Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the 'concentrationary universe' which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais's benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

First published in 1975, this book examines the career of one of the leading post-war Czech filmmakers Milos Forman through his own testimony. After recollecting his childhood and early artistic ventures, Forman gives accounts of the making of his major films, interspersed with contemporaneous reviews by the author, and in the final chapter he sums up his 'lessons along the way'. A section entitled 'Stories behind the Stories' fills in details on the events and people mentioned in Forman's narrative. The author's commentary provides valuable insights not only into the aesthetics of filmmaking but also the social and political environment in contemporary Czechoslovakia.

Since the 1950s Eric Rohmer has been one of the major presences in French cinema as critic and director. This book is a sophisticated engagement with his work in which Keith Tester argues that Rohmer is not the naive realist he is often claimed to be. Instead, his films are revealed as a sustained exercise in Catholic theology.

The films of Sofia Coppola have moved and entranced audiences with her minimalist style, moody soundscapes, and commitment to center the lives and experiences of women and girls. A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola explores the profound implications of her stories, images, and convictions in a comprehensive study of all eight of her major works. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, each chapter offers a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of one of Coppola's films and her treatment of core themes like masculinity, sexual politics, bodies, and love. Rigorously researched and unique, the arguments presented within this volume shed new light on one of the most important women filmmakers in film history.

Who is Soderbergh? Currently Hollywood's hottest hot shot, Soderbergh burst onto the independent scene with his provocative, multi-award winning feature debut sex, lies and videotape in 1989. With the film world seemingly at his feet the guy from Baton Rouge committed critical and commercial hara-kiri, producing a black and white film about the life of writer Franz Kafka that fell foul of studios and audiences alike. The critics liked it though and they were to stay with him through a lean period, which produced increasingly personal, cine-literate projects which very few people saw. Out of favour in Tinseltown, Soderbergh continued to plough his own furrow, producing numerous notable Indie pics along the way. Though disillusioned with his craft, it was arguably during this period that he produced some of his best work. Thankfully the head honchos at Universal had kept Soderbergh's number on speed dial and when a director was needed to give a little sparkle to Out Of Sight, Soderbergh got the call. Back in the big time - but very much on his own terms - the rest as they say is history for the self-proclaimed luckiest bastard you ever saw. As well as an introductory essay, this Pocket Essential reviews and analyses each of Soderbergh's films. There's a handy reference section listing all the Soderbergh related publications- and there ain't many- and a full filmography including Soderbergh's tireless work as a producer and cameraman.

Inspired by the fabled journals in which acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro records his innermost thoughts and unleashes his vivid imagination, Insight Editions has created a replica sketchbook aimed at the director's legion of fans. Similar in design to del Toro's leather-bound volumes, this sketchbook features an inspirational message from the director along with selected examples of his incredible art.

Accessible and original analysis of all Jean Renoir's sound films, including those he made in Hollywood - this is the first major study to appear for a number of years and brings new light on some of the director's most celebrated films.. Illuminating account of critical debates concerning Renoir, and focusing on hitherto neglected areas such as gender, nation and ethnicity the book asks us to rethink our understanding of Renoir's political commitment.. Traces his output from the silent period to the age of television, tying his work into a fast-shifting, socio-historical context.. Detailed analyses of his sound films map his evolving style while individual chapters cover Renoir's career and writings, critical debates, the silent and early sound films, the Popular Front period, Renoir americain and the later films. -- .

Taking as its point of departure the three recurrent themes of nostalgia, memory and local histories, this book is an attempt to map out a new poetics -- the post-nostalgic imagination -- in Hong Kong cinema in the first decade of Chinese rule.

Martin Scorsese is one of the world's great filmmakers, and a genuine auteur. A follow up to The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963-77, this book covers his work from The Last Waltz to Bringing Out the Dead. Central is the detailed, theoretically informed discussion of all of the Scorsese-directed features released during this period, which, for Scorsese, was marked by both considerable artistic achievement and a shifting and at times uncertain relationship with the Hollywood film industry. Filmic discussion is correspondingly situated in relation to a range of forces and developments - institutional, but also of larger historical reference - that shape the films and Scorsese's authorial discourse. Another stimulating demonstration of sustained textual analysis, The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1978-99 presents an extended critical affirmation of the continuing pertinence of the concept of film authorship and illuminates Hollywood cinema from the late 1970s to the turn of the millennium. Like its predecessor, the book is about authorship and context. Discussion of the films is founded upon a combination of formal, psychoanalytic, and ideological approaches.

Leading international scholars consider the films and legacy of Howard Hawks. Diverse contributions consider Hawks' work in relation to issues of gender, genre and relationships between the sexes, discuss key films including Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep and Red River, and address Hawks' visual style and the importance of musicality in his film-making.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

This provocative and unique anthology analyzes Quentin Tarantino's controversial Inglourious Basterds in the contexts of cinema, cultural, gender, and historical studies. The film and its ideology is dissected by a range of scholars and writers who take on the director's manipulation of metacinema, Nazisploitation, ethnic stereotyping, gender roles, allohistoricism, geopolitics, philosophy, language, and memory.

In this collection, the eroticism of the club-swinging and avenging "Bear Jew," the dashed heroism of the "role-playing" French and German females, the patriotic fools and pawns, the amoral yokel, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, and the cosmopolitan, but psychopathic Colonel Landa, are understood for their true functions in what has become an iconoclastic pop-culture phenomenon and one of the classics of early twenty-first century American cinema. Additionally, the book examines the use of "foreign" languages (subverting English and image), the allegory of Austria's identity in the war, and the particularly French and German cinematic influences, such as R. W. Fassbinder's realignment of the German woman's film and the iconic image of the German film star in Inglourious Basterds.>

This, the first book-length study of Hong Kong cult director Wong Kar-wai, provides an overview of his career and in-depth analyses of his seven feature films to date. The study also takes an intriguing look at Wong's commercials for the likes of Motorola, BMW, and Lacoste and at his music vide for DJ Shadow. Stephen Teo probes Wong's cinematic and literary influences - from Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock to Manuel Puig and Haruki Murakami - yet shows how Wong transcends them all. This comprehensive and thoroughly accessible study confirms Wong's position as the star of the Hong Kong-global nexus and as a postmodern exemplar of world cinema.

Guillermo del Toro is a complete and intimate study of the life and work of one of modern cinema's most truly unique directors, whose distinct aesthetic and imagination are unmatched in contemporary film. Widely regarded as one of the most imaginative directors working in cinema today, Guillermo del Toro has built up a body of work that has enthralled movie fans with its dark beauty and edge-of-the-seat set pieces. In this book, acclaimed author Ian Nathan charts the progression of a career that has produced some of contemporary cinema's most revered scenes and idiosyncratic characters. This detailed examination looks at how the strands of del Toro's career have woven together to create one of modern cinema's most ground-breaking bodies of work. Delving deep into del Toro's psyche, the book starts by examining his beginnings in Mexico, the creative but isolated child surrounded by ornate catholicism and monster magazines, filming stop motion battles between his toys on a Super-8 film camera. It follows him to film school, where we learn of his influences, from Kafka to Bunuel, and explores his 1993 debut Cronos, the independent horror debut which draws on the religious and occult themes which would recur throughout del Toro's work. It goes on to cover his development as a director with 1997's Mimic, his blockbuster success with the Hellboy films and goes on to study the films which have cemented his status as a legendary auteur, Oscar award winners Pan's Labrynth and The Shape of Water, as well as his sci-fi masterpiece Pacific Rim, as well as looking at his exciting upcoming projects Nightmare Alley and Pinocchio. An enlightening look into the mind of an auteur blessed with a singular creative vision, Guillermo del Toro analyses the processes, themes and narratives that have come to be recognised as distinctly del Toro, from practical effects to an obsession with folklore and paganism. It looks into the narrative techniques, stylistic flourishes and creative decisions which have made him a true master of modern cinema. Presented in a slipcase with 8-page gatefold section, with scores of illuminating photographs of the director at work on set as well as iconic stills from his films and examples of his influences, this stunning package will delight all Guillermo del Toro devotees and movie lovers in general. Unauthorised and Unofficial.

This is an innovative critical history of Disney feature animation that uproots common misconceptions and brings fresh scholarly definition to a busy field. "Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation" provides a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date examination of the Disney studio's evolution through its animated films. In addition to challenging certain misconceptions concerning the studio's development, the study also brings scholarly definition to hitherto neglected aspects of contemporary Disney. Through a combination of economic, cultural, historical, textual, and technological approaches, this book provides a discriminating analysis of Disney authorship, and the authorial claims of others working within the studio; conceptual and theoretical engagement with the constructions of 'Classic' Disney, the Disney Renaissance, and Neo-Disney; Disney's relationship with other studios; how certain Disney animations problematise a homogeneous reading of the studio's output; and how the studio's animation has changed as a consequence of new digital technologies. For all those interested in gaining a better understanding of one of cinema's most popular and innovative studios, this will be an invaluable addition to the existing literature.

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.

More than 150 million Americans have seen Ken Burns's documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz. With their signature blending of images and interviews, Burns's series have redefined documentary television--and no one, before or since, has made history so popular. Gary R. Edgerton takes the full measure of Burns's accomplishments--with an inside look at the workings of Burns's Florentine Films production company, a genealogy of Burns's style and sources, and a critical account of Burns the historian--how his powerful programs define (and misdirect) our sense of past and present. Ken Burns's America will be essential reading for history buffs and viewers of Burns's immensely popular television documentaries.

Following the two previous volumes in this series of practitioner interviews with Danish directors, "Danish Directors 3" focuses on Danish documentary cinema. Although many of the directors interviewed here have ventured successfully into the terrain of fiction, their main contributions to the thriving post-80s milieu lie in the interconnected areas of documentary film and television. Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features filmmakers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark's now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term "new" also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the filmmakers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and, indeed, of the professional environments in which they operate. A comprehensive overview of documentary directors currently working in Denmark, this is the only book of its kind about this growing area of Danish cinema.

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman's birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman's films and writings with more traditional analyses. Established themes such as Bergman's interest in philosophy and psychology are addressed, but also less familiar topics, notably his relationship with Hollywood and his elaborate use of film music and autobiographical writing that characterised his later work. There are new analyses of aspects of Bergman's most famous films, including Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, but also insightful readings of lesser-known works, such as Saraband and Sawdust and Tinsel. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9789198557718/9789198557718.xml -- .

This is the first book in English on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context. Konrad Wolf (1925-1982) was East Germany's greatest filmmaker and also an influential public figure in his country's political and cultural life. As artist and representative of the GDR, he had to perform a complex balancing act between aesthetic conscience and political function, not unlike Brecht. His work covers almost the whole lifespan of the GDR, in a range of filmic styles and genres, from musicals to antifascist films to films of everyday life. This book, the first in English on Wolf's entire oeuvre, proposes that we understand his work as an archive both of his own personal experience and of the ideology of socialism, embedded in self-reflexive filmic forms and generic references that put Wolf in the vicinity of other filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wajda, and Tarkovsky. The book's comparativist dimension, as well as its larger examination of the problems of a politically committed artist in state socialism, will make it of interest to all readers concerned with late-twentieth-century film history, art under socialism, and the history of East Germany and Eastern Europe. Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He has published The Technological Unconscious (2008); The Differentiation of Modernism (2013), and edited volumes on German television and on classical music in the GDR.

In the late 1920s, Dmitry Shostakovich emerged as one of the first Soviet film composers. With his first score for the silent film the New Babylon (1929) and the many sound scores that followed, he was positioned to observe and participate in the changing politics of the film industry and negotiate the role of the film composer. In The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich, Joan Titus examines the scores of six of Shostakovich's films, from 1928 through 1936. Instead of investigating Shostakovich as a composer, a rebel, a communist, or a dissident, as innumerable studies do, Titus approaches him as a concept in itself-as an idea-and asks why and how listeners understand him as they do. Through Shostakovich's scores, Titus engages with the construct of Soviet intelligibility, the filmmaking and scoring processes, and the cultural politics of scoring Soviet film music, asking why and how listeners understand the composer the way they do. The discussions of the scores are enriched by the composer's own writing on film music, along with archival materials and recently discovered musical manuscripts that illuminate the collaborative processes of the film teams, studios, and composer. The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich commingles film studies, musicology, and Russian studies with original scholarship, and is sure to be of interest to a wide audience including musicologists, film scholars, historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, and Slavicists.