Rachel Maclean
by Bren O'Callaghan, Melissa Gronlund, Rachel Maclean, Sarah Perks, and William Davies
"Multicolored," "jarring," and "always over the top" aptly describe the worlds created by the Scottish multimedia artist Rachal Maclean. Her films are full of oddly exaggerated characters living in fantasy worlds. Wearing elaborate costumes and makeup, the artist plays most of the roles herself. Rachel Maclean's work subsists on ingenious allusions to fairy tales and fables. Her brilliant and scathing contemporary satires are directed at themes such as nationalism or feminism. They combine histo...
Les Archives Star Wars. 1999–2005. 40th Ed. (40th Edition)
by Paul Duncan
From the moment Star Wars burst onto the screen in 1977, audiences have been in equal parts fascinated and appalled by the half-man/half-machine hybrid Darth Vader. In 1999, creator George Lucas began the story of how Anakin Skywalker grew up to train as a Jedi under Obi-Wan Kenobi, found love with the Queen of Naboo, Padmé Amidala, before turning to the dark side of his nature and becoming more machine than man. After driving the development of nascent digital technology, George Lucas perceive...
The award-winning and innovative director Dan Curtis was known for helming epic war movies, but before that he darkened the small screen with the horror genre's most famous soap opera. Curtis directed the groundbreaking daytime television serial Dark Shadows from 1966 to 1971, then turned his lens to numerous made-for-TV horror movies. This book examines 16 horror films that Curtis produced, co-wrote, or directed, as well as the cultural impact of Dark Shadows and its various incarnations. The b...
The Live Television Generation of Hollywood Film Directors
by Gorham Kindem
This text explores the major movies through discussion of their themes and techniques and reveals how much Ford was concerned with the very issues that are central to us today: gender, race, the treatment of ethnic minorities and social outcasts, the nature of history and the relationship between myth and reality. Unlike most books on Ford, which approach the man and his work chronologically, this one is designed around a collection of ideas which provide a better sense of the coherence of the g...
A unique illustrated survey of Keaton's life and films, recalled by his wife of 26 years, Eleanor Keaton, and film historian Jeffrey Vance. Keaton's career was fascinating and dramatic, spanning the history of twentieth-century American comedy, both in vaudeville and in cinema.
Willard Van Dyke worked his way through the twentieth century chasing two illusive muses - photography and film. They were illusive because their powers, reality, and abstraction, are morphic extremes that both exalt and mislead artists who believe that harnessing one will overcome the other.The setting for Van Dyke's life story is thus connected to the story of how these two muses changed the way the world was perceived. Willard Van Dyke stepped into the early twentieth century clamor asking fo...
Fdr'S Moviemaker-Memoirs And Scripts
The films of Pare Lorentz are acknowledged masterpieces of world cinema. They are groundbreaking documentary records of our country in the hard years of the Depression."" —William M. Drennen, Jr.In the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Government produced a series of films about the pressing problems facing the nation—drought, flood, poverty, and slums. Starting with a minuscule initial budget of $6,000, Lorentz, a young film critic from New York who had never made a motion picture, was h...
L.A. Confidential was released in 1997 to huge critical acclaim and it went on to be nominated for nine Academy Awards. Its reputation has since grown to the point that the film is now widely seen as a key Hollywood movie of the 1990s. But it fared poorly at the box-office, having neither big-name stars nor the sop of a comforting moral universe. With characters so bad they were irresistible, the film harked back to an older, darker Hollywood at a time when audiences would soon be flocking to "T...
An exploration of Harold Pinter's work in the theatre – through interviews with the man himself and with actors and directors who worked with him. Eight actors and directors who worked with Pinter in the theatre talk candidly about what it's like to appear in a Pinter play, to direct a Pinter play, to be directed by Pinter, to work alongside Pinter as an actor. The voices belong to directors Katie Mitchell and Sam Mendes, and to actors Barry Foster, Susan Engel, Roger Lloyd Pack, Roger Davids...
Taking Stock: The Theatre of Max Stafford-Clark
by Max Stafford-Clark and Philip Roberts
Inside accounts of the making of some of the most influential theatre productions of the last four decades. Max Stafford-Clark has been at the cutting edge of theatre in Britain for more than thirty years. Taking Stock draws on diaries, photos and interviews to recreate the evolution of nine of his most famous and influential productions: Fanshen by David Hare Epsom Downs by Howard Brenton Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill Rita, Sue and Bob Too by Andrea Dunbar Serious Money by Caryl Churchill Our...
The Cinema of Sara Gómez (New Directions in National Cinemas)
Throughout the 1960s until her untimely death in 1974, Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez engaged directly and courageously with the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations promised by the Cuban Revolution. Gómez directed numerous documentary films in 10 prolific years. She also made De cierta manera (One way or another), her only feature-length film. Her films navigate complex experiences of social class, race, and gender by reframing revolutionary citizenship, cultural memory,...
Refocus: the Films of Paul Leni (ReFocus: The International Directors)
Silent-era film scholarship has all too often focused on a handful of German directors, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, but little attention has been paid to arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the period: Paul Leni. This collection - the first comprehensive English-language study of Leni's life and career - offers new insights into his national and international films, his bold forays into scenic design and his transition from German to Hollywood filmmakin...
Academy Award-winning director Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) - whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954) - was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering outpu...
The Nick Hern Books Page to Stage series – highly accessible guides to the world's best-known plays, written by established theatre professionals to show how the plays come to life on the stage. Actor Michael Pennington conducts us scene by scene through the action of Chekhov's Three Sisters, analysing moment by moment what is actually said and done, and how the staging of these moments affects our understanding of them. Also included in this volume: a concise introduction to Chekhov and the h...
This stunning coffee table book focuses on the storyboards for nine of Alfred Hitchcock's classic movies - Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, Torn Curtain, Marnie, Shadow of a Doubt and Spellbound. It includes never before-published images and incisive text putting the material in context and examining the role the pieces played in some of the most unforgettable scenes in cinema. Hitchcock author and aficionado Tony Lee Moral takes you through the last 100 years of cin...
This traditional auteurist survey closely examines the films of director John Frankenheimer, assessing the thematic and stylistic elements of such films as The Iceman Cometh, The Manchurian Candidate, and Bird Man of Alcatraz. It begins with a complete overview of Frankenheimer's life and career. A chronology lists production history details for each of his films, and a comprehensive biography draws attention to Frankenheimer's early artistic development. Subsequent chapters categorize his fi...