Jonathan Griffin

The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors--models, as he called them--and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career, Bresson dedicated himself to making movies in which nothing is superfluous and everything is always at stake. Notes on the Cinematograph distills the essence of Bresson's theory and practice as a filmmaker and artist. He discusses the fundamental differences between theater and film; parses the deep grammar of silence, music, and noise; and affirms the mysterious power of the image to unlock the human soul. This book, indispensable for admirers of this great director and for -students of the cinema, will also prove an inspiration, much like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, for anyone who responds to the claims of the imagination at its most searching and rigorous.

An accessible A-Z guide to best contemporary art made since 2000

Using painting, drawing and found photographs, British artist Ross Chisholm (born 1977) recreates and then disrupts imagery mined from centuries of British visual culture, from eighteenth-century society portraiture by Allan Ramsay and Joshua Reynolds to photographs of twentieth-century families on vacation acquired at flea markets. Chisolm then painstakingly recreates these original images in the style of Old Master portraiture and genre scenes, sabotaging their historical gravitas with bizarre flourishes of abstraction or collage: rays of incongruous color surrounding a prim figure, a Gainsborough-style lady with a pig-faced man on her arm or two Old Master images super-imposed upon one another. With 40 color plates, this volume surveys his most recent works, which have already been exhibited in major galleries throughout Europe and the U.S.

Message ("Mensagem") was the only book of verse in his own language that Pessoa saw through the press in his lifetime. On the face of it, a patriotic sequence steeped in 'Sebastianismo', the poems offer much more than this, the Kings and navigators of the Portugal's history standing as avatars of the poet's self, their explorations and heroic deeds projections of the poet's inner creative life. Although Pessoa is famous for the many heteronyms under which he composed verse in wildly different styles, this volume was published under his own name - the 'orthonym', as he defined it - and it remains one of his great masterpieces. This edition brings Jonathn Griffin's fine translation (originally published by the Menard Press in 1992) back into print, as part of Shearsman's Pessoa edition.