Images of Dignity is the first major study of the films of Barry Barclay, one of the most important film makers in New Zealand cinema history, and a major indigenous film maker world-wide.
Cowie shows how film director Akira Kurosawa took the samurai genre to its apogee in such films as Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, his predilection for the historical film and the importance of the traditional in his work. He also looks at Kurosawa's adaptations of Shakespeare and his examination of our everyday lives.
Its Alive!, Mistress of the Apes, The Naked Witch, Mars Needs Women and Zontar, the Thing from Venus--in these movies and many others, guerrilla filmmaker Larry Buchanan single-handedly created a movie genre, the good bad picture. Fiercely independent, Buchanan wrote, produced and directed some of the best B-movies ever (and maybe even a few Cs or Ds) on shoestring budgets. Buchanan grew up in a Dallas orphanage with but one dream: to make picture shows. He shot his first full-length movie, Apac...
Part of the "Film Directors" series, this book looks at the career - spanning 25 years and 21 feature films - of Francois Truffaut, the most popular French filmmaker worldwide. An introduction places Truffaut's early films in the context of the "New Wave" in French cinema between 1956 and 1974, while showing how his films differed from most movies. A biographical section traces Truffaut's early life, his career as a film critic, the principal influences on his work and the autobiographical aspec...
Roger Ebert was the most influential film critic in the United States, the first to win a Pulitzer Prize. For almost fifty years, he wrote with plainspoken eloquence about the films he loved for the Chicago Sun-Times, his vast cinematic knowledge matched by a sheer love of life that bolstered his appreciation of films. Ebert had particular admiration for the work of director Werner Herzog, whom he first encountered at the New York Film Festival in 1968, the start of a long and productive relatio...
Finding Birt Acres (Exeter Studies in Film History)
by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony, and Peter Domankiewicz
Apparently from Virginia, Birt Acres appeared out of nowhere in Britain aged 35, without a trace of his former life. Yet immediately he became a prominent figure in the late Victorian photographic world. He soon teamed up with Robert Paul to make a moving picture camera and then shot the first commercial films in Britain in spring 1895, in parallel with the work of the Lumière brothers in France, before repeating this in Germany. His innovations included being the first to establish a dedicated...
This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known.Jean Cocteau is not only one of French cinema's greatest and most influential auteurs whose work covered all the major genres but also an experimenter, collaborator, theorist and all-round ambassador of film. This lu...
This is a richly illustrated retrospective of an icon, with an introduction from Clint Eastwood. This stunning volume presents a chronological look at the Oscar winner's work. It features fascinating photographs with incisive commentary by personal friend, Richard Schickel. Its release coincides with Clint's 80th birthday in May 2010. This richly illustrated, authorised retrospective celebrates the life and films of Clint Eastwood. It is written by renowned "Time" magazine film critic Richard Sc...
Daniel Calparsoro (Spanish and Latin-American Filmmakers)
by Ann Davies
Daniel Calparsoro, a director who has made a crucial contribution to contemporary Spanish and Basque cinema, has provoked strong reactions from the critics. Reductively dismissed as works of crude violence by those lamenting a 'lost golden age' of Spanish filmmaking, Calparsoro’s films in fact reveal a more complex interaction with trends and traditions in both Spanish and Hollywood cinema. This book is the first full-length study of the director’s work, from his early social-realist films set i...
Fragile yet powerful, macho yet transgressive, Jacques Audiard’s films portray disabled, marginalised or otherwise non-normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation. Jacques Audiard is the first book on the cinema of one of the most important French directors working today. It studies his screenwriting background, his collaborative practices and his use of genre motifs alongside his reputation as a celebrated French auteur. Using the motif of border-crossing – both physical an...
Cy Endfield (1914–1995) was a filmmaker who was also fascinated by the worlds of close-up magic, science, and invention. After directing several distinctive low-budget films in Hollywood, he was blacklisted in 1951 and fled to Britain rather than “name names” before HUAC, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee. The Pennsylvania-born Endfield made films that exhibit an outsider’s eye for his adopted country, including the working-class “trucking” drama Hell Drivers an...
Edward Eliscu has lived three celebrated lives for much of this century—on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in Connecticut. Known among his peers as the exemplary professional lyricist and to many others as a trenchant and witty playwright, screenwriter, performer, director, essayist, critic, poet, and political polemicist, Eliscu is best known to the general public as the writer of such memorable songs as Without a Song, More Than You Know, Great Day, Carioca, and Flying Down to Rio. As a screenwrit...
The Films of Oliver Stone (The Scarecrow Filmmakers, #55)
by Don Kunz
The Films of Oliver Stone provides a more sophisticated, detailed, and probing analysis of Stone's career as a filmmaker than that available in the thousands of film reviews, personality profiles, and news items concerning him. The volume includes an interview with the filmmaker followed by 15 essays by professors in departments of American Studies, Communication Studies, English & American Literature, and Film & Video Studies. Organized chronologically, film by film, nine of the essays have be...
Derek Jarman tells the story of his discovery that he is HIV+ and, in a series of flashbacks, looks at his life - his difficult relationship with his father, his discovery of his homosexuality and the dramatic exposure of his first homosexual relationship, his university days and his coming out at art school in the company of contemporaries such as David Hockney and Patrick Proctor. He goes on to describe his early work as a stage designer , his affair with Robert Mapplethorpe and his early enco...
Enfant Terrible!
The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing. Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A vete...
For the casual film fan, Henry Hathaway is not a household name. But in a career that spanned five decades, Hathaway directed an impressive number of films and guided many actors and actresses to some their most acclaimed performances. He also helped launch the Hollywood careers of numerous actors such as Randolph Scott, Lee Marvin, Karl Malden, and Charles Bronson. His work on Niagara established Marilyn Monroe as a major star. Hathaway also guided John Wayne to his Academy Award-winning perfor...
In an eclectic career spanning four decades, Italian director Riccardo Freda (1909-1999) produced films of remarkable technical skill and powerful visual style, including the swashbuckler Black Eagle (1946), an adaptation of Les Miserables (1947), the peplum Theodora, Slave Empress (1954) and a number of cult-favorite Gothic and horror films such as I Vampiri (1957), The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962) and The Ghost (1963). Freda was first championed in the 1960s by French critics who labeled hi...
The films of Ethan and Joel Coen have been embraced by mainstream audiences, but also have been subject to intense scrutiny by critics and cinema scholars. Movies such as Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Raising Arizona represent the filmmakers’ postmodern tendencies, a subject many academics have written about at length. But is it enough to reduce their features as expressions of postmodernism or are there other ways of viewing their work—not only their individual films but their entire ou...
I.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film - and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century: "Volume 1 Writings 1922-34"; "Volume 2 Towards a Theory of Montage"; and, "Volume 3 Writings 1934-47".
Pleading the Blood (Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora)
by Associate Professor Christopher Sieving
The definitive look at one of the most important Black art films and original filmmakers of the 1970s. Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) has across the decades attained a sizable cult following among African American cinema devotees, art house aficionados, and horror fans, thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. Pleading the Blood is the first full-length study of this cult classic. Ganja & Hess was withdrawn almost immediately after its New York premiere by its distributor because G...
Now a major film, starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne and Kenneth Branagh. This edition combines Colin Clark’s acclaimed The Prince, the Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn. In 1956, fresh from Oxford, the 23-year-old Colin Clark (brother of maverick Tory MP and diarist Alan) worked as a humble ‘gofer’ on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, the film that disastrously united Laurence Olivier with Marilyn Monroe. This is the story of when Clark escorted a Monroe...
As a director, actor, writer and producer, Tod Browning was one of the most dynamic Hollywood figures during the birth of commercial cinema. Known for his fantastic collaborations with Lon Chaney in numerous silents, and for directing the horror classic Dracula and the still-controversial Freaks, Browning has been called "the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema." Despite not entering the profession until he began acting in his early thirties, he went on to helm more than 60 films in a 25-year care...
A man of many film firsts, James Stuart Blackton promoted motion pictures as a mass commercial medium by creating the first true movie studio, adopting the star system, pioneering film animation, and publishing Motion Picture Magazine, one of the first film periodicals. As much of a seminal figure to the film industry as Thomas Edison and D.W. Griffith, James Stuart Blackton nonetheless remains unknown to most film enthusiasts and even many cinema scholars. In Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton...