Literature/Letteratura

A profile of writer F Scott Fitzgerald on the 75th anniversary of the publication of his most enduring achievement - The Great Gatsby. Is it merely "an entertaining anecdote", or should it be seen as "the most important novel of the 20th century"? Click on CC for optional English subtitles.

A 2020 Documentary directed by Audrey Gordon. Audio in French with English subtitles. Judged scandalous until her final breath, Emma Bovary, Flaubert's heroine, earned him a trial in a Paris magistrates' court, in 1857, for "outrage to public morality". Her character was studied in every detail, but the writer's intentions remain secret, served by a completely new literary style.

Charles Bukowski, self-styled dirty old man of American writing, lived and died drunk in Los Angeles, spending two decades as a low-life and another decade as a mail sorter before he became a full-time writer at the age of 50. By his death at the age of 73 in March last year, he was a wealthy man, the darling of Hollywood's bad boys - acclaimed for his poetry, short stories, novels including the autobiographical Ham on Rye, and the screenplay for Barfly. Actor Sean Penn and director Barbet Schroeder are among the friends who chronicle his life and times, and there are some candid recorded interviews with Bukowski.

Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov 's masterpiece The Master and Margarita tells how the devil visits Moscow to see how the people are living under communism. For years, amid spiritual starvation, Bulgakov's strange novel has been a gospel; this film shows why. Next Episode: https://rumble.com/v747a08-bookmark-the-ordinary-madness-of-charles-bukowski-1992.html

This is a BBC original production which aired in 1991, directed by James Runcie. It chronicles J.G. Ballard's first trip to Shanghai after he first left it in 1946. He discusses his ilfe and his work especially his two autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. The novels Empire of the Sun and Crash have brought him mainstream success and controversy in equal measure, but JG Ballard remains one of our most inventive and adventurous writers. One of his own characters once said, "I've always thought of life as a kind of disaster area" and Ballard constantly presents his disquieting, often apocalyptic, vision of a world that remains, for him, "the only alien planet". Born and brought up in colonial Shanghai comfort, young James Graham Ballard saw his life change forever when, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, Japanese forces swept into the city. The three years he spent in an internment camp moulded his view of "a world turned up-side down" and have constantly influenced his fiction. Back in Britain, he abandoned his medical studies at Cambridge to become a full-time writer, and his first novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. As with many of his works, the wanderings of his characters' minds are charted as minutely as the external world they inhabit. The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere and The Crystal World all strengthened his reputation for bleak but beautiful chronicles of a post-Hiroshima age. Next Episode: https://rumble.com/v74784i-bookmark-the-devil-in-moscow-mikhail-bulgakov-1991.html

Bookmark is a BBC documentary series about literature, and in particular the lives of authors, broadcast on BBC Two from 1983 to 1999. Coverage of the director of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Oleg Efremov's, masterclasses made especially for the British American Drama Academy, during his visit to Oxford. Students, actors and directors from the RSC at Stratford watch how Efremov translates the text of Uncle Vanya into performance. Theatre and film director, David Jones, identifies how much we can still learn from the Moscow theatre. Next Episode: https://rumble.com/v747638-bookmark-j.-g.-ballard-shanghai-jim-1991.html

A 2024 American two-part documentary directed by Ric Burns, following the life and career of Dante Alighieri, and his poem Divine Comedy. Narrated by Alan Cox, with optional English subtitles (click on CC for subtitles). The ambition of the film, which combines powerful dramatic reenactments, colorful interviews with renowned scholars, exquisite archival material and scenic filming, is to bring to life and make accessible, to the widest possible audience, the transformative power and beauty of this singular work of art. The film is divided into two two-hour episodes. Interviews include Riccardo Bruscagli, Teodolinda Barolini, Lino Pertile, Elena Lombardi, Heather Webb, Catherine Adoyo, Claudio Giunta, Theodore Cachey, Manuele Gragnolati, Giuseppe Ledda, Timothy Verdon and Guy Raff. Part 1: Inferno explores the historical background of medieval Florence from 1216 to Dante's birth in 1265, and recounts the dramatic details of Dante’s childhood, education and early literary and political career, culminating in his exile in 1302. The film also examines his decision to begin The Divine Comedy in 1306 – plunging with Dante and his readers into the underworld itself where, guided by the great Roman poet, Virgil, he will meet a vast cohort of historical and mythological figures – and arriving finally at the very bottom of hell, in their encounter with Lucifer himself. Part 2: https://rumble.com/v72z6mi-dante-inferno-to-paradise-resurrection-1309-and-after-part-2.html

Part 2: Resurrection explores Dante’s experience in exile, and his completion of the last two parts of the Comedy, shortly before his death in Ravenna in 1321. Interweaving soaring scenes drawn from Purgatory and Paradise, the film goes on to explore the afterlife and literary and cultural fate of Dante’s masterpiece from the time of his death down to today.

A 1989 BBC TV Programme. Audio in English with optional English subtitles (click on CC). Desmond Hawkins explores the comer of England that featured so strongly in the life of Thomas Hardy.

A 2002 PBS Biography Documentary narrated by Keith David and Kevin Conway as the voice of Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens rose from a hardscrabble boyhood in the backwoods of Missouri to become, as Mark Twain, America’s best-known and best-loved author. Considered in his time the funniest man on earth, Twain was also an unflinching critic of human nature who used his humor to attack hypocrisy, greed and racism. He created some of the world’s most memorable characters as well as its most quoted sayings. And, in his often-misunderstood novel Huckleberry Finn, he gave the world the masterpiece that Ernest Hemingway would call the true beginning of American literature. Mark Twain tells the story of the writer’s extraordinary life—full of rollicking adventure, stupendous success and crushing defeat, hilarious comedy and almost unbearable tragedy. Part II: https://rumble.com/v2g1hz8-mark-twain-a-documentary-film-part-ii.html