Noted for his charisma, talent, and striking good looks, director Rex Ingram (1893−1950) is ranked alongside D. W. Griffith, Marshall Neilan, and Erich von Stroheim as one of the greatest artists of the silent cinema. Ingram briefly studied sculpture at the Yale University School of Art after emigrating from Ireland to the United States in 1911; but he was soon seduced by the new medium of moving pictures and abandoned his studies for a series of jobs in the film industry. Over the next decade,...
Reading Joss Whedon (Television and Popular Culture)
In an age when geek chic has come to define mainstream pop culture, few writers and producers inspire more admiration and response than Joss Whedon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Much Ado about Nothing, from Dr. Horrible’s Sing–Along Blog to The Avengers, the works of Whedon have been the focus of increasing academic attention. This collection of articles represents some of the best work covering a wide array of topics that clarify Whedon’s importance, including considerations of narrative an...
This collection of interviews brings the filmmaker John Huston vividly to life in his own words. Huston (1906-1987) had an extraordinary career that spanned more than forty years and nearly fifty films. Among these are such classics as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Night of the Iguana, Prizzi's Honor, and The Dead. In these interviews ranging from 1952 to 1985 Huston talks about his approach to directing, the influence of painting upon hi...
From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unve...
The Films of Mike Leigh (Cambridge Film Classics)
by Ray Carney and Leonard Quart
The Films of Mike Leigh is the first critical study of one of the most important and eccentric directors of British independent filmmaking. Although active since 1971, Leigh has only come to the attention of an international audience in the 1990s through films such as Secrets and Lies and Career Girls. Like Robert Altman and John Cassevetes, Leigh works improvisationally, beginning with a small group of actors around whom he builds his films during months of private rehearsal. The script is writ...
Salvador Dalí is one of the most widely recognised and most controversial artists of the twentieth century. He was also an avant-garde filmmaker - collaborating with such giants as Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock - though the impetus and endurance of his fascination with film has rarely been given the attention it merits. King surveys the full range of Dalí's eccentric activities with(in) the cinema. Influenced by the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick, Dalí used the...
A Critical Cinema 4 is the fourth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald once again engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the network of interco...
A major contribution to film scholarship and women's studies, this is the first critical biography of America's first native-born female director. It fully documents the career of Lois Weber as a director from 1908 through 1934 and notes the impressive number of short subjects and feature films that she made. Largely forgotten and often maligned, Lois Weber has received scant attention in recent years, yet this study points out that she was one of the cinema's genuine auteurs, not only directing...
Film history catalogs the influence of film upon the development of modern cultural life. The Films of Mack Sennett is a prominent entry into this important effort. In the same manner that Sennett fully devoted himself to film, the Mack Sennett Collection devotes itself to the detailed study of the history of film. Donated by Sennett in 1951, it marked a pivotal point in the evolution of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was not just the first ma...
Famous for their stunts, gags, and images, Buster Keaton's silent films have enticed everyone from Hollywood movie fans to the surrealists, such as Dalí and Buñuel. Here Robert Knopf offers an unprecedented look at the wide-ranging appeal of Keaton's genius, considering his vaudeville roots and his ability to integrate this aesthetic into the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1920s. When young Buster was being hurled about the stage by his comically irate father in the family's vau...
A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors)
by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline
This compendium of original essays offers invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential directors in the history of cinema, exploring his major films, philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and directors. Presents a compendium of original essays offering invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinemaFeatures contributions from an international cast of major...
Life never ceases to give homage to Jacques Tati. Be it on the beach, in an old part of town, or in the glamour of a modern city, we find everywhere the gags which have peopled such films as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Playtime. If a silhouette crosses us at a street corner, we are quickly reminded of certain scenes in Mon Oncle. Tati was a great film comic who deserves to be placed on the same level as Keaton and Chaplin. Tati created Monsieur Hulot who has now entered the world of scree...
Since the early 1950s, Chris Marker has embraced different filmmaking styles as readily as he has new technologies, and has broadened conceptions of the documentary in distinctly personal ways. He has travelled around the world, tracking political upheavals and historic events, as well as unearthing the stories buried under official reporting. This globetrotting filmmaker testifies to his six decades on the move through a passionate devotion to the moving image. Yet from the outset, his filmic i...
This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines – film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies – in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relatio...
This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world's great filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace patterns of continuity and change, and explore critical assessments of his work over time. His career began in the silent era and ended as the French New Wave was winding down. In between, Duvivier made over sixty films in a long and at times diffi...
The dead walk. Putrid corpses claw their way out of earthy graves and stumble towards civilisation. They are bloody, rotting, and hungry for human flesh - and it's all George Romero's fault. With 1968's Night of the Living Dead Romero unleashed the modern zombie onto cinemas, annihilating their voodoo roots and resurrecting them as passed away friends and dead loved ones. Its sequel, the zombies in a mall masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, took Romero's apocalyptic nightmare further. Its frank depict...
Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics...
The films of Orson Welles inhabit the spaces of citiesfrom America’s industrializing midlandto its noirish borderlands, from Europe’s medieval fortresses to its Kafkaesque labyrinths and postwar rubblescapes. His movies take us through dark streets to confront nightmarish struggles for power, the carnivalesque and bizarre, and the shadows and light of human character. This ambitious new study explores Welles’s vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban tran...