This book philosophically and creatively examines ways in which independent filmmakers may explore, through practice, the discovery and development of a personal voice in the making of their films. Filmmaker and academic, Professor Erik Knudsen, uses a combination of autoethnographic experience derived from his own filmmaking practice and new insights gained from a series of ethnomediaological StoryLab workshops with independent filmmakers in Malaysia, Ghana and Colombia to drive this innovative examination. The book contextualises this practice exploration within an eclectic psychological and philosophical framework that ranges from Jungian psychological theories of the collective unconscious to Sheldrakian scientific theories of morphic resonance, from Christian mystical ideas about creative motivation to structuralist theories that underpin our linguistic understanding of story and narrative. Why should we create? What is a creative act? This in-depth study tackles these questions by examining the early ideation stages of cinematic expression and ultimately seeks to understand the practical ways in which ideas are shaped into stories and narratives.

Screenwriting is the second of the 'Behind the Silver Screen' series of ten volumes, which will together cover for the first time the full art, craft, business and history of filmmaking from inception to reality. Screenwriting is where a movie begins. Written by screenwriters and critics, this innovative book is devoted to the art of the screenwriter and the business of screenwriting from Hollywood's silent beginnings to the global multimedia marketplace. Focusing on key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond and on films from The Birth of a Nation to Chinatown and Lost in Translation, the book reveals the profound ways in which screenwriters contribute to films, as they try to capture the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the period in which they are writing. It is compelling reading for film lovers, screenwriters & film students, industry professionals - anyone interested in the creative collaboration that creates the movies we see on the screen.

Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure combines the author's two main biographical paths: her professional commitment to the fields of both theatre and philosophy. The art of acting on stage is analysed here not only from the theoretical perspective of a spectator, but also from the perspective of the actor. The author draws on her experience as both a theatre actor and a university professor whose teachings in the art of acting rely heavily on her own experience and also on her philosophical knowledge. The book is unique not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its style. Written in a multiplicity of voices, the text oscillates between philosophical reasoning and narrative forms of writing, including micro-narratives, fables, parables, and inter alia by Carroll, Hoffmann and Kleist. Hence the book claims that a trans-disciplinary dialogue between the art of acting and the art of philosophical thinking calls for an aesthetical research that questions and begins to seek alternatives to traditionally established and ingrained formats of philosophy.

In these twenty-one interviews, filmmaker Peter Greenaway expresses his film aesthetic and discusses his combat with the dominant Hollywood style of filmmaking. His films have run unmistakably against the main current of present cinematic practice, from the short film Windows in the mid-seventies, to his more popular but nonetheless challenging films such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Pillow Book in the nineties.

In this collection the ever-controversial Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema. For him such films tell stories or they translate literature with its linear narrative onto a medium that he feels should be preeminently visual. He finds that, instead of foregrounding the image and the composition of visual elements as in the long history of painting, Hollywood-style directors seem mesmerized by the "and then and then" narrative.

In these provocative interviews Greenaway tells of his ambition to make cinema a medium based more on image than on narrative. He explains his painterly approach in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, defends his use of total nudity of both sexes, and declares that traditional literary-based cinema is dead. He believes that the most creative imaginations, the most innovative technologies, and the greatest financial resources are being devoted to television and the Internet and that Hollywood moviemaking is no longer in the vanguard.

Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle. This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of postwar German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Influenced by Hans Weigel and the legendary literary circle Gruppe 47, Bachmann gained international renown for her poems, short stories, and novels, and won numerous awards for her work. Sadly, her life ended abruptly in October of 1973 when a lit cigarette burned down her apartment, causing Bachmann to suffer severe burns that would eventually prove fatal. The author was only forty-seven, and her tragic death left what could have been a long and lustrous writing career regretfully stunted. Nearly twenty years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen episodes of the Viennese radio drama The Radio Family were discovered. Remarkably, they happened to be written by Bachmann herself, who had been a writer on the show just after she graduated from university. The Radio Family was a popular soap opera broadcast in the American sector of occupied Vienna in the 1950s. The program focused on a middle-class Viennese family and their everyday life. Topics ranged from birthday parties and holiday plans to profiteering and currency fraud in the commercial sector and Austrians' involvement in the Nazi past. All fifteen scripts have now been compiled and masterfully translated, revealing an early and significant piece of Bachmann's body of work, while simultaneously offering a rare glimpse into Vienna's quotidian history.

Though screenwriting is an essential part of the film production process, in Britain it is yet to be fully recognised as a form in itself. In this original study, Jill Nelmes brings the art of screenwriting into sharp focus, foregrounding the role of the screenwriter in British cinema from the 1930s to the present day. Drawing on otherwise unseen drafts of screenplays, correspondence and related material held in the Special Collections of the BFI National Archive, Nelmes's close textual analysis of the screenplay in its many forms illuminates both the writing and the production process. With case studies of a diverse range of key writers - from individuals such as Muriel Box, Robert Bolt and Paul Laverty, to teams such as the Carry On writers - Nelmes exposes the depth and breadth of this thriving field.

Federico FelliniOCOs script for perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema, The Journey of G. Mastorna (1965/6), is published here for the first time in full English translation. It offers the reader a remarkable insight into FelliniOCOs creative process and his fascination with human mortality and the great mystery of death. Written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, the project was ultimately abandoned for a number of reasons, including FelliniOCOs near death, although it continued to inhabit his creative imagination and the landscape of his films for the rest of his career.

Marcus Perryman has written two supporting essays which discuss the reasons why the film was never made, compare it to the two other films in the trilogy La Dolce Vita and 8cents, and analyze the script in the light of ItOCOs a Wonderful Life and Fredric BrownOCOs sci-fi novel What Mad Universe. In doing so he opens up an entire world of connections to FelliniOCOs other films, writers and collaborators. It should be essential reading for students and academics studying FelliniOCOs work."

The essays within this collection explore the possibilities and potentialities of all three positions, presenting encounters that are, at times contradictory, at other times supportive, as well as complementary. The collection thereby enriches the questions that are being raised within contemporary cinematic studies.

This thorough account of the life and films of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem is the first book in English on the internationally renowned writer-director of Vacas, La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel), Tierra, Los amantes del Circulo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Lucia y el sexo (Sex and Lucia), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball) and Caotica Ana (Chaotic Ana), Initial chapters explore Medem's childhood, adolescence and education and examine his earliest short films and critical writings against a background of a dramatically changing Spain. Later chapters provide accounts of the genesis, production and release of Medem's challenging and sensual films, which feed into complex but lucid analyses of their meanings, both political and personal, in which Stone draws on traditions and innovations in Basque art, Spanish cinema and European philosophy to create a complete and provocative portrait of Medem and his work. -- .

Alex de la Iglesia, initially championed by Pedro Almodovar, and at one time the enfant terrible of Spanish film, still makes film critics nervous. The director of some of the most important films of the Post-Franco era - Accion mutante, El dia de la bestia, Muertos de risa - receives here the first full length study of his work. Breaking away from the pious tradition of acclaiming art-house auteurs, The cinema of Alex de la Iglesia tackles a new sort of beast: the popular auteur, who brings the provocation of the avant-garde to popular genres such as horror and comedy. This book brings together Anglo-American film theory, an exploration of the legal and economic history of Spanish audio-visual culture, a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish cultural forms and traditions (esperpento, sainete costumbrista) with a detailed textual analysis of all of Alex de la Iglesia's seven feature films. -- .