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Fassbinder Thousands Of MirrorsStock informationGeneral Fields
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Local Description‘[Fassbinder] Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self…It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.’ ‘Do Penman’s flurries of quickfire erudition add up to a dazzling kaleidoscope overall, or a labyrinth of aborted pathways? The answer is “both”. He’s boldly querying his subject’s genius from every vantage point – angry and young; older and (maybe) wiser.’ ‘This is a jittery, clammy book, sweat beading on every page… In its exuberant phrase making, obsessive listing, emotional explosions and crashes, bursting seams – the book has three appendices – and its linguistic pyrotechnics, it ultimately comes down on the side of willing delirium.’ ‘[A] slender love letter.’ ‘[T]his is the efficient, gregarious guidebook that neophytes have been missing’ ‘Drifting through personal back alleys and intellectual boulevards à la the wanderings of Walter Benjamin and Geoff Dyer. A maze of epigrams, aphorisms (“Aren’t all masks death masks?”), anecdotes, and numbered fragments. An exquisitely companionable guidebook-inventory of a vast, intimate mental space Penman dubs the Fassbundesrepublik…A Thousand Mirrors doesn’t try to solve the contradictions of its subject but lays them out like a suit and inhabits them.’ ‘Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands Of Mirrors isn’t a biography of the epic and controversial master filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder – it’s much more. It’s chock-a-block with quotes and confessions, famous writers, artists, politics, history, social commentary and a bit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, among – of course – film talk. Like me, you’ll have to re-read this, not least because it’s a who’s who of post-WWII culture world.’ Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent’s Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is his first original book. DescriptionMelodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution. |