Elia Kazan's varied life and career is related here in his autobiography. He reveals his working relationships with his many collabourators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position, movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities Committee, illuminating much of what may be obscured in McCarthy literature.

The Films of Jess Franco looks at the work of Jesus ""Jess"" Franco (1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is best known as the director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly poetic. Editors Antonio Lazaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled a team of scholars to examine Franco's offbeat films, which command an international cult following and have developed a more mainstream audience in recent years. Arguing that his multifaceted, paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single approach, this edited volume features twelve original essays on Franco's movies written from a variety of different perspectives. This collection does not avoid the methodologies most commonly used in the past to analyze Franco's work-auteur criticism, genre criticism, and cult film criticism-yet it does show how Franco's films complicate these critical approaches. The contributors open up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies, cinephilia studies, and star studies. The Films of Jess Franco seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult director and to broaden the conversation around the director's work in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike.

How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's 'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film authorship, given that several of them were released in different versions and his contributions to others were not always credited? How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.

Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film Eve's Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons's mission has been to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve's Bayou, her first feature film, Lemmons (b. 1961) accomplished the rare feat of creating a film that was critically successful and one of the highest-grossing independent films of the year. Moreover, the cultural impact of Eve's Bayou endures, and in 2018 the film was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film. Lemmons's directing credits also include The Caveman's Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and, most recently, Harriet, making Lemmons one of the most prolific and long-standing women directors in Hollywood. As a black woman filmmaker and a self-proclaimed black feminist, Lemmons breaks the mold of what is expected of a filmmaker in Hollywood. She began her career in Hollywood as an actor, with roles in numerous television series and high-profile films, including Spike Lee's School Daze and Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs. This volume collects fifteen interviews that illuminate Lemmons's distinctive ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art through film, intimately linked to her mission to protest culturally and structurally imposed limitations and push the boundaries imposed by Hollywood.

Patrice Chereau (1944 - 2013) was one of France's leading directors in the theatre and on film and a major influence on Shakespearean performance. He is internationally known for memorable productions of both drama and opera. His life-long companionship with Shakespeare began in 1970 when his innovative Richard II made the young director famous overnight and caused his translator to denounce him publicly as an iconoclast, for a production mixing "music-hall, circus, and pankration". After this break, Chereau read Shakespeare's texts assiduously, "line by line and word by word", with another renowned poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Drawing on new interviews with many of Chereau's collaborators, this study explores a unique theatre maker's interpretations of Shakespeare in relation to the European tradition and to his wider body of work on stage and film, to establish his profound influence on other producers of Shakespeare.

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity. Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered. In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions, pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art history.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries: in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnes Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the Thinking Cinema series draws on feminist theorists and critics from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities.Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency,and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can 'do justice' to female subjectivity: Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, and thereby reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to cast a new veil over such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank; and includes a timeline ofdevelopments in women's film-making and feminist film theory from 1970 to 2011.

Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope offers the first sustained analysis of the current oeuvre of the film director, screenwriter, and producer Darren Aronofsky. Including Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), and Noah (2014), Aronofsky's filmography is discussed with respect to his style and the themes of his films, making astute connections with the work of other directors, other movies and works of art, and connecting his films with other disciplines such as math, philosophy, psychology, and art history. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov deploys her background in philosophy and math to analyze an American filmmaker with an individual voice, working on both independent productions and big-budget Hollywood films. Aronofsky is revealed to be a philosopher's director, considering the themes of life and death, addiction and obsession, sacrifice, and the fragility of hope. Skorin-Kapov discusses his ability to visually present challenging intersections between art and philosophy. Concluding with a transcript of a conversation between the author and Aronofsky himself, Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope is a much-needed study on this American auteur.

Lois Weber (1879-1939) was one of early Hollywood's most successful screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached from street corners, Weber began working in the American film industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the positions of screenwriter and director. She wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, and drug abuse. She gained international fame in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson. Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal studio's biggest box-office hit the following year and played to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class filmmaker. Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood's institutionalized sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and the changing business in which she worked.

Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain examines queer theory as it has emerged in the past three decades and discusses how Brokeback Mountain can be understood through the terms of this field of scholarship and activism. Organized into two parts, in the first half the author discusses key canonical texts within queer theory, including the work of writers as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He provides an historical account of the questions these scholars have posed to our understanding of sexualities-both normative and non-normative-in the historical past and in contemporary life, as well as a discussion of the theories of sexuality and gender offered by these scholars as these phenomena shape the experiences of men and women in the genital, bodily, erotic, discursive, and cultural dimensions. The second part examines Ang Lee's 2005 feature film, Brokeback Mountain, in order to understand the claims and insights of queer theory. Tracing the film's adaptation by screenwriter Larry McMurtry of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same title, this portion of the book examines the film's narrative about two working-class men in the rural mid-20th-century U.S. and the meanings of the sexual and emotional bond between the pair that develops over the course of two decades.

While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his films--even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and narrative resolution--are significantly darker and more emotionally and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for. "Darkness in the Bliss-Out" demonstrates, through close analysis of a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the human condition.

The essays offered here were written between 1970 and 2005. Teaching assignments, requests for articles, and the authors own evolving interests prompted them. They were not written with the view to form a book. They are now published together in the conviction that, both singly and as a whole, they can contribute to a better appreciation of Satyajit Rays legacy. The essays deal with Ray as a film-maker. The date on which each essay was written is indicated as it situate each in the cultural context in which it was conceived. Out of the twenty-nine feature films of Ray, only eight, plus the Apu Trilogy as a whole, are discussed. Moreover, this small collection is not a selection, indicaing preferences; nor is it a classification, rating the films. The discussion of Jana Aranya is the only essay that was written for this book to illuminate the evolution that took place from the first to the last film of Satyajit Ray. In order to preserve their historical value, generally, the essays were not updated. Given Rays deep involvement in film education, especially in the film societies movement in India, it was felt mandatory to include two articles on the subject, one discussing the situation of the film societies today, and the other, inspired by Satyajit Ray, and proposing a programme of media education for a new type of film society.

Renowned for making films that are at once sly domestic satires and heartbreaking 'social realist' dramas, British writer-director Mike Leigh confronts his viewers with an un-romanticized dramatization of modern-day society in the hopes of inspiring them to strive for greater self-awareness and compassion for others. This collection features new, interdisciplinary essays that cover all phases of the BAFTA-award-winner's film career, from his early made-for-television film work to his theatrical releases, including "Life is Sweet" (1990), "Naked" (1993), "Secrets & Lies" (1996), "Career Girls" (1997), "Topsy-Turvy" (1999), "All or Nothing" (2002), "Vera Drake" (2004), "Happy-Go-Lucky" (2008) and "Another Year "(2010).With contributions from international scholars from a variety of fields, the essays in this collection cover individual films and the recurring themes and motifs in several films, such as representations of class and gender, and overt social commentary and political subtexts. Also covered are Leigh's visual stylizations and storytelling techniques ranging from explorations of the costume design to set design to the music and camerawork and editing; the collaborative process of 'devising and directing' a Mike Leigh film that involves character-building, world-construction, plotting, improvisations and script-writing; the process of funding and marketing for these seemingly 'uncommercial' projects, and a survey of Leigh's critical reception and the existing writing on his work.