"You can do anything. But never go against the family." Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather Their tale is the stuff of legend. The Coppolas are one of the great American filmmaking dynasties, an immigrant family who have thrived in the Promised Land. But for every triumph there is tragedy. For every masterpiece there is a battle against the conformities of the system. For every Academy Award there has been blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice. The story is centred on two extraordinary filmm...
Cristi Puiu's black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu announced the arrival of the New Romanian Cinema as a force on the film world stage. As critics and festival audiences embraced the new movement, Puiu emerged as its lodestar and critical voice. Monica Filimon explores the works of an artist dedicated to truth not as an abstract concept, but as the ephemeral revelation of the fuller, ungraspable world beyond the screen. Puiu's innovative use of the handheld camera as an observer and his relia...
In the first ten years of his career, Steven Spielberg directed some of the most influential and beloved films in cinema history. Movies such as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial introduced audiences to the modern blockbuster and cemented Spielberg as a monumental figure in pop culture. Through exclusive imagery and unparalleled insight from Spielberg’s longtime documentarian, Laurent Bouzereau, this deluxe volume explores how a you...
With films such as The Brood and Videodrome, David Cronenberg established himself as Canada's most provocative director. With subsequent movies such as The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, Cronenberg demonstrated his ability not only to touch painful nerves but also to invest his own developing genre with seriousness, philosophical dimension and a rare emotional intensity.Cronenberg on Cronenberg charts his development from maker of inexpensive 'exploitation' cinema to internati...
One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace and desireA young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown. THE BOOK: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V. M. Straka, in which a man with no past...
Alfred Hitchcock called the silent "the purest form of cinema," and the ten silent films he directed between 1925 and 1929 reveal the young director's mature artistry. Hitchcock's silents have often been characterized as the work of a talented amateur, a young director practicing his craft during a pre-sound era of antiquated instruments and poor film techniques--the director experimented with myriad points of view, unique camera angles and movements, and special effects such as dissolves, bl...
The first volume in Kaya's series examining the work of a new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinema Called “the world's most original action auteur” by the Village Voice, Takeshi Kitano is already legendary in Japan, where he is known both for his inventive films and for his legendarily caustic alter ego, comedian Beat Takeshi. In the United States, his stylishly noir aesthetic has both influenced and been admired by such directors as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Taranti...
This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini's entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian t...
It has been three decades since Terry Gilliam first began unleashing his imagination at us. From relatively humble beginnings as the silent partner in Monty Python, he has gone on to be one of the most influential visionaries working in mainstream motion pictures. Uniquely among Hollywood directors, Gilliam has managed to make big-budget movies, with the biggest stars in the world, whilst never quite losing his reputation as a dangerous maverick. By turns hilarious and terrifying, his fantasies...
Five American Cinematographers (The Scarecrow Filmmakers, #17)
by Scott Eyman
Screenwriter David Sherwin reveals what it is really like to work in Hollywood and discusses his friendship with director Lindsay Anderson, whom he collaborated with on the films If..., O Lucky Man, and Brittania Hospital. Contains the original screenplay of If...
One of the most prolific and respected directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905–69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. Little, however, has been written about Naruse in English, and much of the writing about him in Japanese has not been translated into English. With The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell brings deserved critical attention to this under-appreciated director. Besides illuminating Naruse’s contributions to Japanese and world cinema, Russell’s in-depth stud...
This book is about the British film-maker Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was a highly influential personality within British cinema, mostly famous for landmark films like This Sporting Life (1963) and If….(1968). Lindsay Anderson Revisited deals primarily with hitherto unexplored aspects of his career: his biographical background in the British upper class, his devoted film criticism, and his angry relationship to contemporary society in general. Thus, the book contains chapters about his childhood...
Nora Ephron: The Last Interview (The Last Interview)
by Nora Ephron
For fans of When Harry Met Sally and readers of I Feel Bad About My Neck comes an indispensable collection of wit and wisdom from the late, great writer-filmmaker A hilarious and revealing look at one of America’s most beloved screenwriters. From the beginning of her career as a young journalist to her final interview—a warm, wise, heartbreaking reflection originally published in the Believer—this is a sparkling look at the life and work of a great talent.
This work is an interactive computer program developed for museums and non-profit film institutions in celebration of Alfred Hitchcock's centenary in 1999. Much of the material gathered here can ordinarily be found only in special collections, such as the Department of Film and Video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hitchcok Collection in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hill, and the archives of the British Film Institution i...
A Companion to François Truffaut (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors)
The 34 essays of this collection by leading international scholars reassess Truffaut's impact on cinema as they locate the unique quality of his thematic obsessions and his remarkable narrative techniques. Almost 30 years after his death, we are presented with strikingly original perspectives on his background, influences, and importance.Bridges a gap in film scholarship with a series of 34 original essays by leading film scholars that assess the lasting impact of Truffaut's work Provides striki...
This is the definitive life story of Alfred Hitchcock, the enigmatic and intensely private director of Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and more than forty other films. While setting forth every stage of Hitchcock's long life and brilliant career, Donald Spoto also explores the roots of the director's obsessions with blondes, food, murder, and idealized love--and he traces the incomparable, bizarre genius from Hitchcock's English childhood through the golden years of his career in Americ...
As a script supervisor, second unit director, producer, and director, Herbert Coleman's film career spanned seven decades. Active in Hollywood from 1926 through 1988, he enjoyed a lengthy and illustrious career, highlighted by an impressive string of commercial and critical successes with one of the greats of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock. In this memoir, Coleman describes working on such classics as The Big Clock, Carrie, Five Graves to Cairo, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Roman Holiday. Coleman al...
Agrippina Vaganova (1879–1951) is revered as the visionary who first codified the Russian system of classical ballet training. The Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, founded on impeccable technique and centuries of tradition, has a reputation for elite standards, and its graduates include Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Diana Vishneva. Yet the “Vaganova method” has come under criticism in recent years. In this absorbing volume, Catherine Pawlick traces Vaganova’s sto...
Few directors are characterized by both extraordinary film craft and the ironic reputation for lowbrow films. Despite his many achievements as a child of the Italian Cinecitta studios, however, Sergio Leone has been judged severely by writers who find his films lacking in ideas and moralists who find his films unduly cynical. Nevertheless, Leone's greatest cinematic achievement, Once Upon a Time in the West, served to refute these criticisms while exposing the director's unique romanticism an...