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Joseph Losey, a monograph published by the San Sebastian Film Festival

This volume, edited as part of the 65th San Sebastián Festival, and coordinated by Quim Casas and Ana Cristina Iriarte, contains texts, among which some by professors Xavier Pérez, Sergi Sánchez and Carlos Losilla.

06.11.2017

 

Like every year, the San Sebastián Festival organized a retrospective dedicated to a director of classic cinema. The tribute of last 65th edition was paid to the figure of Joseph Losey, with the projection of his 32 featured films and the publication of a collective book devoted to his cinema. The volume, coordinated by Quin Casas and Ana Cristina Iriarte, tries to offer a perspective overview of his trajectory, from the beginnings in the Metro Goldwyn Mayer, until his latest films, through the incursion within the British industry and the golden age of his career during the 60s. Some are the professors of CINEMA which have contributed to the publication:

 

Xavier Pérez in his article “Ciudano M” tackles the study of M, the remake directed by Losey from the masterwork of Lang, and in order to do this he invites us to a round through an alphabetic path, a crossword of acronyms and capital letters which cipher unsuspected connections between Losey’s work, his brechtic influences and the author’s own drift during the witches’ hunt, at the height of the American McCarthyism. As if it were a collection of stamps, Xavier Pérez emblematic letters identify Losey, point to the “designation of origin” of many of the american director’s obsessions and concerns.

 

“Brecht’s shadow is long. The social gesture in four literary adaptations of Losey’s work” is Sergi Sánchez’s text, an analysis about the manner in which Losey stretches the original material of his adaptations. From Eva (1962) to Galileo (1975), through to Boom! (1968) and A Doll’s House (1973) it is laid bare how Losey employed Brechtian principles (even when, apparently, he ignored them) when creating distances in relation to the original works. The anachronisms and the contextual clashes leading to dramatic contrasts that Losey wouldn’t hesitate to use for his own interests, proclaiming a personal discourse full of subtle bends and ironic decisions that the text does actually register.

 

Carlos Losilla in “An expanded style: some fragments about mirrors and other leaks” resolves to question the “modern” condition that overflies Joseph Losey’s figure and to reflect upon how the mark of exile has lead his cinematographic production through hybrid courses that create difficulties for its categorization. The particular “chronotype” of Losey’s cinema equally precipitates an ambiguous interpretation of the place that his style would occupy, midway between the experimental leak and the respect originating in a classic contention. Losilla inquires into the articulation of this paradox of Losey’s cinema, the contradiction of an origin that cannot be avoided at all without expanding upon its starting point, without prolonging it.

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