Starring:
Bob Dylan, B.J. Rolfzen Director: Martin ScorseseBob Dylan- No Direction Home (2005) DVD/791.43/M379
Starring:
Bob Dylan, B.J. Rolfzen Director: Martin Scorsese
Plot Synopsis: Portrait of an artist as a young man. Roughly chronological, using archival footage intercut with recent interviews, a story takes shape of Bob Dylan's (b. 1941) coming of age from 1961 to 1966 as a singer, songwriter, performer, and star. He takes from others: singing styles, chord changes, and rare records. He keeps moving: on stage, around New York City and on tour, from Suze Rotolo to Joan Baez and on, from songs of topical witness to songs of raucous independence, from folk to rock. He drops the past. He refuses, usually with humor and charm, to be simplified, classified, categorized, or finalized: always becoming, we see a shapeshifter on a journey with no direction home.
William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories (2000) DVD/070.1/N347
Starring:
William Gibson, Kimberly Blair Director: Mark Neale
On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel Neuromancer, stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a televiseˇK
The writer who best represents 20th-century Southern narrative led an existence every bit as colorful and dramatic as his fictional sagas. This program beautifully recounts William Faulkner's life and the great literary works it produced, exploring his affinity for the tragic and whimsical aspects of a decaying, racially fractured South. Beginning with the author's birth in New Albany, Mississippi, the video describes his early military and romantic ambitions, his family life, alcoholism, and stints in Hollywood, and his eventual garnering of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-all within the framework of his vast literary output. Summaries of major Faulkner novels-including Soldier's Pay, Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!-highlight the author's recurring themes of loss, faded glory, and dignity in the face of mortality. Passages from several works are read aloud and displayed visually as text. A Films for the Humanities & Sciences Production. (24 minutes)
Katherine Anne Porter DVD/822/P844
A strong, delicate, idiosyncratic writer with the power to evoke vast emotions in short words and the wisdom to understand large worlds in small scenes, Katherine Anne Porter wrote some of the best American short fiction of any age. She moves, sometimes plainly, sometimes unseen, throughout her world-a complex person combining the independence of a woman raised as a tomboy, the unconventionality of the artist, and the straitlaced late-Victorian-Texas views of propriety with which she condemned others who lived as she did. This superb production by Calvin Skaggs uses dramatizations of her stories as the narrative of the childhood which provided so much material for her work, counterpointed by the commentaries of Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark, and Joan Givner. (56 minutes)
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