Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

Publications and Eric Rohmer

I've just updated the list of my recent and upcoming publications on my Web site. A busy year; some will be online, I believe, but most not. Keep an eye out.

And a brief note to mention the passing of film director Eric Rohmer, 89, on Monday. A fine critic who was instrumental in bringing the unique visual styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks to the attention of a more specialized audience, Rohmer's films included Pauline at the Beach and, my personal favorite, Chloe in the Afternoon. In the New York Times obituary, Dave Kehr writes:

In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and to the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer's work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films.

On the occasion of Rohmer's death, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said, "Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the 'Rohmer style,' which will outlive him." Kehr's full obituary can be found here.

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Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum II (2008-2009)
Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)

Notes
Howard Barker 1
Howard Barker 2
Samuel Beckett 1
Samuel Beckett 2
Bertolt Brecht
Richard Foreman 1
Richard Foreman 2
Je Suis Sang
Sarah Kane
Music
Marilyn Nonken
Saint Oedipus

Contact
geh@panix.com