Well known for his slapstick comedic style, Jerry Lewis has also delighted worldwide movie audiences with a directing career spanning five decades. One of American cinema's great innovators, Lewis made unmistakably personal films that often focused on an ideal masculine image and an anarchic, manic acting out of the inability to assume this image. Films such as The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, Three on a Couch, and The Big Mouth present a series of thematic variations on this tension, in which such...
Something needs to be changed—be it through the revolutionary overthrow of social conditions, the liberating force of passion, the contemplation and creation of works of art, or the exploration of an unresolved past. Luchino Visconti's films are models for the failure of such attempts. They show that this failure arises whenever people cling to possibilities that stand opposed to the reality of their lives. Does Adorno not write: "The place of utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immed...
The Danish Directors 3
Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features film-makers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark’s now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term ‘new’ also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the film-makers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and...
Narrative and spectacle describe two extremes of film content, but the oeuvres of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg resist such categorization. Instead, Robert Furze argues, the defining characteristic of Cassavetes and Cronenberg’s respective approaches is that of 'visceral' cinema – a term that illustrates the anxiety these filmmakers provoke in their audiences. Cassavetes demonstrates this through disregard for plot structure and character coherence, while Cronenberg’s focus is on graphic...
The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in southeastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema "events," writing about film, and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljub...
Following an introduction delineating the histories of the film industries of the countries that make up the Middle East and Central Asia – including Iran, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – both books contain interviews stretching over a decade, which position the filmmakers and their creative concerns within the social or political context of their respective countries. The striking variety of approaches toward each inter...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident
by Vlastimir Sudar
Aleksandar Saša Petrovic (1929–1994) was one of the most significant filmmakers to come out of Socialist Yugoslavia. He was by far the most awarded director on a national level, winning three Golden Arenas at the Yugoslav Film Festival in Pula, as well as receiving all the highest state awards. He was also acclaimed internationally, and the first Yugoslav director to win prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1967, as well as Oscar nominations in 1967 and 1968. His film, I Even Met Happy Gypsies...
The cinematic output of Australian director Peter Weir has garnered numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim – from his early short films of the 1970s to the Hollywood hits he’s helmed since 1985, including the likes of Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander. Drawing on contemporary concepts from transnational cinema studies, this book investigates Weir’s entire three-decade career, paying particular attention to his journey from his native Sydney, with its...
Celluloid Ceiling
by Karen Oughton, Ana Maria Bahiana, Jacqui Miller, Gabrielle Kelly, Nathan Shaw, Patricia Di Risio, Beti Ellerson, and Maria Williams-Hawkins
Now Kathryn Bigelow has made history as the first woman to win an Oscar for directing, is this a new era for women filmmakers? The figures suggest otherwise. Seeking to redress the imbalance between male and female film directors, Celluloid Ceiling explores inspiring new work appearing in the USA, the UK and globally. Highlighting emerging women directors alongside ground-breaking pioneers, this is a one-stop guide to the leading women film directors in the 21st century and those who inspired th...
Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde
Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. Her efforts to promote an independent cinema have inspired filmmakers for over fifty years. "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943) ranks among the most widely viewed of all avant-garde films. The eleven essays gathered here examine Maya Deren's writings, films, and legacy from a variety of intriguing perspectives. Some address her relati...
A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, throughout his career, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream. Jeremy Dauber argues that throughout B...
Slow Places in Béla Tarr’s Films explores Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s approach to creating geographies of indifference through slow cinema techniques. Through a close examination of Tarr’s filmography, Clara Orban observes that his interiors provide claustrophobic environments in which human relationships have difficult flourishing, while his exteriors become landscapes through which characters wander endlessly. Furthermore, Orban argues, Tarr’s sparse use of animals provides contrast to the...
While much has been published abroad about the German filmmaker and author Hans Jürgen Syberberg, this is the first English monograph about him. Author Solveig Olsen presents a biographical overview of the controversial artist and his body of work, and offers an in-depth analysis of Syberberg's film of Richard Wagner's Parsifal and his later works. Syberberg gained international fame as a filmmaker with the films of his "German Cycle," which included Our Hitler, a study of the Hitler potential...
For nearly 40 years, David Lynch's works have enthralled, mystified, and provoked viewers. Lynch's films delve into the subjective consciousness of his characters to reveal both the depraved darkness and luminous spirituality of human nature. From his experimental shorts of the 1960s to feature films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch has pushed the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. In David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, author Greg Olson ex...
This edition of Herzog on Herzog presents a completely new set of interviews in which Werner Herzog discusses his career from its very beginnings to his most recent productions. Herzog was once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important director alive. Famous for his frequent collaborations with mercurial actor Klaus Kinski - including the epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the terrifying Nosferatu - and more recently with documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Cave of F...
In-depth chronological guide to the Spanish director\'s films.
The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (Directors' Cuts)
Whether it's a bright yellow Deuce Coupe rocketing through small-town America or a bright yellow rocket ship blasting through a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas' stories have been singular and consistent in the elemental power of their themes and emotions. Yet, since the beginnings of his success much of his storytelling skill has been eclipsed by the popcorn popularity of his work and the advances in visual effects that have characterised so many of his films. Lucas is unique amongst his cont...
The Cinema of Rithy Panh (Global Film Directors)
by Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai
Nominated for 2022 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book award Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director. The fourteen essays in The Cinema of Ri...
Hitchcock and Twentieth–Century Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
by John Orr
An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history "A cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. . . . A brisk study of [Kubrick's] films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times "An engaging and well-researched primer to the work of a cinematic legend."—Library Journal Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor’s son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, ab...