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Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
John Barrymore and the Acting Tradition Onscreen
Edited by Murray Pomerance and Steven Rybin
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Book Presentation:
Analyses the complexity of John Barrymore's performances and career trajectory
John Barrymore’s influence on screen and stage in the early twentieth century is incalculable. His performances in the theatre defined Shakespeare for a generation, and his transition to cinema brought his theatrical performativity to both silent and sound screens. This book, a collection of fifteen original essays on the film performances and stardom of John Barrymore, redresses this lack of scholarship on Barrymore by offering a range of varied perspectives on the actor’s work. Looking at his performances and influence from the perspectives of gender studies, psychoanalysis, queer studies and performance analysis, Hamlet Lives in Hollywood represents a major attempt by contemporary scholars to come to terms with the ongoing vitality of John Barrymore’s work in our present day.
Key Features
• Explores Barrymore’s work from a number of angles including: performance, theatricality, stardom, gender, masculinity, sexuality, psychoanalysis, voice, and queer studies
• Focuses on the actor's film work as well as his roles in theatre
• Situates the actor's roles and career within the context of early American film history
About the authors:
Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2020), Grammatical Dreams (2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018), among many other volumes, and editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books including The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020). He edits the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press and the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers. A Voyage with Hitchcock and Color It True: Impressions of Cinema are both forthcoming.
Dr Steven Rybin is Associate Professor of Film at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of several books including Geraldine Chaplin (2020), Gestures of Love: Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2017), Michael Mann (2013) and Terence Malik and the Thought of Film (2011). He is editor of The Cinema of Hal Hartley (2016), Hamlet Lives in Hollywood (2017) and Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s (2022).
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
See the complete filmography of John Barrymore on the website: IMDB ...
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