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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Individual film directors, film-makers
The 1940s was a watershed decade for American cinema and the
nation. At the start of the decade, Hollywood - shaking off the
Depression - launched an unprecedented wave of production,
generating some of its most memorable classics, including Citizen
Kane, Rebecca, The Lady Eve, Sergeant York, and How Green Was My
Valley. Hollywood then joined the national war effort with a
vengeance, creating a series of patriotic and escapist films, such
as Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, The Road to Morocco, and Yankee Doodle
Dandy. By the end of the war America was a country transformed. The
1940s closed with the threat of the atom bomb and the beginnings of
the Hollywood blacklist. Film Noir reflected the new public mood of
pessimism and paranoia. Classic films of betrayal and conflict -
Kiss of Death, Force of Evil, Caught, and Apology for Murder -
depicted a poisonous universe of femme fatales, crooked lawyers,
and corrupt politicians.
Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema--hailed by
Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"--died
an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has
left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his
life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally
original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated
serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a
continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century
Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal
vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible.
In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky sets down his thoughts and his
memories, revealing for the first time the original inspirations
for his extraordinary films--Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublyov,
Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice. He
discusses their history and his methods of work, he explores the
many problems of visual creativity, and he sets forth the deeply
autobiographical content of part of his oeuvre--most fascinatingly
in The Mirror and Nostalgia. The closing chapter on The Sacrifice,
dictated in the last weeks of Tarkovsky's life, makes the book
essential reading for those who already know or who are just
discovering his magnificent work.
Through a career that spanned decades and included dozens of
films-among them such American masterpieces asThe Searchers, The
Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My
Valley-John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a body of work that
few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as bold as the stamp of his
personality was on each film, he was reticent about his personal
life. Basically shy, and intensely private, he was known to enjoy
making up stories about himself, some of them based loosely on fact
but many of them pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let
his films speak for him. What mattered to Ford was always what was
up there on the screen. Now, in this definitive look at the life
and career of one of America's true cinematic giants, noted
biographer and critic Scott Eyman, working with the full
participation of the Ford estate, has managed to document and
delineate both aspects of John Ford's life-the human and the
legend.
The rare woman director working in second-wave exploitation,
Stephanie Rothman (b. 1936) directed seven successful feature
films, served as the vice president of an independent film company,
and was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America's
student filmmaking prize. Despite these career accomplishments,
Rothman retired into relative obscurity. In The Cinema of Stephanie
Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, author Alicia Kozma uses
Rothman's career as an in-depth case study, intertwining
historical, archival, industrial, and filmic analysis to grapple
with the past, present, and future of women's filmmaking labor in
Hollywood. Understanding second wave exploitation filmmaking as a
transitory space for the industrial development of contemporary
Hollywood that also opened up opportunities for women
practitioners, Kozma argues that understudied film production
cycles provide untapped spaces for discovering women's directorial
work. The professional career and filmography of Rothman exemplify
this claim. Rothman also serves as an apt example for connecting
the structure of film histories to the persistent strictures of
rhetorical language used to mark women filmmakers and their labor.
Kozma traces these imbrications across historical archives.
Adopting a diverse methodological approach, The Cinema of Stephanie
Rothman shines a needed spotlight on the problems and successes of
the memorialization of women's directorial labor, connecting
historical and contemporary patterns of gendered labor disparity in
the film industry. This book is simultaneously the first in-depth
scholarly consideration of Rothman, the debut of the most
substantive archival materials collected on Rothman, and a feminist
political intervention into the construction of film histories.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a theatre director, writer of graphic
novels and comics, novelist, poet, and an expert in the Tarot. He
is also an auteur filmmaker who garnered attention with his
breakthrough film El Topo in 1970. He has been called a "cult"
filmmaker, whose films are surreal, hallucinatory, and provocative.
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky explores the ways
in which Jodorowsky's films are transformative in a psychologically
therapeutic way. It also examines his signature style, which
includes the symbolic meaning of various colors in which he clothes
his actors, the use of his own family members in the films, and his
casting of himself in leading roles. This total involvement of
himself and his family in his auteur films led to his
psycho-therapeutic theories and practices: metagenealogy and
psychomagic. This book is the only the second book in the English
language in print that deals with all of Jodorowsky's films,
beginning with his earliest mime film in 1957 and ending with his
2019 film on psychomagic. It also connects his work as a writer and
therapist to his films, which themselves attempt to obliterate the
line between fantasy and reality.
Complete with behind-the-scenes diary entries from the set of Vachon's best-known fillms, Shooting to Kill offers all the satisfaction of an intimate memoir from the frontlines of independent filmmakins, from one of its most successful agent provocateurs -- and survivors. Hailed by the New York Times as the "godmother to the politically committed film" and by Interview as a true "auteur producer," Christine Vachon has made her name with such bold, controversial, and commercially successful films as "Poison," "Swoon," Kids," "Safe," "I Shot Andy Warhol," and "Velvet Goldmine." Over the last decade, she has become a driving force behind the most daring and strikingly original independent filmmakers-from Todd Haynes to Tom Kalin and Mary Harron-and helped put them on the map. So what do producers do? "What don't they do?" she responds. In this savagely witty and straight-shooting guide, Vachon reveals trheguts of the filmmaking process--rom developing a script, nurturing a director's vision, getting financed, and drafting talent to holding hands, stoking egos, stretching every resource to the limit and pushing that limit. Along the way, she offers shrewd practical insights and troubleshooting tips on handling everything from hysterical actors and disgruntled teamsters to obtuse marketing executives. Complete with behind-the-scenes diary entries from the sets of Vachon's best-known films, Shooting To Kill offers all the satisfactions of an intimate memoir from the frontlines of independent filmmaking, from one of its most successful agent provocateurs-and survivors.
Sofia Coppola (b. 1971) was baptized on film. After appearing in
The Godfather as an infant, it took twenty-five years for Coppola
to take her place behind the camera, helming her own adaptation of
Jeffery Eugenides's celebrated novel The Virgin Suicides. Following
her debut, Coppola was the third woman ever to be nominated for
Best Director and became an Academy Award winner for Best Original
Screenplay for her sophomore feature, Lost in Translation. She has
also been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and
Best Director at Cannes. In addition to her filmmaking, Coppola is
recognized as an influential tastemaker. She sequenced the
so-called Tokyo dream pop of the Lost in Translation soundtrack
like an album, a success in its own right. Her third film, Marie
Antoinette, further showcased Coppola's ear for the unexpected
needle drop, soundtracking the controversial queen's life with a
series of New Romantic bangers popular during the director's
adolescence. The conversations compiled within Sofia Coppola:
Interviews mark the filmmaker's progression from dismissed
dilettante to acclaimed auteur of among the most visually
arresting, melancholy, and wryly funny films of the twenty-first
century. Coppola discusses her approach to collaboration, Bill
Murray as muse, and how Purple Rain blew her twelve-year-old mind.
There are interviews from major publications, but Coppola speaks
with musician Kim Gordon for indie magazine Bust and Tavi Gevinson,
then-adolescent founder of online teen magazine Rookie as well. The
volume also features a new and previously unpublished interview
conducted with volume editor Amy N. Monaghan. To read these
interviews is to witness Sofia Coppola coming into her own as a
world-renowned artist.
Ingmar Bergman's rich legacy as film director and writer of
classics such as The Seventh Seal, Scenes From a Marriage, and
Fanny and Alexander has attracted scholars not only in film studies
but also of literature, theater, gender, philosophy, religion,
sociology, musicology, and more. Less known, however, is Bergman
from the perspective of production studies, including all the
choices, practices, and routines involved in what goes on behind
the scenes. For instance, what about Bergman's collaborations and
conflicts with film producers? What about his work with musicians
at the opera, technicians in the television studio, and actors on
the film set. What about Bergman and MeToo? In order to throw light
on these issues, art practitioners such as film directors Ang Lee
and Margarethe von Trotta, film and opera director Atom Egoyan, and
film producer and screenwriter James Schamus are brought together
with academics such as philosopher and film scholar Paisley
Livingston, musicologist Alexis Luko, and playwright and
performance studies scholar Allan Havis to discuss Bergman's work
from their unique perspectives. In addition, Ingmar Bergman at the
Crossroads provides, for the first time, in-depth interviews with
Bergman's longtime collaborators Katinka Farago and Mans
Reutersward, who both have first-hand experience of working
intimately as producers in film and television with Bergman,
covering more than 5 decades. In an open exchange between
individual and institutional perspectives, this book bridges the
often-rigid boundaries between theoreticians and practitioners, in
turn pointing Bergman studies in new directions.
A filmmaker whose work exhibits a wide range of styles and
approaches, Louis Malle (1932-1995) was the only French director of
his generation to enjoy a significant career in both France and the
United States. Although Malle began his career alongside members of
the French New Wave like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and
Claude Chabrol, he never associated himself with that group. Malle
is perhaps best known for his willingness to take on such difficult
or controversial topics as suicide, incest, child prostitution, and
collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. His filmography
includes narrative films like Zazie dans le Metro, Murmur of the
Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les
enfants, as well as several major documentaries. In the late 1970s,
Malle moved to the United States, where he worked primarily outside
of the Hollywood studio system. The films of his American period
display his keen outsider's eye, which allowed him to observe
diverse aspects of American life in settings that ranged from
turn-of-the-century New Orleans to present-day Atlantic City and
the Texas Gulf Coast. Louis Malle: Interviews covers the entirety
of Malle's career and features seventeen interviews, the majority
of which are translated into English here for the first time. As
the collection demonstrates, Malle was an extremely intelligent and
articulate filmmaker who thought deeply about his own choices as a
director, the ideological implications of those choices, and the
often-controversial themes treated in his films. The interviews
address such topics as Malle's approach to casting and directing
actors, his attitude toward provocative subject matter and
censorship, his understanding of the relationship between
documentary and fiction film, and the differences between the film
industries in France and the US. Malle also discusses his
sometimes-challenging work with such actors as Brigitte Bardot,
Pierre Blaise, and Brooke Shields, and sheds new light on the
making of his films.
Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores
the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara
Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a
series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity.
Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred
films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer
experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers
Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between
the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist
theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's
physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in
shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's
primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the
places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she
explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's
legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine
the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to
solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered.
In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with
Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate
perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker
herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers
to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and
artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in
the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and
politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions,
pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic
artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital
text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art
history.
The Films of Jess Franco looks at the work of Jesus ""Jess"" Franco
(1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive
filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is best known as the
director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad
scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also
dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to
pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of
low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work
that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly
poetic. Editors Antonio Lazaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled
a team of scholars to examine Franco's offbeat films, which command
an international cult following and have developed a more
mainstream audience in recent years. Arguing that his multifaceted,
paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single
approach, this edited volume features twelve original essays on
Franco's movies written from a variety of different perspectives.
This collection does not avoid the methodologies most commonly used
in the past to analyze Franco's work-auteur criticism, genre
criticism, and cult film criticism-yet it does show how Franco's
films complicate these critical approaches. The contributors open
up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre
from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies,
cinephilia studies, and star studies. The Films of Jess Franco
seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult
director and to broaden the conversation around the director's work
in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike.
Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film
Eve's Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons's mission has been
to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve's Bayou,
her first feature film, Lemmons (b. 1961) accomplished the rare
feat of creating a film that was critically successful and one of
the highest-grossing independent films of the year. Moreover, the
cultural impact of Eve's Bayou endures, and in 2018 the film was
added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as a
culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film.
Lemmons's directing credits also include The Caveman's Valentine,
Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and, most recently, Harriet, making
Lemmons one of the most prolific and long-standing women directors
in Hollywood. As a black woman filmmaker and a self-proclaimed
black feminist, Lemmons breaks the mold of what is expected of a
filmmaker in Hollywood. She began her career in Hollywood as an
actor, with roles in numerous television series and high-profile
films, including Spike Lee's School Daze and Jonathan Demme's
Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs. This volume
collects fifteen interviews that illuminate Lemmons's distinctive
ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize
stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and
maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art
through film, intimately linked to her mission to protest
culturally and structurally imposed limitations and push the
boundaries imposed by Hollywood.
How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure
promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's
'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader
set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film
authorship, given that several of them were released in different
versions and his contributions to others were not always credited?
How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is
sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses
these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting
reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the
formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an
emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and
the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with
different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult
classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an
August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror
Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be
ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.
Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary
film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only
real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO
Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen
to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an
acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal
collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here
reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating
career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the
Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of
his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his
films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter,
Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this
truly remarkable artist.
Elia Kazan's varied life and career is related here in his
autobiography. He reveals his working relationships with his many
collabourators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford
Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon
Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes
his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position,
movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces
his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities
Committee, illuminating much of what may be obscured in McCarthy
literature.
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