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

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

After a long, critical appraisal of Warhol's career and social presence up to the time of his death, Koch examines the cultural vortex in which the artist first existed: his old sixties studio, the Factory. It was here, that Warhol produced his films, notorious underground classics whose radical esthetics are discussed in depth--from the silent marathon, "Sleep, " to "Chelsea Girls."

Ernst Lubitsch (1982-1947) was one of the most successful and influential German filmmakers in American film comedy. In this volume, Rick McCormick argues for a more transnational view of Lubitsch's career and films with respect to nationality, ethnicity, migration, class, sexuality, and gender. McCormick focuses on Lubitsch's Jewishness, which is inseparable from the distinct transnational character of the director, categorizing his early films as "Jewish comedies" where Lubitsch strikes a tenuous balance between Jewish humor, antisemitic jokes, stereotypes, and the incorporation of antifascist subjects into his popular films. Above all, the larger political issues at stake in Lubitsch's work are brought forward: German-Jewish perspectives and experiences, the subtle treatment of covert political and social messages, and the relationship of comedy, especially sexual comedy, to emancipatory politics and, in particular, to the turbulent politics of Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The book discusses in depth the following films by Lubitsch: The Pride of the Firm (1914), Shoe Palace Pinkus (1916), Meyer From Berlin (1918), I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918), The Oyster Princess (1919), Madame Dubarry (1919), The Doll (1919), Sumurun (1920), The Wildcat (1921), The Marriage Circle (1924), The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), The Love Parade (1929), The Man I Killed (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), and To Be or Not to Be (1942).

In a comprehensively revised and updated new edition, James Naremore provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Naremore offers provocative analyses of each of Kubrick's films, considering his emphasis on the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Combining close readings with new insights into the production histories and cultural contexts of key films, Naremore provides a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful to students of Kubrick's filmmaking and cinephiles who seek a deeper insight into the work of this perfectionist genius. Revised throughout, this new edition also includes a fully updated bibliography of critical writings on Kubrick's cinema.

A leading film theorist and a filmmaker discuss the lasting contributions of the most prominent living filmmaker, Jean Luc-Godard Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion. Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues-each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career-get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work. As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Jia Zhangke is praised as "the most internationally prominent and celebrated figure of the Six-Generation of Chinese filmmakers". This book provides an examination the content and forms of Jia's featured films and analyzes their merits and faults. Jia's films often narrate the lives of ordinary Chinese people against the backdrop of the political-economic changes. The author conducts an in-depth analysis of how this change have ferociously impinged upon the characters' living conditions since China integrated itself with the world economy in the high tide of accelerated globalization since the 1970s. The author focuses on discussing the "politics of dignity" expressed by Jia's allegorical renditions to explore the director's political unconsciousness and cultural-political notions. This book maps ten of Jia Zhangke's films onto three major themes: Jia's filmmaking and China in the market society; truth claims and political unconscious; "post-socialist modernity" in the age of globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese film studies, as well as other disciplines, such as political science, sociology, anthropology, etc.

Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise is the first book to examine the films of Jim Jarmusch from a sound-oriented perspective. The three essential acoustic elements that structure a film - music, words and noise - propel this book's fascinating journey through his work. Exploring the director's extensive back catalogue, including Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down By Law (1986), Dead Man (1995), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) Sara Piazza's unique reading reveals how Jarmusch created a form of "sound democracy" in film, in which all acoustic layers are capable of infiltrating each other and in which sound is not subordinate to the visual. In his cultural melting pot, hierarchies are irrelevant: Schubert and Japanese noise-bands, Marlowe and Betty Boop can co-exist easily side-by-side. Developing the innovative idea of a Silent-Sound Film, Piazza identifies prefiguring elements from pre-sound-era film in Jarmusch's work. Highlighting the importance of Jarmusch's treatment of sound, Piazza investigates how the director's distinctive reputation consolidated itself over the course of a thirty-year career.Based in New York, Jarmusch was able to develop a fiercely personal vision far from the commercial pressures of Hollywood. The book uses wide-ranging examples from music, film, literature and visual art, and features interviews with many prominent figures including Ennio Morricone, Luc Sante, Roberto Benigni, John Lurie, and Jarmusch himself.An innovative account of a much-admired body of work, Jim Jarmusch will appeal not only to the many fans of the director, but also all those interested in the connections between sound and film.

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors-Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer-and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader's theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Bela Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film. Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of 'worldly pleasures' such as movies, Paul Schrader nevertheless defied his upbringing to become first a leading film critic, then a star pupil among the US 'movie brat' generation of the 1970s: writing the coruscating screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing such provocative pictures as Blue Collar, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Maturity has never sated his appetite for attacking 'difficult' material, from adapting Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation for Scorsese, to filming the singular lives of Mishima and Patty Hearst. Schrader on Schrader is a tour through this formidable body of work, including some of Schrader's finest critical essays.

Secrets of Screen Directing: The Tricks of the Trade is a practical guide which bridges the gap between classroom learning and the realities of being on a set. Author Patrick Tucker uses insights and techniques gained from over 40 years of directing both screen and stage to open up the craft of effectively telling stories, exploring the reality of a directing career with practical day to day solutions and problem-solving methods for working directors. This book addresses the fact that most professional directors spend their careers directing other writers' scripts, and deals with the practicalities of working on continuing dramas. Following the Director's mantra of 'show, not tell' it contains over 300 illustrations, diagrams, paperwork examples and floor plans, with lists and charts throughout. Covering planning, preparation, and shooting a project, it delves beyond just script construction and into the nuts and bolts of screen directing. Directors at any level are always under huge time constraints, and this book provides immediate and simple solutions to working under such restrictions. This is an ideal resource for filmmaking students and early career directors to refer to when encountering a problem, as well as all those screen enthusiasts, actors and writers, who want to know what directors actually do.

Secrets of Screen Directing: The Tricks of the Trade is a practical guide which bridges the gap between classroom learning and the realities of being on a set. Author Patrick Tucker uses insights and techniques gained from over 40 years of directing both screen and stage to open up the craft of effectively telling stories, exploring the reality of a directing career with practical day to day solutions and problem-solving methods for working directors. This book addresses the fact that most professional directors spend their careers directing other writers' scripts, and deals with the practicalities of working on continuing dramas. Following the Director's mantra of 'show, not tell' it contains over 300 illustrations, diagrams, paperwork examples and floor plans, with lists and charts throughout. Covering planning, preparation, and shooting a project, it delves beyond just script construction and into the nuts and bolts of screen directing. Directors at any level are always under huge time constraints, and this book provides immediate and simple solutions to working under such restrictions. This is an ideal resource for filmmaking students and early career directors to refer to when encountering a problem, as well as all those screen enthusiasts, actors and writers, who want to know what directors actually do.

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. This volume undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centered on Winterbottom's collaborative working practices, political and cultural contexts, and critical reception. Arguing that his work delineates a 'cinema of borders', this study examines Winterbottom's treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and national and international politics, as well as his quest to adequately narrate inequality, injustice, and violence.

Offers alternative insights into the complex relationship between politics and intelligentsia in revolutionary Cuba. This work offers an alternative insight into the longstanding and conflicting relationship between politics and the (gay) intelligentsia in Cuba by looking closely at political texts, film, documentaries and literature from priorto Fidel Castro's regime until the present day. The book offers new readings of the work, letters and interviews of two influential voices, Reinaldo Arenas and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Arenas's material reveals a new account of the nature of 'the voice of the invisibles' and the key elements of the construction of a Cuban national rhetoric that looks at (governmental) power and (gay) resistance as being in perpetual tension, which often increases the feelingof moral panic and even social exclusion and displacement among citizens. The book also offers a new interpretation of Gutierrez Alea's renowned film Fresa y Chocolate (1994), resulting from the use of unpublished and revealing testimonies of the Cuban dance critic and writer Roger Salas and the secret messages inferred in his short story 'Helados de pasion: El cordero, la lluvia y el hombre desnudo' (1998). Dr MARIA E. LOPEZ is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Sociology at London Metropolitan University and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London.

With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong s highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking. * Brings together the most cutting edge, in-depth, and interesting scholarship on arguably the greatest living Asian filmmaker, from a multinational group of established and rising film scholars and critics * Covers a huge breadth of topics such as the tradition of the jianghu in Wong's films; queering Wong's films not in terms of gender but through the artist's liminality; the phenomenological Wong; Wong's intertextuality; America through Wong's eyes; the optics of intensities, thresholds, and transfers of energy in Wong's cinema; and the diasporic presence of some ladies from Shanghai in Wong's Hong Kong * Examines the political, historical, and sociological influence of Wong and his work, and discusses his work from a variety of perspectives including modern, post-modern, postcolonial, and queer theory * Includes two appendices which examine Wong s work in Hong Kong television and commercials

Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have-a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitue, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. For this first dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.

Examines an under-analysed period of Robert Altman's career.

This is the first book to be published on one of the greatest American designers of the 20th Century, who was as famous for his work in film as for his corporate identity and graphic work. With more than 1,400 illustrations, many of them never published before and written by the leading design historian Pat Kirkham, this is the definitive study that design and film enthusiasts have been eagerly anticipating. Saul Bass (1920-1996) created some of the most compelling images of American post-war visual culture. Having extended the remit of graphic design to include film titles, he went on to transform the genre. His best known works include a series of unforgettable posters and title sequences for films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most famous logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines and Minolta. His wife and collaborator, Elaine, joined the Bass office in the late 1950s. Together they created an impressive series of award-winning short films, including the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates, as well as an equally impressive series of film titles, ranging from Stanley Kubrick s Spartacus in the early 1960s to Martin Scorsese s Cape Fear and Casino in the 1990s. Designed by Jennifer Bass, Saul Bass's daughter and written by distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham who knew Saul Bass personally, this book is full of images from the Bass archive, providing an in depth account of one of the leading graphic artists of the 20th century.

In an epilogue provided for his incomparable study of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Donald Richie reflects on Kurosawa's life work of thirty feature films and describes his last, unfinished project, a film set in the Edo period to be called "The Ocean Was Watching,"
Kurosawa remains unchallenged as one of the century's greatest film directors. Through his long and distinguished career he managed, like very few others in the teeth of a huge and relentless industry, to elevate each of his films to a distinctive level of art. His "Rashomon"--one of the best-remembered and most talked-of films in any language--was a revelation when it appeared in 1950 and did much to bring Japanese cinema to the world's attention. Kurosawa's films display an extraordinary breadth and an astonishing strength, from the philosophic and sexual complexity of "Rashomon" to the moral dedication of "Ikiru," from the naked violence of "Seven Samurai" to the savage comedy of "Yojimbo," from the terror-filled feudalism of "Throne of Blood" to the piercing wit of "Sanjuro,"

In this book Richard Ayoade -- actor, writer, director, and amateur dentist -- reflects on his cinematic legacy as only he can: in conversation with himself. Over ten brilliantly insightful and often erotic interviews, Ayoade examines Ayoade fully and without mercy, leading a breathless investigation into this once-in-a-generation visionary. They have called their book Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey. Take the journey, and your life will never be the same again.

Calling on his unique perspective as playwright, screenwriter, and director of his own critically acclaimed movies, House of Games and Things Change, David Mamet illuminates how a film comes to be. He looks at every aspect of directing--from script to cutting room--to show the many tasks directors undertake in reaching their prime objective: presenting a story that will be understood by the audience and has the power to be both surprising and inevitable at the same time.

Based on a series of classes Mamet taught at Columbia University's film school, On Directing Film will be enjoyed not only by students but by anyone interested in an overview of the craft of filmmaking.

This book collects the best artwork from the first five years of "Bad Dads," an annual exhibition of art inspired by the films of Wes Anderson. Curated by Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco, "Bad Dads" has continued to grow and progress and has featured work from more than four hundred artists. From paintings to sculptures to limited-edition screen prints, the artworks vary greatly in style, but share the imagery and beloved characters from the mind of one of Hollywood's most noteworthy and imaginative filmmakers. The book features an original cover by graphic artist Max Dalton, a foreword by writer and director Wes Anderson himself, and an introduction by TV and movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz, author of the bestselling Wes Anderson Collection books.

A low-budget breakout film that wowed critics and audiences on its initial release, Stranger than Paradise would prove to be a seminal film in the new American independent cinema movement and establish its director, Jim Jarmusch, as a hip, cult auteur. Taking inspiration from 1960s underground filmmaking, international art cinema, genre cinema, and punk culture, Jarmusch's film provides a bridge between midnight movie features and a new mode of quirky, offbeat independent filmmaking. This book probes the film's production history, initial reception, aesthetics, and legacy in order to understand its place within the cult film canon. In examining the film's cult pedigree, it explores a number of threads that fed into the film - including New York downtown culture of the early 1980s and Jarmusch's involvement in music - as well as reflecting on how the film's status has developed alongside Jarmusch's subsequent output and reputation.