Hal Ashby (1929-1988) is considered to be the lost genius of the New Hollywood generation. While his name does not bear the familiarity of, say, Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, his diverse films are among the best known and most beloved of the era. From the cult classic "Harold and Maude" (1971) to the iconic political satire "Being There" (1979), from the subversive sex comedy "Shampoo" (1975) to the anti-Vietnam romance "Coming Home" (1979), Ashby rejected mainstream conventions while his films attracted both popular and critical praise.

A true actors' director, Ashby drew A-list stars and elicited powerful performances from Jack Nicholson in "The Last Detail" (1973), Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in "Shampoo," Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in "Coming Home," and Peter Sellers in "Being There."

"Hal Ashby: Interviews" for the first time brings together the best interviews conducted over the course of Ashby's career. Ashby discusses his filmmaking philosophy, memories of working his way up the Hollywood ladder in the 1950s, and his troubled productions in the 1980s.

The inimitable, haunting films of Alfred Hitchcock took place in settings, both exterior and interior, that deeply impacted our experiences of his most unforgettable works. From the enclosed spaces of Rope and Rear Window to the wide-open expanses of North by Northwest, the physical worlds inhabited by desperate characters are a crucial element in our perception of the Hitchcockian universe. As Christine Madrid French reveals in this original and indispensable book, Hitchcock's relation to the built world was informed by an intense engagement with location and architectural form-in an era marked by modernism's advance-fueled by some of the most creative midcentury designers in film. Hitchcock saw elements of the built world not just as scenic devices but as interactive areas to frame narrative exchanges. In his films, building forms also serve a sentient purpose-to capture and convey feelings, sensations, and moments that generate an emotive response from the viewer. Visualizing the contemporary built landscape allowed the director to illuminate Americans' everyday experiences as well as their own uncertain relationship with their environment and with each other. French shares several untold stories, such as the real-life suicide outside the Hotel Empire in Vertigo (which foreshadowed uncannily that film's tragic finale), and takes us to the actual buildings that served as the inspiration for Psycho's infamous Bates Motel. Her analysis of North by Northwest uncovers the Frank Lloyd Wright underpinnings for Robert Boyle's design of the modernist house from the film's celebrated Mount Rushmore sequence and ingeniously establishes the Vandamm House as the prototype of the cinematic trope of the villain's lair. She also shows how the widespread unemployment of the 1930s resulted in a surge of gifted architects transplanting their careers into the film industry. These practitioners created sets that drew from contemporary design schools of thought and referenced real structures, both modern and historic. The Architecture of Suspense is the first book to document how these great architectural minds found expression in Hitchcock's films and how the director used their talents and his own unique vision to create an enduring and evocative cinematic world.

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.

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello. Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.

Based on more than a half dozen interviews with the director himself, this unauthorized biography recounts Spielberg's childhood, education, career, philanthropic and charitable endeavors, and his extremely private personal life. This updated edition explores Spielberg's latest filmmaking efforts, from Schindler's List to Men in Black 2.

In Eisenstein Rediscovered Ian Christie and Richard Taylor present the first true East-West symposium on Eisenstein with an unparalleled diversity of views and methodologies. Two newly discovered texts by Eisenstein are here translated fro the first time, and all the contributors make extensive use of material only recently available - variant scripts, drawings, diaries and other writings - to probe behind the familiar facade. The `new' Eisenstein that emerges is in all respects a more engaging and contemporary figure than is traditionally perceived, his wit, eroticism and exlectic passions defining a distinctively modern sensibility whose rediscovey is long overdue.

Jean Vigo is one of the legendary figures of world cinema, whose films L'Atalante and Zero de conduite still inspire young audiences today. Film historian Michael Temple explores Vigo's intense career and asks why it has had such a long-lasting impact on film culture, not just in France, but also for generations of filmmakers, critics and moviegoers around the world. Each film is examined under four headings: - social and political context - the making of the film, from conception to release - detailed analysis of narrative structure, main stylistic features and dominant themes - the reception of the film and its critical reputation Accessibly written, this will be essential reading for students, teachers, film enthusiasts and researchers, indeed for anyone who is interested in the cinema as a living art form. -- .

In the early 1900s, so-called race filmmakers set out to produce black-oriented pictures to counteract the racist caricatures that had dominated cinema from its inception. Richard E. Norman, a southern-born white filmmaker, was one such pioneer. From humble beginnings as a roving "home talent" filmmaker, recreating photoplays that starred local citizens, Norman would go on to produce high-quality feature-length race pictures. Together with his better-known contemporaries Oscar Micheaux and Noble and George Johnson, Richard E. Norman helped to define early race filmmaking. Making use of unique archival resources, including Norman's personal and professional correspondence, detailed distribution records, and newly discovered original shooting scripts, this book offers a vibrant portrait of race in early cinema.

Years after his death, American filmmaker John Huston (1906-1987) remains an enigmatic and compelling figure. This wide-ranging collection of new essays encompasses a variety of topics relating to Huston's lifestyle, political activities and cinematic legacy. Fresh analyses of such films as Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, The Misfits and Prizzi's Honor are included along with insightful studies of Huston's oft-overlooked literary adaptations In This Our Life, Moby Dick and A Walk With Love and Death. Also evaluated are Huston's controversial World War II documentary Let There Be Light, and two a clef portraits of the ""real"" Huston in the films The Way We Were and White Hunter, Black Heart. Bookending these essays are revealing interviews with John's actress daughter Angelica Huston and film producer Wieland Schultz-Keil.

With a career spanning four decades, Wes Craven (1939-2015) bridged independent exploitation cinema and Hollywood big-budget horror. A pioneer of the modern horror cinema, Craven directed such landmark films as The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream-considered not only classics of the genre, but examples of masterful filmmaking. Producing an impressive oeuvre that mixed intellectual concerns and political ideas, Craven utilized high-tension suspense, devastating visual brutality, and dark humor to evoke a unique brand of fear. Moreover, his films draw attention to the horror of American society-Namely racism, classism, and the traumas often associated with family. This collection of twenty-nine interviews-spanning from 1980 until his final interview in 2015-traces Craven's life and career, from his upbringing in a strict religious family and his life as an academic to his years toiling in exploitation cinema. The volume also chronicles Craven's ascendancy as an independent director, his work within the studio system, and his eventual triumph in mainstream cinema. Within the interviews gathered here, including three previously unpublished pieces, Craven reflects on failed projects and the challenges of working with studios while offering thoughtful meditations on the dynamics and appeal of horror. Wes Craven: Interviews cements Craven's legacy as a master of horror who left an indelible mark on the genre by forever altering expectations of-and approaches to-the cinema of fear.

Since the cinema first began to be taken seriously as an art form, there has been a constant debate on the question: who is the real creator of the film, the writer or the director? This study of a group of key film-makers in the sixties suggests that during this decade there was an emergence of a generation of film-makers who conceived a whole film in their minds just as an architect conceives a whole cathedral or a composer a whole symphony. The book presents detailed critical studies of the work of six commanding figures in the international cinema: four who have made their major reputations since 1950, the Italians Frederico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, the Frenchman Robert Bresson and the Swede Ingmar Bergman; and two film-makers of an older generation, the Spaniard Luis Bunuel and the Anglo-American Alfred Hitchcock, who have reached the height of their powers and exerted their most important influence on the cinema during the same period. There is also a section on the new talents to emerge more recently in the French 'New Wave', in particular Francois Truffaut, Jen-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. In addition, the book contains detailed filmographies of the directors discussed.

From his early horror movies, including Scanners, Videodrome, Rabid, and The Fly-with their exploding heads, mutating sex organs, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects-to his inventive adaptations of books by William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis), and Bruce Wagner (Maps to the Stars), Canadian director David Cronenberg (b. 1943) has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh. ""I think of human beings as a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical, and both of these things have their say at every moment we're alive,"" says Cronenberg. ""My films are some kind of strange metaphysical passion play."" Moving deftly between genre and arthouse filmmaking and between original screenplays and literary adaptations, Cronenberg's work is thematically consistent and marked by a rigorous intelligence, a keen sense of humor, and a fearless engagement with the nature of human existence. He has been exploring the most primal themes since the beginning of his career and continues to probe them with growing maturity and depth. Cronenberg's work has drawn the interest of some of the most intelligent contemporary film critics, and the fifteen interviews in this volume feature remarkably in-depth and insightful conversations with such acclaimed writers as Amy Taubin, Gary Indiana, David Breskin, Dennis Lim, Richard Porton, Gavin Smith, and more. The pieces herein reveal Cronenberg to be one of the most articulate and deeply philosophical directors now working, and they comprise an essential companion to an endlessly provocative and thoughtful body of work.

Mike Leigh may well be Britain's greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, this is the first study of his work to challenge the critical privileging of realism in histories of the British cinema, placing the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humour: of jokes and their functions, of laughter as a survival mechanism, and of characterisations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of 'realism'. Striving for the all-important quality of truth in everything he does, Leigh has consistently shown how ordinary lives are too complex to fit snugly into the conventions of narrative art. From the bittersweet observation of Life is Sweet or Secrets and Lies, to the blistering satire of Naked and the manifest compassion of Vera Drake, he has demonstrated a matchless ability to perceive life's funny side as well as its tragedies. -- .

A key figure in early avant-garde cinema, Walter Ruttmann was a pioneer of experimental animation and the creative force behind one of the silent era's most celebrated montage films, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Yet even as he was making experimental films, Ruttmann had a day job. He worked regularly in advertising -and he would go on to make industrial films, medical films, and even Nazi propaganda films. Michael Cowan offers here the first study of Ruttmann in English, not only shedding light on his commercial, industrial, and propaganda work, but also rethinking his significance in light of recent transformations in film studies. Cowan brilliantly teases out the linkages between the avant-garde and industrial society in the early twentieth century, showing how Ruttmann's films incorporated and enacted strategies for managing the multiplicities of mass society. This book has won the Willy Haas Award 2014 for its outstanding contribution to the study of German cinema.

The 34 essays of this collection by leading international scholars reassess Truffaut's impact on cinema as they locate the unique quality of his thematic obsessions and his remarkable narrative techniques. Almost 30 years after his death, we are presented with strikingly original perspectives on his background, influences, and importance.Bridges a gap in film scholarship with a series of 34 original essays by leading film scholars that assess the lasting impact of Truffaut s work * Provides striking new readings of individual films, and new perspectives on Truffaut s background, influences, and importance * Offers a wide choice of critical perspectives ranging from current reflections in film theories to articles applying methodologies that have recently been neglected or considered controversial * Includes international viewpoints from a range of European countries, and from Japan, New Zealand, and Brazil * Draws on Truffaut s archives at the BiFI (Bibliotheque du film) in Paris * Includes an extended interview with French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin concerning Truffaut s shifting stature in French film culture and his manner of thought and work as a director

In this study of the impact and influence of the New Wave in French cinema, Douglas Morrey looks at both the subsequent careers of New Wave filmmakers and the work of later film directors and film movements in France. This book is organized around a series of key moments from the past 50 years of French cinema in order to show how the meaning and legacy of the New Wave have shifted over time and how the priorities, approaches and discourses of filmmakers and film critics have changed over the years. Morrey tackles key concepts such as the auteur, the relationship of form and content, gender and sexuality, intertextuality and rhythm. Filmmakers discussed include Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol and Rohmer plus Philippe Garrel, Luc Besson, Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Christophe Honore, Francois Ozon and Jacques Audiard.

How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh's career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate. Gallagher investigates Soderbergh's work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant , as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh's role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989's sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.

Few mainstream filmmakers have as pronounced a disregard for the supposed rules of filmmaking as Martin Scorsese. His inventiveness displays a reaction against the "right" way to make a movie, frequently eschewing traditional cinematic language in favor of something flashy, unexpected and contrary to the way "proper" films are done. Yet despite this, he's become one of the most influential directors of the last fifty years, a critical darling (though rarely a box office titan), and a fan favorite. On the surface, Scorsese's work is defined by shocking violence and rampant profanity. These are often loud, brash films that appear to glorify the worst kinds of people. He makes heroes of mobsters, thugs, con men, and murderers. Yet dig deeper and you find the true beating heart of his oeuvre: guilt, collapse, self-destruction, spiritual turmoil, and the complicated hypocrisies of faith, among other themes that are a constant in his work. In this book, San Juan guides readers through the crooks, the mobsters, the loners, the moguls, and the nobodies of Scorsese's 26-movie filmography. The Films of Martin Scorsese examines the techniques that have made him one of the most innovative directors in history: needle-drop soundtracks, outbursts of violence, daring camera work, and more. The book further looks at the themes that are the engine driving all of this, including themes of self-sabotage, alienation, faith, and guilt. What is Martin Scorsese trying to tell us through his work? Can we learn something about the human conditions via works like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and The Irishman? With that goal in mind, between these covers you'll find fodder for discussion, dissection, and debate, all of it driven by insightful-yet-approachable analysis of Martin Scorsese's entire filmography, from 1967s Who's That Knocking At My Door? to 2019's The Irishman, as well as carefully chosen excerpts from five decades worth of Martin Scorsese interviews and rare behind-the-scenes photos.

Some thirty years ago filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard told critic Gene Youngblood, I am trying to change the world. He has pursued his revolution in works ranging from the explosive "Breathless" to the eloquent "Contempt" to the controversial "Hail Mary" and the postmodern "Histoire(s) du cinema," shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative ap-proaches to every aspect of cinema and video-including film criticism via provocative essays in "Cahiers du Cinema" and interviews dating to the early years of his career.

This book presents a varied selection of his conversations with critics, scholars, and journalists, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and illuminating key facets of his life, work, and ideas.

Topics include the seductiveness of cinema (Films are the only things by which to look inside of people, and that's why people are so fond of movies and why they'll never die); film as a blend of truth and beauty (I mix images and sounds like a scientist, I hope. The mystery of the scientific is the same as the mystery of the artist. So is the misery); and the personal realities of aging (Maybe it's that when you get old, in one way you feel younger and younger but still being old-young oldness, if I may say so, which is very. . .comforting).

As challenging and evocative as they are quirky and unpredictable, these interviews cast light on Godard's lifelong position as a proudly unclassifiable thinker who feels, as he said in 1980, that a language is obviously made to cross borders. I'm someone whose real country is language, and whose territory is movies.

David Sterritt is an associate professor of film at Long Island University and film critic of "The Christian Science Monitor."

'Georges Franju' is the fullest study to date of this little-known French director, the co-founder of the Cinematheque francaise, and the first book on him in English since 1967. Born in 1912, but only enjoying his real debut as a director in 1948 with his notorious documentary about Parisian abattoirs 'Le Sang des betes', Franju went on to make thirteen more courts metrages and eight longs metrages, including his horror classic 'Les Yeux sans visage'. Ince takes a new approach to Franju's films, investigating the areas of genre and gender, and grouping the films thematically rather than chronologically. A chapter on Franju's cinematic aesthetics offers a new synthesis of existing writings, combined with the author's responses to the films. A full introduction and conclusion set Franju's directorial career in the context of his lifelong commitment to France's cinema institutions. 'Georges Franju' will be essential reading on Franju, and of great interest to researchers, academics and students in film studies -- .

Vidor recounts his early days in Texas, his years at the birth of Hollywood, and his rise through the MGM Studios to become a prominent film director.

With a twist on the practical movie-making genre, This Is How You Make a Movie brings the subject to life by explaining the terms and processes through the films you know and love. Using key scenes from some of the best-loved movies of all time, Tim Grierson explores everything from cinematography to the secrets of talking to camera. Deep focus is explored through Citizen Kane, forced perspective through Elf, and slow motion through Reservoir Dogs. A fascinating read for film buffs who want to understand what goes on behind the camera, and above all an essential read for students and beginners in the industry.

Originally published in 1990, this book brought a new rigor and subtlety to the interpretation of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on traditional literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and current film theory about gender and subjectivity, the author combines close readings of seven films with historical and biographical studies of the directors who made them. Offering substantial readings of Jean-Luc Godard's controversial deconstructed King Lear and of Liz White's independent African-American Othello, Donaldson also applies his provocative and contemporary point of view to more familiar films. He reads Olivier's Henry V in relation to its treatment of sexual difference; Olivier's Hamlet in part as an expression of the director's childhood sexual trauma; Kurosawa's Throne of Blood as an allegory of the relationship between Western and Japanese cinema; and Zeffirelli's immensely popular Romeo and Juliet in the light of its powerful homoerotic subtext. With striking perspectives on Shakespeare, on the movies as an expressive medium, and on the complex processes of cultural change, this is timeless useful reading for teachers and students of film and literature.

The work of Richard Wagner is a continuing source of artistic inspiration and ideological controversy in literature, philosophy, and music, as well as cinema. In Wagner and Cinema, a diverse group of established and emerging scholars examines Wagner's influence on cinema from the silent era to the present. The essays in this collection engage in a critical dialogue with existing studies extending and renovating current theories related to the topic and propose unexplored topics and new methodological perspectives. The contributors discuss films ranging from the 1913 biopic of Wagner to Ridley Scott s Gladiator, with essays on silent cinema, film scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, German cinema, and Wagner beyond the soundtrack."

Why would you purposefully shoot scenes with no film in your camera? To find the answer, you will need to read this memoir, in which internationally-known Director/Cameraman Bill Gibson recounts some of his most exciting assignments of the past six decades. His career as a combat cameraman propelled him through World War II with the Navy, the Korean Conflict with the Air Force, and to Vietnam as a civilian on assignment with the U.S. Marines. His stories begin with the harrowing retelling of a kamikaze and torpedo attack against the USS Hornet (the Aircraft Carrier that brought the Doolittle Raiders within striking distance of the Japanese homeland) and continue through time and across space, taking the reader on a rollicking ride through history as told through one man's camera. Gibson offers up riots in Indonesia, uprisings in Africa, and coverage of world leaders that reads like a twentieth-century who's who: FDR, Harry Truman, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Charles Lindbergh, Albert Schweitzer, DeGaulle, John F. Kennedy, Reagan, and many others. He also provides insights into the frustrations and triumphs of America's space program, from his vantage point as a consultant to NASA on the photographic coverage of Apollo 11. In No Film in My Camera, Gibson brings all of these scenes to life, not only with his photography, but also with detail and emotion.