By Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin knew he used to be going to be an actor from the age of 5: "Every movie I observed, each play, each piece of tune fed an unquenchable have to flip myself into whatever except what I was." An Improvised Life is the Oscar winner's clever and unpretentious recollection of the process--artistic and personal--of changing into an actor, and a revealing investigate the artistic brain of 1 of the easiest practitioners on degree or reveal. In a fashion that's direct, down-to-earth, available, and articulate, Arkin finds insights not just approximately himself (and his viewers and students), but additionally truths for the remainder of us approximately paintings, relationships, and experience of self.
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Additional info for An Improvised Life: A Memoir
Sample text
That was the conception of knowledge and truth inaugurated in the philosophy of Plato, and between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries the same conception seemed close to finding fulfillment. With Russell’s paradox, however, that program unravelled. ”—reverberated through the intellectual and artistic communities. 16 More recently, postmodern thinkers have simply accepted that we cannot find “truth and certitude” and have argued that the illusion that it is possible to find truth has contributed to the enfeebling of Western consciousness at least since Plato (if that illusion is not the product of an inherent tendency of the human mind).
However, another volume in this series deals with the Cubist and Futurist movements, and in that volume I deal with the origins and character of the Cubist practice of collage at considerable length. The analysis I offer there connects that topic to the fundamental argument about the nature of cinema’s influence on Cubism (and on Futurism). I do not wish to repeat that commentary in this volume. Furthermore, Dada collage has a different character than Cubist collage, and for that reason I did not incorporate my discussion of Dada collage in the section in the Cubist book in which Cubism’s influence is discussed.
We spent our winters in London, and during the winters I did not attempt to work, but the two summers of 1903 and 1904 remain in my mind as a period of complete intellectual deadlock. It was clear to me that I could not get on without solving the contradictions, and I was determined that no difficulty should turn me aside from the completion of Principia Mathematica, but it seemed quite likely that the whole of the rest of my life might be consumed in looking at that blank sheet of paper. 11 Russell broke down in despair.