Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941-2021) was widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s in the wake of the New Wave. In just over forty years, he directed twenty-two feature films in an eclectic range of genres from intimate family portrait to historical drama and neo-Western. Beginning with his debut feature-L'Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974), which won the prestigious Louis Delluc prize-Tavernier showed himself to be a public intellectual. Like his films, he was deeply engaged with the pressing issues facing France and the world: the consequences of war, colonialism and its continuing aftermath, the price of heroism, and the power of art. A voracious cinephile, he was immensely knowledgeable about world cinema and American film in particular. Tavernier's roots were in Lyon, the birthplace of the cinema. He founded and presided over the Institut Lumiere, which hosts retrospectives and an annual film festival in the factory where the Lumiere brothers made the first films. In this collection, containing numerous interviews translated from French and available in English for the first time, he discusses the arc of his career following in the lineage of the Lumiere brothers, in that his goal, like theirs, is to "show the world to the world." It is no surprise, then, that an interview with Tavernier is a treat. Beginning with discussions of his own films, the interviews in this volume cover a vast range of topics. At the core are his thoughts about the ways cinema can inspire the imagination and contribute to the broadest possible public conversation.

For well over a decade, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have produced highly original and ethically charged films that immerse their audiences in an intense and embodied viewing experience. Their work has consistently attracted international recognition, including the rare feat of two Palmes d'Or at Cannes. In this first book-length study of the Belgian brothers, Joseph Mai delivers sophisticated close analyses of their directorial style and explores the many philosophical issues dealt with in their films (especially the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas). Mai discusses the Dardennes' varied and searching career from its inception in the late 1970s, starting with the working-class political consciousness and lost utopias of their documentary period; passing through their transition toward fictional narrative, experimental techniques, and familial themes; and finishing with a series of in-depth and philosophically informed interpretations of the brothers' more recent work. In such highly influential films such as La promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and The Child, the brothers have recast filmmaking through what Mai calls a "sensuous realism"--realism capable of touching the audience with the most compelling problems and moral dilemmas of contemporary society. This volume also features an interview in which the Dardennes discuss their approach to film production and the direction of actors.

An intimate account of a seminal filmmaker's development-as a creator and as a woman-both in art and in life. "Joyce Chopra, what a gift of an extraordinary filmmaker you are, and one of our great pioneers who forged a very difficult path. And for female filmmakers everywhere, we are so blessed to have you as a storyteller to forge the way to make it easier for others."-Laura Dern, actor Hailed by the New Yorker as "a crucial forebear of generations," award-winning director Joyce Chopra came of age in the 1950s, prior to the dawn of feminism, and long before the #MeToo movement. As a young woman, it seemed impossible that she might one day realize her dream of becoming a film director-she couldn't name a single woman in that role. But with her desire fueled by a stay in Paris during the heady beginnings of the French New Wave, she was determined to find a way. Chopra got her start making documentary films with the legendary D.A. Pennebaker. From her ground-breaking autobiographical short, Joyce at 34 (which was acquired for NY MoMA'S permanent collection), to her rousingly successful first feature, Smooth Talk (winner of the Best Director and Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1985), to a series of increasingly cruel moves by Hollywood producers unwilling to accept a woman in the director's role, Chopra's career trajectory was never easy or straightforward. In this engaging, candid memoir, Chopra describes how she learned to navigate the deeply embedded sexism of the film industry, helping to pave the way for a generation of women filmmakers who would come after her. She shares stories of her bruising encounters with Harvey Weinstein and Sydney Pollack, her experience directing Diane Keaton, Treat Williams, and a host of other actors, as well as her deep friendships with Gene Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Laura Dern. Along with the successes and failures of her career, she provides an intimate view of a woman's struggle to balance the responsibilities and rewards of motherhood and marriage with a steadfast commitment to personal creative achievement. During a career spanning six decades, Joyce Chopra has worked through monumental shifts in her craft and in the culture at large, and the span of her life story offers a view into the implacable momentum of the push for all womens' liberation. "Joyce Chopra has written a devastatingly frank, candid, and unsparing memoir of her life as a film director-a 'woman director' in a field notoriously dominated by men. The reader is astonished on her behalf, at times infuriated, moved to laughter, and then to tears. Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond is one of its kind-highly recommended." -Joyce Carol Oates, author of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

"The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood "is a detailed aesthetic, Deleuzian, and phenomenological exploration of Japan's finest currently-working film director, performer, and celebrity. The volume uniquely explores Kitano's oeuvre through the tropes of stillness and movement, becoming animal, melancholy and loss, intensity, schizophrenia, and radical alterity; and through the aesthetic temperatures of color, light, camera movement, performance and urban and oceanic space. In this highly original monograph, all of Kitano's films are given due consideration, including "A Scene at the Sea" (1991), "Sonatine" (1993), "Dolls" (2002), and "Outrage" (2010).

With Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Clint Eastwood made a unique contribution to film history, being the first director to make two films about the same event. Eastwood's films examine the battle over Iwo Jima from two nations' perspectives, in two languages, and embody a passionate view on conflict, enemies, and heroes. Together these works tell the story behind one of history's most famous photographs, Leo Rosenthal's "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima." In this volume, international scholars in political science and film, literary, and cultural studies undertake multifaceted investigations into how Eastwood's diptych reflects war today. Fifteen essays explore the intersection among war films, American history, and Japanese patriotism. They present global attitudes toward war memories, icons, and heroism while offering new perspectives on cinema, photography, journalism, ethics, propaganda, war strategy, leadership, and the war on terror.

"One of the great works of film history of the decade." -Slate Now a Netflix original documentary series, also written by Mark Harris: the extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors-John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra-changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America's war, shaping the public's collective consciousness of what we've now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood's role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back.

The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Li?ge-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes' work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.

Films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema's premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved.Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz's themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz's uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters reject any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema. It also reflects both Solondz's declining box office fortunes and the changing economics of independent film in an era of financial contraction.

Explains how the American horror movie came into existenceAlthough early cinema has long been a key area of research in film studies, the origin and development of the horror film has been a neglected subject for what is arguably one of the world's most popular film genres. Using thousands of primary sources and long-unseen illustrations, 'The Birth of the American Horror Film' examines a history that begins in colonial Salem, taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the influence of horror-themed literature, theatre and visual culture in America, and how that context established an amorphous structural foundation for films produced between 1895 and 1915. Exhaustively researched, bridging scholarship on Horror Studies and Early Cinema, 'The Birth of the American Horror Film' is the first major study dedicated to this vital but often overlooked subject.Key featuresThe first scholarly book dedicated to the birth of the American horror filmBridges scholarship on Horror Studies and Early CinemaExamines pre-cinema (literature, theatre and visual culture), as well as major works in early horror-themed cinemaSuitable for use on courses focusing on Film History, Genre and Horror

In 1983 visionary director John Cassavetes asked journalist Michael Ventura to write a unique film study - an on-set diary of the making of his film Love Streams. Cassavetes laid out his expectations. He wanted 'a daring book, a tough book'. In Ventura's words, 'All I had to do for 'daring' and 'tough' was transcribe this man's audacity day by day.' Cassavetes Directs describes the creation of Love Streams shot by shot, crisis by crisis. During production, the director learned that he was seriously ill, that this film might, as it tragically turned out, be his last. Starring alongside actress and wife Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes shot in sequence, reconceiving and revising his film almost nightly, in order that Love Streams could stand as his final statement. Both an intimate portrait of the man and an insight into his unique filmmaking philosophy, Cassavetes Directs documents a heroic moment in the life of a great artist.

The sixth in the ultrascreen series of anthologies celebrates the worlds created by one New Zealander in his pastoral homeland. From low-budget splatterfests to a world-conquering Hollywood franchise, Peter Jackson has relied as much on imagination as on technical ability. From the Pythonish splatter of the no-budget Bad Taste and the uproarious Muppets parody Meet the Feebles to zombie movie Braindead, Jackson cornered the market in Antipodean gore.
But there were new worlds to conquer. His acclaimed Heavenly Creatures told the story of two teenaged girls fatally enmeshed in a world of make-believe. It put Jackson on the road to realising Tolkien's mythological worlds in The Lord of the Rings, and creating the jungle hell of King Kong. Peter Jackson: From Gore to Mordor details his eccentric career path, from the days when his films were only covered in horror fanzines to their debating by Tolkien societies.

As the first woman to win two Best Documentary Oscars and the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards, Barbara Kopple deserves scholarly attention. Two of her early documentaries, Harlan County USA and American Dream, not only won Academy Awards but are foundational within the study of documentary as a whole. In ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple, a range of international scholars trace Kopple's career to date, analysing her contributions in the contexts of funding, style, production and reception, and examining her films' interrogations of social class using the lenses of gender, sexuality and race. In a shifting digital media landscape, Kopple's critical reputation is also assessed, alongside her enduring influence on contemporary filmmakers.

*** "I loved it. An amazing book." - Louis Theroux "A rip-roaring read. It left me breathless." - Chris Evans, Virgin Radio Breakfast Show "Riveting." - The New York Times "... a Hollywood movie in itself." - Spike Lee "Raw, savagely honest, as dramatic as any of his movies." - Mail on Sunday "A tremendous book - readable, funny and harrowing." - The Sunday Times In this powerful and evocative memoir, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter, Oliver Stone, takes us right to the heart of what it's like to make movies on the edge. In Chasing The Light he writes about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while taking miscellaneous jobs and driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with vivid details of the high and low moments: we sit at the table in meetings with Al Pacino over Stone's scripts for Scarface, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July; relive the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine); experience his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; and see his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino. We also learn of the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador; and witness tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award-winning film, Midnight Express. The culmination of the book is the extraordinarily vivid recreation of filming Platoon in the depths of the Philippine jungle with Kevin Dillon, Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp et al, pushing himself, the crew and the young cast almost beyond breaking point. Written fearlessly, with intense detail and colour, Chasing the Light is a true insider's story of Hollywood's years of upheaval in the 1970s and '80s, and Stone brings this period alive as only someone at the centre of the action truly can.

The acclaimed French auteur behind the mind-bending modern classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Michel Gondry has directed a number of innovative, ground-breaking films and documentaries, episodes of the acclaimed television show Kidding and some of the most influential music videos in the history of the medium. In this collection, a range of international scholars offers a comprehensive study of this significant and influential figure, covering his French and English-language films and videos, and framing Gondry as a transnational auteur whose work provides insight into both French/European and American cinematic and cultural identity. With detailed case studies of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep (2006), Microbe & Gasoline (2015) and Mood Indigo (2013), this collection will appeal to readers interested in the various media in which Gondry has worked, and in contemporary post-modern French and American cinema in general.

The award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier has become increasingly known for her generic innovations and industrial fluidity, moving confidently between cinema and television at a time where the scarcity of women directors has become a subject of major critical and popular attention. Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier is a dynamic, scholarly engagement with Bier's work, and a timely consideration of her impressive authorial achievements. Featuring essays from both recognized and up-and-coming scholars in Scandinavian, transnational and feminist film and media studies, this book also includes an original interview with Bier, addressing some of the provocative readings of her films advanced by the volume's contributors.

Following the Second World War, low-budget B-movies that explored and exploited Gothic narratives and aesthetics became a significant cinematic expression of social and cultural anxieties. Influencing new trends in European, Asian and African filmmaking, these films carried on the tradition established by the Gothic novel, and yet they remain part of a largely neglected subject. B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives examines the influence of Gothic B-movies on the cinematic traditions of the United States, Britain, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Japan, Hong Kong and India, highlighting their transgressive, transnational and provocative nature. It shows how B-movie Gothic is a relentlessly creative form, filled with political tensions and moving from shocking conservatism to profound social critique.

From the mid-1940s to the late 1980s American film studios enjoyed commercial success in a range of often overlooked genres, employing a new realism to depict social class structures, capitalist desires and the expansion of the marketplace, and to turn American cultural values comically and subversively against themselves. With case studies of the Cold War comedy, the 'rogue cop' film, the brainwashing thriller and the urban romances that defined the 'new woman', Cold War Film Genres explores these myriad productions, redefining American cinematic history with a more inclusive view of the types of films that post-war audiences actually enjoyed, and that the studios provided for them.

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere introduces a new concept to Nordic film studies as well as to other small national, transnational and world cinema traditions. Examining overlooked 'elsewheres', the book presents Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic and geographically dispersed, from their beginnings in the early silent period to their present 21st-century dynamics. Exploring both canonical works by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, as well as a wide range of unknown or overlooked narratives of movement, synthesis and resistance, the book offers a new model of inquiry into a multi-varied Scandinavian cultural lineage, and into small nation and pan-regional world cinemas.

Ever since his first feature film I Killed My Mother premiered at Cannes, every film from the 29-year-old director Xavier Dolan has generated significant critical interest. A recipient of numerous awards, Dolan has recently taken his career to an international level with The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. As the first book-length study about Dolan, with case studies of key films like Mommy (2014), Tom at the Farm (2013) and It's Only the End of the World (2016), this volume explores the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas. In particular, it uses Dolan's cinema as a departure point to reconsider the position of Quebec film and cultural imaginary within a global cinematic culture, as well as the intersections between national, millennial and queer filmmaking.

From documentary to art-house cinema - and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence - films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over and soundscapes do not only engage viewers' thoughts and senses. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is perceptible on screen. This book explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. Bringing together an international range of films with debates in philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship and cognitive psychology, author Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.

The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. "In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his "sickness." As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu."--Choice Originally published in 1992. 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. "In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his "sickness." As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu."--Choice Originally published in 1992. 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

Few directors have played such a prominent role as Francis Veber in shaping the cinematic identity of France over the past forty years, yet in many ways his chosen genre of comedy has relegated his work to the margins of Film Studies. Using an auterist lens to challenge the notions of taste, genre and aesthetics that are commonly used to form the cinematic canon, this book explores the twelve films Veber directed between 1976 and 2008. These include Le Jouet (1976), Les fugitifs (1986) and L'emmerdeur (2008). Considering also Veber's extensive work as a playwright, theatre director and screenwriter - as well as the numerous remakes and adaptations of his films in Hollywood - author Keith Corson focuses on issues of class, labour and politics to examine the ways in which Veber embeds serious social critiques in his mainstream films.

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before the movie industry- even America itself- would never be the same. In The Moment of Psycho , film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's career, recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Thomson shows that Psycho was not just a sensation in film: it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new life. Psycho , all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film- and, as Thomson brilliantly demonstrates, still does.

This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it. This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines. The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity - Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War - coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses. Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond. Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students - both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use. Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography.