The Age of Anxiety and Later Modernism

1. Drama–Theater of the Absurd (pp. 645-647)
Theater > Directing > Concept
http://www.mhhe.com/HumanitiesStudio/7/5/1.html
Click on the link above to consider the idea of a directorial concept in theater, including style/genre, intensity, setting, space, and costume. A director can stage a scene in many different ways, with different meanings. Late-modern playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Howard Pinter, and others probed and mocked the conventions and artifice of theater in ways influenced by existentialism. How would you direct a play based on an absurdist script by one of these authors?

2. Film (pp. 661)
Film > Cinematography > Types of Shots
http://www.mhhe.com/HumanitiesStudio/4/4/2.html
In the late modern era, film directors began to develop films as art forms, with innovations in narratives, production, and form. To investigate how cinematographers use shots, camera angles and movement, point of view, and lighting, click on the link above. Looking at the still shot from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Fig. 21.28, p. 691), how have these elements been manipulated? How have other films that you’ve seen manipulated elements of cinematography for artistic effect?