Emile De Antonio
Emile de Antonio (1919-1989) was an important political filmmaker in the United States during the Cold War. Director of such controversial films as ""Point of Order"" (1963), ""In the Year of the Pig"" (1969), ""Millhouse: A White Comedy"" (1971) and ""Mr. Hoover and I"" (1989), de Antonio lived a remarkable life in dissent. De Antonio was a womanizing raconteur, upper-class Marxist, Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy, WWII bomber pilot and failed professor, who lived a colourful life even bef...
The Northman: A Call to the Gods is the official look at how this epic Viking revenge thriller was conceived, written, cast, and produced by acclaimed director Robert Eggers. Set against the ruthless backdrop of tenth-century Norse territory, The Northman is an epic Viking revenge thriller by acclaimed director Robert Eggers (The Witch [2015] and The Lighthouse [2019]), featuring an all-star cast including Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and Bjoer...
In this much-anticipated autobiography, Raymond Gubbay brings to life his extraordinary fifty-year career as one of the most experienced and well-connected impresarios in British music and entertainment. With a provenance rich in history and talent, he retraces the musical legacy of his family, growing up in a liberal Jewish household in 1950s post-war London with the challenges he faced while embarking on his musical journey after a few failed attempts at corporate conformity. Beginning his ca...
This is a collection of letters to (and occasionally from) all manner of names from Lawrence Olivier to Maggie Smith and Richard Burton, Barbara Windsor, Joe Orton and Benazir Bhutto. Kenneth Williams meticulously kept carbon copies of all his letters (some 12 boxes of correspondence survive) - usually very long ones, faultlessly typed. They expand and ratify events and attitudes only briefly sketched by the diaries. There are also Williams selections from the extensive files at the BBC, where h...
Paul Schrader's unique relationship to the role of the author (as screenwriter, director and critic) has long informed his cinema, and raises complicated questions about the definition of the auteur. This volume of essays includes the first original appraisals of his much-lauded masterpiece First Reformed (2017), as well as a chapter-length interview with Schrader himself, conducted by the editors. Michelle E. Moore PhD is Professor of English at the College of DuPage.
Terence Fisher is best known as the director who made most of the classic Hammer horrors – including The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Devil Rides Out. But there is more to Terence Fisher than Hammer horror. In a busy twenty-five-year career, he directed fifty films, not just horrors but also thrillers, comedies, melodramas and science-fiction. This book offers an appreciation of all of Fisher's films and also gives a sense of his place in British film history. Looking at Fisher’s caree...
Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This is the first ever book-length study of his work, combining detailed analysis of all his films with a persuasive and stimulating investigation of key filmic issues of time and memory, identity and selfhood, and the nature of literary adaptation, as well as a previously unpublished interview with Davies himself.The book demonstrates that Davies's films successfully subvert tra...
The Alexander Medvedkin Reader (Cinema and Modernity (CHUP)) (Cinema and Modernity)
by Alexander Medvedkin
Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900 89), a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, is celebrated today for his unique form of "total" documentary cinema, which aimed to bridge the distance between film and life, and for his use of satire during a period when the Soviet authorities preferred that laughter be confined to narrowly prescribed channels. This collection of selected writings by Medvedkin is the first of its kind and reveals how his work is a crucial link in the histo...
The first major English-language study of JarmuschAt a time when gimmicky, action-driven blockbusters ruled Hollywood, Jim Jarmusch spearheaded a boom in independent cinema by making now-classic low-budget films like Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train. Jarmusch's films focused on intimacy, character, and new takes on classical narratives. His minimal form, peculiar pacing, wry humor, and blank affect have since been adopted by directors like Sofia Coppola, Hal Hartley, Richar...
A fresh account of the career of one of the most important photographers of the 20th century Through his amazing variety of innovative images, photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976) played a crucial role in establishing the medium's significance as a modern art form. Celebrating the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent acquisition of the core collection of Strand's prints from the Paul Strand Archive, this stunning book comprehensively reassesses the artist's career in light of current scholarship...
Director in Action – Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film
by Stephen Teo
The work of Andrzej Wajda, one of the world’s most important filmmakers, shows remarkable cohesion in spite of the wide ranging scope of his films, as this study of his complete output of feature films shows. Not only do his films address crucial historical, social and political issues; the complexity of his work is reinforced by the incorporation of the elements of major film and art movements. It is the reworking of these different elements by Wajda, as the author shows, which give his films...
Although Frank Capra (1897-1991) is best known as the director of It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It's a Wonderful Life , he was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker as well as a behind-the-scene force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the s...
Alfred Hitchcock has long been understood as an inspired technician and master of abnormal psychology. The authors of this volume sugges, through new readings of his American films, that he is also a cultural critic of remarkable insight and undeniable presence. With new intensity and specificity, Hitchcock's America looks at Hitchcock's analysis of and engagement with American culture. His films emerge as our richest history of American middle-class culture at mid-century.
Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinéma team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet his work remains little-known in comparison with his contemporaries, and this study is the first in English to look at the full span of his career. Starting with his decisively influential film criticism of the 1950s, it moves from the New Wave t...
Over her more than four-decade career, New York-based filmmaker, performer, and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross the boundaries of experimental film, video art, and multimedia performance—from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion, to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit in the Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of movement and the resilience of the human spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of c...
A career-spanning introduction to the award-winning director of Small Axe, with contributions from Paul Gilroy, Hamza Walker and more Declared by Time "one of the most influential people in the world" in 2014, British filmmaker Steve McQueen (born 1969) first presented his work in galleries and museums in the early 1990s, with installations and films influenced by Warhol and French New Wave. (An early friendship with Okwui Enwezor was also formative.) His first major work was Bear (1993), in wh...
Who is Soderbergh? Currently Hollywood's hottest hot shot, Soderbergh burst onto the independent scene with his provocative, multi-award winning feature debut sex, lies and videotape in 1989. With the film world seemingly at his feet the guy from Baton Rouge committed critical and commercial hara-kiri, producing a black and white film about the life of writer Franz Kafka that fell foul of studios and audiences alike. The critics liked it though and they were to stay with him through a lean perio...
The Montage Principle (Critical Studies, #21)
This book of essays is quite unique in that it intervenes in a still contested area within many universities, that of the relevance of film to literature, critical theory, politics, sociology and anthropology. The essays were commissioned by Jean Antoine-Dunne whose research has explored the impact of Eisenstein’s aesthetics on different areas of modernist literature and drama. The essays in this collection use Eisenstein as a point of departure into divergent fields of analysis and are concerne...