Placing Robbe-Grillet’s filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire fi...
Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph Despite his films being subjected to censorship and denigration in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading independent film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s. Cecilia Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu a...
To Repair the World (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Mary B. Robinson
This book is a biography in the form of an oral history about a woman whose founding of Arena Stage in Washington, DC in 1950 shifted live professional theater away from Broadway and inspired the creation of non-profit theaters around the country. Dianne Wiest, James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach, and Jane Alexander, among many others, share their memories of this intrepid pioneering woman during Arena Stage’s early years. As Head of New York University’s Graduate Acting Program for 25 years, Zelda F...
This is the first full-length monograph in English about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English speaking world for his award winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. This study locates André Téchiné within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian war, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French wave. The originali...
Conversations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Conversations - (Seagull Titles CHUP)) (Conversations)
by Hamid Dabashi
Born in Tehran in 1957, film-maker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religiously and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972 Makhmalbaf formed his own urban guerrilla group and two years later attacked a police officer, for which he was arrested and jailed. He remained incarcerated until 1978, when the revolutionary wave led by Ayatollah Khomeini freed him and launched his career as a...
Clint Eastwood is Hollywood’s elder statesman and its conscience. He is the standard by which other films and filmmakers are judged. He represents both classical Hollywood and an entirely modern, uncompromising and unfussy directorial presence. There are those who adore him as a cowboy, a superstar, the rugged, unyielding yet introspective face of American machismo. There are those who read him as a great American auteur fashioning uncompromising, fascinating, intellectual films about his coun...
Maria Luisa Bemberg, who died in 1995, was one of Latin America's best known and most popular film-makers. The only woman director in the region to have achieved consistent success both nationally and internationally, she is all the more remarkable for having made her first feature at the age of fifty-eight. Born into a traditional, aristocratic Argentine family, her late-blossoming career focused above all on women's issues. The six films she made between 1980 and 1993 all have female protagoni...
From King Lear to the Tragedy of Carmen, from Marat/Sade to the epic Mahabharata, Peter Brook has reinvented modern theatre, not once but again and again. In The Open Door the visionary director and theorist offers a lucid, comprehensive exposition of the philosophy that underlies his work. It is a philosophy of paradoxes: We come to the theatre to find life, but that life must be different from the life we find outside. Actors have to prepare painstakingly yet be willing to sacrifice the resu...
Empire of Dreams is the first definitive look at all of the science fiction (SF), fantasy, and horror films directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the world today. In the 1970s and 1980s, along with George Lucas, Spielberg helped spark the renaissance of American SF and fantasy film, and he has remained highly productive and prominent in these genres ever since. SF, fantasy, and horror films form the bulk of his work for over thirty years; of the twen...
Founded in 1973, the journal Literature/Film Quarterly has featured interviews with some of the most prominent and influential filmmakers from around the world. In Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly, the journal's coeditors have assembled an exciting collection of interviews spanning 35 years of the internationally-renowned publication and representing a broad spectrum of artistic approaches, industrial contexts, and cultural concerns. Intervi...
The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now...
As the career of Worsley Senior languished amid studio politics, young Wally began his own odyssey through the Hollywood legacy of the twentieth century, spending almost two decades at MGM with such actors as Greta Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Kelly, on pictures like The Wizard of Oz and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Wally left during the turbulent 1950s and went to New York City, Singapore, and Europe. When he returned to Hollywood in 1960, he spent another two decades in the new, television...
Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned f...
Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems faced by this small nation as it pursues its film-making ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kári's film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking. Björn Norðfjörð's examination of the film integrates the...
Filmmaker David Lynch's work is viewed here as patriotic and Puritanical. This Lynch is an idealistic conservative on a reformer's mission. Lynch promotes a return to the values inherent in a mythological America, but he indulges in a voyeuristic pleasure which he simultaneously condemns. Like Jeffrey peeking through the slats of Dorothy's closet in Blue Velvet, the viewer of Lynch's work is a rationalist plagued by his dreams; intrigued and repulsed, fascinated and judgmental, he both craves...
Henry King's America (The Scarecrow Filmmakers, #15)
by Walter Coppedge
Highlights and Shadows (The Scarecrow Filmmakers)
by Charles G. Clarke and Anthony Slide
Charles G. Clarke (1899-1983) was a prolific Hollywood cinematographer whose career extended from the Twenties through the early Sixties. Among his best-known films are Miracle on 34th Street and Carousel. Clarke's autobography is filled with unique anecdotes and personal observations on those with whom he worked, including Will Rogers, John Ford, and Henry King.
This is the autobiography of actor, author and artist Anthony Sher. It offers an insight into his first 50 years. Starting with his time in the sinister paradise of white South Africa, we follow Sher through his time as a rifleman during conscription in Namibia, his feelings of being an outsider and his escape to London. Small, weedy, Jewish and conscious of his homosexuality Anthony found a refuge in art and later theatre. Sher was turned down by RADA and Central but still went on to create a s...
This is the authorised biography of John Schelsinger. The author has the full co-operation of Jon Schelsinger, including unprecedented access to Schelsinger's personal tape recordings that he made during his career and to his voluminous correspondence. This book will also include interviews with many of the stars who have worked with Schelsinger. John Schlesinger made stars of Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Sean Penn. He has resurrected the careers of Laurence Olivier...
Gus Van Sant: Icons
This reference work presents the full range of the filmmaker’s artistry (photography, painting and music) through the optic of his films. It is an original work combining all facets of his creation for the first time, bringing a fresh vision of his cinematographic work. At the heart of the book is the exhibition curator Matthieu Orléan’s unpublished interview with Gus Van Sant in Portland in June 2015, discussing the whole scope of his work and inspirations through a network of images organized...
The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan (Film and History)
by Ron Briley
Elia Kazan first made a name for himself on the Broadway stage, directing productions of such classics as The Skin of Our Teeth, Death of Salesman, and A Streetcar Named Desire. His venture to Hollywood was no less successful. He won an Oscar for only his second film, Gentleman’s Agreement, and his screen version of Streetcar has been hailed as one of the great film adaptations of a staged work. But in 1952, Kazan’s stature was compromised when he was called to testify before the House Un-Americ...
The history of animated cartoons has for decades been dominated by the accomplishments of Walt Disney, giving the impression that he invented the medium. In reality, it was the work of several pioneers. Max Fleischer--inventor of the Rotoscope technique of tracing animation frame by frame over live-action footage--was one of the most prominent. By the 1930s, Fleischer and Disney were the leading producers of animated films but took opposite approaches. Where Disney reflected a Midwestern...
The Films of Michael Powell and the Archers (The Scarecrow Filmmakers)
by Scott Salwolke
Michael Powell was introduced to film relatively late in life, and feeling dissatisfied with what British films had to offer, he took his primary influences from American and German films. Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian emigre who was educated in the German film industry before fleeing from the threat of the Nazi party. These two men of diverse backgrounds would successfully collaborate on 16 films over a period of fifteen years, most often with their identities united as the Archers. The A...
Exactly fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made his first completed film - a two-minute student exercise which he called Murder. In the half-century since, Polanski has become an iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually charged films and yet derided as - in his own words - 'an evil, profligate dwarf'. In January 1978, facing a possible fifty-year sentence for 'unlawful sexual intercourse' with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski fled the United States and flew to Fran...