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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Individual film directors, film-makers
Jeffrey Jacob ""J. J."" Abrams (b. 1966) decided to be a filmmaker
at the age of eight after his grandfather took him on the back-lot
tour of Universal Studios. Throughout his career, Abrams has
dedicated his life to storytelling and worked tirelessly to become
one of the best-known and most successful creators in Hollywood.
The thirty interviews collected in this volume span Abrams's entire
career, covering his many projects from television and film to
video games and theater. The volume also includes a 1982 article
about Abrams as a teen sensation whose short film High Voltage won
the Audience Award at a local film festival and garnered the
attention of Steven Spielberg. Beginning his career as a
screenwriter on films like Regarding Henry and Armageddon, Abrams
transitioned into a TV mogul with hit shows like Alias and Lost.
Known for his imaginative work across several genres, from science
fiction and horror to action and drama, Abrams's most successful
films include Mission: Impossible III; Star Trek; and Star Wars:
The Force Awakens, which went on to become the highest-grossing
film of all time in the United States. His production company, Bad
Robot, has produced innovative genre projects like Cloverfield and
Westworld. Abrams also cowrote a novel with Doug Dorst called S.,
and, most recently, he produced the Broadway run of The Play That
Went Wrong. In conversations with major publications and
independent blogs, Abrams discusses his long-standing
collaborations with others in the field, explains his affinity for
mystery, and describes his approach to creating films like those he
gravitated to as a child, revealing that the award-winning
director-writer-producer is a fan before he is a filmmaker.
This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism,
asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of
others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to
represent human social complexity in fiction. With case studies of
films like Parenthood (1989), American Beauty (1999), Little Miss
Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original
study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition,
evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new
theory of the storytelling instinct.
Lois Weber (1879-1939) was one of early Hollywood's most successful
screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached
from street corners, Weber began working in the American film
industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the
positions of screenwriter and director. She wrote, directed,
starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career
and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At
the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address
pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital
punishment, poverty, and drug abuse. She gained international fame
in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that
featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson.
Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal
studio's biggest box-office hit the following year and played to
enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many
others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class
filmmaker. Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the
business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood's institutionalized
sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a
largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews
restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items
in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The
volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of
a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her
Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights
into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and
the changing business in which she worked.
This book is open access and available on
www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
Catherine O'Brien draws on the structure of Dante Alighieri's
Divine Comedy to explore Martin Scorsese's feature films from Who's
That Knocking at My Door (1967-69) to Silence (2016). This is the
first full-length study to focus on the trajectory of faith and
doubt during this period, taking very seriously the oft-quoted
words of the director himself: 'My whole life has been movies and
religion. That's it. Nothing else.' Films discussed include
GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Taxi Driver and Mean
Streets, as well as the more recent The Wolf of Wall Street. In
Dante's poem in 100 cantos, the Pilgrim is guided by the poet
Virgil down through the circles of Hell in Inferno; he then climbs
the steep Mountain of the Seven Deadly Sins in Purgatory; and he
finally encounters God in Paradise. Embracing this popular analogy,
this study envisions Scorsese as a contemporary Dante, with his
filmic oeuvre offering the dimensions of a cinematic Divine Comedy.
Drawing on debates at the heart of religious studies, theology,
literature and film, this book goes beyond existing explorations of
religion in Scorsese's work to address issues of sin and salvation
within the context of wider debates in eschatology and the
afterlife.
David Cronenberg has moved from the depths of low-budget
exploitation horror to become one of North America's most respected
movie directors. Since the early 1970s, the softly-spoken Baron of
Blood has attracted widespread controversies with a steady stream
of shocks - sex-crazed parasites in Shivers (1975), exploding heads
in Scanners (1981), revolutionary flesh technology in Videodrome
(1983), mutating bugs in The Fly (1986), car crash scars in Crash
(1996) and psychopathic bursts of gun fire in A History of Violence
(2005). This new study provides an overview of Cronenberg's films
in the light of their international reception, placing them firmly
in the cultures they influenced. It also highlights often-ignored
works, such as the race movie Fast Company (1979), and includes a
chapter on the latest film Eastern Promises (2007). Amidst bans and
boos, Cronenberg has developed a consistent cult following
Though Ingmar Bergman became famous as a filmmaker, his roots-and,
to some extent, his heart-were in the theater. He directed more
than one hundred plays in his career, and The Serious Game takes a
close look at fourteen productions he staged at the Royal Dramatic
Theatre in Stockholm. Looking closely at the relationship between
the verbal and the visual, this book gives even longtime Bergman
fans a new understanding of his sensitivity to nuance, his
versatility, and his dedication to craftsmanship. **INCLUDES DVD
WITH FOURTEEN VIDEO RECORDINGS, ALL IN COLOUR**
In Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli
explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German
filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akin. The first minority director in
Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akin
makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic
imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public
discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his
treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and
multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some
of Akin's key works-In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among
others-Gueneli identifies Akin's unique stylistic use of
multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational
characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Akin's
films-including music and multiple languages, dialects, and
accents-create an "aesthetic of heterogeneity" that envisions an
expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature
of Akin's decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a
time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by
questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli
demonstrates how Akin's aesthetics intersect with politics to
reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.
Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900 89), a contemporary of Sergei
Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, is celebrated today for his
unique form of "total" documentary cinema, which aimed to bridge
the distance between film and life, and for his use of satire
during a period when the Soviet authorities preferred that laughter
be confined to narrowly prescribed channels. This collection of
selected writings by Medvedkin is the first of its kind and reveals
how his work is a crucial link in the history of documentary film.
Although he was a dedicated communist, Medvedkin's satirical
approach and social critiques ultimately led to his suppression by
the Soviet regime. State institutions held back or marginalized his
work, and for many years, his films were assumed to have been lost
or destroyed. These texts, many assembled for this volume by
Medvedkin himself, document for the first time his considerable
achievements, experiments in film and theater, and attempts to
develop satire as a major Soviet film genre. Through scripts,
letters, autobiographical writings, and more, we see a Medvedkin
supported and admired by figures like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and
Maxim Gorky. This is a rich testimony to the talent and
inventiveness of one of the Soviet era's most revolutionary
filmmakers.
The films of Lars von Trier offer unique opportunities for thinking
deeply about how Philosophy and Cinema speak to one another. The
book addresses von Trier's films in order of their release. The
earlier chapters discuss his Golden Heart trilogy and USA: Land of
Opportunities series by addressing issues of potential misogyny,
ethical critique, and racial justice. The later chapters focus on
his Depression Trilogy and address the undermining of gender
binaries, the psychoanalytic meaning of the sacrifice of children
and depression, and philosophical questions provoked by the
depiction of the end of the world. Taken together, the volume
explores the topics of Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory,
Political Theory, Theories of the Self, Philosophy of Race, and
Feminist Thought, and opens a conversation about von Trier's
important work.
Over the course of nearly thirty years, Hal Hartley has cultivated
a reputation as one of America's most steadfastly independent film
directors. From his breakthrough films - The Unbelievable Truth
(1989), Trust (1990), and Simple Men (1992) - to his recently
completed 'Henry Fool' trilogy, Hartley has honed a rigorous,
deadpan, and instantly recognizable film style informed by both
European modernism and playful revisions of Classical Hollywood
genres. Featuring new essays on this important director and his
films, this collection explores Hartley's work from a variety of
aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking
closely at his collaborations with actors, the contexts of his
authorial reputation, his reworking of the romantic comedy and
other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking. This
book, up-to-date through Hartley's latest film, Ned Rifle (2014),
includes new scholarship on the director's early work as well as
reflections on his cinema in connection with new theories and
approaches to independent filmmaking. Covering the entire
trajectory of his career, including both his features and short
films, the book also includes new readings of several of Hartley's
seminal films, including Amateur (1994), Flirt (1995), and Henry
Fool (1997).
From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to Club Silencio in Mulholland
Drive, the work of David Lynch contains some of the most remarkable
spaces in contemporary culture. Richard Martin's compelling study
is the first sustained critical assessment of the role architecture
and design play in Lynch's films. Martin combines original research
at Lynchian locations in Los Angeles, London and Lodz with insights
from architects including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Jean Nouvel
and urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and Edward Soja. In
analyzing the towns, cities, homes, roads and stages found in
Lynch's work, Martin not only reveals their central importance for
understanding this controversial and distinctive film-maker, but
also suggests how Lynch's films can provide a deeper understanding
of the places and spaces in which we live.
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