Introduction -- 1. The Joys and Perils of Victimhood -- 2. Fascinating Narcissism: Leni Riefenstahl -- 3. Werner Herzog and His Heroes -- 4. The Genius of Berlin: Rainer Werner Fassbinder -- 5. The Destruction Germany -- 6. There's No Place Like Heimat -- 7. The Afterlife of Anne Frank -- 8. 0ccupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel -- 9. The Twisted Art of Documentary -- 10. Ecstatic About Pearl Harbor -- 11. Suicide for the Empire -- 12. Eastwood's War -- 13. Robbed of Dreams -- 14. The Catty Chronicler: Harry Kessler -- 15. The Believer -- 16. The Last Bengali Renaissance Man -- 17. The Way They Live Now: Mike Leigh -- 18. The Great Art of Embarrassment -- 19. The Invention of David Bowie -- 20. Dressing for Success -- 21. The Circus of Max Beckmann -- 22. Degenerate Art -- 23. George Grosz's Amerika -- 24. Mr. Natural -- 25. Obsessions in Tokyo -- 26. A Japanese Tragedy -- 27. Virtual Violence -- 28. AsiaWorld -- Sources
Summary:
Theater of Cruelty has three main themes that frequently overlap: war, film, and the visual arts. Many of the movies discussed are about war and violence, often related to World War II, and more specifically deal with the two nations that unleashed the war, Germany and Japan: why they did what they did, and how they came to terms with it afterward or didn't. Other essays in the collection, about the diaries of Harry Kessler and Anne Frank, the bombing of German cities, Japan's kamikaze pilots further explore these themes. Many of the artists discussed by Buruma were German or Japanese, including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Tsuguharu Foujita, as were the filmmakers Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, all of whom were affected in one way or another by fascism and its terrible consequences. Theater of Cruelty is less about war itself than the way people deal with violence and cruelty, in the arts and in life.--Amazon.com.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.