'Erotikon' brings together leading contemporary intellectuals from a variety of fields for an expansive debate on the full meaning of eros. Restricted neither by historical period nor by genre, these contributions explore manifestations or eros throughout Western culture.

Memorable stills from great cinematic tradition — Ingeborg Holm (1913) to Wild Strawberries (1957). Complete credits, synopsis, commentary for each film. Introduction, critical biographies of directors.

When movie lovers speak of the "Lubitsch touch," they refer to a singular sense of style and taste, humor and humanity, that suffused the films of one of Hollywood's greatest directors. In this first ever full-length biography of Ernst Lubitsch, Scott Eyman takes readers behind the scenes of such classic films as Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Heaven Can Wait (1943), which together constitute one of the most important and influential bodies of work in Hollywood. Eyman examines both the films Lubitsch crafted and the life he lived—his great successes and his overwhelming anxieties—to create an indelible portrait of Hollywood's Golden Age and one of its most respected artists.

Study of Medieval Greek Romance

"Including masterpieces, oddities, guilty pleasures, and classics (with just a few disasters)"--Cover.

Contents: v. 1. 1898-1930 Filmography including feature films of Czech production, both promotional and educational nature, co-productions, banned films, and uncompleted films.

This book is a critical encyclopedia of silent European films currently available on DVD, laser disc, and VHS. It provides concise and accurate summaries of the films, evaluates the quality of the prints, discusses the changing reputations of both films and filmmakers, and considers how the techniques developed during the silent period continue to influence filmmaking today. The book cites contemporary and recent criticism of the films and includes an extensive bibliography as well as a list of films by director. Numerous photos are also included.

How do we discover our deepest desires, those that at once elude and define us? In Erotikon, award-winning poet Susan Mitchell invites us to make that discovery -- and in the process, to understand our true selves. In language both staggeringly beautiful and wonderfully mischevious, Mitchell explores the primal , transformative power of our sexual appetites. Drawing us in like a lover through her sensual world, she moves from seduction to surrender to symbiosis and the ultimate communion we long for in our lives on earth.

Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme R tif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that R tif's 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten including how the author actively worked to define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre, and how he coined the psycho-sexual term "fetish" and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how R tif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established. Placing R tif's novels and short stories in dialogue with his autobiographical writings as well as with contemporary and modern critical commentaries, the various chapters of the book examine the author's repeated testing of the limits of censorship to define and redefine the boundaries of obscenity; his advancement of the modern form and definition of pornography through a focus on intimacy and (female) pleasure; his detailed narrative explorations of foot and shoe fetishisms that were later appropriated by the sexologists; and his development of theories of eugenics and reproduction in his utopian science fiction. The history of R tif's texts and their reception reveals an evolution in the criteria of what is considered to be "good" or "worthy" literature--a category once defined purely on moral grounds that is increasingly seen in cultural terms. Bad Books corroborates the recent resurgence of interest in the author by showing the import of his texts, which not only designate a number of firsts in the histories of sexuality and pornography, but which also illuminate some of the defining moments in the history of French literary studies.