Cinema

By Samuel Kaye

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Description

Daniel Day Lewis, Tilda Swinton, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman star in Cinema, a novel that explores the hitherto unrecognized relationships  between acting, writing, performance, being, office politics, restructures, and corporate thinking about new ways of working.
Nick Clement, former small-time circus impresario, is resigned to his existence in a valueless bureaucracy where he learns the new languages of activity-based working, collaborative spaces and cross-functional engagement. Clement and his new colleague, Claire, are tasked by the company with undertaking a whole-of-business analysis of where operational improvements can be made. In the face of this opportunity to demonstrate his executive potential, Clement’s life takes a turn when he meets Claire’s film director boyfriend, James McNeil. McNeil has written a screenplay of such overwhelming complexity and beauty it seems it could never be realized.
The screenplay is picked up and financed by a well-established and ambitious English film producer, who is able, because of the ground-breaking nature of the work, to engage four of the finest actors of their generation to commit to the project. There is one role in the cast that is unable to be filled, that of Friedrich Engels, the great comrade of Daniel Day Lewis’ Karl Marx. Nick Clement is, against his better judgment, thrown into a film production that will change the course of cinema forever.
Cinema will take you to Sydney, London, the Sachsenwald Forest outside Hamburg, and Los Angeles as it explores the birth of Communism, Germanic-Gypsy history, and an invisible writing that foretold a great literature of the future. It will take you across the Atlantic in a medieval replica sailing boat hand-made by the the most admired actor of the last 40 years. In essence, Cinema outlines a never-ending performative process of being.

BOOK DETAILS

ISBN: 978-1-952600-02-9

Publication date: 02 December 2020

Paperback price: 18

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING

Samuel Kaye is a Kafka for these neoliberal, fame-obsessed times. But he is a better writer than the Bohemian. His crisp, taut prose and flat characters create a world where there is no authentic self, but merely layers of performance. So much so, that it is not stretching it to say that performance is the main character and method of this novel. The book itself is performative. It performs what it is about in its structure and unfolding. It does what it says. Kaye enacts the arguments he describes. He mounts classic debates in performance studies around how an actor should act, specifically mentioning Diderot, Stanislavski, and Strasberg, and brings down a conclusion something like Mamet, where the actor serves the writing, allowing it to bring itself to life through its takeover of the actor’s body. Kaye also stretches this to build a world where the various meanings of performance, from the aesthetic performance of the actors, the neoliberal jargon of corporate performance, and the everyday performance of self blend into each other. He shows how these various modes of performance manifest as languages. In this, he reveals the nuanced complexity of self which has historically been variously misinterpreted as soul, psyche, and subject, to be performance. The media-constructed real-world actors he writes about, his interpretation of them as characters in the novel, the real world and fictional characters they play in the film in the novel, and the imaginary characters the writer-director constructs on them in their imaginations, blend effortlessly into each other in a play of revealing and obscuring, appearing and disappearing. This is further complexified by the multi-faceted dimensions of the characters portrayed in the novel playing characters in the film bleeding into the characters in the novel being written in the film being made in the novel. Through this layering, Kaye circumscribes the limit where self and performance become each other. This is important work. Fucken capital L literature. But this is not just a novel. It is philosophy in a way to which so many novels pretend but fail. Enjoyable though it is, this book should not be merely enjoyed, but studied as the performance of philosophy of performance which it is.

– Stuart Grant, Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University

As certain drugs are “creepers” and certain people are “slow burners”, Sam Kaye's Cinema slowly immerses you in the exquisite banalities of corporate speech and the ritual boredoms of bureaucracy, while flashing in and out of the human glamour machine of cinema, in a weird reimagining of what industrial art has become. Cinema’s elegant subject is thinking through talking: there is a smoldering glee in dialogue rarely encountered. This book is full of risks, peculiar or “bent” in ways you must experience, and you get to fall in love with Tilda Swinton in real time.

– Duncan Hose