Allen Smithee specializes in the mediocre. He is versatile. He is prolific. And he doesn't exist. From 1969 until 1999, Allen Smithee was the pseudonym adopted by Hollywood directors when they wished not to be associated with films ostensibly of their making . Encompassing over fifty films of various stripes -- B movies, sequels, music videos, made-for-TV movies -- Smithee's three decades of work affords the authors of this volume a unique opportunity to reassess the claims of auteurism, both in its traditional guise and in the more commodified form it currently assumes.

Sometimes treating Smithee as an auteur in much the same way critics and scholars have treated directors as diverse as Douglas Sirk, Abbas Kiarostami, and Quentin Tarantino, the contributors reclaim new possibilities for auteurist filmmaking and film studies, even as they show what an empty display it has recently become. In accounting for this change, the essays in this volume employ innovative theories of authorship to recapture the subversive effect that auteurism once enjoyed. Thus the Smithee name becomes part of a larger discussion of the economics and history of pseudonyms in filmmaking -- notably in the blacklist of the 1950s -- as well as an opportunity to employ Jacques Derrida's theory of the signature to recover obscured economic and historic contexts within Smithee's films.

Unique in its focus, innovative in its approach, Directed by Allen Smithee argues that it is precisely through throwaway films such as Smithee's that recent Hollywood cinema can best be studied.

As one of the foremost Spanish directors of all time, Luis Bunuel's filmography has been the subject of innumerable studies. Despite the fact that the twenty films he made in Mexico between 1946 and 1965 represent the most prolific stage of his career as a filmmaker, these have remained relatively neglected in writing on Bunuel and his work. This book focuses on nine of the director's films made in Mexico in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films' narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. Although in recent years Bunuel's Mexican films have begun to enjoy a greater presence in criticism on the director, they are often segregated according to their perceived critical value, effectively creating two substrands of work: the independent and the studio potboiler. The interdisciplinary approach of this book unites the two, focusing on films such as Los olvidados, Nazarin, and El angel exterminador alongside La mort en ce jardin, The Young One, and Simon del desierto, among others. In doing so, it avoids the tropes most often associated with Bunuel's cinema-surrealism, Catholicism, the derision of the bourgeoisie-and the approach most often invoked in analysis of these themes: psychoanalysis. Instead, this book takes inspiration from the fields of human geography, anthropology, and philosophy, applying these to film-focused readings of Bunuel's Mexican cinema to argue that, ultimately, these films depict an overriding sense of placelessness, overtly or subliminally enacting a search for belonging that forces the viewer to question what it means to be in place.

Viennese filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, who has been making films since the 1970s, has created an exciting and widely recognized body of essay and documentary films. Her work is both deeply personal and political. She discusses the complex relationship between history and the present and reflects on her identity as a Jewish woman in postwar Austria and Europe. Tropes of travel and migration feature heavily in her work as means of experiencing the world and of staying alive, literally as well as artistically. Beckermann's films speak about identity conflicts and class struggle (Suddenly, a Strike), her family history in the Habsburg monarchy (Paper Bridge), and the war generation as it confronts the crimes of the Wehrmacht (East of War). In 2016, she turned the love affair between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann in postwar Vienna into an unconventional feature film (The Dreamed Ones). In her latest project, The Waldheim Waltz (2018), Beckermann uses 1980s archival footage of the "Waldheim Affair" to reflect on the mechanisms of populism and the media. This is the first English-language publication on Ruth Beckermann's filmic oeuvre, including an original essay by Nick Pinkerton, an in-depth conversation with the artist conducted by Alexander Horwath and Michael Omasta, and a detailed filmography by Michael Omasta and Brigitte Mayr.

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

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de l'amour. Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films. Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for close analysis, demonstrating how the director's radical approaches to narrative, editing, sound and shot composition have made the cinema into an analytical tool in its own right. The book will be essential to all students of Godard's films, and of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary French cinema, culture and thought. -- .

A filmmaker whose work exhibits a wide range of styles and approaches, Louis Malle (1932-1995) was the only French director of his generation to enjoy a significant career in both France and the United States. Although Malle began his career alongside members of the French New Wave like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, he never associated himself with that group. Malle is perhaps best known for his willingness to take on such difficult or controversial topics as suicide, incest, child prostitution, and collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. His filmography includes narrative films like Zazie dans le Metro, Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants, as well as several major documentaries. In the late 1970s, Malle moved to the United States, where he worked primarily outside of the Hollywood studio system. The films of his American period display his keen outsider's eye, which allowed him to observe diverse aspects of American life in settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century New Orleans to present-day Atlantic City and the Texas Gulf Coast. Louis Malle: Interviews covers the entirety of Malle's career and features seventeen interviews, the majority of which are translated into English here for the first time. As the collection demonstrates, Malle was an extremely intelligent and articulate filmmaker who thought deeply about his own choices as a director, the ideological implications of those choices, and the often-controversial themes treated in his films. The interviews address such topics as Malle's approach to casting and directing actors, his attitude toward provocative subject matter and censorship, his understanding of the relationship between documentary and fiction film, and the differences between the film industries in France and the US. Malle also discusses his sometimes-challenging work with such actors as Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Blaise, and Brooke Shields, and sheds new light on the making of his films.

The work of the experimental filmmaker Lutz Mommartz (*1934) has been shaking up the art and film community for more than 50 years. Ever since he embarked on his career as an artist in the 1960s, Mommartz has been thinking out of the box. Rejecting the cliches of the movie industry, he aimed to bring about a radical new beginning of film - with a focus on aesthetic and social goals. In 1967, he soared to the top of the German avantgarde as a self-taught filmmaker after his surprising success at the renowned experimental film festival in Knokke, Belgium. Not only was he one of the founding members of the legendary Creamcheese bar populated by artists, but he also participated in influential festivals and exhibitions such as the documenta 4 (1968). From this time onward, he belonged to the circle of filmmakers who pressed ahead with "the other cinema" against the mainstream film industry and promoted alternative distribution systems. In 1975, Mommartz became the first professor of film at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and headed the film class until 1999. During a career spanning more than 50 years, Mommartz produced an impressive body of short and experimental films, feature films, and documentary recordings of Dusseldorf's art scene. The two-volume publication provides an introduction into his diverse oeuvre and highlights thematic and associative connections between his films. Text in English and German. Published to accompany an exhibition at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, between 21 November 2020 and 7 February 2021.

Silent-era film scholarship has all too often focused on a handful of German directors, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, but little attention has been paid to arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the period: Paul Leni.This collection the first comprehensive English-language study of Leni's life and career offers new insights into his national and international films, his bold forays into scenic design and his transition from German to Hollywood filmmaking. The contributors give fresh insights into Leni's most influential films, including Waxworks (1924), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), and explores such lesser-known productions as The Diary of Dr. Hart (1918), Backstairs (1921) and the Rebus film series (1925 7). Engaging with new historical, analytical, and theoretical perspectives on Leni's work, this book is a groundbreaking exploration of a cinematic pioneer.

Despite an output of only 7 feature films in 20 years, Andrei Tarkovsky has had a profound influence on international cinema. Famous for their spiritual depth and incredible visual beauty, his films have gained cult status among cineastes and are often included in ranking polls and charts dedicated to the 'best movies ever made.' Beginning with the late 1980s, Tarkovsky's highly complex cinema has continuously attracted scholarly attention by generating countless hermeneutic challenges and possibilities for film critics. This book provides a fresh look at the director's legacy, with critical essays by both world-famous and early-career film scholars. It examines Tarkovsky's cinematic techniques and his treatment of genre, landscape and sound and offers highly original interpretations of his oeuvre in the context of film aesthetics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies and art history.

Eric Ames draws on original archival research to provide fresh perspectives on Werner Herzog's breakthrough 1972 film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes), which portrays an expedition by Spanish conquistadors led by Aguirre (played by Klaus Kinski) to find the legendary city of El Dorado. Ames explores how the film is remembered: for its breathtaking visual style and narrative power, but also for Herzog's tense, behind-the-scenes relationship with star Kinski. Did Herzog really direct him at gunpoint? Did they plot each other's murder? The legends begin here ... Ames reconstructs the film as an experiment in visualising the past from the viewpoint of the present. Aguirre is not a history film in the narrow sense, but it does engage a specific episode in the conquest of the New World, and it explores that history in terms of vision. Interweaving close analysis with extensive archival research, Ames explores Aguirre as a seminal film about the madness and hopelessness of Western striving. In addition, as an appendix, he offers for the first time a complete translation of an infamous, secretly recorded argument between Herzog and Kinski on the set.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

Few novelists have taken films as seriously, or been closely involved in so many aspects of the film business all their lives, as Graham Greene. Even at University he was touching on it. His long-term experience of the evolving art included producing, performing, script-writing and adaptation. Not to mention the libel case against him brought by Miss Shirley Temple for some disobliging words. Mornings in the Dark gathers some of Greene's best film criticism with a mass of related material: his film articles, interviews, lectures and radio talks, stories for film, letters and film proposals. With appendices on Greene's own films and unfulfilled film projects, and David Parkinson's introduction, this is an essential collection for readers of fiction and film enthusiasts alike.

Inspired by Shakespeare's famous words, "If music be the food of love, play on," "The Food of Love," by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is a story of amorous obsession set in Venice and London.

Laleen Jayamanne examines the major works of leading Indian film director, Kumar Shahani, and explores the reaches of modernist film aesthetics in its international form. More than an auteur study, Jayamanne approaches Shahani's films conceptually, as those that reveal cinema's synaesthetic capabilities, or "cinaesthesia." As the author shows, Shahani's cinematic project entails a modern reformulation of the ancient oral tradition of epic narration and performance in order to address the contemporary world, establishing a new cinematic expression, "an epic idiom." As evidenced by his films, constructing cinematic history becomes more than an archival project of retrieval, and is instead a living history of the present which can intervene in the current moment through sensory experiences, propelling thought.

The New Iranian Cinema is considered by many to be the most fascinating cultural phenomenon produced within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Containing twelve first-hand interviews with the most renowned film-makers living and working in contemporary Iran, this book provides insights into film-making within a society often at odds with its rulers. Reflecting upon the 1979 revolution and its influence on their work, as well as the effect of their films on Iranian audiences, film-makers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi highlight the key issues surrounding the reception of Iranian cinema in the West and also its role in the development of Iran's global image. Through these conversations Shiva Rahbaran reveals that the seeds of the New Iranian Cinema were sown long before the revolution, and that Iranian film-makers gave rise to a cinema which became a global phenomenon despite censorship, sanctions and political isolation.

Henry Brandt (1921-1998) was a legendary figure in Swiss postwar film-making, a photographer and a pioneer of the "nouveau cinema suisse." His second film Les Nomades du soleil, an ethnographic documentary shot in 1953-54 about a nomadic people in Niger, earned him international renown. At the 1964 Swiss national exhibition Expo 64 in Lausanne, Brandt left his mark on the memory of an entire generation: his five short films La Suisse s'interroge questioned the countries affluent Swiss society in a hitherto unknown form and were the initial spark for the sociologically incisive film-making in francophone Switzerland that later gave rise to masterpieces by Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta. This first monograph on Henry Brandt spans the entire oeuvre of this versatile cinematographer, which includes numerous documentaries, photo reportages, and TV productions. The essays investigate Brandt's works and provide insights into his efforts to combine the description of the local with the exploration of the distant. The book highlights that Henry Brandt's commissioned work as well as his own independent productions are critical testimonies to global inequality and thus more relevant today than ever. Text in French.

The prevalence of loss and mourning, and of charged relationships with parents or parental figures has had a surprising influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers' work . To date, however, little attention has been given to these themes. In The Melancholy Lens, author Tony Pipolo offers a detailed look at the significant role of underlying biographical and psychological factors in specific works by leading avant-garde filmmakers. Covering a range of filmmakers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr, The Melancholy Lens takes a sensitive approach to understand the motivations of each filmmaker as related to a given work. Pipolo argues, for example, that the work of Deren and Brakhage lends itself to a more aggressive appreciation of psychoanalytic principles. The Deren films studied-Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time-are read as varying responses to the death of her father, with whom she had a strained relationship. Tortured Dust-the final film Brakhage made about his first family-was, by his own account, a work of contention and desperation. The elusiveness of Gregory Markopoulos' The Mysteries cannot conceal its naked obsession with death any more than it can diminish the film's poignancy. Robert Beavers' Sotiros is an especially rich and vivid exposure of a vulnerable chapter in the filmmakers's life. In the final two chapters on Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr, Pipolo looks outward for artistic motivation to show how both filmmakers' fascination with the history of film and video manifests as a melancholic view of greater history in their work. In the afterword, the author considers later figures whose work is kindred to the theme of this book, among them Nathaniel Dorsky, Phil Solomon, David Gatten, and Lewis Klahr.

This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary. Featuring the work of leading scholars from around the world, The Grierson Effect explores the impact of Grierson's ideas about documentary and educational film in a wide range of cultural and national contexts - from Russia and Scandinavia, to Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand. In reconsidering Grierson's international infl uence, this major new study emphasises the material conditions of the production and circulation of documentary cinema, foregrounds core issues in documentary studies, and opens up expanded perspectives on transnational cinema cultures and histories.

John Carpenter is a seminal figure in the history of horror and science fiction filmmaking. His work in these genres has been highly influential in their ongoing development. This book gives Carpenter's output the sustained critical treatment it deserves. It comprises essays that address the whole of Carpenter's work, as well as others which focus on a smaller number of key films. Some essays take on wide-ranging issues such as Carpenter's approach to remakes and the question of genre, while others are organized around a specific theme or technical aspect of Carpenter's film-making. The text's key strength is that it draws upon an international group of scholars offering a variety of expertise. Films discussed include "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), "Halloween" (1978) and its subsequent sequels, "Escape from New York" (1981), "Escape from L.A."(1996), "The Fog" (1980), "The Thing" (1982), "Village of the Damned" (1995) and "Ghosts of Mars"(2001). The book also features an exclusive interview with John Carpenter.

For more than fifteen years the "Hitchcock Annual" has offered groundbreaking and authoritative scholarship on Hitchcock, becoming the journal of record for Hitchcock studies. Wallflower Press is proud to announce a new partnership with this prestigious publication, resulting in "The Hitchcock Annual Anthology," which features contributions from such leading critics as Charles Barr, Thomas Elsaesser, Bill Krohn, Mark Rappaport, Michael Walker, Robin Wood, and Slavoj Zizek. The anthology includes essays on Hitchcock's entire oeuvre, from his early silents to his late American masterpieces, and overviews of Hitchcock criticism, as well as interviews with and discussions between Hitchcock's collaborators.

Teuvo Tulio (1912 2000) was one of the most obsessive directors in film history. As an independent producer and an increasingly reclusive personality, he developed his own, excessive brand of melodrama, haunted by irresistible temptations, obsessive desires, mad jealousies and toxic moralism. Combining cultural and historical contextualisation with formalist analysis, ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio is the first English-language study on this innovative director. Three internationally recognised scholars analyse the strange trajectory of his career through its impressive beginning within the Finnish studio system to becoming an outsider, an independent producer-director who could single-mindedly pursue his own, highly idiosyncratic line.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema's 'modern' incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new 'impure' art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films' dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book replaces auteuristic accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentieth century cinema and visual culture.Matilde Nardelli teaches at the University of West London

Pablo Larrain is among the most prominent filmmakers in contemporary Chilean cinema. Having created a highly original cinematic language and established a focused critical dialogue about Chile's troubled contemporary history, his work presents an unflinching portrait of one of the most notorious regimes of modern Latin America (indeed, the world) and its problematic aftermath. In a straightforward, often surprising, and reliably controversial series of films, Larrain never retreats in the face of violence or the painful truths that still undergird Chilean reality. Assessing his work in the context of film aesthetics, philosophy, history, adaptation studies and cultural studies, ReFocus: The Films of Pablo Larrain is the first book-length English-language anthology about this important director's cinema, offering a wide range of perspectives by a diverse range of international scholars.