Re-visions: essays in film and dramatic criticism

In Re-visions: Essays in Film and Dramatic Criticism, Robert Cardullo attempts to review major works of film and dramatic art, revising either his own views or the received wisdom about them in the process. The book begins with an historical overview of the whole subject of theater and film, or theater versus film, and then proceeds to re-examine the work of such playwrights as Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller, Bernard Shaw, Thomas Heywood, Carlo Terron, Fernand Crommelynck, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, and John Steinbeck, as well as the concept of ahistorical avant-gardism and the dramatic adaptation of the Antigone myth. In the area of cinema, Re-visions re-visits, and re-evaluates, the film theory of André Bazin and the film movement of Italian neorealism; reconsiders such films as Robert Bresson's Une Femme douce, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura, Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour; and rethinks the rationale behind war movies, gangster films, and even the idea of New York as a character in the cinema. Re-visions includes an interview with David Hare in which, among other subjects, the British playwright discusses the differences between writing for the cinema and writing for the stage. The collection concludes with an essay in which the author re-examines five American films from the perspective of the first time he saw them versus the perspective of today.