On the boundaries of the Hollywood cinema: Art and the films of Albert Lewin.
Item
-
Title
-
On the boundaries of the Hollywood cinema: Art and the films of Albert Lewin.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9405524
-
identifier
-
9405524
-
Creator
-
Felleman, Susan.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rosalind Krauss
-
Date
-
1993
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Art History | Cinema
-
Abstract
-
Albert Lewin (1894-1968) was the writer-director between 1942 and 1957 of six unusual Hollywood films. Visually, these fall into two groups. The first three were all made during the 1940s, in black-and-white (with color inserts of paintings), in Hollywood studios, although set in fin-de-siecle Europe. These are The Moon and Sixpence (1942), adapted from W. Somerset Maugham's novel; The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), adapted from Oscar Wilde's novel; and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), adapted from Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami. Thematically, these films involve art, aestheticism and decadence, and feature a male protagonist as overestimated object of desire.;Lewin's three films of the 1950s were all filmed in color on location abroad: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), in Spain; Saadia (1954), in Morocco; and The Living Idol (1957), in Mexico. Each relishes the beauty and exoticism of the landscape and culture of its locale. Two of these (Pandora and Idol) were from original scripts and the third was adapted from an obscure novel, Francis d'Autheville's Echec au Destin. Although set in the 20th century, each deals with ancient and ineffable themes and features a female protagonist who is beset by supernatural forces.;This study analyzes not only the content and composition of the film frame, which is always in Lewin's films very exactingly constructed, often including art-historical references, but also the films' thematic incorporation and visual foregrounding of artists and art works. Lewin's relationship to Surrealism is relevant to the analysis of three films: Dorian Gray, Bel Ami, and Pandora, the last of which was a concertedly Surrealist exercise. These three films happen also to be Lewin's best, and are thus accorded closest scrutiny. In his last two directorial films, Lewin's increasing taste for the exotic and primitive was indulged at the expense of the productive tension between modernism and anti-modernism, culture and nature, intellect and instinct, that characterized the four films set in Europe.;Appendices include a chronology, a filmography and a list of works in the Lewin art collection.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
