This is a unique collection of pieces about the many filmmakers and writers from around the globe - Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East - who populate Judy Stone's world. In these articles, we clearly hear their voices as they talk art, politics, and culture. We get to see past the cinema screens and past the pages of books and hear lively conversations about personal freedoms, political change, nationalism, religion, women in society, gays in society, the influence of history, ideas about creating a better tomorrow, and much more. In this book, Stone talks with and writes about over 120 creative people who range from the pioneer Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk to the great Polish poet/essayist Czeslaw Milosz; from the innovative Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to the writer/provocateur Jean Genet; from the tantalising Turkish storyteller Orhan Pamuk to the "underground" Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke; from Israeli Amos Gitai to Palestinian Elia Suleiman, filmmakers whose films are devilish irritants to their own "tribes"; and, from popular actors Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack to actor/filmmaker Liev Schreiber.
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
"Judy Stone has the wit, the independence and the journalistic guts to call the shots as she sees them. Her interviews are smashing in their revelations." —Studs Terkel
About the Author
Judy Stone has been writing about international cinema for the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Ramparts, for over forty years. She is also the author of Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers and The Mystery of B. Traven.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A feast of a book,
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This review is from: Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World (Paperback)
For anyone who has enjoyed Judy Stone's perceptive articles over the years, this book is a feast: a look back at several decades of writing and filmmaking. The only problem is that it reminds you of all the books you wish you had read and the films you wish you had seen. But still, in a world where there is more culture than we can possibly take in, it's nice to have this kind of guidebook to the highlights.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A treasury of insights from the world's leading artists,
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This review is from: Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World (Paperback)
"Not Quite a Memoir" flies around the world from the U.S's Gus Van Sant to Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, Israel's Amos Gitai,Spain's Carlos Saura, Chile's Isabel Allende, India's Satyajit Ray...At every landing, Stone creates a portrait of the artist as a force for social change. Intriguingly, the author backs up her portrait in words by capturing - with unassuming genius--astonishingly insightful photographs of her interview subjects...For medical reasons, Kiarostami never takes off those enigmatic sunglasses. Yet Stone's camera flash cleverly shines right through the artist's dark glasses to give us the first glimpse of eyes that revolutionized filmmaking with how they saw the world. Judy Stone's short interviews, like that camera flash, are just as clever and penetrating."Ari Siletz, author "The Mullah with No Legs and other stories."
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Film Fans, `Quite a Book',
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This review is from: Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World (Paperback)
Judy Stone's "Not Quite a Memoir" is a rich tapestry of life, politics, philosophy, travel, and insights from an erudite film critic, who has marched to her own (leftist, humanistic) drum for eight decades.During her 30 years with the San Francisco Chronicle, she became a kind of West Coast Pauline Kael (who herself hailed from here, before becoming a "New Yorker" fixture), writing complex, highly intellectual - and yet honestly visceral - reviews and interviews, concentrating heavily on European and Third World cinema. A wonderful anthology of Stone's interviews with some of history's greatest film directors appeared a decade ago, in "Eye on the World." In "Not Quite a Memoir," there are additional scores of interviews, and features - none more memorable and moving than the final chapter, "Encounter in Montenegro," a 1959 story about the discomfort of "being American" abroad, something unhappily valid even today. The list of interviews is much too long to include here, but - just as a teaser - it includes Nobel-Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, E.L. Doctorow, Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Korean director Im Kwon Taek, and Maya Angelou. Stone's interest in the lives and works of Jews, of oppressed minorities, of society's underdogs runs through the book as a thread, but there are also hundreds of unexpected bits here, such as a report of Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 closed-circuit press conference: "He regaled his interlocutors with stories of his meticulous concern for the infinite advance detail, his cool contempt for improvisation. In measured tones that recall the glory of Winston Churchill declaring war on the forces of darkness, he recalled his unceasing battle to vanquish the ever-present threat of the insidious cliché." I wonder if Stone realized when writing about Hitchcock that she did a pretty good job describing herself, and her work.
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