Gilles Deleuze represents the most widely referenced theorist of cinema today. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. From one of the foremost theorists following Deleuze in the world today, Deleuze and Lola Montès offers a detailed explication of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film – from his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Building on this foundation,...
Tony Richardson was a key figure in British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Having established himself in the theatre with the first production of John Osborne’s landmark play Look Back in Anger, he became a central director in the New Wave, bringing greater realism to British cinema. He went on to make some of the most significant films of the 1960s including the multi Oscar-winning Tom Jones.This detailed and authoritative account of Richardson’s career provides a reassessment of his achievemen...
Bertrand Tavernier is widely recognised as the leading French filmmaker of his generation. Both a consummate artist and a controversial public figure, he is a passionate advocate for social causes and also a tireless defender of world cinema in general and the French cinematic heritage in particular. Lynn Higgins’ book offers a guided tour through Tavernier’s oeuvre, taking into account both its prodigious diversity and its unifying themes. It explores his use of genre and adaptation, his work w...
Richard Lester is of the most significant yet misunderstood directors of the post-war era. Indelibly associated with the Beatles and the ‘swinging Sixties’ because of his direction of A Hard Day’s Night and Help and his joyous sex comedy The Knack, Lester has tended to be categorised as a modish director whose heyday passed when that decade’s optimism slid into disillusionment and violence.This book offers a critical appreciation and reappraisal of his work, arguing that it had much greater dept...
David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (Canadian Cinema)
by Bart Beaty
Arguably the most famous and critically acclaimed Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg is celebrated equally for his early genre films, like Scanners (1981) and The Fly (1986), and his dark artistic vision in films such as Dead Ringers (1988) and Crash (1996). The 2005 film A History of Violence was a mainstream success that marked Cronenberg's return to the commercial fold of Hollywood after years of independent art house filmmaking. His international reputation grew and the film was honoured w...
My Life as a Mankiewicz (Screen Classics)
by Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane
The son of famed director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz ( All About Eve [1950], Guys and Dolls [1955], Cleopatra [1963]) and the nephew of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz was genuine Hollywood royalty. He grew up in Beverly Hills and New York, spent summers on his dad's film sets, had his first drink with Humphrey Bogart, dined with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, went to the theater with Ava Gardner, and traveled the world writing for Brando, Sinatra,...
Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle across ensuing decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film has formed a backdrop to an array of formal, contextual, and ideological battles. In this book, Paul Cuff takes account of those battles...
After nearly fifty years of disrupting media, gleefully Rabelaisian uberindie filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman (b. 1945) has been maligned, mocked, and—worst of all—ignored throughout the general course of his wildly eclectic and impactful filmography. As the equally huckster-ish and self-denigrating cofounder and president of Troma Entertainment—responsible for the likes of such schlocky "midnight movie" fare as The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D., Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke ’Em High, Tro...
In The Fly, one of Seth Brundle's experiments goes disastrously wrong, and the chimpanzee he was attempting to transport from one telepod to the other ends up in the second device, a quivering mass of flesh; the process of teleportation has turned it inside out and yet it remains in unimaginable agony alive. David Cronenberg is undoubtedly one of the great directors of transgression, violating boundaries between the subjective and the objective and, even more spectacularly, between the human and...
In his bold new study of the career of one of filmmaking's premier directors, author James M. Vest traces two intertwining strands of history: Alfred Hitchcock's interest in French culture, and French critics' sometimes complementary, sometimes confrontational interest in him. In the 1950s, Hitchcock was increasingly committed to including French-related elements in his films to enhance suspense and humor. At that same time, young critics in France-including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Er...
George Sidney (Bio-Bibliographies in the Performing Arts)
by Eric Monder
George Sidney directed a number of popular Hollywood films, such as Anchors Aweigh, Show Boat, Kiss Me Kate, and Bye Bye Birdie. His revisions of traditional Hollywood product resulted in films that remain surprisingly modern, and his work continues to influence popular culture. But despite the popularity of his films, Sidney has been a largely unheralded figure in film history. This book is the first serious, full-length study of Sidney's life and work. A critical introduction to the volume ex...
Modern European cinema and love examines nine European directors whose films contain stories about romantic love and marriage. The directors are Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer. The book approaches questions of love and marriage from a philosophical perspective, applying the ideas of authors such as Stanley Cavell, Leo Bersani, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou, while also tracing k...
The Global Auteur
Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capi...
Lars von Trier's Women
The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, ‘She’ in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his...
Peter Jackson (The Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers)
by Alfio Leotta
Peter Jackson is one of the most acclaimed and influential contemporary film-makers. This is the first book to combine the examination of Jackson’s career with an in-depth critical analysis of his films, thus providing readers with the most comprehensive study of the New Zealand film-maker’s body of work. The first section of the book concentrates on Jackson's biography, surveying the evolution of his career from the director of cult slapstick movies such as Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead...
The first comprehensive study of men and masculinity in the cinema of Satyajit Ray Links Ray's male characters with India's national trajectory in its early post-independence years Interrogates the director's standing as a national filmmaker Situates Ray within post-colonial filmmaking and realist cinema traditions Satyajit Ray belonged to a category of filmmakers and artists from newly independent countries whose work was used to define 'national culture'. Failed Masculinities: The Men in Sa...
Hitchcock (SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema) (Harvard Film Studies)
by William Rothman
No reader of this challenging book will ever view a Hitchcock film (perhaps any film) in quite the same way again. By a close analysis of five representative works and documenting his readings with more than 600 frame enlargements, Rothman shows how Hitchcock composed his films--how each moment bears his imprint and his special demands on the viewer. It is the seriousness of Hitchcock's reflections on the murderous power of the camera's gaze, and on the larger mysteries of love and murder, that...
This monograph offers the first ever comprehensive study of Channel 4's film production, distribution and broadcasting activities and represents a significant contribution to British cinema and television history. The importance of Channel 4 to the British film industry over the last 40 years cannot be overstated. The birth of the Channel in 1982 heralded a convergence between the UK film and television sectors which was particularly notable given that the two industries had historically been at...
The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola’s oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola’s films, exploring fashion’s primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme...
Danny Boyle's journey to Oscar night began in a working-class family in Lancashire in 1956. After a career in the theatre - working for such esteemed companies as Joint Stock and the Royal Court - Boyle went to the BBC in Belfast and produced dramas such as Alan Clarke's "Elephant," and "Mr. Wroes Virgins." "Shallow Grave" announced the arrival of a dynamic new talent to British cinema - a reputation that was confirmed with the blistering "Trainspotting" - the zeitgeist film of the 90s. The succ...
Rape in Art Cinema (Continuum Film Studies)
This is a unique collection of essays exploring the treatment of rape in the 'art cinema' genre - this is an interdisciplinary, groundbreaking study. Art cinema has always had an aura of the erotic, with the term being at times a euphemism for European films that were more explicit than their American counterparts. This focus on sexuality, whether buried or explicit, has meant a recurrence of the theme of rape, nearly as ubiquitous as in mainstream film. This anthology explores the representatio...
In "The Director's Cut", 21 Hollywood filmmakers share the thrilling accounts of their creative journeys into the film industry's most coveted positions. Together, their films have won dozens of Oscars. Each conversation provides a revealing and in-depth exploration of each director's artistic roots - giving readers an unparalleled understanding of the very different environments and attitudes that these outstanding filmmakers have experienced and embraced in their careers and personal lives. Th...