Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Individual film directors, film-makers
Lino Brocka (1939-1991) was one of Asia and the Global South's most celebrated filmmakers. A versatile talent, he was at once a bankable director of genre movies, an internationally acclaimed auteur of social films, a pioneer of queer cinema, and an outspoken critic of Ferdinand Marcos's autocratic regime. Jose B. Capino examines the figuration of politics in the Filipino director's movies, illuminating their historical contexts, allegorical tropes, and social critiques. Combining eye-opening archival research with fresh interpretations of over fifteen of Brocka's major and minor works, Martial Law Melodrama does more than reveal the breadth of his political vision. It also offers a timely lesson about popular cinema's vital role in the struggle for democracy.
Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated director, critically acclaimed for his fantasy horror films and the macabre ghosts, animated corpses and grotesques that inhabit them. This innovative study centres on the body as a centripetal force in Burton's work and considers the array of anomalous, extraordinary and transgressive beings that pervade his canon. It broadens the focus of living forms to include animated, creaturely, corporeal and Gothic bodies, exploring the way that Burton celebrates the body - whether human, animal, animated or anthropomorphised. In prioritising the somatic aspects of characters, Tim Burton's Bodies spotlights actual physical attributes and behaviour, and considers what meanings these may impart in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, humanimality and disability.
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 video 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.
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.
Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville. After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative. He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect, Gummo, two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity (Mister Lonely), a gritty quasi-diary film (Trash Humpers), and a blistering portrait of American hedonism (Spring Breakers), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.
Explores how Armstrong's films re-work conventions about literary adaptation, biography and realist storytelling Examines Armstrong's work in light of new media scholarship and philosophies, including feminist cinematic ethics Situates Armstrong's achievements in the context of Australian film policies and history Provides an examination of never-before-studied elements, including Armstrong's short films Includes a never-before-utilised oral history project with Armstrong A commercially successful Australian director of over eighteen feature films and documentaries, including My Brilliant Career (1979), Gillian Armstrong is an early, notable example of a woman director connecting with mass audiences. Armstrong's films are unique in their aesthetic expression and in the ethical relationships that they depict, framed through the language of gender inclusivity and due in part to her foregrounding of original, complex and nuanced female characters. This important book fills a gap in the literature on women screen practitioners and is a long overdue response to demands for new insight into the work of this significant director.
For well over a century, those who create motion pictures have touched our hearts and souls; they have transported and transformed our minds, intoxicated and entranced our senses. One artist's vision is the single most prominent force behind the scenes: the director. The Essential Directors illuminates the unseen forces behind some of the most notable screen triumphs from the aesthetic peak of silent cinema through the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Considering each artist's influence on the medium, cultural impact, and degree of achievement, Turner Classic Movies presents a compendium of Hollywood's most influential filmmakers, with profiles offering history and insight on the filmmaker's narrative style, unique touches, contributions to the medium, key films, and distinctive movie moments to watch for. The work of these game-changing artists is illustrated throughout by more than 200 full-color and black-and-white photographs. In The Essential Directors you'll read how Cecil B. DeMille revamped religion to define an era, and how Oscar Micheaux broke barriers to become the most influential Black filmmaker of the 1920s. You'll marvel at the efficient artistry of "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke and fall in love again with the sophisticated studio-era classics of George Cukor. You'll gain insight into how women like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino built thriving careers in an industry ruled by men and discover what drove Mike Nichols to mix comedy with tragedy, becoming the highest-paid director of his day in the the process. The Essential Directors presents the work of these game-changing artists and dozens more in this stunning volume.
Peter Weir: Interviews is the first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b. 1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject. He talks about "the precious desperation of the art, the madness, the willingness to experiment" in all his films; the adaptation process from novel to film, when he tells a scriptwriter, "I'm going to eat your script; it's going to be part of my blood!"; and his self-assessment as "merely a jester, with cap and bells, going from court to court. " He is encouraged, even provoked to tell his own story, from his childhood in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, to his apprenticeship in the Australian television industry in the 1960s, his preparations to shoot his first features in the early 1970s, his international celebrity in Australia and Hollywood. An extensive new interview details his current plans for a new film. Interviews discuss Weir's diverse and impressive range of work-his earlier films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, as well as Academy Award-nominated Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander. This book confirms that the trajectory of Weir's life and work parallels and embodies Australia's own quest to define and express a historical and cultural identity.
Greek Cinema and Migration provides a response to urgent calls to comprehend the cultural impact of immigration in Greece, and to determine the capacity of contemporary Greek cinema to challenge the logic of Fortress Europe. Placing contemporary Greek cinema within the context of European film production and transnational cinema, the book explores the fascination of Greek filmmakers with migration, mobility, borders and identity, between 1991 and 2016. With case studies of films such as The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), The Way to the West (2003), Man at Sea (2011) and many more, this ground-breaking book provides an in-depth understanding of contemporary Greek cinema and its direct correlation to the country's ongoing struggles to implement European modernity.
In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of ecriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization's formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salo, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.
Kenneth Lonergan's three films-You Can Count on Me (2000), Margaret (2011), and Manchester by the Sea (2016)-are rife with philosophical complexities. They challenge simple philosophical approaches to central issues of human behaviour. In particular, they ask questions about how to cope with suffering that one cannot overcome, the role that self- deception plays in people's lives and how to think about characters who do not embody simplistic moral ideas of virtue and vice. By philosophically engaging with these themes as they unfold in Lonergan's films, we are then able to formulate a more nuanced answer to the questions they pose. Kenneth Lonergan: Philosophical Filmmaker will draw from Lonergan's films and plays, along with the philosophical literature on the topics that they explore. The rich history of philosophical reflection surrounding these areas enables the reader to determine how the themes central to Lonergan's work have combined to create a rich cinematic oeuvre.
The first detailed study of what filmic images can tell us about iconic photographs, No Power Without an Image reveals the multifaceted connections between seven celebrated photographs of political struggles, taken between 1936 and 1968, and cinema in all its forms. Moving from the 'paper cinema' of magazines via newsreels and film journals, to documentary, fiction and experimental films, this fascinating book draws on original archival research and multidisciplinary icon theory to explore new ways of thinking about the confluence of still and moving images.
ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb is the first book-length study of the internationally recognized director's films. Bouchareb was one of France's first filmmakers of North African descent and his career as a director and producer now spans over 35 years. Remarkably varied in their themes, formal elements and narrative settings, Bouchareb's work has engaged with and reflected on a variety of crucial social, political and historical issues; from the role of colonial troops in the French army during the Second World War, to terrorism in contemporary Europe. This volume examines Bouchareb's films from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring key influences on his output and considering new theoretical approaches to his filmmaking.
"On Story is film school in a box, a lifetime's worth of filmmaking knowledge squeezed into half-hour packages." -Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times Austin Film Festival (AFF) is the first organization focused on the writer's creative contribution to film. Its annual Film Festival and Conference offers screenings, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions that help new writers and filmmakers connect with mentors and gain advice and insight from masters, as well as refreshing veterans with new ideas. To extend the festival's reach, AFF produces On Story, a television series currently airing on PBS-affiliated stations and streaming online that presents footage of high-caliber artists talking candidly and provocatively about the art and craft of screenwriting and filmmaking, often using examples from their own films. On Story-Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films presents renowned, award-winning screenwriters and filmmakers discussing their careers and the stories behind the production of their iconic films such as L.A. Confidential, Thelma & Louise, Groundhog Day, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Silence of the Lambs, In the Name of the Father, Apollo 13, and more. In their own lively words transcribed from interviews and panel discussions, Ron Howard, Callie Khouri, Jonathan Demme, Ted Tally, Jenny Lumet, Harold Ramis, and others talk about creating stories that resonate with one's life experiences or topical social issues, as well as how to create appealing characters and bring them to life. Their insights, production tales, and fresh, practical, and proven advice make this book ideal for film lovers, screenwriting students, and filmmakers and screenwriters seeking inspiration.
The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema from 1957 to 1963, Eric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.
A unique document: Clint Eastwood's story, as told in his own words A reference work in which one of the great masters of contemporary cinema revisits, film by film, his entire career as both a legendary actor and a remarkable director An insightful conversation with the critic and documentary filmmaker Michael Henry Wilson, who has known Eastwood for over twenty years A richly illustrated, faithful record of Eastwood's work, containing film stills and set photographs as well as previously unpublished photographs from his personal collection, dating from his youth and early years as an actor A potential 2010 bestseller: Eastwood's recent films - including Million Dollar Baby (2004), Gran Torino (2008), Changeling (2008) and Invictus (2009) - have enjoyed huge worldwide success, both at the box office and with the critics Includes a biography and a complete filmography
In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of ecriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization's formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salo, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.
A lavish hardback containing Orson Welles' Portfolio, much of which has never been seen before. Orson Welles, famous as an accomplished actor, writer, producer and visionary director, had originally aspired to become a musician or artist. Having studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for one summer, he continued to draw and paint throughout his life. The majority of his artwork, including costume and set designs and caricatures, has been unavailable to the public. Until now.
'One of the best things published about cinema.' Sight & Sound
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.
Addressing the appeal of the journey narrative from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction and the spaces between, this collection reveals the journey to be a persistent presence across cinema and in cultural modernity. Drawing on examples from different regions and cultures that traverse art and genre cinema, the book explores the journey as a motif for something wider, a metaphor for self-discovery and social transformation, and evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). Illuminating areas of global movement, belonging, diaspora and memory, these essays document epochal changes in human behaviour, from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping.
Making a compelling argument for the continuing relevance of Brechtian film theory and cinema, this book offers new research and analysis of Brecht the film and media theorist, placing his scattered writings on the subject within the lively film theory debates that took place in Europe between the 1920s-1960s. Furthermore, Angelos Koutsourakis identifies key points of convergence between Brecht's 'unfinished project' and contemporary film and media theory. With case studies of films ranging from Robert Roberto Rossellini's Paisa to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing amongst others, this study challenges many existing preconceptions about Brecht's theoretical position and invites readers to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht in film studies.
In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic survey of Orson Welles' life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the triumphs and failures of an ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another - theatre, radio, film, television, even, at one point, ballet - in each of which his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed possibilities. The book begins with Welles' self-exile from America, and his realisation that he could only function happily as an independent film-maker, a one-man band; by 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete, Mr Arkadin, the biggest conundrum in his output, and his masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, as well as Touch of Evil, his sole return to Hollywood and, like all too many of his films, wrested from his grasp and re-edited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television and a number of stage plays, including Moby-Dick, considered by theatre historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. Meanwhile, his private life was as dramatic as his professional life. The book shows what it was like to be around Welles, and, with a precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, in which lies the answer to the old riddle: whatever happened to Orson Welles?
The Apu Trilogy is the fourth directorial monograph written by influential film critic Robin Wood and republished for a contemporary audience. Focusing on the famed trilogy from Indian director Satyajit Ray, Wood persuasively demonstrates his ability at detailed textual analysis, providing an impressively sustained reading that elucidates the complex view of life in the trilogy. Wood was one of our most insightful and committed film critics, championing films that explore the human condition. His analysis of The Apu Trilogy reveals and illuminates the films' profoundly humanistic qualities with clarity and rigor, plumbing the psychological and emotional resonances that arise from Ray's delicate balance of performance, camerawork, and visual design. Wood was the first English language critic to write substantively about Ray's films, which made the original publication of his monograph on The Apu Trilogy unprecedented as well as impressive. Of late there has been a renewed interest in North America in the work of Satyajit Ray, yet no other critic has come close to equaling the scope and depth of Wood's analysis. In his introduction, originally published in 1971, Wood says Ray's work was met with indifference. In response, he offers possible reasons why this occurred, including social and cultural differences and the films' slow pacing, which contemporary critics tended to associate with classical cinema. Wood notes Ray's admiration for Western film culture, including the Hollywood cinema and European directors, particularly Jean Renoir and his realist films. Assigning a chapter to each Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957) and The World of Apu (1959), Wood goes on to explore each film more thoroughly. One of the aspects of this book that is particularly rewarding is Wood's analytical approach to the trilogy as a whole, as well as detailed attention given to each of the three films. The book, with a new preface by Richard Lippe and foreword by Barry Keith Grant, functions as a masterclass on what constitutes an in-depth reading of a work and the use of critical tools that are relevant to such a task. Robin Wood's The Apu Trilogy offers an excellent account of evaluative criticism that will appeal to film scholars and students alike. |
You may like...
Guillermo Del Toro - Cabinet of…
Guillermo Del Toro, Marc Scott Zicree
Hardcover
Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White…
David Hardy, Jason Clark
Paperback
(1)
|