Robert and Frances Flaherty (McGill-Queen's Native and Northern, #45)
by Robert J. Christopher
The early career of acclaimed documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his wife Frances told through their intimate journals.
William Friedkin (Conversations with Filmmakers)
Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school-educated filmmakers of the directors' era, Friedkin got his start as a mailroom clerk at a local TV station and worked his way up to becoming a full-blown Hollywood filmmaker by his thirties. His rapid rise behind the camera from television director to Oscar winner came with self-confidence and unorthodox met...
'I've sometimes thought in the dead of night, "Look at your life, Bruce, rip out the writing, and with all these boiling frustrations and opinions what would you be?" I'd be in trouble, wouldn't I? Or I'd be in jail. Hard-talking, boisterous, frank and forthright, Bruce Robinson reveals to Alistair Owen the truth about his work and life in a series of exclusive interviews. Talking candidly about his entire career; his acting, writing and directing, and the many tussles he has faced with Hollywoo...
George Lucas is an innovative and talented director, producer, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose prolific career spans decades. While he is best known as the creative mind behind the Star Wars franchise, Lucas first gained notoriety with his 1973 film American Graffiti, which received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. When Star Wars (1977) was released, the groundbreaking motion picture won six Academy Awards, became the highest grossing film at the time,...
An authentic visionary of cinema, Japanese filmmaker Hara Kazuo has spent the past four decades pioneering a stark documentary style that challenged the mores of postwar Japanese society. His works feature dramatic narratives and characters--radicals, outcasts and those on the margins--who struggle against adversity: "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society," Kazuo has avowed. Camera Obtrusa is the first English-language publication addressing his work. Composed as a straightforward handb...
Harvard, Hollywood, Hitmen, and Holy Men (Screen Classics)
by Paul W Williams
The movie director Paul Williams is a real-life Forrest Gump. Williams' experiences form a unique and often wild constellation of encounters with star power, political power, and spiritual power - a life cycle that led to fame and fortune and to integrity and anonymity. In a mad childhood created by an autocratic English teacher father and an infantilizing mother, he develops a precocious visual acuity to avoid wallops and a writing ability that mollified his father. This skill set wins hi...
Derek Jarman's films explore the possibilities and limitations of same-sex love and self-expression during various historical eras, ranging from ancient Egypt to present times. His work covers a millennium of sexual repression and efforts to escape it. Jarman provides us with a cinematic history of people whose homoerotic passions had a major impact on western civilization in religion, art, politics, philosophy, and war. This book provides background information on each of Jarman's fiftee...
The Social, Psychological and Cultural Significance of Westerns
by Arthur Asa Berger
This book is about cowboy Western books and two important Western films, Shane and High Noon. Its focus is on the psychological, social, and cultural significance of Westerns, a narrative genre of major importance in American popular culture. What you will find, as you read this book, is that while the stories may have relatively simple plot lines, compared to classic novels, and are based on certain formulas, their psychological significance and cultural importance is a very complicated matter....
He was Red Skelton's favorite director, and mentored Lucille Ball in the art of physical comedy. In his 15-year Hollywood career, S. Sylvan Simon (1910-1951) directed and/or produced more than 40 films, with stars like Lana Turner, Abbott and Costello, and Wallace Beery. Though he loved to make moviegoers laugh, he demonstrated his versatility with murder mysteries, war stories, and musicals. After a decade at MGM, he moved to Columbia, where he produced his own projects, including the Western m...
Glauber Rocha is known as the visionary Brazilian director of landmark films, Black God, White Devil, Entranced Earth and Antonio das Mortes. Hitherto virtually unknown outside Brazil is that he was also a brilliant film critic and innovative thinker on world cinema. On Cinema brings together for the first time in the English language a comprehensive selection of Rocha's film writings, revealing for the first time to English-speaking readers the full critical power, inventiveness and vision of a...
Most published works on writer-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959) have focused on the elements that made him a symbol of classic Hollywood comedy or his contributions to the genre via such 1940s classics as ""The Lady Eve"", ""Sullivan's Travels"" and ""Miracle of Morgan's Creek"". In contrast, this critical study asserts that there are enough unexplained incongruities, fragmentations and contradictions in Sturges' output to demand a re-evaluation of his place in film history as a predecessor...
The Creature Chronicles
by Tom Weaver, David Schecter, and Steve Kronenberg
He was the final addition to Universal's "royal family" of movie monsters: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. With his scaly armour, razor claws and a face only a mother octopus could love, this Amazon denizen was perhaps the most fearsome beast in the history of Hollywood's Studio of Horrors. But he also possessed a sympathetic, poignant quality which elevated him fathoms above the many aquatic monsters who swam in his wake. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Gill Man and his mid-50s...
The author's treatment of the works of the most subtle of all film-makers analyzes the key elements of suspense, humour and tone across the whole of the director's career. Arguing that all three are central to our viewing experience the book aims to demonstrate how Hitchcock's integration of these elements is the key to his success as a filmmaker. Films such as "North by Northwest", "The Birds", "Shadow of a Doubt" and "Notorious" amongst others are examined in detail. The book discusses the ide...
The three films comprising director Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy' - Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures(2002) - represent key contributions to the cinema of contemporary China. The films, which are set in Jia's home province of Shanxi, highlight the plight of marginalised individuals - singers, dancers, pickpockets, prostitutes and drifters - as they struggle to navigate through the radically transforming terrain of contemporary China. Xiao Wu tells the story of a small-ti...
The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda
Drawing especially on the encounters and relationships that defined her exceptional career, The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda outlines a sustainable legacy for the celebrated director and visual artist. Over nine chapters, it unpacks how creation, connection, and environment form the core of Varda’s artistry, which centers foremost on relationships with her family, with other artists, even with passersby she would meet in her travels around the world. Also celebrating her feminist legacy,...
The Coppolas (Modern Filmmakers)
by Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet R. Morrison
This fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at a Hollywood dynasty offers an in-depth study of the films and artistry of iconic director Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia, exploring their work and their impact on each other, both personally and professionally. The Coppolas: A Family Business examines the lives, films, and relationship of two exemplary filmmakers, Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia. It looks at their commonalities and differences, as artists and people, and at th...
The Art of Rehearsal (Theatre Makers)
What are the key elements that go into creating a work of art for the stage? Which are the most productive conditions and methods of rehearsal? In this collection of interviews, 18 international artists share their experience and offer practical advice on the creation of performance work. Their answers provide a goldmine of tried and tested approaches as they discuss the common problems and difficulties of creative work, their turning-point experiences, and ways in which they have challenged per...
"A cinephile's dream: the chance to follow legendary director Woody Allen throughout the creation of a film--from inception to premiere--and to enjoy his reflections on some of the finest artists in the history of cinema. Eric Lax has been with Woody Allen almost every step of the way. He chronicled Allen's transformation from stand-up comedian to filmmaker in On Being Funny (1975). His international best seller, Woody Allen: A Biography (1991), was a portrait of a director hitting his stride. C...
Anyone who has watched "Twin Peaks" or sat through the dark and grainy world of "Eraserhead" knows that David Lynch's films pull us into a strange world where reality turns upside down and sideways. His films are carnivals that allow us to transcend our ordinary lives and to reverse the meanings we live with in our daily lives. Nowhere is this demonstrated better than in the opening scene of "Blue Velvet" when our worlds are literally turned on their ears. Lynch endlessly vacillates between Holl...
Michael Allen's insightful study explores the long and diverse career of the actor and director Robert Redford, from his early work in theatre and TV to his contemporary status as an iconic and enduring star. Allen assesses Redford’s importance to the American film industry during a period of great transformation: as an influential industry player, an award-winning director and a committed political activist. Allen considers Redford’s individual achievements in the context of shifts and changes...
Stanley Kubrick (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture, #39)
by Mario Falsetto
The second edition of Mario Falsetto's extensive analysis of Kubrick's films carefully examines the filmmaker's oeuvre in its entirety--from smaller, early films (The Killing) through mid-career masterpieces (Dr. Strangelove; 2001: A Space Odyssey; A Clockwork Orange), later films such as Full Metal Jacket, and his final work, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut. The author, offering close readings supported by precise shot descriptions, shows us how Kubrick's body of work represents a stylistically and thema...
This analysis of the films of Wim Wenders from the early 1970's through the 1990's attempts to place his work in the cultural and political context of the time. Feminist analysis, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis combine to explore the major themes in the films with an emphasis on gender and narrative and on Wenders' concern with the representation of otherness. Wenders' earlier films reflect concerns with identity and with issues of masculinity and detachment. His later films reveal a preocc...
This indispensable guide provides a thorough chronological examination of Ridley Scott's directorial career. All of Scott's films are included, along with information on his frequent collaborators, his thoughts on his own films, and a section on his unrealised projects. This is the essential reference guide to one of mainstream cinema's most diverse directors.
Mention famous film directors and the name of Alfred Hitchcock is bound to come up. Not only were Hitchcock's films innovative and unique, they were also entertaining, captivating critics and audiences alike. He had a gift for turning the familiar into the unfamiliar, the mundane into the unexpected. With a penchant for planning the entire movie before the first day of filming began - a story board approach he shared with only one other director, Walt Disney - he was renowned for his relaxed dir...