} The Great Cartoon Directors is the only book to profile the remarkable careers and achievements of the Hollywood cartoon directors of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s whose unique humor has entertained people around the world for seven decades. Nine of the best cartoon directors are featured: Friz Freleng, the creator of Speedy Gonzales, Yosemite Sam, and the Pink Panther; Ub Lwerks, the designer of Mickey Mouse and the wizard behind the first sound animated film, Steamboat Willie ; Chuck Jones, the...
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia's novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan's "Childhood", "Andrei Rublev", "Solaris", "Mirror", "Nostalgia and Sacrifice", has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. This book is a comprehensive, well-illustrated and...
Because screenwriter Robert Riskin spent most of his career collaborating with legendary Hollywood director Frank Capra, Riskin's own unique contributions to film have been largely overshadowed. With five Academy Award nominations to his credit for the monumental films Lady for a Day, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Here Comes the Groom, and It Happened One Night (for which he won the Oscar), Riskin is often imitated but rarely equaled. In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career...
A premier playwright, Edward Albee is also a gifted director. Albee in Performance details Albee's directorial vision and how that vision animates his plays. Having had extraordinary access to Albee as director, Rakesh H. Solomon reveals how Albee has shaped his plays in performance, the attention he pays to each aspect of theater, and how his conception of the key plays he has directed has evolved over a five-decade career. Solomon pays careful attention to the major works, from The American Dr...
Robert Rodriguez stands alone as the most successful U.S. Latino filmmaker today, whose work has single-handedly brought U.S. Latino filmmaking into the mainstream of twenty-first-century global cinema. Rodriguez is a prolific (eighteen films in twenty-one years) and all-encompassing filmmaker who has scripted, directed, shot, edited, and scored nearly all his films since his first breakout success, El Mariachi, in 1992. With new films constantly coming out and the launch of his El Rey Network t...
Winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2016 Known for their violence and prolific profanity, including free use of the n-word, the films of Quentin Tarantino, like the director himself, chronically blurt out in polite company what is extremely problematic even when deliberated in private. Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with vir...
An alternative autobiography of the well-loved actor and man of the theatre, winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. In My Life in Pieces, Simon Callow recaptures the multifarious people, productions and events which have fed into his lifeblood and left their indelible mark. Starting with his first ever visit to the theatre – Peter Pan – he takes us through a somewhat chaotic boyhood in southern Africa and South London, an aborted university career, a testing time at drama sc...
Ingmar Bergman is seen as one of the world's greatest and prolific directors, having earned his status as indefatigable, unfaltering auteur. Throughout his long career, his films have conveyed, thematically and stylistically, various elements of illusion, including dreams, fantasies, nightmare visions, destabilized identity and the cinema as mask. The Films of Ingmar Bergman explores these diverse elements, in relation to broader concerns and perspectives, such as cultural and artistic influence...
Clint Eastwood's career has been unmatched in the history of Hollywood. A popular TV star, he was catapulted to film stardom as 'The Man With No Name' in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. Once established as a star, he became the John Wayne of his era, an American icon whose box-office drawing power remained undiluted three decades later, despite unfriendly critics, unfavourable gossip and unspectacular forays into politics and political life. Uniquely, Eastwood used his new-found star status t...
Who was Hitchcock? A fat man who played practical jokes on people? A control freak who humiliated others to make himself look better? A little boy afraid of the dark? One of the greatest storytellers of the century? He was all of these and more - twenty years after his death, he is still a household name; most people in the Western world have seen his film, and he popularised the action movie format we see every week on the cinema screen. He was both a great artist and dynamite at the box office...
Nicolas Roeg is one of the most distinctive and influential film-makers of his generation. The generation of film-makers who define contemporary movie-making - Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), James Marsh (Man on Wire), and Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), all acknowledge their debt to the work of Nicolas Roeg.Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a...
The Films of Jean-Luc Godard examines the work of one of the most versatile and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. With a career ranging from France's New Wave movement in the early 1960s to a period of political experimentation in the late 1960s and 70s, and, currently, a contemplative period in which Godard has explored issues of spirituality, sexuality, and the aesthetics of sound, image, and montage, the filmmaker's work defies easy categorization. In this study, David Sterritt...
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema (Asian Visual Cultures)
by Zhen Zhang
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the...
As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world's perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, C\u00e9line et Julie vont en bateau--Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret d\u00e9fense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty. In this study of Rivet...
A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of LynchAEs work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of LynchAEs plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform LynchAEs films and signature mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, Justus Nieland argues that plas...
A unique collection of everything that Chekhov wrote about the theatre. Chekhov started writing about theatre in newspaper articles and in his own letters even before he began writing plays. Later, he wrote in detail about his own plays to his lifelong friend and mentor Alexei Suvorin, his wife and leading actress, Olga Knipper, and to the two directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Collected for this volume, these writings reveal Chekhov's instinctive curi...
A unique collection of interviews with Sir Michael Gambon, ranging over thirteen years, offering a fascinating picture of this most mischievously evasive of actors. Michael Gambon was a notoriously private man. Yet this profile of him in his own words – assembled from interviews with drama critic Mel Gussow – offers the most complete portrait in print of an actor who had 'just about everything – enormous power, great depth, absolute expertise and the ability to illuminate a character by the sim...
"In this highly original homage, Adam Bartos' exquisite photographs of Marker's studio, a workspace both extraordinarily cluttered and highly organized, appear alongside a moving reminiscence of his friend by the film theorist and practitioner Colin MacCabe."--