John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston's identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston's thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader...
In A Silence from Hitchcock, Murray Pomerance explores the resonating power of silence in the director's work—its variation, its haunting temptation, and its technical power. Working from a meditative devotion to and an illuminating familiarity with the director's work, Pomerance shines light upon six films, some of them (Notorious, The Lady Vanishes, and The Trouble with Harry) frequently, even obsessively treated, and others (Frenzy, The Wrong Man, and Topaz) less often discussed. In its stran...
This volume examines the work of Joan Littlewood, Giorgio Strehler and Roger Planchon, demonstrating how these three directors take up key aesthetic prompts from earlier innovators – Stanislavski, the modernist avant-garde and not least Brecht – and thereby prepare the ground for contemporary, politically-engaged ‘directors’ theatre’. It argues that, in creating their major productions in the prosperous ‘glorious decades’ that followed the devastation of the Second World War, they represent a fi...
Refocus: the Films of Fran Ois Ozon (Refocus: The International Directors)
Examines Fran ois Ozon, one of France's most prolific and best known international (queer) directors Analyses films including Potiche, Frantz and By the Grace of God, and shows how Ozon's work is deeply influenced by literature, cinema and music Draws on recent theoretical developments in gender, queer and film studies Each chapter offers a case study of one film while grounding its arguments within Ozon's larger oeuvre, as well as the social, historical and political context A queer auteur wh...
Pasolini – The apocalyptic Anarchist (Analyse & Exzess)
by Hans Ulrich Reck
Tells the interwoven stories of revered dance teacher Timothy Draper, the Rochester City Ballet that he founded, and its predecessor, the Eastman Theatre Ballet, established in 1923 as the first professional ballet company in theUnited States. In this engaging book, journalist Wendy Wicks tells the story of revered dance teacher Timothy Draper, the Rochester City Ballet that he founded, and its predecessor, the Eastman Theatre Ballet, established in 1923 as the first professional ballet company...
Read the Book! See the Movie! From Novel to Film Via 20th Century-Fox (hardback)
by Gary A Smith
This is a collection of writings by the giant of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, that shows him in a completely new light, as part of world cinema. For the duration of the 1980s, Brakhage contributed to the Boulder literary magazine Rolling Stock , mostly publishing reports from the Telluride Film Festival. These reports show that Brakhage was keenly interested in world cinema, anxious to meet and dialogue with filmmakers of many different stripes. The book also contains substantial discussi...
Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and … modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’...
Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film The Silence was made at a point in his career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to censorship boards in Sweden and the United States. The film's depiction of sexuality was, as Judith Crist wrote at the time in the New York Herald-Tribune, "not for the prudish." Yet Bergman's notebooks and screenplays reveal his tendency for self-censorship, both to dampen the literary quality of his...
On the Act of Looking
This collection analyzes Joshua Oppenheimer’s diptych The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as a cinematic event that invites interrelated questions on historical memory, truth and reconciliation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking. Featuring a new interview with Joshua Oppenheimer himself, On the Act of Looking affirms Oppenheimer’s use of fiction and manipulation as a technique to expose, contrary to the classic documentary form, not so much a reality behind the appearance of thi...
In full command of both Hollywood stylistics and camp aesthetics, Spain's Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1951) has become a master of the audacious and the unorthodox, of the permissive and the polemical. Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews documents the 22-year-long cinematic career of the most internationally celebrated Spanish art-film director since Luís Buñuel. Many of these interviews, from French, Italian, and Spanish periodicals, appear for the first time in English. Almodóvar's early cinematic ventures...
Refocus: the Films of Lucrecia Martel
by Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje, and Merchant
Lucrecia Martel has made only four feature films to date, but has nonetheless become one of the world's most admired directors. Her work is extraordinarily sensitive to the limits of sensory perception, the limits imposed by gender roles, and the limits of empathy and affect across social divisions. This edited collection broadens the critical conversation around Martel's work by integrating analyses of her features with the less frequently studied short films and her other artistic projects. Th...
This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman’s birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman’s films and writings with more traditional analyses. Established themes such as Bergman’s interest in philosophy and psychology are addressed, but also less familiar topics, notably his relationship with Hollywood and his elaborate use of film music and autobiographical writing that characte...
Alain Resnais (Conversations with Filmmakers)
Among the most innovative and influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, Alain Resnais (1922-2014) did not originally set out to become a director. He trained as an actor and film editor and, during the sixty-eight years of his working life, delved into virtually every corner of filmmaking, working at one time or another as screenwriter, assistant director, camera operator and cinematographer, special effects coordinator, technical consultant, and even author of source material. From such...
Alfred Hitchcock was a major figure in the development and flourishing of film noir. His noir films became an inspirational foundation of the neo-noir movement beginning in the 1970s, from Brian de Palma's mash-up homages to Hitchcock originals such as Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984) to the dark political thrillers of the era that explore the underside of American life, all of which owe a substantial debt to Hitchcock. However, the central role of Hitchcock in the long history of film no...
Refocus: the Films of Claire Denis (Refocus: The International Directors)
Updates and reapplies film theory to French director Claire Denis's films, with a particular focus on her most recent work Features essays on all of Denis's fiction and documentary World leading Denis scholars Innovative readings of Denis in the 21st Century ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis comprises 14 original works of criticism from world leading Denis scholars and early career researchers. With contributors from as far afield as Canada and Australia, the collection offers a global perspe...
This classic in the literature of cinema represents the convergence of the three leading figures of French film: Jean Renoir, universally considered the greatest French director André Bazin, the outstanding French film critic and theorist and François Truffaut, the pioneer of la nouvelle vague. Bazin left this examination of Renoir's films unfinished when he died in 1958 Truffaut collected and edited the essays, and added a comprehensive filmography in which Bazin, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, J...
Stanley Kubrick, director of the acclaimed films Path of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: Space Odyssey. A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, is arguably one of the greatest American filmmakers. Yet, despite being hailed as a giant" by Orson Welles, little is known about the reclusive director. Stanley Kubrick ,the first full-length study of his life,is based on assiduous archival research as well as new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues.Film...
From the early cinematic career of Frank Capra to the psychologically revealing films of Martin Scorsese, the books in this series offer an authoritative guide to the study of film and its trends by studying individual filmmakers and cinematic movements.
George Lucas (born 1944) is a producer, screenwriter and director, who played a major role in the anti-establishment New Hollywood movement of the 1970s and helped define the blockbuster era of the 1980s. He is best known as the creator of the Star Wars space opera and the producer of the iconic Indiana Jones adventure film series. Lucas had directed THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973) before launching, in 1977, the first film in the Star Wars franchise. Rapidly a worldwide pop culture...