Steven Spielberg
A Biography (Third Edition)
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- CHF 19.00
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- CHF 19.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of the most successful films of all time: Jaws, CloseEncounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and the 'Indiana Jones' series. Yet for many years most critics condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man incapable of dealing maturely with the complexities of life. The deeper levels of meaning in his films were largely ignored. This changed with Schindler's List, his masterpiece about a gentile businessman who saves eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. For Spielberg, the film was the culmination of a long struggle with his Jewish identity - an identity of which he had long been ashamed, but now triumphantly embraced.
Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. In his astute and perceptive biography, Joseph McBride reconciled Spielberg's seeming contradictions and produced a coherent portrait of the man who found a way to transmute the anxieties of his own childhood into some of the most emotionally powerful and viscerally exciting films ever made.
In the second edition, McBride added four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to 2010, a period in which he balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--films which expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter.
This third edition brings Spielberg's career up-to-date with material on The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse.
The original edition was praised by the New York Times Book Review as 'an exemplary portrait' written with 'impressive detail and sensitivity'; Time called it 'easily the finest and fairest of the unauthorized biographies of the director.'
Of the second edition, Nigel Morris - author of The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light - said: 'With this tour de force, McBride remains the godfather of Spielberg studies.'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whereas John Baxter's identically titled biography of Spielberg (Forecasts, Feb. 24) was based almost entirely on previously published interviews, McBride has interviewed more than 300 of the director's family, friends and co-workers, though not Spielberg himself. The result is a more sympathetic but also lopsided portrait of the man than Baxter's, with too much emphasis on Spielberg's childhood and young manhood. It isn't until nearly the book's halfway point that McBride gets to the making of The Sugarland Express, Spielberg's first feature film. Much of the early material is illuminating, especially the examination of Spielberg's Jewish roots, which he did not publicly acknowledge until Schindler's List, and the portrait of Spielberg as an ambitious, inventive and driven filmmaker even as a boy in Scottsdale, Ariz. But with so much about the young Spielberg, the director's adult career is given short shrift. With less new material to work with--McBride and Baxter use many of the same anecdotes--the second half of the book seems rushed in comparison to its leisurely first. McBride's readings of the individual films, however, are shrewd and unsentimental. The book ends with a persuasive reading of Schindler's List, which McBride sees as a logical outgrowth of Spielberg's career-long artistic preoccupations, rather than, as most critics do, as a break with them. Either the McBride or the Baxter will serve readers as a splendid introduction to the life and work of this fascinating director. The book presents a thorough filmography, including some of Spielberg's amateur films. Photos not seen by PW.
