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Steven Spielberg is known as the most powerful man in New Hollywood and a pioneer of the contemporary blockbuster, America's most successful export. His career began a new chapter in mass culture. At the same time, American post war liberalism was breaking down. This fascinating new book explains the complex relationship between film and politics through the prism of an iconic filmmaker. Spielberg's early films were a triumphant emergence of the Sunbelt aesthetic that valued visceral kicks...

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and the...

'The guillotine - and capital punishment and other diverse methods of dispensing death more generally - have been the abiding obsessions of my life. It began very early. I must have been no more than ten years old...' Born to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the li...

This book presents the complete works of Ingmar Bergman: an homage to one of the most esteemed film and theater artists of all time, began in cooperation with Bergman himself and made with full access to his archives.Since 1957, when he released "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries", Ingmar Bergman has been one of the leading figures in international cinema, along with others such as Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. In a career that spanned 60 years, he wrote, produced, and directed 50...

As a star, Clint Eastwood is recalled primarily for two early roles--the ""Man With No Name"" of three European-made Westerns and ""Dirty"" Harry Callahan, the uncompromising cop who spoke softly and carried a big gun in five movies. But like few other stars, Eastwood has shaped his own career by appearing almost exclusively in films he produced or co-produced, frequently under his own direction. No other contemporary dramatic star has directed himself so often. His acclaim as a director began...

The author of this biography of Bunuel spent time in Paris and Mexico to interview people who worked with the director and family and friends, including Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Bunuel's sons. Luis Bunuel was a surrealist who worked with great figures of the movement but was influenced little by them, a man of ascetic habits who was also a 50-year alcoholic, an eroticist but one with little physical interest in women, and an anarchist who carried a bow-tie in his pocket so as to be p...

Since his successful spell running the National Theatre, Richard Eyre's career as a director of film, theatre and opera has made him a leading cultural figure and a hugely respected commentator on the arts. This book collects over fifty short pieces written by Eyre about people he has known and worked with, ideas he has struggled with, things that have moved, delighted or infuriated him. He writes with candour, perceptiveness and charm, and always with an eye for the telling anecdote or the rev...

Oliver Stone has left an indelible mark on public opinion and political life and has generated enormous controversy and debate among those who take issue with his dramatic use of history. This text brings Stone face-to-face with some of his critics and supporters and allows Stone himself ample room to respond to their views. Featuring such luminaries as David Halberstam, Stephen Ambrose, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Walter LaFeber and Robert Rosenstone, this book provides a critique of Stone's most c...

The Abbey Theatre played a leading role in the politicisation of the revolutionary generation that won Irish freedom, but comparatively little is known about the men and women who formed the lifeblood of the institution: those whose radical politics drove them to fight in the 1916 Rising. Drawing on a huge range of previously unpublished material, The Abbey Rebels of Easter 1916 explores the experiences, hopes and dreams of these remarkable but largely forgotten individuals: Maire Nic Shiubhla...