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.

The Films of Charles and Ray Eames traces the history of the Eameses work, examining their evolution away from the design of mass-produced goods and toward projects created as educational experiences. Closely examining how the Eameses described their work reveals how the films and exhibitions they generated were completely at odds with the earlier objectives exemplified in their furniture designs. Shifting away from promoting the consumer-culture, they turned their attention to the presentation of complex sets of scientific, artistic, and philosophical ideas.

During a critical period from the late 1950s to the early 1960s there was a moment of introspective self-reflection in the West stemming from the events of the Cold War. This moment of uncertainty was crucial, for it provided the incentive to question the values and concerns of society as a whole. In turn, designers began to question their own sense of purpose, temporarily expanding the purview of design to a broader field of inquiry. In the case of the Eameses, they identified an overriding problem related to consumerism and excess in America and sought to resolve the issue by creating a network of communication between universities, governments, institutions, and corporations. The solution of promoting greater education experiences as an alternative to consumerism in America required that different sectors of society functioned in unison to address political, social, economic, and educational concerns. "The Films of Charles and Ray Eames" reconsiders how design intersects with humanity, culture, and the sciences.

"

Once a favorite of mainly art house audiences, Hayao Miyazaki's films have enjoyed increasing exposure in the West since his Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003. The award signaled a turning point for Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, bringing his films prominence in the media and driving their distribution in multiple formats. This book explores the closing decade of Miyazaki's career (2004-2013), providing a close study of six feature films to which he contributed, including three he directed (Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo and The Wind Rises). Seven short films created for exclusive screening at Tokyo's Ghibli Museum are also covered, four of which were directed by Miyazaki.

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.

Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This is the first ever book-length study of his work, combining detailed analysis of all his films with a persuasive and stimulating investigation of key filmic issues of time and memory, identity and selfhood, and the nature of literary adaptation, as well as a previously unpublished interview with Davies himself. The book demonstrates that Davies's films successfully subvert traditional division between 'popular' culture and 'art-house' cinema. Gardner explores not only Davies's debt to social realism, the British Documentary movement, and Ealing comedies, but equally to the European auteur tradition and to the great Hollywood musicals and melodramas that continue to inspire him. It provides fresh insight into the centrality of music in Davies's work, and into his conviction that film itself is closer to music than to any other art form. -- .

The career of Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey spanned over four decades and several countries. A self-proclaimed Marxist and veteran of the 1930s Soviet agit-prop theater, he collaborated with Bertholt Brecht before directing noir B-pictures in Hollywood. A victim of McCarthyism, he later crossed the Atlantic to direct a series of seminal British films such as "Time Without Pity," "Eve," "The Servant," and "The Go-Between," which mark him as one of the cinema's greatest baroque stylists. His British films reflect on exile and the outsider's view of a class-bound society in crisis through a style rooted in the European art house tradition of Resnais and Godard. Gardner employs recent methodologies from cultural studies and poststructural theory, exploring and clarifying the films' uneasy tension between class and gender, and their explorations of fractured temporality.

Cine-literate and single-minded, Michael Reeves took on exploitative film production companies, the British censors, and even Vincent Price to create a unique vision of savage poetry and lacerating despair: Witchfinder General. He died aged 25 in 1969, between the end of Swinging London and the collapse of the British film industry - an apt candidate to represent all that could have been. This critical biography claims Reeves as the great, lost auteur of British cinema and traces his conception of film back to his childhood and formative experiences. Benjamin Halligan examines Reeves's films in the context of the times, citing The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General as foreshadowing and critiquing the psychedelic and revolutionary zeitgeist. Reeves's earlier work on the fringes of the freewheeling European exploitation cinema is also covered, with particular emphasis on his Revenge of the Blood Beast. Drawing on recollections from colleagues, friends and family, many speaking here for the first time, draft scripts, correspondence and original documentation pertaining to the controversial censorship of Witchfinder, and Reeves's struggle with his own private demons, Halligan creates a complete picture of this elusive, driven figure and his films. He speculates on what Reeves would have gone on to achieve, and why this should still matter. -- .

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.

Nicolas Winding Refn has emerged as a uniquely talented international filmmaker with an eye for visceral, iconic images. A 21st century mythmaker from his cult Pusher trilogy to the award-winning Drive and Only God Forgives, Refn infuses a sophisticated avant-garde sensibility with the grit of exploitation cinema. This book relates Refn's films to the ideas of Nietzsche, Canetti, Blanchot and others, and to aesthetic theory in general. It also asks why the West has become a largely artificial society, unable to generate new communal mythologies.

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.

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.

Preston Sturges' independence was at least partially responsible for his unique filmmaking style, marked by razor-sharp dialogue, wild plot turns and wondrously original supporting characters. Works such as The Power and the Glory, The Lady Eve and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock offer a distinctive and often satirical view of American life, deflating many of the ideals (honesty, justice, hard work, democracy, and others) that Americans feel a need to embrace. Each entry includes full filmographic data, a plot synopsis, and critical analysis of the movie.

The first book in English to deal exclusively with Duras' cinema, including such films as India Song, Le Camion, and Nathalie Granger. Provides a lucid and stimulating introduction to her films, which is accessible to a wide readerhip, both specialist and non-specialist.. Locates the films in their autobiographical as well as social and historical context, making the book broadly interesting to students and teachers in all areas of French Studies.. The book's empahasis on gender issues widens it's appeal to include those working in Women's Studies, Gender Studies and Gay and Lesbian Studies. -- .

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

Terence Fisher is best known as the director who made most of the classic Hammer horrors - including The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Devil Rides Out. But there is more to Terence Fisher than Hammer horror. In a busy twenty-five year career, he directed fifty films, not just horrors but also thrillers, comedies, melodramas, and science-fiction. This book offers an appreciation of all of Fisher's films and also gives a sense of his place in British film history. Fisher was a film-maker who spent most of his career working in the low-budget sector of British cinema, largely unnoticed by critics and possessing little control over the projects he was assigned. That he managed to fashion something distinctive from such limited resources is a testament to his considerable abilities as a film-maker, abilities which proved invaluable in the development of Hammer horror in the late 1950s. Looking at Fisher's career as a whole not only underlines his importance as a film-maker but also casts a new, interesting light on the areas in which he worked - Gainsborough melodrama, the 1950s B film, 1960s science-fiction and, of course, Hammer, one of the most successful independent film companies in the history of British cinema.

Saccharine for some, poignant for others, Jacques Demy's 'enchanted' world is familiar to generations of French audiences accustomed to watching Christmas repeats of his fairytale Peau d'ane (1970) or seeing Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac prance and pirouette in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). Demy achieved international recognition with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1963), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes. However, beneath the apparently sugary coating of his films lie more philosophical reflections on some of the most pressing issues that preoccupy Western societies, including affect, subjectivity, self/other relations and free will. This wide-ranging book addresses many of the key aspects of Demy's cinema, including his associations with the New Wave, his unique approach to musicals, his adaptations of fairytales, his representations of gender and sexuality and his legacy as an iconic director for generations of audiences and filmmakers. -- .

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."

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.

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.

This volume is the first to examine, in either French or English, the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix, often seen as the best example of the 1980s cinema du look, with cult films, such as Diva and Betty Blue (37 2 le matin) .. After an introduction which places Beineix in the context of the 1980s and the arguments centering on a postmodern cinema, the volume devotes a chapter to each of Beineix's feature films, including the film which marked his return to feature film making after a break of a decade, Mortel Transfert (2001). Prefaced by an excellent foreword by the director himself, which includes a broad condemnation of French critics. Includes many illustrations direct from the director's own collection, complementing the interviews Powrie made with him and his collaborators. -- .

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.

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?

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.