David Mamet: Entre el guion teatral y la narrativa visual

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AS DIVERSAS VOZES NOS ESTUDOS DA NARRATIVA CLÁSSICA PARA O ROTEIRO CINEMATOGRÁFICO

A partir dos anos 1980, proliferaram vários estudos sobre roteiro com o intuito de orientar a criação de histórias com apelo popular. Publicações bastante influentes foram escritas por autores como Syd Field, Blake Snyder, Robert McKee e Christopher Vogler, além de roteiristas como Paul Schrader, David Mamet e Jill Chamberlain. Essas diferentes vozes concordam e divergem ao analisar aspectos que compõem um roteiro. A elas juntaram-se roteiristas que subvertiam conceitos desses estudos, abrindo novas possibilidades. Esse artigo pretende analisar diferentes conceitos acerca dessas teorias demonstrando como Charlie Kaufman, um roteirista reconhecido por sua criatividade, os aplica em seu trabalho.

Jewish American Cinema

There is an intricate, long, and rich history of Jewish presence in Hollywood, from executives to producers to directors to screenwriters to performers. It starts with the Jewish moguls who were at the helm of most major studios in the 1920s and 30s and tried to separate as much as possible from their Jewish heritage and past. This preponderance of Jews prompted an anti-Semitic response in the American entertainment scene which could hardly be ignored. The result was an overt timidity in the representation of Jews and Jewish topics on screen, with some Jewish actors perceived as “too Jewish” for the general taste. The changes in the perception of identity in the 1960s, marked by culture wars and the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and the flourishing of American Jewish literature and the pride many American Jews took in Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, on the other, enabled a much more open and unabashed embrace of Jewishness in Hollywood. Consequently, the late 1960s usher in the New Jewish Wave, when the issues of Jewish identity and experience start to dominate the screen and are defined by such auteurs as Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Sidney Lumet, and Paul Mazursky, and such actors as Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, Eliot Gould, George Seagal, and Woody Allen throughout the 1970s and 80s. The Jewish representation grows in the 1990s and 2010s with such directors as the Coen brothers, Darren Aronofsky, David Cronenberg, David Mamet, Jonathan Glazer, Stephen Spielberg, and the Safdie brothers.

Rethinking Language in Irigaray’s Mimesis Applied in David Mamet’s Oleanna

Throughout history, women have always sought their rights and place and this has long been the subject of much debate among writers and critics. So writers and critics, both men and women have reflected this issue in their works in different ways. From the very outset of her career, Luce Irigaray showed a keen interest in the exploration of the key role that language has in determining how women are evaluated in their society and the position they hold in it. In order to show resistance to masculine values imposed on them, women resort to strongholds such as mimesis in opposition. This paper aims to primarily, trace the backgrounds of this notion, secondly, to pursue the effect and use of it by women characters and to depict in what way it is employed as a means of resistance. Examples that will be provided shall be selected from the play “Oleanna”, a modern play written by David Mamet.

A Few Bad Friends: Dynamics of Male Dominance and Failure of Masculine Bonding in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross

David Mamet is often considered as the quintessential dramatist of American urban life whose stage is peopled exclusively, and at times questionably, with men. Glengarry Glen Ross is the outstanding epitome of Mamet’s avid engagement with the world of men and their primordial, instinctive thirst for dominance, authority, and the celebration of their masculine prowess. Exploring the turbulent dynamics of male interactions determined and affected by contemporary capitalism, the present study investigates the disturbed depiction of masculinity and male bonding. Mainstream masculinity has been fundamentally linked to power and organized for domination. Historically changing and politically fraught, masculinity is the product of social learning or socialization. Rather than a celebration of the camaraderie of men, as most criticisms of Mamet focus upon, it is argued that the play highlights the failure of such fellowship and the tragic consequences. In Mamet, capitalism and the market economy do to men what in a patriarchal system men do to women: marginalize, dominate, displace. Men, therefore, are losing their cultural centrality, and with that, their capacity for constructive male bonds. Glengarry Glen Ross faithfully captures the sad ethos of American capitalism. The dynamics of dominance and success, the exercise of power, and the hierarchies of control lead to a dysfunctional network of male connections and interactions. Men are expected to develop more instrumentally functioning abilities and roles while maintaining the more expressively dominant roles they used to possess. Caught in between, they are only subject to alienation. This is the paradox of contemporary American men.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.