A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors)
by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline
This compendium of original essays offers invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential directors in the history of cinema, exploring his major films, philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and directors. Presents a compendium of original essays offering invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinemaFeatures contributions from an international cast of major...
This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. This volume undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centered on Winterbottom's collaborative worki...
David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of Lynch's career, this book documents Lynch's first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artist's studio. Much like his movies, m...
The dead walk. Putrid corpses claw their way out of earthy graves and stumble towards civilisation. They are bloody, rotting, and hungry for human flesh - and it's all George Romero's fault. With 1968's Night of the Living Dead Romero unleashed the modern zombie onto cinemas, annihilating their voodoo roots and resurrecting them as passed away friends and dead loved ones. Its sequel, the zombies in a mall masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, took Romero's apocalyptic nightmare further. Its frank depict...
Hitchcock Annual – Volume 12 (Hitchcock Annual)
by Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen
A Companion to Werner Herzog (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors, #18)
A Companion to Werner Herzog showcases over two dozen original scholarly essays examining nearly five decades of filmmaking by one of the most acclaimed and innovative figures in world cinema. First collection in twenty years dedicated to examining Herzog’s expansive careerFeatures essays by international scholars and Herzog specialistsAddresses a broad spectrum of the director’s films, from his earliest works such as Signs of Life and Fata Morgana to such recent films as The Bad Lieutenant...
The Alexander Medvedkin Reader (Cinema and Modernity (CHUP)) (Cinema and Modernity)
by Alexander Medvedkin
Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900 89), a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, is celebrated today for his unique form of "total" documentary cinema, which aimed to bridge the distance between film and life, and for his use of satire during a period when the Soviet authorities preferred that laughter be confined to narrowly prescribed channels. This collection of selected writings by Medvedkin is the first of its kind and reveals how his work is a crucial link in the histo...
When Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, s...
A fresh account of the career of one of the most important photographers of the 20th century Through his amazing variety of innovative images, photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976) played a crucial role in establishing the medium's significance as a modern art form. Celebrating the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent acquisition of the core collection of Strand's prints from the Paul Strand Archive, this stunning book comprehensively reassesses the artist's career in light of current scholarship...
Rosi's films consistently and directly address the themes of political and institutional corruption and the complex relationship between the individual, the mafia, and the state. Whether evoking the multiple facets of Sicilian banditry in Salvatore Giuliano (1962), exposing right-wing killing squads in Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses) (1976), or courageously debating the roots of Italian terrorism in ^ITre fratelli (Three Brothers)^R (1981), his gripping political-documentary works have...
Focusing on onscreen objects in Alfred Hitchcock's films, this study examines the staircases, eyeglasses, lamps, doors, candles, cigarettes, buildings, monuments, statues and dozens of other props the director treated as subjective protagonists, with roles practically equal to the actors'. Hitchock's imperative was to charge the screen with emotion. Subject matter and acting were, for him, subordinate to ""all of the technical aspects that made the audience scream."" Examining each of the direct...
The Fictional Christopher Nolan
by University of Vermont Todd McGowan
From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan’s films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us h...
Alfred Hitchcock is arguably the most famous director to have ever made a film. Almost single-handedly he turned the suspense thriller into one of the most popular film genres of all time, while his Psycho updated the horror film and inspired two generations of directors to imitate and adapt this most Hitchcockian of movies. Yet while much scholarly and popular attention has focused on the director's oeuvre, until now there has been no extensive study of how Alfred Hitchcock's films and methods...
The Northman: A Call to the Gods is the official look at how this epic Viking revenge thriller was conceived, written, cast, and produced by acclaimed director Robert Eggers. Set against the ruthless backdrop of tenth-century Norse territory, The Northman is an epic Viking revenge thriller by acclaimed director Robert Eggers (The Witch [2015] and The Lighthouse [2019]), featuring an all-star cast including Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and Bjoer...
The Art and Making of Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley: The Rise and Fall of Stanton Carlisle
by Gina McIntyre
Comprehensive and insightful, , is the ultimate companion to the master director's latest work. Inspired by William Lindsay Gresham's cult 1947 novel, Nightmare Alley stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton "Stan" Carlisle, a talented but troubled drifter who takes up with a travelling carnival. Ingratiating himself with its troupe of misfits, Stan swindles his way to fortune and fame, but when he meets psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), his greed and duplicity will put him on the path to sel...
Explore an A-Z of everything you need to know about the iconic films of Wes Anderson, from Asteroid City to Steve Zissou and everything in between.With hundreds of entries covering every facet of Anderson's work - from inspiration and influences to his most frequent collaborators and little-known quirks - A Wes Anderson Dictionary is a stylish guide to the wonderful world of this iconic, unique filmmaker.Written by author and journalist Sophie Monks Kaufmann (Little White Lies, Empire, Netflix,...
Set during the 1970s in smog-ridden Los Angeles, The Nice Guys is the story about a Los Angeles private investigator (Ryan Gosling) who reluctantly partners with a former fighter (Russell Crowe) to find a missing girl. Their investigation reveals a connection between the missing girl to porn star Misty Mountain, recently dead from a fatal car crash. In classic Shane Black fashion, the writer/director spins a darkly humorous noir, as our pair crisscross the city, from Bel-Air to downto...
First advertised as a “mind-stretching experience,” Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth stunned the cinema world. A tour-de-force of science fiction as art form, the movie brought not only hallucinatory visuals and a haunting exploration of contemporary alienation, but also glam-rock legend David Bowie in his lead role debut as paranoid alien Newton. Based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 sci-fi fable of the same title, The Man Who Fell to Earth follows alien Newton from his arrival on earth in...
From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period – before going on to become one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers – Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine sheds new light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped his artistic voice. Tracing the links between his photojournalism and films, Philippe Mather shows how working at Look...
Perhaps the best-known Spanish filmmaker to international audiences, Pedro Almodóvar gained the widespread attention of English-speaking critics and fans with the Oscar-nominated Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the celebrated dark comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Marvin D'Lugo offers a concise, informed, and insightful commentary on a preeminent force in modern cinema. D'Lugo follows Almodóvar's career chronologically, tracing the director's works and their increasing complexity in...
One of the most distinguished filmmakers working today, David Lynch is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in fine art. He was motivated to make his first film as a student because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” Most existing studies of Lynch, however, fail to engage fully with the complexities of his films’ relationship to other art forms. The Film Paintings of David Lynch fills this void, arguing that Lynch’s cinematic output needs to be considered wit...
Over her more than four-decade career, New York-based filmmaker, performer, and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross the boundaries of experimental film, video art, and multimedia performance—from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion, to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit in the Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of movement and the resilience of the human spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of c...
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Contemporary Film Directors)
by Joseph Mai
For well over a decade, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have produced highly original and ethically charged films that immerse their audiences in an intense and embodied viewing experience. Their work has consistently attracted international recognition, including the rare feat of two Palmes d'Or at Cannes. In this first book-length study of the Belgian brothers, Joseph Mai delivers sophisticated close analyses of their directorial style and explores the many philosophical issues dealt with in thei...