Browsing by Author "Valente, Peter"

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    A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter
    (punctum books, 2022-09-08) Valente, Peter
    A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about the complex relationships between men and women; Day of the Idiots, a visually baroque, operatic and highly dramatic film about madness; The Kingdom of Naples, Schroeter’s visually stunning depiction of Italy in the post-war years; and Palermo or Wolfsburg, for which Schroeter won the Golden Bear, an epic film about love, violence, and cultural malaise. But Valente also addresses Schroeter's early experimental films that don't get as much attention, such as Aggression, Neurasia, and Argila, all of which are about the struggle between repression and desire, and Deux, a late work that Schroeter considered his masterpiece, a film about the double and the ways in which identity is formed by integrating the abject part of ourselves with the good. Valente concludes with an analysis of Nuit de Chien, Schroeter's final film, a powerful summation of a live devoted to art, music, literature, and film. When the Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Schroeter's ouevre in 2012, there was hardly anything in English on his films and only one film available on DVD in the US, such that Schroeter's work as a director has remained largely invisible in the English-speaking world. A Credible Utopia repairs this lacuna in film history, and, in a detailed and intimate reading of Schroeter's queer ouevre, links all these films together through Schroeter's desire for a “credible utopia,” despite our shared awareness of disaster, torture, viciousness, and political corruption in the world.
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    Essays on the Peripheries
    (punctum books, 2021-04-22) Valente, Peter
    Essays on the Peripheries contains essays written by translator and scholar Peter Valente over a twenty-year period, stretching from the 1990s to 2019. They are a record of literary exploration and discovery, concerned with the recovery of lost works, with those writers whose works were out of print or hard to find, and whose names were somehow not fashionable in the current discourse, but who are important nevertheless. Edouard Roditi, Barbara Barg, and Tom Savage, for example, should be better known, but their books are largely ignored. This collection of essays highlights those works on the periphery, such as Turkish poets Seyhan Erözçelik and Küçük İskender, while it also includes several essays on better-known queer authors like Pierre Guyotat and Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing on often overlooked qualities in their work that bear looking at closely. These essays on works of literature are complemented by a number of texts on jazz, again highlighting important and interesting figures in the world of jazz and free improvisation that may have fallen through the cracks, such as the pianist Richard Twardzick and the Ganelin trio, which recorded their great experimental work Ancora da Capo in 1980, behind the Iron Curtain. Attention is also to given to more popular figures such as Stan Getz. The volume is completed with a series of essays reappraising Roman poets in the twenty-first century, offering fresh new translations and readings of authors such as Catullus and Callimachus. A collection of essays, like an anthology, is by its nature incomplete. Essays on the Peripheries is a kind of sketch, rather than a finished portrait, of the author's changing impressions on various subjects over the years.