Bøger af Sam B. Girgus

From generation to generation, three outstanding American Jewish directors¿William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg--advance a tradition of Jewish writers, artists, and leaders who propagate the ethical basis of the American Idea and Creed. They strive to renew the American spirit by insisting that America must live up to its values and ideals. These directors accentuate the ethical responsibility for the other as a basis of the American soul and a source for strengthening American liberal democracy. In the manner of the jeremiad, their films challenge America to achieve a liberal democratic culture for all people by becoming more inclusive and by modernizing the American Idea. Following an introduction that relates aspects of modern ethical thought to the search for Americäs soul, the book divides into three sections. The Wyler section focuses on the director¿s social vision of a changing America. The Lumet section views his films as dramatizing Lumet¿s dynamicand aggressive social and ethical conscience. The Spielberg section tracks his films as a movement toward American redemption and renewal that aspires to realize Lincoln¿s vision of America as the hope of the world. The directors, among many others, perpetuate a ¿New Covenant¿ that advocates change and renewal in the American experience.

From generation to generation, three outstanding American Jewish directors-William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg--advance a tradition of Jewish writers, artists, and leaders who propagate the ethical basis of the American Idea and Creed.

In 'Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image', Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of delayed cinema to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others.

Girgus defines the American idea as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions of democracy, equality, and republicanism and argues that writers of the New Covenant tradition challenged society to live up to its own imperatives for individual and cultural renewal.

The steady rise of Clint Eastwood s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona.

In this lively and original book, Sam Girgus offers a fresh look at classic films by Ford, Capra, Hawks, Zinnemann, Kazan, and Stevens, and shows how they are part of the cultural and historic debate that examines, structures, and questions what modern America means to its people, the world, and history.

America on Film, first published in 2002, examines how the notion of 'American' has changed from American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Malcolm X , Raging Bull, When We Were Kings, and Bugsy Sam Girgus finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals, and conflicts.

The Films of Woody Allen was the first full-length work to examine the director as a serious filmmaker and artist. Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness, challenging our notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus argues that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work. The union between Allen's public and private selves that created a special 'aura' about him remains intact despite the director's concerted efforts to separate his private life from his screen image. Allen now assumes a postmodern moral relativism and 'sensual realism' that differs profoundly from the moral sensibility of his earlier work.

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "e;ontological adventure"e; of immediate experience and the "e;ethical adventure"e; of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self. In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "e;cinema of redemption"e; that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).

This work attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.