If cinema can be approached as poetry and philosophy, it is because of Jean Epstein. Cocteau, Bunuel (who was his assistant), Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and theoreticians Kracauer, Deleuze and Ranciere are directly influenced by Epstein's pioneering film work, writings, and concepts. This book is the first in English to examine his oeuvre comprehensively. An avant-garde artist and an anti-elitist intellectual, Epstein wanted to craft moments of pure transformative cinema. Using familiar genres - melodramas and documentaries - he hoped to heal viewers of all classes and hasten social utopia. A lover of cinema as cognitive and sensorial technology, and a poet of the screen, he pushed cinematography - as photogenie - towards the experimental sublime, through daring close-ups, rhythmic montage, slow motion, even reverse motion. Polish-born, half-Jewish, and the author of a treatise on homosexuality, Epstein has been unfairly relegated to the shadows of film history. This book restores him to the limelight of interwar world cinema, on a par with Renoir, Lang, Capra and Eisenstein. -- .

The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has, to date, written and directed nine films, winning an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013. In 2016, he created and directed his first TV series, The Young Pope, which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films. This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film. International contributors from the UK, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada and the United States, Italy, Israel, France, UK, Australia, Canada, offer original interpretations of Sorrentino's work. They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory, nostalgia, ageing, love, thirst for fulfilment, search for the self, identity crisis, human estrangement, marginality, irony and power. In so doing, they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion, challenging established assumptions and interpretations. Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino's highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture. While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian, none of these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership. This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino, arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker. The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY, and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli, who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions. Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS - The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019. The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field. Primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies. Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates. Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses Given the subject, there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership, but this is primarily a scholarly text.

Though long ignored or dismissed by film critics and scholars, Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) was among the most influential auteurs of his era. This comprehensive overview of Pagnol's career, now available in paperback, highlights his unique place in French cinema as a self-sufficient writer-producer-director and his contribution to the long-term evolution of filmmaking in a broader European context. In addition to reassessing the converted playwright's controversial prioritisation of speech over image, the book juxtaposes Pagnol's sunny rural melodramas with the dark, urban variety of poetic realism practised by influential peers such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne. In his penchant for outdoor location shooting and ethnographic authenticity, as well as his stubborn attachment to independent, artisanal production values, Pagnol served as a precursor to the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism, inspiring the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica, and Roberto Rossellini. -- .

This collection of exciting new research on British cinema of the 1960s reconsiders and reframes the film culture that emerged from that tumultuous decade. Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes. With perspectives and insights from established scholars and new critical voices, Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered draws on under-explored archival resources to explore four key research areas: stars and stardom; creative collaborations in filmmaking; developments in genre and film style; and how the cinema of the period both responded and contributed to social and cultural transformation in the 1960s.

The golden age of German cinema began at the end of the First World War and ended shortly after the coming of sound. From "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari "onwards the principal films of this period were characterized by two influences: literary Expressionism and the innovations of the theater directors of this period, in particular Max Reinhardt. This book demonstrates the connection between German Romanticism and the cinema through Expressionist writings.

Since his death in 1989, John Cassavettes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero—a renegade loner who fought the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having already established himself as an actor, he struck out as a filmmaker in 1959 with Shadows, and proceeded to build a formidable body of work, including such classics as Faces, Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Gloria. In Cassavettes on Cassavettes, Ray Carney presents the great director in his own words—frank, uncompromising, humane, and passionate about life and art.

Alfred Hitchcock was, despite his English origins and early career, an American master. Arriving on US shores in 1939, for the next three decades he created a series of masterpieces that redefined the nature and possibilities of cinema itself: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, to name just a few. In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender and desire over his American career. This Companion explores the way in which Hitchcock was transformed by the country where he made his home and did much of his greatest work. This book will be invaluable as a guide for both fans and students of Hitchcock and twentieth-century American culture, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved and hugely influential director.

An Iranian immigrant struggling to integrate into 1970s German society, the filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944 98) has become a neglected figure in discussions of diaspora cinema. In this the first English-language book to reflect on his work and its implications for creativity in the diasporic conditions of urban displacement a range of international scholars provide a comprehensive account of Shahid Saless's films and production methods. Outlining his affinity with celebrated directors like Chantal Akerman and Abbas Kiarostami, as well as visual artists like Romuald Karmakar, the contributors firmly position Shahid Saless as a filmmaker who speaks forcefully to the traumas of displacement and migration.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock had to deal with a wide variety of censors attuned to the slightest suggestion of sexual innuendo, undue violence, toilet humor, religious disrespect, and all forms of indecency, real or imagined. From 1934 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code Office controlled the content and final cut on all films made and distributed in the United States. Code officials protected sensitive ears from standard four-letter words, as well as a few five-letter words like tramp and six-letter words like cripes. They also scrubbed "excessively lustful" kissing from the screen and ensured that no criminal went unpunished. During their review of Hitchcock's films, the censors demanded an average of 22.5 changes, ranging from the mundane to the mind-boggling, on each of his American films. Code reviewers dictated the ending of Rebecca (1940), absolved Cary Grant of guilt in Suspicion (1941), edited Cole Porter's lyrics in Stage Fright (1950), decided which shades should be drawn in Rear Window (1954), and shortened the shower scene in Psycho (1960). In Hitchcock and the Censors, author John Billheimer traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcock's interactions with code officials on a film-by-film basis as he fought to protect his creations, bargaining with code reviewers and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films. Despite the often-arbitrary decisions of the code board, Hitchcock still managed to push the boundaries of sex and violence permitted in films by charming - and occasionally tricking - the censors and by swapping off bits of dialogue, plot points, and individual shots (some of which had been deliberately inserted as trading chips) to protect cherished scenes and images. By examining Hitchcock's priorities in dealing with the censors, this work highlights the director's theories of suspense as well as his magician-like touch when negotiating with code officials.

Ra?l Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work in English. This volume sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget 'European' costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work -- with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources -- as a type of 'impossible' cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.

Ingmar Bergman was the last and arguably the greatest of the old-style European auteurs and his influence across all areas of contemporary cinema has continued to be considerable since his death in July 2007. Drawing on interviews with collaborators and original research, this book puts Bergman's career into the context of his life and offers a new and revealing portrait of this great filmmaker. Geoffrey Macnab explores the often painfully autobiographical nature of his work, while also looking in detail at Bergman as a craftsman. He considers Bergman's working relationship with his actors (especially the actresses he helped make into international stars), his passion for theatre, literature and classical music and his obsession with death and cruelty. The book traces his traumatic childhood, asking how his experiences growing up as the son of a strict Lutheran pastor fed into his later writing and filmmaking. It also looks at his political life, chronicling his teenage flirtation with Nazism, his bitter spat in the mid-70s with the Swedish authorities over his tax affairs and his often vexed relationship with his fellow Swedes. Geoffrey Macnab also considers how Bergman's work was financed and distributed, his relationship with US agents and how close he came to working in Hollywood. 'When I was 10 years old I received my first rattling film projector with its chimney and lamp which went round and round and round. I found it both mystifying and fascinating' - Ingmar Bergman.

This volume of spellbinding essays explores the tense relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, providing new perspectives on their collaboration. Featuring chapters by leading scholars of Hitchcock's work, including Richard Allen, Charles Barr, Murray Pomerance, Sidney Gottlieb and Jack Sullivan, the collection examines the working relationship between the pair and the contribution that Herrmann's work brings to Hitchcock's idiom. Examining key works, including The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, Marnie and Vertigo, the essays explore approaches to sound, music, collaborative authorship and the distinctive contribution that Herrmann's work with Hitchcock brought to this body of films, examining the significance, meanings, histories and enduring legacies of one of film history's most important partnerships. By engaging with the collaborative work of Hitchcock and Herrmann, the book explores the ways in which film directors and composers collaborate, how this collaboration is experienced in the film text, and the ways in which such partnerships inspire later work. -- .

Alfred Hitchcock was, despite his English origins and early career, an American master. Arriving on US shores in 1939, for the next three decades he created a series of masterpieces that redefined the nature and possibilities of cinema itself: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, to name just a few. In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender and desire over his American career. This Companion explores the way in which Hitchcock was transformed by the country where he made his home and did much of his greatest work. This book will be invaluable as a guide for both fans and students of Hitchcock and twentieth-century American culture, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved and hugely influential director.

This book is a major reassessment of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who received a Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000. This timely collection covers all aspects of his work, from his early trilogy of the 1950s -- "A Generation," "Kanal," "Ashes and Diamonds" -- to his 1999 epic, "Pan Tadeusz," The contributors consider Wajda's daring innovations in style, his concern with Polish history and nationhood, and his artistic defiance of authoritarian rule during the Cold War, particularly in such films as "Man of Marble" and "Man of Iron," A wide-ranging examination of this prolific filmmaker, "The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda" covers four decades of films that reflect not only the major changes in this director's work but also the changing nature of cinema itself.

A close analysis of Bunuel's and the Order of Toledo's making of iconoclastic public art. In 1923, Luis Bunuel established the Order of Toledo, a parody order of knights whose members included Salvador Dali, Garcia Lorca, and Rafael Alberti. Together, they often visited the ancient Spanish capital to stroll through itslabyrinthine streets. But these excursions on the part of Bunuel and the Brotherhood were more than simple episodes of cultural sightseeing; they were happenings, public interventions in space. This book explores the anti-artistic aspect of these activities and urban perambulations. Are these practices similar to the flanerie of the Dadaists and French Surrealists? Taking into account their liberal, Spanish context, what was new about them, and what did they mean? Does their aesthetic experimentation make for ideological radicalism? And what impact do these first steps have on Bunuel's subsequent work and his later ideological trajectory? Maria Soledad Fernandez Utrera is Associate Professor of Spanish at The University of British Columbia.

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a "filmmaker and philosopher"? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de l'amour. Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films. Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for close analysis, demonstrating how the director's radical approaches to narrative, editing, sound and shot composition have made the cinema into an analytical tool in its own right. The book will be essential to all students of Godard's films, and of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary French cinema, culture and thought. -- .

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La cienaga. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms. -- .

The definitive look at one of the most important Black art films and original filmmakers of the 1970s. Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) has across the decades attained a sizable cult following among African American cinema devotees, art house aficionados, and horror fans, thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. Pleading the Blood is the first full-length study of this cult classic. Ganja & Hess was withdrawn almost immediately after its New York premiere by its distributor because Gunn's poetic re-fashioning of the vampire genre allegedly failed to satisfy the firm's desire for a by-the-numbers "blaxploitation" horror flick for quick sell-off in the urban market. Its current status as one of the classic works of African American cinema has recently been confirmed by the Blu-ray release of its restored version, by its continued success in screenings at repertory houses, museums, and universities, and by an official remake, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), directed by Spike Lee, one of the original picture's longtime champions. Pleading the Blood draws on Gunn's archived papers, screenplay drafts, and storyboards, as well as interviews with the living major creative participants to offer a comprehensive, absorbing account of the influential movie and its highly original filmmaker.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

Placing Robbe-Grillet's filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique. Now available in paperback, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet's contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged. -- .

"Harmony Korine: Interviews" tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.

After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's "Kids" in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative.

In 1995, Korine was discovered while skateboarding and became the bad boy teen writer behind "Kids." He parlayed this success into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect "Gummo" two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama "Julien Donkey-Boy," Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity ("Mister Lonely," 2007), a gritty quasi-diary film ("Trash Humpers," 2009) and a blistering portrait of American hedonism ("Spring Breakers," 2013), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a "filmmaker and philosopher"? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

British national cinema has produced an exceptional track record of innovative, creative and internationally recognised filmmakers, amongst them Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and David Lean. This tradition continues today with the work of directors as diverse as Neil Jordan, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. This concise, authoritative volume analyses critically the work of 100 British directors, from the innovators of the silent period to contemporary auteurs. An introduction places the individual entries in context and examines the role and status of the director within British film production. Balancing academic rigour with accessibility, British Film Directors provides an indispensable reference source for film students at all levels, as well as for the general cinema enthusiast. Key features include: * A complete list of each director's British feature films. * Suggested further reading on each filmmaker. * A comprehensive career overview, including biographical information and an assessment of the director's current critical standing. * 10 B&W illustrations.