In "Some Sort of A Life", Miriam Karlin talks to Jan Sargent about her early life training as an actress in London during the war, the extraordinary origins of her very left-wing politics and absolute commitment to justice. Her passionate views are reflected in her feelings about people, and hold surprising revelations and intimate reflections on her relationships with friends, lovers, colleagues and the theatre world of the last fifty years.
Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France argues that, between World Wars I and II, documentary film made a substantial contribution to the rewriting of the French national narrative to include rural France and the colonies. The book mines a significant body of virtually unknown films and manuscripts for their insight into revisions of French national identity in the aftermath of the Great War. From 1918 onwards, government institutions sought to advance social programs they believ...
A member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s, Claude Chabrol has received the least amount of critical and scholarly attention, although he was the more prolific and commercially successful of them all. Jacob Leigh fills this lacuna by focusing on the last nine feature films of Chabrol’s career, exploring his imagery, camerawork, use of sound and music, and performances, revealing the stylistic characteristics of his films while identif...
For decades, scholarship on Federico Fellini has focused on the figure of the director himself, while formal analysis of the craft of filmmaking has been largely overlooked. Fellini spent countless hours in the studios of Cinecitta recording, mixing, and editing voices, sound effects, and music for his films, but his unique and often revolutionary uses of cinematic sound have never before been systematically studied. "Listening to Fellini" reveals the singularly important role played by music in...
Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This ... True Stories From A Life
by Bruce Beresford
This account of the craft of film making is written by the director Don Siegel. Don was one of Hollywood's most individual film directors with "The Invasion of the Body snatchers" regarded as a science fiction classic, and "Dirty Harry" - with its catch phrase "make my day" - which has become a part of the modern consciousness. This autobiography is a series of reminiscences whose cast of characters includes Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Bogart and Bacall, and others from the Golden Ag...
The Art of Castle in the Sky (The Art of Castle in the Sky)
by Hayao Miyazaki
The definitive examination of the art and animation of Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece of fantasy and flight, Castle in the Sky! The latest in the perennially popular line of Studio Ghibli art books, which include interviews, concept sketches and finished animation cels from classics such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky was the first feature film produced by the legendary Studio Ghibli. Sheeta, a girl who has the power to defy gravity, is on the run from...
Alfred Hitchcock made many great films, but he also made many that critics and audiences largely dismissed. These least celebrated films, despite their admitted flaws and relative obscurity, offer much to reward the open-minded viewer. This critical study examines and reappraises fifteen such films generally overlooked by scholars and Hitchcock aficionados: Juno and the Paycock, The Skin Game, Waltzes from Vienna, Jamaica Inn, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn, I Confess, Torn Curtain, N...
The Griffith Project, Volume 1 (The Griffith Project Vols 1-12)
by Paolo Cherchi Usai
No other silent film director has been so extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than 500 films has been the subject of a systematic analysis and the vast majority of his other works still awaits proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from "Professional Jealousy" (1907) to "The Struggle" (1931) - will be explored in this multi-volume collection of contributions from an international team of leadin...
Hal Wallis might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced -- Casablanca, Jezebel, Now Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies) -- have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America's film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked and no full-length study has yet assessed his incredible career. A former office...
Profitable, relatively inexpensive to produce, and with a faithful built-in audience, Hollywood horror franchise films have long dominated the market for generic feature film productions. This work examines the significant effects, good and bad, that the horror franchise genre has had on the careers of several American film directors, including Wes Craven (""Nightmare on Elm Street""), Don Coscarelli (""Phantasm""), and Joe Berlinger (""Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows"").
In the 1970s, British filmmaker Ken Russell (1927–2011) quickly gained a reputation as the enfant terrible of British cinema. His work, like the man himself, was regarded as flamboyant, excessive, and unrestrained. Inheriting and yet subverting the venerable mantle of British documentary, Russell did not fit comfortably in the context of a national cinema dominated by sober realism. His distinct style combined realism with fictional devices, often in audacious ways, to create the biographical ""...
Eleanor Powell (Screen Classics)
by Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère
When considering the best dancers in Hollywood's history, some obvious names come to mind - Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Bill Robinson. Yet often overlooked is one of the most gifted and creative dancers of all time, Eleanor Powell. Powell's effervescent style, unmatched technical prowess in tap, and free-flowing musicality led MGM to build top-rate musicals around her unique talents, including Born to Dance (1936) with James Stewart and Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940) with Fred Astaire, in whic...
Star Wars exploded onto our cinema screens in 1977, and the world has not been the same since. After watching depressing and cynical movies throughout the early 1970s, audiences enthusiastically embraced the positive energy of the Star Wars universe as they followed moisture farmer Luke Skywalker on his journey through a galaxy far, far away, meeting extraordinary characters like mysterious hermit Obi-Wan Kenobi, space pirates Han Solo and Chewbacca, loyal droids C-3PO and R2-D2, bold Princess L...
During the filming of his celebrated novel "The English Patient", Michael Ondaatje became increasingly fascinated as he watched the veteran editor Walter Murch at work. "The Conversations", which grew out of discussions between the two men, is about the craft of filmmaking and deals with every aspect of film, from the first stage of script writing to the final stage of the sound mix. Walter Murch emerged during the 1960s at the centre of a renaissance of American filmmakers which included the di...
Examines the life and works of the filmmaker who has chosen to explore the many dimensions of the black American experience.
Mike Leigh, the satirist of the suburbs, has been one of the great mavericks and creative geniuses of British stage, cinema and television since his first film, "Bleak Moments", burst on an unsuspecting public in 1971. Since then, his works have included "Nuts in May", "Goose-pimples", "Life is Sweet" and many more. He has worked with most of Britain's leading actors, including Tim Roth, Timothy Spall and Jane Horrocks, as well as with his wife, Alison Steadman.
As a high-rolling Paramount producer, Robert Evans was responsible for a handful of major Hollywood hits, including "Love Story" and "The Godfather". His bad-boy lifestyle was a gift to the gossip columnists. In the 1980s however, his cocaine habit led to penury, two criminal charges (one for conspiracy to murder) and self-commital to a mental institution. Now, having hit rock bottom, he is beginning to bounce back: he is producing films again and has regained some of the Tinsel Town status symb...
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, pow...
The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Spanish and Latin-American Filmmakers)
by Deborah Martin
The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's fil...