity," "Eve," "The Servant," and "The Go-Between," which mark him as one of the cinema's greatest baroque stylists. His British films reflect on exile and the outsider's view of a class-bound society in crisis through a style rooted in the European art house tradition of Resnais and Godard. Gardner employs recent methodologies from cultural studies and poststructural theory, exploring and clarifying the films' uneasy tension between class and gender, and their explorations of fractured temporality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526141569
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2019
Series:	British Film-Makers
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Table of Contents

List of Plates
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Joseph Losey and the Crisis of Historical Rupture
• Losey in Exile: The Sleeping Tiger (1954); A Man on the Beach (1955) and The Intimate Stranger (1956)
• A Question of Background: Class and the Politics of Impulse in Time Without Pity (1957); The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957); Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960)
• Dystopic Malevolence and the Politics of Collusion: Evan Jones The Damned (1961); Eve (1962); King and Country (1964) and Modesty Blaise (1966)
• Harold Pinter's Time-Image: The Servant (1963); Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970)
• Three Allegorical Fables: Boom! (1968); Secret Ceremony (1968) and Figures in a Landscape (1970)
• Bertholt Brecht and Galileo (1974)
• Gender Matters: A Doll's House (1973); The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Steaming (1985)
• A Second Exile: Losey in Europe
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index