Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, who began his career under the censorship of Franco's regime, has forged an international reputation for his unique cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions. In films such as Carmen and El Dorado, where reality and fantasy are deliberately fused together, Saura reveals the illusions of Franco's mythologized Spain--a chaste, Catholic, and heroic Spain of the Golden Age--that tend to isolate Spaniards from the rest of Europe, from each other, and from their own individuality. In this first English-language book on Saura, Marvin D'Lugo looks at the social and artistic forces behind this film auteur's highly personal cinema. Tracing Saura's career over three decades, D'Lugo discusses each work from Hooligans (1959), a realist film about a Madrid street-gang member trying to become a bullfighter, to The Dark Night (1989), a film dealing with the persecution of the religious reformer St. John of the Cross in the late sixteenth century. Throughout he argues that Saura's cinematic style results from a highly original response to the political and historical constraints of Spanish culture. D'Lugo shows how in order to explore the complex cultural politics of "Spanishness" as it was institutionalized under Franco, Saura frames his narrations through the eyes of characters who question the forces that shape personal and collective identity. Moving beyond the limits of traditional auteur studies, this book addresses the relationship between the filmmaker and the cultural ideology that historically has thwarted and manipulated the expressions of individuality in Spanish society.

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.

Bringing together a range of Japanese and western scholars, this is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka's career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.

For more than forty years, the experimental filmmaker James Benning has been engaged in a systematic investigation of the relations between man, landscape, and the filmic medium, and during the last decade it has become increasingly clear how much these investigations have to offer to contemporary debates about ecology, the age of the anthropocene and the potentialities of new digital technologies. In James Benning's Environments a range of international scholars highlight the thematic and formal coherence of Benning's practice, whilst providing readers with an artistic and historical context to understand his experimental film work. The volume offers a number of interpretative frameworks drawing on film theory, environmental humanities, visual culture and philosophy, explaining why Benning has emerged as one of today's essential filmmakers.

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as "Funny Games" (1997), "Code Unknown" (2000), and "Hidden" (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of "The Seventh Continent" (1989) and "Time of the Wolf" (2003) a dark strain of optimism emerges, releasing each from its terrible and inescapable guilt. It is this contingent and unlikely possibility that we find in Haneke's cinema: a utopian Europe. This collection celebrates, explicates, and sometimes challenges the worldview of Haneke's films. It examines the director's central themes and preoccupations--bourgeois alienation, modes and critiques of spectatorship, the role of the media--and analyzes otherwise marginalized aspects of his work, such as the function of performance and stardom, early Austrian television productions, the romanticism of "The Piano Teacher" (2001), and the 2007 shot-for-shot remake of "Funny Games."

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

One of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. This book offers a new interpretation of Ozu's career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozu's work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to postwar Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a groundbreaking new study of a master of cinema.

Four-time winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (b. 1960) began his career while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. His first love was playwriting, but he began to see that he could investigate themes emotionally through film- that the camera could play a role. He learned his craft in his own independent films and by directing television episodes before attempting his first feature film, "Next of Kin" (1984). There he explored the themes of family and identity that continue to interest him today.

A frequent winner at film festivals, Egoyan broke through to a general audience with his film "Exotica" (1994). Since then such films as "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997) and "Felicia's Journey" (1999) have gained him wide acclaim. These interviews, collected from the last two decades, reveal Egoyan's unique themes, and his individual, independent approach to filmmaking. He discusses his development as a director, his interest in opera and museum installations, and the expectations he has for his audience. He engages in open, forthright discussions of his work and those who have worked with him.

Roman Polanski is a great maverick figure of world cinema who has lived a controversial and tragic life. Yet his notoriety has eclipsed the true importance of his long career, starting with his short films in the 1950s and continuing through to the recent "Oliver Twist" (2005). This collection highlights the bold and dazzling diversity of his work as well as recurrent themes and obsessions. Films discussed include "Knife in the Water" (1962), "Repulsion" (1965), "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), "Chinatown" (1974), "Death and the Maiden" (1994), and "The Pianist" (2002).

Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed. Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.

The New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and 1970s is celebrated as a time when maverick directors bucked the system. Against the backdrop of counterculture sensibilities and the prominence of auteur theory, New Hollywood directors such as Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola seemed to embody creative individualism. In Post-Fordist Cinema, Jeff Menne rewrites the history of this period, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood's corporate project. Menne traces the surprising affinities between auteur theory and management gurus such as Peter Drucker, who envisioned a more open and flexible corporate style. In founding production companies, New Hollywood filmmakers took part in the creation of new corporate models that emphasized entrepreneurial creativity. For firms such as Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions, Altman's Lion's Gate Films, the Zanuck-Brown Company, and BBS Productions, the counterculture ethos limbered up the studio system's sclerotic production process-with striking parallels to how management theory conceived of the role of the individual within the firm. Menne offers insightful readings of how films such as Lonely Are the Brave, Brewster McCloud, Jaws, and The King of Marvin Gardens narrate the conditions in which they were created, depicting shifting notions of work and corporate structure. While auteur theory allowed directors to cast themselves as independent creators, Menne argues that its most consequential impact came as a management doctrine. An ambitious rethinking of New Hollywood, Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the "creative economy."

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

This timely volume explores the massively popular cinema of writer-director James Cameron. It couches Cameron's films within the evolving generic traditions of science fiction, melodrama, and the cinema of spectacle. The book also considers Cameron's engagement with the aesthetic of visual effects and the 'now' technology of performance-capture which is arguably moving a certain kind of event-movie cinema from photography to something more akin to painting. This book is explicit in presenting Cameron as an authentic auteur, and each chapter is dedicated to a single film in his body of work, from The Terminator to Avatar. Space is also given to discussion of Strange Days as well as his short films and documentary works.

Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the book interrogates questions of authorial subversion, gendered concepts of film authorship and male/female genre divisions, as well as re-evaluating certain genres as a space worthy of feminist criticism. By offering an analysis of the films themselves and the circumstances of production and reception, this book redefines political, theoretical and commercial conceptualisations of women's cinema, and offers new perspectives on how women filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre.

Examining the centrality of dialogue to American independent cinema, Jennifer O'Meara argues that it is impossible to separate small budgets from the old adage that 'talk is cheap'. Focusing on the 1980s until the present, particularly on the films by writer-directors like Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater, this book demonstrates dialogue's ability to engage audiences and bind together the narrative, aesthetic and performative elements of selected cinema. Questioning the association of dialogue-centred films with the 'literary' and the 'un-cinematic', O'Meara highlights how speech in independent cinema can instead hinge on what is termed 'cinematic verbalism' when dialogue is designed and executed in complex, medium-specific ways.

What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations - blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation - indicate a concurrent evolution of filmmaking that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement. Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed 'excess' is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made.

In recent years queer identities have become increasingly visible in Irish cinema, a shift that can be linked to political, economic and social changes taking place both in Ireland and around the world, as well as to changes in national film policy to cater more to international audiences. Irish Queer Cinema explores the sexual politics and socio-economic conditions that have determined the shape and evolution of these representations whilst interrogating the relationship between on-screen visibility and progressive sexual politics. Drawing together 23 films as depictive of an Irish queer cinema, including Clash of the Ash, The Crying Game and Me First, the book investigates the different ways gender and sexuality intersect with nationhood and national forms of belonging, and explores the role of queerness within the constitution of an Irish national culture.

Often described as 'the Master of Gimmicks', William Castle is best known for the outrageous publicity stunts that characterised his genre films in the 1950s and '60s, including offers for an insurance policy against death by fright, vibrating seats, a skeleton that flew over the audience, and a 'punishment poll' to determine a film's conclusion. But far from being 'the world's craziest filmmaker', Castle was also a dependable studio director who made more than 50 films between 1944 and 1974, and who produced films for Orson Welles and Roman Polanski. ReFocus: The Films of William Castle assembles fourteen essays on the full sweep of Castle's career, including his horror films, westerns, film noirs and more. With an influence felt on directors like Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis and John Waters, this volume reappraises Castle's legacy as an innovator as much as a showman.

Since 1979, China has been undergoing a period of immense social and economic change, transitioning from state-run economics to free market capitalism. This book focuses on how the 'Reform Era' has been constructed in the work of the director Jia Zhangke, analysing the archetypal class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual and entrepreneur that are found in his films. Examining how these figures are represented, and how Jia's cinematography creates those 'structures of feeling' that concretise around a particular time and place, the book argues that Jia's cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social transition, but also as an effort to engage the audience's emotional responses through representation, symbolism and the affective experience of specific cinematic tropes. Making an important contribution to scholarship about the Reform Era, and opening up many new areas in the larger fields of Chinese visual culture, cultural studies and the affective qualities of film, this is groundbreaking work about a cinematic culture in a period of profound transformation.

Boats on the Marne offers an original interpretation of Jean Renoir's celebrated films of the 1930s, treating them as a coherent narrative of philosophical response to the social and political crises of the times. Grounded in a reinterpretation of the foundational film-philosopher Andre Bazin, and drawing on work from a range of disciplines (film studies, art history, comparative literature, political and cultural history), the book's coordinated consideration of Renoir's films, writings, and interviews demonstrates his obsession with the concept of romanticism. Renoir saw romanticism to be a defining feature of modernity, a hydra-headed malady which intimately shapes our personal lives, culture, and politics, blinding us and locking us into agonistic relationships and conflict. While mapping the popular manifestations of romanticism that Renoir engaged with at the time, this study restores the philosophic weight of his critique by tracing the phenomenon back to its roots in the work and influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first articulated conceptions of human desire, identity, community, and history that remain pervasive today. Prakash Younger argues that Renoir's films of the 1930s articulate a multi-stranded narrative through which the director thinks about various aspects of romanticism and explores the liberating possibilities of an alternative paradigm illuminated by the thought of Plato, Montaigne, and the early Enlightenment. When placed in the context of the long and complex dialogue Renoir had with his audience over the course of the decade, masterpieces such as La Grande Illusion and La Regle du Jeu reveal his profound engagement with issues of political philosophy that are still very much with us today.

This is the first major study in English of cine quinqui, a cycle of popular Spanish films from the late 1970s and early 1980s that starred real-life juvenile delinquents. The book provides a close analysis of key quinqui films by directors such as Eloy de la Iglesia, Jose Antonio de la Loma and Carlos, as well as the moral panics, public fears and media debates that surrounded their controversial production and reception. In paying particular attention to the soundtrack of the films, the book shows how marginal youth cultures during Spain's transition to democracy were shaped by sound. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Spanish film, history and cultural studies, and those working in sound studies and youth subcultures more broadly. -- .

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.

This book explores the development of Robert Lepage's distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984-1994) and middle (1995-2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect on shaping his aesthetic and his professional trajectory. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage's productions. Productions discussed include The Dragon's Trilogy, Needles and Opium, and The Far Side of the Moon. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage's original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the early 21st century. -- .

The September 11th attacks in 2001 and the subsequent 'War on Terror' have had a profound effect on American cinema, and the contemporary Western is no exception. In this book, John White explores how films such as Open Range, True Grit and Jane Got a Gun reinforce a conservative myth of America exceptionalism; endorsing the use of extreme force in dealing with enemies and highlighting the importance of defending the homeland. Placing their characters within a dark world of confusion and horror, these films reflect the United States' post-9/11 uncertainties, and the conflict between civilised values and the brutality employed to defend them.