Since 1996, Alexander Payne (b. 1961) has made six feature films and a short segment of an omnibus movie. Although his body of work is quantitatively small, it is qualitatively impressive. His movies have garnered numerous accolades and awards, including two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. As more than one interviewer in this volume points out, he maintains an impressive and unbroken winning streak. Payne's stories of human strivings and follies, alongside his mastery of the craft of filmmaking, mark him as a contemporary auteur of uncommon accomplishment. In this first compilation of his interviews, Payne reveals himself as a captivating conversationalist as well. The discussions collected here range from 1996, shortly after the release of his first film, Citizen Ruth, to the 2013 debut of his film, Nebraska. Over his career, he muses on many subjects including his own creative processes, his commitment to telling character-centered stories, and his abiding admiration for movies and directors from across decades of film history. Critics describe Payne as one of the few contemporary filmmakers who consistently manages to buck the current trend toward bombastic blockbusters. Like the 1970s director-driven cinema that he cherishes, his films are small-scale character studies that manage to maintain a delicate balance between sharp satire and genuine poignancy.

In 1980, Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas traveled to Lebanon to film a documentary of interviews with Palestinians of the refugee camps around Beirut about their dreams. The Dream: A Diary of the Film is Malas's haunting chronicle of his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh. It also describes the filmmaking process, from the research stage to the film's unofficial release, in Shatila Camp, before it reached a global audience. In vivid and poetic detail, Malas provides a snapshot of Palestinian refugees at a critical juncture of Lebanon's bloody civil war, and at the height of the PLO's power in Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion and the PLO's subsequent expulsion. Malas probes his subjects' dreams and existential fears with an artist's acute sensitivity, revealing the extent to which the wounds and contingencies of Palestinian statelessness are woven into the tapestry of a fragmented Arab nationalism. Although he halted his work on the film in 1982, following the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, he completed it in 1987, turning 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, but they are preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now in digital code. The Dream is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Palestinians in the modern Middle East, and for students and scholars of Arab filmmaking, politics, and literature.

John Carpenter is a seminal figure in the history of horror and science fiction filmmaking. His work in these genres has been highly influential in their ongoing development. This book gives Carpenter's output the sustained critical treatment it deserves. It comprises essays that address the whole of Carpenter's work, as well as others which focus on a smaller number of key films. Some essays take on wide-ranging issues such as Carpenter's approach to remakes and the question of genre, while others are organized around a specific theme or technical aspect of Carpenter's film-making. The text's key strength is that it draws upon an international group of scholars offering a variety of expertise. Films discussed include "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), "Halloween" (1978) and its subsequent sequels, "Escape from New York" (1981), "Escape from L.A."(1996), "The Fog" (1980), "The Thing" (1982), "Village of the Damned" (1995) and "Ghosts of Mars"(2001). The book also features an exclusive interview with John Carpenter.

Presents a critical analysis of the films and career of George Cukor. Though many of his films are celebrated as classics, Cukor has yet to receive his proper due from academic critics. The film maker's interest in the various forms of indoor cinema lacked the generic focus of Ford's westerns and Hitchcock's thrillers, which were championed by the Cahiers critics in the 1950s. His style was theatricality writ large, a successful transference to the screen of what he had learned from his stage career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. Ultimately, Cukor was much more than a man of the theatre who happened to spend most of his career making films. With ten original essays by leading film scholars, this volume celebrates Cukor's filmmaking career and supplies a hitherto missing chapter in the history of classic Hollywood. One of the first scholarly books to critical evaluate the work of George Cukor; Covers his work in theatre and his early films as well as his later work and emphasis on Cukor and performance.

Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.

"Hitchcock Annual: Volume 19" is forthcoming in the fall of 2014. It will include articles on Hitchcock's silent film work and an analysis of Hitchock's "Rear Window" (1954).

The British Film Industry in 25 Careers tells the history of the British film industry from an unusual perspective - that of various mavericks, visionaries and outsiders who, often against considerable odds, have become successful producers, distributors, writers, directors, editors, props masters, publicists, special effects technicians, talent scouts, stars and, sometimes, even moguls. Some, such as Richard Attenborough and David Puttnam, are well-known names. Others, such as the screenwriter and editor Alma Reville, also known as Mrs Alfred Hitchcock; Constance Smith, the 'lost star' of British cinema, or the producer Betty Box and her director sister Muriel, are far less well known. What they all have in common, though, is that they found their own pathways into the British film business, overcoming barriers of nationality, race, class and gender to do so. Counterpointing the essays on historical figures are interviews with contemporaries including the director Amma Asante, the writer and filmmaker Julian Fellowes, artist and director Isaac Julien, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, and media entrepreneur Efe Cakarel, founder of the online film platform MUBI, who've come into today's industry, adjusting to an era in which production and releasing models are changing - and in which films are distributed digitally as well as theatrically.

Hitchcock Annual, volume 22, contains essays on Muybridge and Vertigo; undoing propaganda in Yeats, Hitchcock, and de Man; three newspaper articles Hitchcock wrote after visiting Hollywood in 1938; interviews with screenwriters Arthur Laurents and Howard Fast; and a review article on several new books on Hitchcock.

Reinterpreting twelve of Renoir's best-known works, Professor Faulkner attributes their qualities not to the director's unified sensibility but to varying social and historical circumstances.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Armando Bo and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation. Victoria Ruetalo situates Bo and Sarli's films amidst the popular culture and sexual norms in post-1955 Argentina, and explores these films through the lens of bodies engaged in labor and leisure in a context of growing censorship. Under Peron, manual labor produced an affect that fixed a specific type of body to the populist movement of Peronism: a type of body that was young, lower-classed, and highly gendered. The excesses of leisure in exhibition, enjoyment, and ecstasy in Bo and Sarli's films interrupted the already fragmented film narratives of the day and created alternative sexual possibilities.

"The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead" is the first in-depth study in English of the career of this foremost auteur working at the margins of the Hollywood mainstream in the horror genre. In placing Romero's oeuvre in the context of literary naturalism, the book explores the relevance of the director's films within American cultural traditions and thus explains the potency of such work beyond 'splatter movie' models. The author explores the roots of naturalism in the work of Emile Zola and traces this through to the EC Comics of the 1950s and on to the work of Stephen King. In so doing, the book illuminates the importance of seminal Romero texts such as "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "Creepshow" (1982), "Monkey Shines" (1988), "The Dark Half" (1992). This study also includes full coverage of Romero's latest feature, "Bruiser" (2000), as well as his screenplays and teleplays.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema.

Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. "Alfred Hitchcock's America" is full of stunning details that bring new light to Hitchcock's method and works. The American "spirit of place," is seen here in light of the titanic American personality, American values in a consumer age, social class and American social form, and the characteristic American marriage. The book's analysis ranges across a wide array of films from "Rebecca" to "Family Plot," and examines in depth the location sequences, characterological types, and complex social expectations that riddled American society while Hitchcock thrived there.

Fractured Lives is a memoir of one woman's experiences as a documentary filmmaker covering the wars in southern Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. Part autobiography, part history, part social commentary and part war story, it offers a female perspective on a traditionally male subject. Growing up in South Africa in a politically active family, Toni went to Britain as an exile in 1965 in the wake of the famous Rivonia Trial, and in the years to follow, became a filmmaker. Despite constant difficulties fighting for funding and commissions from television broadcasters, and the prejudices of working in a male-dominated industry, Toni made several remarkable films in Mozambique and Angola. These bear witness to the silent victims of war, particularly the women and children. Fractured Lives paints the changing landscape of southern Africa: Namibian independence and the end of the war in Mozambique bring hope - but also despondency. Yet there is also the possibility of redemption, of building new lives for the victims of war. In its final chapters, Fractured Lives traces the power of survival and the opportunities for new beginnings. Fractured Lives concludes with Toni's return to South Africa after nearly three decades in exile. However, the joy following the demise of apartheid is tempered by the poignancy of returning to a place that for so long had existed in her dreams alone and the realization that home will forever lie somewhere else.

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.

An illustrated and in-depth exploration of four of Rosas's early works, Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, and Bartok, through sketches, notes, and photographs Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of the most prominent choreographers in contemporary dance. Her 1982 debut with Fase immediately attracted the attention of the international dance scene; since then, De Keersmaeker and her company, Rosas, have created an impressive series of choreographic works that have been described as "pure writing with movement in time and space." This book explores four of Rosas' early works, Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena' s Aria, and Bartok, through sketches, notes in reviews, and photographs. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Exposing and illustrating how an ongoing engagement with nihilistic alienation may contribute to, rather than detract from, the value of life, Cinematic Nihilism both challenges and builds upon past scholarship that has scrutinised nihilism in the media, but which has generally over-emphasised its negative and destructive aspects. Through case studies of popular films, including Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, Dawn of the Dead and The Human Centipede, and with chapters on Scotland's cinematic portrayal as both a site of 'nihilistic sacrifice' and as 'nowhere in particular', this book presents a necessary corrective, re-emphasising the constructive potential of cinematic nihilism and casting it as a phenomenon that need not be overcome.

In a long and varied career, Lindsay Anderson made training films, documentaries, searing family dramas and blistering satires, including This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man , and Britannia Hospital.Students of British cinema and television from the 1950s to 1990s will find this book a valuable source of information about a director whose work came to public attention with Free Cinema but who, unlike many of his peers in that movement did not take the Hollywood route to success. What emerges is a strong feeling for the character of the man as well as for a remarkable career in British cinema.The book will appeal to admirers, researchers, and students alike. Making use of hitherto unseen original materials from Anderson's extensive personal and professional records, it is most valuable as a study of how the films came about: the production problems involved, the collaborative input of others, as well as the completed films' promotion and reception.It also offers a finely argued take on the whole issue of film authorship, and achieves the rare feat of being academically authoritative whilst also being completely accessible. It prompts renewed respect for the man and the artist and a desire to watch the films all over again.

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Steven Spielberg is known as the most powerful man in New Hollywood and a pioneer of the contemporary blockbuster, America's most successful export. His career began a new chapter in mass culture. At the same time, American post war liberalism was breaking down. This fascinating new book explains the complex relationship between film and politics through the prism of an iconic filmmaker.

Spielberg's early films were a triumphant emergence of the Sunbelt aesthetic that valued visceral kicks and basic emotions over the ambiguities of history. Such blockbusters have inspired much debate about their negative effect on politics and have been charged as being an expression of the corporatization of life. Here Frederick Wasser argues that the older Spielberg has not fully gone this way, suggesting that the filmmaker recycles the populist vision of older Hollywood because he sincerely believes in both big time moviemaking and liberal democracy. Nonetheless, his stories are burdened by his generation's hostility to public life, and the book shows how he uses filmmaking tricks to keep his audience with him and to smooth over the ideological contradictions. His audiences have become more global, as his films engage history.

This fresh and provocative take on Spielberg in the context of globalization, rampant market capitalism and the hardening socio-political landscape of the United States will be fascinating reading for students of film and for anyone interested in contemporary America and its culture.

"Hitchcock Annual: Volume 17" contains essays on two of Hitchcock's most well-known films, "Notorious" and "The Birds," and two of his lesser-known works, "Juno and the Paycock" and "Stage Fright." It also includes a detailed study of the unused score for "Frenzy" by Henry Mancini, an examination of Hitchcock's presence in contemporary art installations and experimental films, and a review essay on two recent books on Hitchcock.

ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze is the first collection of essays on this important and original contemporary filmmaker. It looks at his ground-breaking work in both features and short forms, exploring the impact of his filmmaking across a range of philosophical and cultural discussions. Each of Jonze's feature films, from Being John Malkovich (1999) to Her (2013), is discussed at length, focusing on issues of authorship, narration, genre and adaptation. As well as the textual aspects of Jonze's feature films, the contributors consider his work in music videos and shorts - investigating his position as a filmmaker on the blurred boundaries between studio and independent modes of production.

The rare woman director working in second-wave exploitation, Stephanie Rothman (b. 1936) directed seven successful feature films, served as the vice president of an independent film company, and was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America's student filmmaking prize. Despite these career accomplishments, Rothman retired into relative obscurity. In The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, author Alicia Kozma uses Rothman's career as an in-depth case study, intertwining historical, archival, industrial, and filmic analysis to grapple with the past, present, and future of women's filmmaking labor in Hollywood. Understanding second wave exploitation filmmaking as a transitory space for the industrial development of contemporary Hollywood that also opened up opportunities for women practitioners, Kozma argues that understudied film production cycles provide untapped spaces for discovering women's directorial work. The professional career and filmography of Rothman exemplify this claim. Rothman also serves as an apt example for connecting the structure of film histories to the persistent strictures of rhetorical language used to mark women filmmakers and their labor. Kozma traces these imbrications across historical archives. Adopting a diverse methodological approach, The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman shines a needed spotlight on the problems and successes of the memorialization of women's directorial labor, connecting historical and contemporary patterns of gendered labor disparity in the film industry. This book is simultaneously the first in-depth scholarly consideration of Rothman, the debut of the most substantive archival materials collected on Rothman, and a feminist political intervention into the construction of film histories.

Ana Kokkinos is an Australian screenwriter, producer and director who has worked in film and television for almost thirty years. Best known for her fictional films - Antamosi, Only the Brave, Head On, The Book of Revelation and Blessed - her work is often bold and confrontational in its exploration of the alienation, estrangement and visceral distresses of those outside the mainstream. In the first major study of the director, Ana Kokkinos: An Oeuvre of Outsiders offers new readings of and across her fictional oeuvre by broadly tracing the deployment of the outsider as an organising motif.