While best known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter (1930–2008) had an equally successful career writing screenplays. His collaborations with director Joseph Losey garnered great attention and esteem, and two of his screenplays earned Academy Award nominations: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Betrayal (1983). He is also credited for writing an unproduced script to remake Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Lolita. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the subject of Pinter as playwright, but the rich landscape of his work in film has been left largely undisturbed. In Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, Steven H. Gale, the world's foremost Pinter scholar, analyzes Pinter's creative process from initial conception to finished film. Gale makes careful, point-by-point comparisons of each stage in the screenplay's creation—the source material, the adaptations themselves, and the films made from the scripts—in order to reveal the meaning behind each film script and to explain the cinematic techniques used to express that meaning. Unlike most Pinter scholars, who focus almost solely on the written word, Gale devotes discussion to the cinematic interpretation of the scripts through camera angles and movement, cutting, and other techniques. Pinter does not merely convert his stage scripts to screenplays; he adapts the works to succeed in the other medium, avoiding elements of the live play that do not work onscreen and using the camera's focusing operations in ways that are not possible on the stage. As Pinter's career progressed and his writing evolved, screenplays became for him an increasingly vital means of creative expression. Sharp Cut is the first study to fully explore this important component of the Pinter canon.

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written. With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

There is no writer who excels at the art of adaptation for the screen so much as Harold Pinter. His consummate craftmanship and unerring ear for dialogue, coupled with his sensitivity and understanding of the work of other writers, makes the three volumes of his collected screenplays a masterclass in screenwriting. This second volume includes The Go-Between, another of his unforgettable collaborations with Joseph Losey, his adaptation of Russell Hoban's novel Turtle Diary, his remarkable Proust Screenplay, as well as Victory and Reunion. The volume contains a new introduction by the author.

In his Nobel speech, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, Harold Pinter explained how he was fighting against the «tapestry of lies». It is indeed those daily lies, lies of love or of state, that are exposed in this book, which emphasises his political agenda. In March 2007, the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin) and the ENS LSH organised VIVA PINTER, a tribute to his work centred on a key notion for the city of Lyon, the Spirit of Resistance. Pinter combined a concise, fragmented and syllogistic style with a keen perception of the metaphors of our time. The most specific instrument of this great humanist lay in his representation of power games. In this volume, scholars, stage-directors and lawyers tell us how his work is highly meaningful for them. Golden Palm winners Volker Schlöndorff and Jerry Schatzberg, film and theatre director David Jones, and BBC radio producer Barbara Bray share with us the memory of how they worked with Pinter on his major plays and films.

Collects some of the author's most famous writings, including plays, short stories, and essays.

“One of the most essential artists produced by the twentieth century. Pinter’s work gets under our skin more than that of any living playwright.” —New York Times Upon its premiere at the National Theatre, Betrayal was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It won the Olivier Award for best new play, and has since been performed all around the world and made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Hodge. Betrayal begins with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes of the play, we move back in time through the stages of their affair, ending in the house of Emma and her husband Robert, Jerry’s best friend. “[Betrayal] deals with the shifting balance of power in triangular relationships, and with the pain of loss. . . . Pinter probes the corrosive nature of betrayal . . . a world where pain and loss are explored with poetic precision.” —Guardian “Betrayal is an exquisite play, brilliantly simple in form and courageous in its search for a poetry that turns banality into a melancholy beauty.” —Newsweek “There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.” —Times (UK)

Harold Pinter has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary theatre; his arresting and original works have left a lasting imprint on the development of the stage and screen while delighting audiences around the world. This, the first of four volumes, contains his first five plays, including The Birthday Party (1958), his first full-length drama; as well as two short stories—"The Black and White" and "The Examination"—both written before Pinter turned to the theatre. Pinter's exacting and complex use of language and the features that mark his "comedies of menace" are clearly realized in these plays and stories. His speech "Writing for the Theatre" introduces the volume and establishes the context for those early years. Includes: The Birthday Party The Room The Dumb Waiter A Slight Ache A Night Out "The Black and White" "The Examination" "Writing for the Theatre"