In this second volume of his autobiography, controversial film-maker Michael Powell, who died in 1990, offers an account of his life in the cinema industry, the many good and the many awful people he insulted, disliked and loved, and his arguments with film-company bosses. Shunned after the first screening of "Peeping Tom", which astonished his 1960s audience, Powell went to ground for many years until the young Martin Scorsese, a Powell admirer since childhood, went in search of his mentor and...
New Zealand Filmmakers in Conversation (Studies in New Zealand Culture, #15)
by Ian Conrich
If cinema can be approached as poetry and philosophy, it is because of Jean Epstein. Cocteau, Buñuel (who was his assistant), Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and theoreticians Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière are directly influenced by Epstein’s pioneering film work, writings, and concepts. This book is the first in English to examine his oeuvre comprehensively.An avant-garde artist and an anti-elitist intellectual, Epstein wanted to craft moments of pure transformative cinema. Using familiar genr...
Fritz Lang, director of films such as "Metropolis", "M" and "The Big Heat", established his reputation in Germany during the silent era. When Hitler rose to power, Lang emigrated to the USA, where he injected his fatalistic Expressionism into the domestic world of Hollywood cinema. This biography presents him as a flawed human being, and includes suggestions that he murdered his first wife and engaged in sado-masochistic practices both on and off the set. Patrick McGilligan has also written biog...
Before the turn of the twentieth century, before the nickelodeon, even before the first cinemas, Georges Méliès began making movies.. Directing, editing, producing, designing, and starring in over 500 films between 1896 to 1912, Méliès was also the first cinematic auteur.. This is the first study of Méliès's films to appear in English in over twenty years and the only book to interpret his work using the tools of modern film analysis.. Locates the roots of modern narrative cinema in Méliès's wor...
The most complete study of Blier's work to date, Harris traces the director's career from the early 1960s until the present. Outlines the forms, themes and style which dominate in Blier's work, and challenges the many labels that have been used to describe both the corpus of films and the man himself. Provides an original and controversial discussion of Blier's alleged 'misogyny', and invites the reader to understand the scatological and corporeal aspects of Blier's filmmaking in terms of long-...
Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories: Migrations, Movies, Music is the first comprehensive study of Martin Scorsese's prolific work as a documentary filmmaker. Highlighting the historiographic aims of the director's various non-fiction film, video, and television productions, Mike Meneghetti re-examines Scorsese's documentaries as resourceful audiovisual histories of migrations, movies, and popular music. Italianamerican's critical immersion in the post-Sixties ethnic revival inaugurates Scor...
"A cinephile's dream: the chance to follow legendary director Woody Allen throughout the creation of a film--from inception to premiere--and to enjoy his reflections on some of the finest artists in the history of cinema. Eric Lax has been with Woody Allen almost every step of the way. He chronicled Allen's transformation from stand-up comedian to filmmaker in On Being Funny (1975). His international best seller, Woody Allen: A Biography (1991), was a portrait of a director hitting his stride. C...
A Doll's House (French's Acting Editions) (Acting Edition S.)
by Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on stage. The play ushered in a new social era and "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life". "Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner)
Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film.Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of 'worldly pleasures' such as movies, Paul Schrader nevertheless defied his upbringing to become first a leading film critic, then a star pupil among the US 'movie brat' generation of the 1970s: writing the coruscating screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing s...
Bruce Babington analyses the achievement of one of the central partnerships in British film history, the screenwriters of famous films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed, who became the producer-writer-directors of a succession of famous and well-loved films including Millions Like Us, Two Thousand Women, Waterloo Road, The Rake’s Progress, I See a Dark Stranger, The Blue Lagoon and The Happiest Days of Your Life. This study of the pair is notable both for its contextualising of them within English and...
Glauber Rocha is known as the visionary Brazilian director of landmark films, Black God, White Devil, Entranced Earth and Antonio das Mortes. Hitherto virtually unknown outside Brazil is that he was also a brilliant film critic and innovative thinker on world cinema. On Cinema brings together for the first time in the English language a comprehensive selection of Rocha's film writings, revealing for the first time to English-speaking readers the full critical power, inventiveness and vision of a...
Filming Ritual, Death and Dissent
Robert Rodriguez (Conversations with Filmmakers (Hardcover)) (Conversations with Filmmakers)
Rogue filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968) rocketed to fame with his ultra-low-budget film El Mariachi (1992). The Spanish-language action film, and the making-of book that accompanied it, were inspirational to filmmakers trying to work with the most meager of resources. Rodriguez embodies the postmodern auteur, maintaining a firm control of his projects by not only writing and producing his films, but also editing, shooting, composing, as well as working with the visual effects. He was one of t...
Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers
by Derek Hill
Since the late 1990s, a subtle, subversive element has been at work within the staid confines of the Hollywood dream factory. Young filmmakers like Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Sofia Coppola rode in on the coattails of the independent film movement that blossomed in the early 1990s and have managed to wage an aesthetic campaign against imaginative cowardice of all persuasions, much like their artistic forebears - the so-called Movie Brats Cop...
The Family Way
In pre-World War I England, a frail Jewish girl - so shy she barely spoke a word until age six and so sickly she needed to be homeschooled - is diagnosed with flat feet, knock knees and weak legs. In short order, Lilian Alicia Marks would become a dance prodigy, the cherished baby ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev, and the youngest ever soloist at his famed Ballets Russes. It was there that George Balanchine choreographed his first ballet for her, Henri Matisse designed her costumes, and Igor Stravi...
Little Book of Marilyn Monroe in the Movies (Little Books)
by Timothy Knight
Mai Elizabeth Zetterling (1925-94) is among the most exceptional postwar female filmmakers. Born in Sweden, she lived in England and France for most of her life, making her directorial debut in 1964 with the Swedish art film Loving Couples after a fraught transition from working in front of the camera as a successful actress. Critics have compared her work to that of Ingmar Bergman, Luis BuÑuel, and Federico Fellini, but Zetterling had a distinct style - alternately radical and reactionary - th...