An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray's legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater's Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film's many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater's singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all people.

Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman is the first musical examination of Bergman's style as an auteur filmmaker. It provides a comprehensive examination of all three aspects (music, sound effects, and voice) of Bergman's signature soundtrack-style. Through examinations of Bergman's biographical links to music, the role of music, sound effects, silence, and voice, and Bergman's working methods with sound technicians, mixers, and editors, this book argues that Bergman's soundtracks are as superbly developed as his psychological narratives and breathtaking cinematography. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book bridges the fields of music, sound, and film.

Akira Kurosawa is widely known as the director who opened up Japanese film to Western audiences, and following his death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life's work as a whole and its legacy to cinema. Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon has become one of the best-known Japanese films ever made, and continues to be discussed and imitated more than 60 years after its first screening. This book examines the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, as well as the director's larger legacies to cinema, its global audiences and beyond. It demonstrates that these legacies are manifold: not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive. The book moves from an examination of one filmmaker and his immediate social context in Japan, and goes on to explore how an artist's ideas might transcend their cultural origins to ultimately provide global influences. Discussing how Rashomon's effects began to multiply with the film being re-imagined and repurposed in numerous media forms in the decades that followed its initial release, the book also shows that the film and its ideas have been applied to a wider range of social and cultural phenomena in a variety of institutional contexts. It addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, extending to the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to the significantly different interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event. As the first book on Rashomon since Donald Richie's 1987 anthology, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of film studies, film history, Japanese cinema and communication studies. It will also resonate more broadly with those interested in Japanese culture and society, anthropology and philosophy.

A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, throughout his career, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream. Jeremy Dauber argues that throughout Brooks's extensive body of work-from Your Show of Shows to Blazing Saddles to Young Frankenstein to Spaceballs-the comedian has seen the most success when he found a balance between his unflagging, subversive, manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores. Dauber also explores how Brooks's American Jewish humor went from being solely for niche audiences to an essential part of the American mainstream, paving the way for generations of Jewish (and other) comedians to come.

Timothy Asch (1932-1994) was probably the greatest ethnographic filmmaker of the latter twentieth century, and one of the best-known anthropologists of his generation. He worked with Margaret Mead, John Marshall and Napoleon Chagnon, lived and filmed on every continent except Antarctica, and won numerous international prizes. His work, which includes 'The Ax Fight' and more than 50 other films of the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela, comprises the most widely used resource in the teaching of anthropology today. Timothy Asch and Ethnographic Film combines a biographical overview of Asch's life with theoretical and critical perspectives, giving a definitive guide to his background, aims and ideas, methodology and major projects. Beautifully illustrated with 60 photos, and featuring articles from many of Asch's friends, colleagues and collaborators as well as an important interview with Asch himself, it is an ideal introduction to his work and to a range of key issues in ethnographic film."

The inimitable, haunting films of Alfred Hitchcock took place in settings, both exterior and interior, that deeply impacted our experiences of his most unforgettable works. From the enclosed spaces of Rope and Rear Window to the wide-open expanses of North by Northwest, the physical worlds inhabited by desperate characters are a crucial element in our perception of the Hitchcockian universe. As Christine Madrid French reveals in this original and indispensable book, Hitchcock's relation to the built world was informed by an intense engagement with location and architectural form-in an era marked by modernism's advance-fueled by some of the most creative midcentury designers in film. Hitchcock saw elements of the built world not just as scenic devices but as interactive areas to frame narrative exchanges. In his films, building forms also serve a sentient purpose-to capture and convey feelings, sensations, and moments that generate an emotive response from the viewer. Visualizing the contemporary built landscape allowed the director to illuminate Americans' everyday experiences as well as their own uncertain relationship with their environment and with each other. French shares several untold stories, such as the real-life suicide outside the Hotel Empire in Vertigo (which foreshadowed uncannily that film's tragic finale), and takes us to the actual buildings that served as the inspiration for Psycho's infamous Bates Motel. Her analysis of North by Northwest uncovers the Frank Lloyd Wright underpinnings for Robert Boyle's design of the modernist house from the film's celebrated Mount Rushmore sequence and ingeniously establishes the Vandamm House as the prototype of the cinematic trope of the villain's lair. She also shows how the widespread unemployment of the 1930s resulted in a surge of gifted architects transplanting their careers into the film industry. These practitioners created sets that drew from contemporary design schools of thought and referenced real structures, both modern and historic. The Architecture of Suspense is the first book to document how these great architectural minds found expression in Hitchcock's films and how the director used their talents and his own unique vision to create an enduring and evocative cinematic world.

Peter Biskind's extraordinary book tells the story of creativity and excess in Hollywood. From the making of Easy Riders in 1969 to the release of Ragnig Bull in 1980 — when Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Lucas, Hopper, Altman and Spielberg were at the height of their powers — Beverly Hills tossed and turned under a blanket of cocaine. All the biggest names spill their frankest stories, about sex, drugs and money, and, most venomously, about each other.

'If there is a better book about the inside of the film industry, I'd like to see it' —Nick Lezard, Sunday Times

The Films of Charles and Ray Eames traces the history of the Eameses work, examining their evolution away from the design of mass-produced goods and toward projects created as educational experiences. Closely examining how the Eameses described their work reveals how the films and exhibitions they generated were completely at odds with the earlier objectives exemplified in their furniture designs. Shifting away from promoting the consumer-culture, they turned their attention to the presentation of complex sets of scientific, artistic, and philosophical ideas.

During a critical period from the late 1950s to the early 1960s there was a moment of introspective self-reflection in the West stemming from the events of the Cold War. This moment of uncertainty was crucial, for it provided the incentive to question the values and concerns of society as a whole. In turn, designers began to question their own sense of purpose, temporarily expanding the purview of design to a broader field of inquiry. In the case of the Eameses, they identified an overriding problem related to consumerism and excess in America and sought to resolve the issue by creating a network of communication between universities, governments, institutions, and corporations. The solution of promoting greater education experiences as an alternative to consumerism in America required that different sectors of society functioned in unison to address political, social, economic, and educational concerns. "The Films of Charles and Ray Eames" reconsiders how design intersects with humanity, culture, and the sciences.

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Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the three acclaimed masters--together with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa--of Japanese cinema. Ten years in the making, "Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema" is the definitive guide to the life and work of one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century.

Born at the end of the 19th Century into a wealthy family, Mizoguchi's early life influenced the themes he would take up in his work. His father's ambitious business ventures failed and the family fell into poverty. His mother died and his beloved sister was sold into a geisha house. Her earnings paid for Mizoguchi's education. Weak and deluded men, and strong, self-sacrificing women--these were to become the obsessive motifs of Mizoguchi's films.

Mizoguchi's apprenticeship in cinema was peculiarly Japanese. His concerns--the role of women and the realist representation of the inequities of Japanese society--were not. Through two World Wars, Japan's culture changed. Though censored, Mizoguchi continued to produce films. It was only in the 1950s that Mizoguchi's astonishing cinematic vision became widely known outside Japan."Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema" tells the full story of this famously perfectionist, even tyrannical, director. Mizoguchi's key films, cinematographic techniques and his social and aesthetic concerns are all discussed and set in the context of Japan's changing popular and political culture.

In Eisenstein Rediscovered Ian Christie and Richard Taylor present the first true East-West symposium on Eisenstein with an unparalleled diversity of views and methodologies. Two newly discovered texts by Eisenstein are here translated fro the first time, and all the contributors make extensive use of material only recently available - variant scripts, drawings, diaries and other writings - to probe behind the familiar facade. The `new' Eisenstein that emerges is in all respects a more engaging and contemporary figure than is traditionally perceived, his wit, eroticism and exlectic passions defining a distinctively modern sensibility whose rediscovey is long overdue.

Barbara Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors.
Devoting each chapter to a significant quality of Stanwyck's performances, Andrew Klevan foregrounds crucial scenes from her exemplary films, including "Stella Dallas" (1937), "The Lady Eve" (1941), and "Double Indemnity" (1944). Through the lens of her achievement, Klevan examines the wider concerns of these films while revisiting classic topics from Film Studies - psychoanalysis, medium reflexivity, and the representation of female roles such as the 'sacrificial mother' and the 'femme fatale'. In paying close attention to the various aspects of Barbara Stanwyck's skilfully executed performances, this book enhances familiar understandings and provides fresh illumination.

Since the cinema first began to be taken seriously as an art form, there has been a constant debate on the question: who is the real creator of the film, the writer or the director? This study of a group of key film-makers in the sixties suggests that during this decade there was an emergence of a generation of film-makers who conceived a whole film in their minds just as an architect conceives a whole cathedral or a composer a whole symphony. The book presents detailed critical studies of the work of six commanding figures in the international cinema: four who have made their major reputations since 1950, the Italians Frederico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, the Frenchman Robert Bresson and the Swede Ingmar Bergman; and two film-makers of an older generation, the Spaniard Luis Bunuel and the Anglo-American Alfred Hitchcock, who have reached the height of their powers and exerted their most important influence on the cinema during the same period. There is also a section on the new talents to emerge more recently in the French 'New Wave', in particular Francois Truffaut, Jen-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. In addition, the book contains detailed filmographies of the directors discussed.

James Naremore's study of Max Ophuls' classic 1948 melodrama, Letter from an Unknown Woman, not only pays tribute to Ophuls but also discusses the backgrounds and typical styles of the film's many contributors--among them Viennese author Stephan Zweig, whose 1922 novella was the source of the picture; producer John Houseman, an ally of Ophuls who nevertheless made questionable changes to what Ophuls had shot; screenwriter Howard Koch; music composer Daniele Amfitheatrof; designers Alexander Golitzen and Travis Banton; and leading actors Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, whose performances were central to the film's emotional effect. Naremore also traces the film's reception history, from its middling box office success and mixed early reviews, exploring why it has been a work of exceptional interest to subsequent generations of both aesthetic critics and feminist theorists. Lastly, Naremore provides an in-depth critical appreciation of the film, offering nuanced appreciation of specific details of mise-en-scene, camera movement, design, sound, and performances, integrating this close analyses into an overarching analysis of Letter's "recognition plot;" a trope in which the recognition of a character's identity creates dramatic intensity or crisis. Naremore argues that Letter's use of recognition is one of the most powerful in Hollywood cinema, and contrasts it with what we find in Zweig's novella.

In 1895, the Lumiere brothers invented the cinematograph. Less than a year later, 23-year-old Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker in cinema history, made The Cabbage Fairy, a 60-second movie, for Leon Gaumont, going on to direct over 300 films before 1922. Her life is a shadow history of early cinema, the chronicle of an art form coming into its own. A free and independent woman, rubbing shoulders with luminaries such as Georges Melies and the Lumieres, she was the first to define the professions of screenwriter and producer. She directed the first feminist satire, then the first sword-and-sandal epic, before crossing the Atlantic in 1907 to become the first woman to found her own production company in New Jersey. Alice Guy died in 1969, excluded from the annals of film history. In 2011, Martin Scorsese honoured this cinematic visionary, "forgotten by the industry she had helped create", describing her as "a filmmaker of rare sensitivity, with a remarkable poetic eye and an extraordinary feel for locations". The same can be said of Catel & Bocquet's luminous account of her life.

Originally published in 1990, this book brought a new rigor and subtlety to the interpretation of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on traditional literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and current film theory about gender and subjectivity, the author combines close readings of seven films with historical and biographical studies of the directors who made them. Offering substantial readings of Jean-Luc Godard's controversial deconstructed King Lear and of Liz White's independent African-American Othello, Donaldson also applies his provocative and contemporary point of view to more familiar films. He reads Olivier's Henry V in relation to its treatment of sexual difference; Olivier's Hamlet in part as an expression of the director's childhood sexual trauma; Kurosawa's Throne of Blood as an allegory of the relationship between Western and Japanese cinema; and Zeffirelli's immensely popular Romeo and Juliet in the light of its powerful homoerotic subtext. With striking perspectives on Shakespeare, on the movies as an expressive medium, and on the complex processes of cultural change, this is timeless useful reading for teachers and students of film and literature.

The films of Michael Powell (1905-90) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-88), among them I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), are landmarks in British cinema, standing apart from the realist and comic mainstream with their highly stylised aesthetic and their themes of romantic longing and spiritual crisis. Powell and Pressburger are revered by film lovers and film-makers (Martin Scorsese has called them 'the most successful experimental film-makers in the world'). In this first-ever collection of essays on Powell, an international group of critics and scholars map out his film-making skills, providing new readings of individual films, analysing recurrent techniques and themes, and relating them to contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, nationality and cinematic spectacle. Powell, with and without Pressburger, emerges as a film-maker of lasting originality and significance.

On its release in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies riveted audiences with its uncompromising drama. Directed by Isao Takahata at Studio Ghibli and based on an autobiographical story by Akiyuki Nosaka, the story of two Japanese children struggling to survive in the dying days of the Second World War unfolds with a gritty realism unprecedented in animation. Grave of the Fireflies has since been hailed as a classic of both anime and war cinema. In 2018, USA Today ranked it the greatest animated film of all time. Yet Ghibli's sombre masterpiece remains little analysed outside Japan, even as its meaning is fiercely contested - Takahata himself lamented that few had grasped his message. In the first book-length study of the film in English, Alex Dudok de Wit explores its themes, visual devices and groundbreaking use of animation, as well as the political context in which it was made. Drawing on untranslated accounts by the film's crew, he also describes its troubled production, which almost spelt disaster for Takahata and his studio.

In this exciting new book, Gelley both considers the significance of the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic, and re-examines the director's immediate postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussions on Italian national identity. She argues that rather than marking a radical break with the director's early neorealist successes, Rossellini's films with Bergman in fact extend the boundaries of the concept of neorealism and challenge the standard reading of some of its basic tenets, especially regarding the relationship between character and depicted settings, both urban and natural. Gelley also aims to reassess the relationship between European postwar and American cinema by looking at the ways in which the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. Rossellini's insertion of the Hollywood star into the native landscape, Gelley shows, had a significant influence on the evolution of the director's approach to the neorealist aesthetic. His filming of the encounter between Bergman and the Italian landscape involves not only a re-interpretation and transformation of the Hollywood star persona, but also a challenge to the idealized notion of an authentic Italian national collective free from foreign influence. The disruption which Bergman's character introduced into the Italian landscape became one means whereby the director was able to explore the ambivalence inherent in any attempt to construct a national identity.

This book re-assesses director Jean Renoir's work between his departure from France in 1940 and his death in 1979, and contributes to the debate over how the medium of film registers the impact of trauma.

The 1930s ended in catastrophe for both for Renoir and for France: La Regle du jeu was a critical and commercial disaster on its release in July 1939 and in 1940 France was occupied by Germany. Even so, Renoir continued to innovate and experiment with his post-war work, yet the thirteen films he made between 1941 and 1969, constituting nearly half of his work in sound cinema, have been sorely neglected in the study of his work.

With detailed readings of the these films and four novels produced by Renoir in his last four decades, Davis explores the direct and indirect ways in which film, and Renoir's films in particular, depict the aftermath of violence.

With the international success of Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), Lars von Trier has established himself as a one of the most provocative and daring film directors working today. The founding father of Dogma 95, he made the movement's most controversial film, The Idiots (1998), and has played a leading role in the recent resurgence of Danish cinema. Yet despite his success, von Trier remains something of an polarising and enigmatic figure hailed as the new Godard by some and a charlatan by others. In this new study, Jack Stevenson explores the achievements as well as the paradoxes of Lars von Trier, assessing his life, work, and critical reception. The book follows von Trier from his early life as a troubled son of 'Cultural Radical' parents through to his student days at the Danish Film School, diligently spent making films that were as innovative and disturbing as his later features have proved to be. These films (consisting of the Europa and Gold-Hearted trilogies) are fully examined together with considerations of his creative detours into other media and his current work in progress, Dogville. Based in Denmark, the author brings a unique perspective to Lars von Trier creating a multi-dimensional portrait of the director. Utilising sources heretofore unavailable in English, Stevenson's lively yet fact-filled narrative is accessible to students and film enthusiasts alike. The book is indispensable to anyone interested in Lars von Trier and the broader issues that surround modern Danish film and its current renaissance.

As a charismatic director in the Indian film industry, Chopra's name is synonymous with the glamour of the romantic film and a certain style within Indian culture. Spanning four decades, his directed features include some of the classic films of Indian film history, such as "Deewaar" and "Kabhi Kabhie". His directorial career began in 1959 with "Dhool Ka Phool" and he has been a major producer since 1973, consolidating his success in the 1990s with a series of huge box office hits including "Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge". He has also worked in other Hindi movie genres, directing action movies such as "Mashaal" and a thriller, "Darr". This book discusses in depth his work with the Hindi megastar Amitabh Bachanan in films such as "Deewaar", "Trishul", "Kala Patthar" and "Silsila" and how, in his transformation of the look of mainstream cinema in "Dil To Pagal Hai" and other films, Yash Chopra has proved to be a tireless innovator within a mainstream tradition. The author integrates this analysis with information about the man and his work, based on interviews with Yash Chopra, his family, his colleagues, his stars, his contemporaries and major critics that include views from Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan, Shashi Kapoor and Sri Devi. A study of a top contemporary Indian film director, Rachel Dwyer's book also examines the influence on Chopra of predecessors such as Raj Kapoor and how his own legacy can be seen in such films as "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" and younger directors such as Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra.

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve as a repressed and tormented manicurist, is a gripping, visually inventive descent into paranoia and self-destructive alienation. Emblematic of recurrent Polanski motifs, evinced in his student short films, in his striking debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962), and in subsequent features like Death and the Maiden (1994), Repulsion is a tour de force examination of crippling anxiety and the sinister potency of inanimate objects. Repulsion amplifies the realm of psychological horror by evoking the seething impact of increasing delusion, literal and figurative seclusion, and the consequences of one woman's foreboding sensitivity to the unsettling world that surrounds her. This Devil's Advocate considers Repulsion within the context of familiar horror tropes and the prevailing qualities of Polanski's broader oeuvre. Drawing on the research of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed and others, concerning issues of abjection, the 'monstrous-feminine', and the psychology of horror spectatorship, this text focuses on central themes of isolation, sexuality and setting. Bookended by introductory biographical details and concluding with a roundup of the film's reception, Jeremy Carr situates Repulsion within the horror genre at large as well as its various off-shoots, such as the rape/revenge subgenre. There is also an analysis of the film's technical qualities, from its sound design to its brilliantly low-key special effects, all of which define the film as Polanski's most audaciously stylish realisation of dread and unease.

Fifty Contemporary Film Directors examines the work of some of today's most popular and influential cinematic figures. It provides an accessible overview of each director's contribution to cinema, incorporating a discussion of their career, major works and impact. Revised throughout and with twelve new entries, this second edition is an up-to-date introduction to some of the most prominent film makers of the present day. The directors, from differing backgrounds and working across a range of genres, include: Martin Scorsese; Steven Spielberg; Sofia Coppola; Julie Dash; Shane Meadow; Michael Moore; Peter Jackson; Guillermo Del Toro; Tim Burton; Jackie Chan; Ang Lee; and, Pedro Almodovar. With further reading and a filmography accompanying each entry, this comprehensive guide is indispensable to all those studying contemporary film and will appeal to anyone interested in the key individuals behind modern cinema's greatest achievements.