The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors—models, as he called them—and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career,...

A compelling collection of programmes exploring one of the world's most repressive and dangerous nationsThe Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a highly secretive totalitarian state - and one that poses an increasing threat to the West due to its rapidly expanding nuclear weapons programme. This unique 3-part collection takes an in-depth look at the country, encompassing its history, the human stories behind the regime, and its possible future....

In "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," Wassily Kandinsky explores the transformative power of art and its deep-seated connections to the spiritual realm. Written in a lyrical and contemplative style, the book articulates Kandinsky's revolutionary theories about abstraction, color theory, and the emotive qualities of shapes and forms. Grounded in the early 20th-century avant-garde movement, this seminal work serves as a manifesto for the modernist ethos that emphasizes personal expression an...

A beloved multidisciplinary treatise comes to Penguin ClassicsSince its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metapho...

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understan...

Street photography is perhaps the best-loved and most widely known of all photographic genres, with names like Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Doisneau familiar even to those with a fleeting knowledge of the medium. Yet what exactly is street photography? From what viewpoint does it present its subjects, and how does this viewpoint differ from that of documentary photography? Looking closely at the work of Atget, Kertesz, Bovis, Rene-Jacques, Brassai, Doisneau, Cartier- Bresson and more, this...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone will not get him through”. Bayley took this to mean that an affable, genial, outgoing nature was not enough to ensure survival in a harsh world of statistical performance. But survive and flourish is...

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what...

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and iconoclastic, this powerfully influential work both criticizes the elitist nature of art in nineteenth-century Western society, and rejects the idea that its sole purpose should be the creation of beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, ...

In the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950sOne of America's most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which foll...

Three decades after its first publication, The New Wave is still considered one of the fundamental texts on the French film movement of the same name. Led by filmmakers as influential as Truffaut and Godard, the New Wave was a seminal moment in cinematic history, and The New Wave has been hailed as the most complete book ever written about it.The New Wave tells the story of the New Wave through examinations of five of the most important directors of the era: Truffaut, Godard, Chabr...

This study is not literary criticism but a fascinating chapter in Miller's own spiritual autobiography.The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.