The inspiration behind BBC2's The Girl starring Toby Jones and Sienna Miller, Spellbound by Beauty examines Hitchcock's relationship with his leading ladies including Tippi Hendren and Grace Kelly. Hitchcock is also the subject of an upcoming film, Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren due for release in 2013.Spellbound by Beauty examines Alfred Hitchcock's well known collaborations with the leading ladies of his day, and, in so doing, delves into his creative life and his uniquel...
This study explores how five major directors-Pedro Almodovar, Alejandro Amenabar, Alex de la Iglesia, Guillermo del Toro, and Juan Jose Campanella-modeled their early careers on Hitchcock and his film aesthetics. In shadowing Hitchcock, their works embraced the global aspirations his movies epitomize. Each section of the book begins with an extensive study, based on newspaper accounts, of the original reception of Hitchcock's movies in either Spain or Latin America and how local preferences for...
The Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan (New Perspectives on World Cinema)
by Suranjan Ganguly
This first study of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s feature films offers a compelling analysis of the socio-historical contexts of his work. Suranjan Ganguly examines how Kerala’s abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity has shaped Gopalakrishnan’s complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake, and characters struggle with their consciences. Ganguly places the films within their larger frameworks of guilt and redem...
Satyajit Ray is widely acknowledged to be one of the masters of world cinema. This anthology of critical essays presents a reassessment of his entire oeuvre. The essays range from a close reading of individual films to broader analyses of Ray's thematic and stylistic concerns. The essays assess Ray's preoccupations with realism, the development of cinematic modernism in his films, the cultural and ideological context of his work, representational and narrative strategies, and his sense of artist...
Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is ach...
Kubrick and Control is an examination of authority, order, and independence in the films directed by Stanley Kubrick, as well as in his personal life and working habits. This study explores the ways in which these central preoccupations develop and reformulate through the course of Kubrick's career, as he moved from genre to genre and shifted stories, locations, time periods, scope, and technical facilities. Separating the productions in accordance to their wider filmic classifications, the indi...
Ozu International
In Japan and much of Europe, Ozu is widely considered to be one of the finest film directors who ever lived. While Ozu has a strong reputation in the West, his films are not as well-known or widely appreciated in the U.S. as they are elsewhere. A notable exception to this trend is film critic Roger Ebert, who recently wrote that Ozu is one of his “three or four” favorite directors. Also, moving beyond the view that Tokyo Story is a masterful exception in the Ozu canon, Ebert sees Ozu’s films as...
In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948—The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them—all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclai...
Preston Sturges independence was at least partially responsible for his unique filmmaking style, marked by razor-sharp dialogue, wild plot turns and wondrously original supporting characters. Works such as The Power and the Glory, The Lady Eve and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock offer a distinctive and often satirical view of American life, deflating many of the ideals (honesty, justice, hard work, democracy, and others) that Americans feel a need to embrace. Each entry includes full filmographic d...
How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh’s career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific...
In this innovative historical examination of the American movie audience, Eric Smoodin focuses on reactions to the films of Frank Capra. Best known for his Hollywood features—including It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—Capra also directed educational films, military films, and documentaries. Based on his analysis of the reception of a broad range of Capra’s films, Smoodin considers the preferences and attitudes toward Hollywood of the people who watch...
This is the first book on a key contemporary British film director, Shane Meadows. From his breakthrough short films in the early 1990s and feature debut TwentyFourSeven (1997) through to the BAFTA-winning This Is England (2007) and hit television spin-off, director Shane Meadows has emerged as one of the most distinctive and influential voices in contemporary British cinema. Danny Perkins, CEO of StudioCanal UK, credits Meadows as the key figure in British film's contemporary renaissance, with...
One of the most dynamic and diverse contemporary filmmakers, David Fincher has earned critical praise and cult stardom for his hard-edged and uncompromising movies. "Dark Eye" examines each of the director's films in detail and features behind-the-scenes information, commentary from actors, writers and production staff, plus extensive material from exclusive interviews with Fincher.
"Reach for the Sky", "Alfie", "You Only Live Twice", "The Spy Who Loved Me", "Educating Rita", "Shirley Valentine"...these are just some of the films directed by Lewis Gilbert during the course of seven decades in the industry. "All My Flashbacks" is the inside story of some of our best-loved films, but above all it is a warm, incisive and deeply moving account of an extraordinary life.
Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood is a fast-paced view of Harrington's journey through the kaleidoscope of the movie business, acting alternatively as personal memoir and cultural history from a veteran of thee entertainment business. In addition, Harrington was living as a gay man in Hollywood and the book gives a rare peek into the hidden world of what was then an elite subculture. Starting in 1940s avant-garde heyday, harrington made several deeply intuitive and evocative films. Against all o...
Nora Ephron was one of the most popular, accomplished, and beloved writers in American journalism and film. Nora Ephron: A Biography is the first comprehensive portrait of the Manhattan-born girl who forged a path of her own, earning accolades and adoration from critics and fans alike. Author Kristin Marguerite Doidge explores the tremendous successes and disappointing failures Ephron sustained in her career as a popular essayist turned screenwriter turned film director. She redefined the moder...
A Hollywood director who blends substance with the mainstream Steven Soderbergh's feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles: from the self-absorption of his breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape to populist social problem films such as Erin Brockovich, and from the modernist discontinuity of Full Frontal and filmed performance art of Gray's Anatomy to a glossy, star-studded action blockbuster such as Ocean's Eleven. Using a combination of realism and expressiv...
Christopher Nolan occupies a rare realm within the Hollywood mainstream, creating complex, original films that achieve both critical acclaim and commercial success. In The Traumatic Screen, Stuart Joy builds on contemporary applications of psychoanalytic film theory to consider the function and presentation of trauma across Nolan’s work, arguing that the complexity, thematic consistency and fragmentary nature of his films mimic the structural operation of trauma. From 1997’s Doodlebug to 2017’s...
A landmark biography explores the crucial resonances among the life, work, and times of one of the most influential filmmakers of our ageWhen Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images--cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as...
The Danish Directors 2
Over the last two decades or so, the New Danish Cinema has established itself as an important source of cinematic renewal and innovation, and as a model for how small, minor or peripheral cinemas can survive in an industry dominated by Global Hollywood. Following in the footsteps of critically-acclaimed The Danish Directors (also published by Intellect), The Danish Directors 2 provides a practitioner’s perspective on the social, cultural, and economic milieus in which Danish film-makers have been...