Before he directed Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Mother!, and The Whale, Darren Aronofsky was a 27-year-old would-be filmmaker struggling to make his first feature, Pi (1998). This is his diary of those years – alongside hundreds of never-before-seen photos and materials pulled from Aronofsky’s extensive archives. Featuring a new introduction by Darren Aronofsky; the complete (and long out of print) Guerilla Diaries, Darren's journal entries chronicling the pre-production, prod...
Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at War...
As Hitler's war looms, famous Australian artist Roland Griffin returns home from London with his family to live a simple life of shared plums and low-cut lawns in the suburbs.In the yard: a daughter, and a son, Hal, growing up with a preoccupied father who is always out in his shed stretching canvases and painting outback pubs. An isolated man obsessed with other people and places. Everything is a picture, a symbol. Even Hal, the boy in the boat, drifting through a strange world of Incredible Fl...
On July 5, 2011, the day of Cy Twombly’s death, Julian Schnabel (born 1951) painted a series of cruciform works as a tribute to Twombly, who was an important influencer of his early painting and a close friend. La Nil examines these artworks alongside a number of recent paintings and sculptural work.
Life and work of an Indian motion picture producer and director.
Loie Fuller was the most famous American in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, impresario, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Fuller befriended royalty and inspired artists such as Mallarme, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Today, though, she is remembered mainly as an untutored 'pioneer' of modern da...
Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives brings together essays by scholars who have examined the traces that Kubrick's work has left in archives, in particular his own collection of film-related materials, which was donated to the University of the Arts London in 2007. Richly illustrated with film stills and previously unseen material from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, this book is designed to open the reader's eyes to the wonder and richness of Kubrick's oeuvre. Kubrick's films have inspired a huge a...
Vivid, eccentric and free-ranging, Sergei Eisenstein's Immoral Memories is written in a style reminiscent of the brilliant visual effects of montage and dynamic progression of the legendary Russian director, creator of Ivan The Terrible and Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein wittily portrays his life in Russia from the time of the Revolution, his travels in the West and his encounters with an amazing medley of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain - including Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich a...
Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theore...
In a film career that spanned more than seven decades, Freddie Francis distinguished himself as both an award-winning cinematographer and as a director of classic British horror films of the 1960s and 70s. From his formative years as a clapperboy and camera assistant in the 1930s to his work as camera operator, director of photography, and director through the 1990s, Francis had a unique behind-the-scenes perspective on filmmaking, particular British cinema. Throughout his career, Francis was ho...
Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook
by Adam Roberts and Joanna Hogg
Michael Mann: Masters of Cinema (Masters of Cinema)
by Vincent Malausa
It took Michael Mann (b. 1943), today a major figure in contemporary American cinema, many years to establish himself: his experience as a flamboyant television producer in the 1980s — notably on the series Miami Vice — overshadowed his early work as a filmmaker. In 1991 Mann exploded into the mainstream with the success of The Last of the Mohicans. Since then his work has focused on the crime movie, with Heat in 1995, Collateral in 2004 and Public Enemies in 2009.
Few people have influenced Hollywood history than Douglas Fairbanks. And who better than his niece and Fairbanks family historian, Letitia, to relate that story? On-screen and offscreen, he was a force of nature, progressing in easy leaps and bounds from the Broadway stage to silent movies when feature-length film was just a few years old. His happy, healthy characters and acrobatic acting style brought a new energy to the medium. But it was through his extraordinary success as a producer that F...
Jim Henson was the creative force behind a huge catalog of television series, films, specials, and other productions, even excepting the Muppets. This collection of essays delves into the rest of Henson's body of work, including projects developed during his lifetime and those that represent his legacy. Covered here are Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, The Jim Henson Hour, Dinosaurs, Farscape, and more. Henson's influence on both audiences and later productions remains palpable on s...
The Making of Andrey Zvyagintsev's Film Elena
by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Oleg Negin, and Mikhail Krichman