The most internationally renowned of Irish film directors, Neil Jordan's diverse work has spanned gothic horror ( "The Company of Wolves," 1984, and "Interview With the Vampire," 1994), Irish history ( "Michael Collins," 1996), literary adaptation ( "The End of the Affair," 1999) and sexual identity ( "The Crying Game," 1992, and "Breakfast on Pluto," 2005), while retaining a distinctive stylistic flair for fantasy and the carnivalesque. "The Cinema of Neil Jordan" discusses his entire output as part of the first comprehensive study of Jordan's career, looking beyond ideological and national concerns to view his films through the prism of Celtic folklore, fairy tales, the gothic, romanticism and postmodernism. Incorporating discussion of Jordan's award-winning literary work and benefiting from extensive access to Jordan's personal archives, this book explains the mythic and poetic impulses that suffuse the director's work.

James Cameron (b. 1954) is lauded as one of the most successful and innovative filmmakers of the last thirty years. His films often break records, both in their massive budgets and in their box-office earnings. They include such hits as "The Terminator," "Aliens," "The Abyss," "Titanic," and "Avatar." Part scientist, part dramatist, Cameron combines these two qualities into inventive and captivating films that often push the boundaries of special effects to accommodate his imagination. "James Cameron: Interviews" chronicles the writer-director's rise through the Hollywood system, highlighted by his "can-do" attitude and his insatiable drive to make the best film possible.

As a young boy growing up in Canada, Cameron imagined himself an astronaut, a deep-sea explorer, a science fiction writer, or a filmmaker. Transplanted to southern California, he would go on to realize many of those boyhood fantasies.

This collection of interviews provides glimpses of the filmmaker as he advances from Roger Corman's underling to "king of the world." The interviews are drawn from a number of sources including TV appearances and conversations on blogs, which have never been published in print. Spanning more than twenty years, this collection constructs a concise and thorough examination of Cameron, a filmmaker who has almost single-handedly ushered Hollywood into the twenty-first century.

The films of the Coen brothers have become a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Highly acclaimed and commercially successful, over the years their movies have attracted increasingly larger audiences and spawned a subculture of dedicated fans. Shunning fame and celebrity, Ethan and Joel Coen remain maverick filmmakers, producing and directing independent films outside the Hollywood mainstream in a unique style combining classic genres like film noir with black comedy to tell off-beat stories about America and the American Dream. This study surveys Oscar-winning films, such as Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), as well as cult favorites, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Beginning with Blood Simple (1984), it examines major themes and generic constructs and offers diverse approaches to the Coens' enigmatic films. Pointing to the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, the study appreciates the postmodern aesthetics of the Coens' intertextual creativity.

A compelling story of African adventure, romance and intrigue, perfect for readers of bestselling true crime such as WHITE MISCHIEF and MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. WILDFLOWER is the gripping life story of the naturalist, filmmaker and lifelong conservationist Joan Root. From her passion for animals and her hard-fought crusade to save Kenya's beautiful Lake Naivasha, to her storybook love affair, Root's life was one of a remarkable modern-day heroine. After 20 years of spectacular, unparalleled wildlife filmmaking together, Joan and Alan Root divorced and a fascinating woman found her own voice. Renowned journalist Mark Seal has written a breathtaking portrait of a strong woman discovering herself and fighting for her beliefs before her mysterious and brutal murder in Kenya. With a cast as wild, wondrous and unpredictable as Africa itself, WILDFLOWER is a real-life adventure tale set in the world's disappearing wilderness. Rife with personal revelation, intrigue, corruption and murder, readers will remember Joan Root's extraordinary journey long after they turn the last page of this compelling book.

A provocative memoir from Luis Bunuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema's most important films, from "Un Chien Andalou" to "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie."
Luis Bunuel's films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism and subversion of his cinema, Bunuel turns his artistic gaze inward. In swift and generous prose, Bunuel traces the surprising contours of his life, from the Good Friday drumbeats of his childhood to the dreams that inspired his most famous films to his turbulent friendships with Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. His personal narratives also encompass the pressing political issues of his time, many of which still haunt us today--the specter of fascism, the culture wars, the nuclear bomb. Filled with film trivia, framed by Bunuel's intellect and wit, this is essential reading for fans of cinema and for anyone who has ever wanted to see the world through a surrealist's eyes.

A critical study of the films of Stanley Kubrick, one of the great directors of the century. Garcia Mainar's critical study of the films of the late Stanley Kubrick includes analysis of all but his last work, Eyes Wide Shut, and offers both a formal analysis of the films based on style and narrative pattern, and atheoretical, postmodernist approach to ideas presented in the films. Garcia Mainar is particularly concerned with analyzing the relevance of spectacle in Kubrick's films, seeing it as a disruptive mechanism that can call into question the value and necessity of communication. He identifies different kinds of spectacle in the films, and proceeds to a detailed examination of these different forms in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. Luis M. Garcia Mainar teaches English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Before award-winning director Dan Curtis became known for directing epic war movies, he darkened the small screen with the horror genre's most famous soap opera, Dark Shadows, and numerous subsequent made-for-TV horror movies. This second edition serves as a complete filmography, featuring each of Curtis' four-dozen productions and 100 photographs. With the addition of new chapters on Dark Shadows, the author further explores the groundbreaking daytime television serial. Fans and scholars alike will find an exhaustive account of Curtis' work, as well as a new foreword from My Music producer Jim Pierson and an afterword from Dr. Mabuse director Ansel Faraj.

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 unveiling the intimate mysteries of human nature, no new film by Kubrick ever failed to spark debate or to be deeply pondered.

Kubrick (1928-1999) has remained as elusive as the subjects of his films. Unlike many other filmmakers he was not inclined to grant interviews, instead preferring to let his movies speak for themselves. By allowing both critics and moviegoers to see the inner workings of this reclusive filmmaker, this first comprehensive collection of his relatively few interviews is invaluable. Ranging from 1959 to 1987 and including Kubrick's conversations with Gene Siskel, Jeremy Bernstein, Gene D. Phillips, and others, this book reveals Kubrick's diverse interests -- nuclear energy and its consequences, space exploration, science fiction, literature, religion, psychoanalysis, the effects of violence, and even chess -- and discloses how each affects his films. He enthusiastically speaks of how advances in camera and sound technology made his films more effective.

Kubrick details his hands-on approach to filmmaking as he discusses why he supervises nearly every aspect of production. "All the hand-held camerawork is mine," he says in a 1972 interview about "A Clockwork Orange." "In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it virtually impossible to explain what I want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator. "

Neither guarded nor evasive, the Kubrick who emerges from these interviews is candid, opinionated, confident, and articulate. His incredible memory and his gift for organization come to light as he quotes verbatim sections of reviews, books, and articles. Despite his reputation as a recluse, the Kubrick of these interviews is approachable, witty, full of anecdotes, and eager to share a fascinating story.

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature fiction films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and also identifies in them a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity, alongside a pattern of tensions and paradoxes. This book thus offers new keys to understand the lasting and ever-renewed appeal of the Russian director's Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema - a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.

From Slacker (1991), a foundational work of independent American cinema, to the Before trilogy, Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed films and aesthetic ambition have earned him a place as one of the most important contemporary directors. In this second edition of The Cinema of Richard Linklater, Rob Stone shows how Linklater's latest films have redefined our understanding of his work. He offers critical discussions and analysis of all of Linklater's films, including Before Midnight (2013) and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), as well as new interviews with Linklater and a chapter on Boyhood (2014), hailed as one of the best films of the twenty-first century. Stone explores the theoretical, practical, contextual, and metaphysical elements in Linklater's filmography, especially his experimentation with cinematic representations of time and growth. He demonstrates that fanciful lives and lucid dreams are as central as alternative notions of America and time to Linklater's films. Stone also considers Linklater's collaborative working practices, his deployment of such techniques as rotoscoping, and his innovative distribution strategies. Thoroughly revised, updated, and extended, the book includes analysis of all of Linklater's films, including Dazed and Confused (1993), Waking Life (2011), and A Scanner Darkly (2006) as well as his documentaries, short films, and side projects.

EBest in ShowE is the first in-depth look at the method behind film director and actor Christopher Guest's madness a and genius. John Kenneth Muir focuses his attention on the acclaimed Guest-directed trilogy of what some call mockumentaries : EWaiting for GuffmanE EBest in ShowE and EA Mighty WindE. In these films Guest has escorted rapt audiences into the purportedly real worlds of a small-town theatrical company dog show competition and folk music festival. Muir also details the events that lead to Rob Reiner's influential and legendary EThis Is Spinal TapE which ERolling StoneE called the best rock and roll movie of all time and in which Guest played the part of guitarist Nigel Tufnel.THMuch of EBest in ShowE exemplifies the unique process by which Guest directs films. He employs a common repertory company improvises scenes often without any rehearsal and does not use any screenplay with dialogue instead following a detailed outline often co-authored with his ace actor/writer Eugene Levy. Company members that have been interviewed for this book include Fred Willard Harry Shearer Bob Balaban and Michael Hitchcock.THGuest's influences a ESaturday Night LiveE ENational LampoonE a as well as his more conventional comedies such as EThe Big PictureE and EAlmost HeroesE are studied. EBest in ShowE is general enough to bring new fans to the table yet detailed enough to satisfy the most in-the-know Guest fan and film student. A complete filmography with Guest's directing acting and writing credits is included as is the appendix You Know You're in a Christopher Guest Film When ... THGuest once commented I am drawn to people who have dreams that are slightly out of reach. Now thanks to John Kenneth Muir the fascinating world of Christopher Guest and company is substantially more within reach.

Nicholas Haeffner provides a comprehensive introduction to Alfred Hitchcock's major British and Hollywood films and usefully navigates the reader through a wealth of critical commentaries. One of the acknowledged giants of film, Hitchcock's prolific half-century career spanned the silent and sound eras and resulted in 53 films of which Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) are now seen as classics within the suspense, melodrama and horror genres. In contrast to previous works, which have attempted to get inside Hitchcock's mind and psychoanalyse his films, this book takes a more materialist stance. As Haeffner makes clear, Hitchcock was simultaneously a professional film maker working as part of a team in the film factories of Hollywood, a media celebrity, and an aspiring artist gifted with considerable entrepreneurial flair for marketing himself and his films. The book makes a case for locating the director's remarkable body of work within traditions of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture, appealing to different audience constituencies in a calculated strategy. The book upholds the case for taking Hitchcock's work seriously and challenges his popular reputation as a misogynist through detailed analyses of his most controversial films.

Talking Movies is a collection of interviews with audacious and respected contemporary filmmakers. Selected directors represent figures whose work has defined how images are processed and appreciated by modern audiences. The book offers a truly international perspective, including global pioneers who frankly discuss their craft and the social, political, and technological forces that inform it: Laurent Cantet, Robert Gu?diguian, C?dric Kahn, and Bertrand Tavernier (France); David Gordon Green, Hal Hartley, and Richard Linklater (USA); Alejandro Gonz?lez I rritu and Carlos Reygadas (Mexico); Stephen Frears and Andrew K?tting (UK); Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey); Atom Egoyan (Canada); Suzanne Bier (Denmark); Tran Anh Hung (Vietnam); Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran); Elia Suleiman (Palestine); and Lucrecia Martel (Argentina).

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the "queering" of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the "North American" attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the "European" perspectives of Pedro Almodovar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.

From her relatively small-scale feature debut Luck By Chance (2009) to her recent premieres of Gully Boy (2019) and Made in Heaven (2019) to local and global audiences via the Berlin Film Festival and Amazon Prime Streaming services, Zoya Akhtar has become a prominent figure representing change in Bollywood. As the first collection on Akhtar, this book examines how she is contributing to a shift in one of the world's leading film industries, and through analysis of her work explores the contradictions and possibilities of the present moment in Bollywood.

Costa-Gavras is a seminal figure in French and international cinema. A master of the political thriller, he explores historical events through individual human stories, thereby involving his audience in past and contemporary traumas, from the horrors of the Holocaust through mid-century international state terrorism and totalitarianism to the current global financial crisis. With a career spanning half a century, he remains one of cinema's most intriguing and enduring storytellers, theorists and political commentators. This collection of original essays charts and re-examines Costa-Gavras's career from Un homme de trop (1967) to Le capital (2012). Readable and carefully researched, it will appeal to students and scholars of film, as well as fans of the director's work. -- .

For three decades, no American filmmaker has been as prolific -- or as paradoxical -- as Woody Allen. From Play It Again, Sam (1972) through Celebrity (1998) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Allen has produced an average of one film a year, yet in many of these films Allen reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward both the value of art and the cultural contributions of artists. In examining Allen's filmmaking career, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen demonstrates that his movies often question whether the projected illusions of magicians/artists benefit audience or artists. Other Allen films dramatize the opposed conviction that the consoling, life-redeeming illusions of art are the best solution humanity has devised to the existential dilemma of being a death-foreseeing animal. Peter Bailey demonstrates how Allen's films repeatedly revisit and reconfigure this tension between image and reality, art and life, fabrication and factuality, with each film reaching provisional resolutions that a subsequent movie will revise. Merging criticism and biography, Bailey identifies Allen's ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as a key to understanding his entire filmmaking career. Because of its focus upon filmmaker Sandy Bates's conflict between entertaining audiences and confronting them with bleak human actualities, Stardust Memories is a central focus of the book. Bailey's examination of Allen's art/life dialectic also draws from the off screen drama of Allen's very public separation from Mia Farrow, and the book accordingly construes such post-scandal films as Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite as Allen's oblique cinematic responses to that tabloid tempest. By illuminating the thematic conflict at the heart of Allen's work, Bailey seeks not only to clarify the aesthetic designs of individual Allen films but to demonstrate how his oeuvre enacts an ongoing debate the screenwriter/director has been conducting with himself between creating cinematic narratives affirming the saving powers of the human imagination and making films acknowledging the irresolvably dark truths of the human condition.

The films of John Hughes (1950-2009) have enjoyed popular and critical success alike, from his first scripts in the early 1980s through to his celebrated work later in the decade and into the 1990s. While Hughes is best remembered for his stories about teenagers, such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), almost all of his films deal with comical conflicts within everyday American families. He directed eight films and wrote over thirty in a career spanning a quarter of a century, and is fondly remembered for influencing American perceptions of - and appreciation for - the daily lives of (primarily) common citizens. This wide-ranging collection examines the films of John Hughes from diverse angles, considering how he depicted young characters, how he revealed the humour of family life, and how his films subtly critiqued social issues such as class, race, gender, education and domestic relationships.

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy has had a significant influence on film theory in recent years. Proposing a relationship between Levinasian ethics and film style, and bringing it into a productive dialogue with theories of performativity, this book explores this influence through three directorial bodies of work: those of the Dardenne Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. Discussing a range of films - including the Dardennes' Le Fils and The Kid with a Bike, Schroeder's Maitresse and Reversal of Fortune and Schrader's American Gigolo and The Comfort of Strangers - Edward Lamberti demonstrates how film styles can perform a Levinasian ethics.

Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors. Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture. Cael M. Keegan views the Wachowskis' films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn "to sense beyond the limits of the given world." Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.

Cultural Metamorphoses in Contemporary Italian Cinema explores four different areas of study in contemporary Italian cinema: the migrants' social struggle, the decline of the middle class, the isolation of the elderly, and gender inequality. This book focuses on four films produced between 2007 and 2013, specifically Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011), Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds, 2007), Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch, 2008), and Viaggio sola (A Five Star Life, 2013), examining a slice of contemporary Italian cinema to highlight specific socio-economic changes within the country over the past decade. Italian filmmakers Andrea Segre, Silvio Soldini, Gianni Di Gregorio, and Maria Sole Tognazzi concentrate on themes that refer to "metamorphoses" to exemplify several Italian societal changes deeply affected by economic challenges and strongly rooted in male-dominant ideology. These Italian filmmakers reevaluate cultural traditions and societal roles by depicting unconventional narratives and identities in their films and giving "voice to the voiceless."

Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child's play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. The publication will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman's career, providing the first opportunity to survey her contribution to the art world. With new scholarly essays on Beckman's work that offer an art-historical consideration of her early Super-8 Films and a critical situating of the artist's ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism, the exhibition catalogue contextualizes Beckman's practice on the occasion of this major survey exhibition. More than 20 colour images in the catalogue include photo- documentation of Beckman's works since 1983 and installation views of the MIT List Center exhibition.

Besides the great and renowned auteurs, the history of Italian cinema includes also a number of peculiar, lesser-known but very interesting filmmakers. Their artistic trajectories were unorthodox and sometimes plagued by economic and productive issues, and their works were original and thought-provoking. The book examines eight Italian "mavericks" who were active from the late 1940s onwards: Pier Carpi, Alberto Cavallone, Riccardo Ghione, Giulio Questi, Brunello Rondi, Paolo Spinola, Augusto Tretti, and Nello Vegezzi. Their life and works are discussed with an abundance of previously unpublished production information drawn from official papers and original scripts. These filmmakers brought to their films their experience in different fields-such as poetry, playwriting, advertising, literature, comics-and a nonconformist, sometimes antagonistic attitude. Their bodies of work are ripe for a rediscovery and a proper critical and historical analysis. Furthermore, they allow us to better understand the cultural milieu and the productive dynamics of the Italian film industry from the early post-WWII years to the new millennium.

"Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema" looks at the work, influences, legacy and style of one of cinema's most famous directors. Alfred Hitchcock worked in Britain and America, in silent and sound films, and through and beyond the studio system, all the time appealing to mass audiences while employing his own distinctive style. This book examines how he was affected by German cinema, British writing, the Hays Code and his own upbringing to produce films that challenged key notions of acting, sexuality, mise-en-sc?ne and narrative convention. John Orr contends that Hitchcock is a matrix figure who forged a new dynamics of exchange and of re-made identities in the feature film that in turn has influenced film noir, neo-noir, the French New Wave and David Lynch, as well as countless filmmakers all around the world and, indeed, continues to do so.