This volume of spellbinding essays explores the tense relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, providing new perspectives on their collaboration. Featuring chapters by leading scholars of Hitchcock's work, including Richard Allen, Charles Barr, Murray Pomerance, Sidney Gottlieb and Jack Sullivan, the collection examines the working relationship between the pair and the contribution that Herrmann's work brings to Hitchcock's idiom. Examining key works, including The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, Marnie and Vertigo, the essays explore approaches to sound, music, collaborative authorship and the distinctive contribution that Herrmann's work with Hitchcock brought to this body of films, examining the significance, meanings, histories and enduring legacies of one of film history's most important partnerships. By engaging with the collaborative work of Hitchcock and Herrmann, the book explores the ways in which film directors and composers collaborate, how this collaboration is experienced in the film text, and the ways in which such partnerships inspire later work. -- .

Spanning from obscurity to notoriety, the films of director, screenwriter, actor and comic Elaine May have recently experienced a long-overdue renaissance. Although she made only four films -- A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) -- and never reached the level of acclaim of her frequent collaborator Mike Nichols, May's work is as enigmatic, sophisticated and unceasingly fascinating as her own complicated, reluctant star persona. This collection focuses both on the films she has directed, and also emphasises her work with other high profile collaborators such as John Cassavetes, Warren Beatty and Otto Preminger.

Rakhshan Banietemad is one of the first female film directors in Iran. This book, the first English language study of her films and career, Iranian director Rakhshan Banietemad contains chapters by some of the most prominent scholars of Iranian cinema, as well as younger scholars with fresh points of view. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book devotes special attention to Banietemad's understudied documentaries and films, including Under the Skin of the City (2000) and Tales (2014), while offering new perspectives on well-known works such as The Blue Veiled (1994) and The May Lady (1997). Focusing on questions of aesthetics and poetics, social realism, gender dynamics and the 'afterimages' and 'counter-memories' of revolution and war, the book also includes an in depth interview with Banietemad herself.

Charles Crichton is perhaps best remembered as the director of the unlikely blockbuster hit A Fish Called Wanda, made when he was seventy-seven years old. But the most significant part of his career was spent at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, working on such beloved comedies as Hue and Cry, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt. Nonetheless, as this pioneering study of Crichton's work reveals, his filmmaking skills extended way beyond comedy to wartime dramas and film noir, and his adaptability served him well when he made the transition into primetime television, working on popular shows such as The Avengers, Space: 1999 and The Adventures of Black Beauty. Featuring first-hand testimony from colleagues ranging from Dame Judi Dench and Petula Clark to John Cleese and Sir Michael Palin, this riveting account of Crichton's fascinating life in film will appeal to film scholars and general readers alike. -- .

One of world cinema's most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodovar has been delighting, provoking, arousing, shocking, and-above all-entertaining audiences around the globe since he first burst onto the international film scene in the early 1980s. All about Almodovar offers new perspectives on the filmmaker's artistic vision and cinematic preoccupations, influences, and techniques. Through overviews of the filmmaker's oeuvre and in-depth analyses of specific films, the essays here explore a diverse range of subjects: Almodovar's nuanced use of television and music in his films; his reworkings of traditional film genres such as comedy, horror, and film noir; his penchant for melodrama and its relationship to melancholy, violence, and coincidence; his intricate questioning of sexual and national identities; and his increasingly sophisticated inquiries into visuality and its limits. Closing with Almodovar's own diary account of the making of Volver and featuring never-before-seen photographs from El Deseo studio, All about Almodovar both reflects and illuminates its subject's dazzling eclecticism. Contributors: Mark Allinson, U of Leicester; Pedro Almodovar; Isolina Ballesteros, Baruch College; Leo Bersani, UC Berkeley; Marvin D'Lugo, Clark U; Ulysse Dutoit, UC Berkeley; Peter William Evans, Queen Mary U of London; Victor Fuentes, UC Santa Barbara; Marsha Kinder, USC; Steven Marsh, U of Illinois, Chicago; Andy Medhurst, U of Sussex; Ignacio Olivia, Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca; Paul Julian Smith, U of Cambridge; Kathleen M. Vernon, SUNY Stony Brook; Linda Williams, UC Berkeley; Francisco A. Zurian, U Carlos III, Madrid.

This revised and updated edition of the "Critical Guide" encompasses the careers of over 500 directors that have worked within the North American film industry, including Canada, since the early 1990s. This edition features new or revised material on 150 directors, and includes coverage of mainstream luminaries such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, and Kathryn Bigelow, independent mavericks like Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch, and innovative emerging talents including Todd Field ( "In the Bedroom"), David Gordon Green ( "George Washington") and Christopher McQuarrie ( "The Way of the Gun"). This is a unique reference to the changing dynamics of the world's most watched movies.

This is the first book in English on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context. Konrad Wolf (1925-1982) was East Germany's greatest filmmaker and also an influential public figure in his country's political and cultural life. As artist and representative of the GDR, he had to perform a complex balancing act between aesthetic conscience and political function, not unlike Brecht. His work covers almost the whole lifespan of the GDR, in a range of filmic styles and genres, from musicals to antifascist films to films of everyday life. This book, the first in English on Wolf's entire oeuvre, proposes that we understand his work as an archive both of his own personal experience and of the ideology of socialism, embedded in self-reflexive filmic forms and generic references that put Wolf in the vicinity of other filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wajda, and Tarkovsky. The book's comparativist dimension, as well as its larger examination of the problems of a politically committed artist in state socialism, will make it of interest to all readers concerned with late-twentieth-century film history, art under socialism, and the history of East Germany and Eastern Europe. Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He has published The Technological Unconscious (2008); The Differentiation of Modernism (2013), and edited volumes on German television and on classical music in the GDR.

This book examines the work and art of Bill Douglas, thirty years after his death. Douglas made only a small body of work during his lifetime: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, based on his deprived childhood in Scotland; and Comrades, his epic on the Tolpuddle Martyrs; but he is acknowledged by many as one of Britain's greatest filmmakers. His films inspire a depth of passion in those that have seen them, and interest in his work has intensified over the years, both within the UK and overseas. This is the first work to examine Douglas's life and career through archive material recently made available to researchers. Editors Amelia Watts and Phil Wickham have carefully selected a range of voices-both scholars and practitioners-to reappraise Douglas's career from a variety of angles. The book raises important questions about Douglas's status as an artist, and reflects on his struggles within the film industry of the 1970s and 1980s in order to consider the attendant difficulties of working within a collaborative and commercial medium such as cinema. The volume also explores the wider legacy of this film artist, through the collection on moving image history he assembled with Peter Jewell, which became the foundation of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. It will appeal to film students and scholars, and the small but committed group of general readers who are interested in Douglas's work. The book has a foreword by the renowned filmmaker Mark Cousins, who, like many other contemporary directors, is a great enthusiast for Douglas's work.

Why are constitutionalist ideals so prominent in science fiction? Does Independence Day depict self-defence as a legal concept with absolute limits? Is international law lost in space? This innovative interdisciplinary volume represents the first exploration of the relationship between international law and cinema. From Star Wars to Werner Herzog, The Godfather to The West Wing, this book uncovers a diverse range of representations of international law and its norms in film and television. Examining the wider links between international law, cinema, and ideology, the contributions not only examine visual representations of international law, but they offer an essential insight into the functions fulfilled by these cinematic representations. Providing an extraordinary introduction to a variety of perspectives on core international legal questions, Cinematic perspectives on international law extends a valuable methodology by which international lawyers can critique the depiction of international law in film. -- .

Horror cinema grants bodies and images a precarious hold on sense and order: from the zombie's gory disintegration to the shaky visuals of 'found footage' horror, and from the vampire's absent reflection to the spectacle of shattering glass in the Italian giallo. Addressing classic horror movies alongside popular and innovative contemporary works, Visceral Screens investigates how they have rendered the human form as a media artefact, dramatically dis-figuring it with optical effects, chromatic shifts, glitches and audiovisual fragmentation. Conducting their own anatomies of the screen, cutting into the matter of cinema, horror films revel in the breakdown of frames, patterns and figures, undermining subjectivity and meaning.

When we think of the pulse in cinema, we may think of the heartbeat of the spectator as they respond to affective or moving scenes in the film, or how fast-paced and shocking images exacerbate this affective response. Conceptually extending cinema spectatorship, The Pulse in Cinema contends that cinema is an energetic arrangement of affective and intense forces, where the image and the spectator are specific components. Analysing body horror films such as The Tingler (1959), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and The Beyond (1981), this book builds on Lyotard's concept of the dispositif, Deleuze's work on sensation and Bataille's economic theory to conceptualise a pulse in cinema, arguing for its importance in cinema spectatorship theory.

Identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay are internationally renowned moving image artists and designers who for over thirty years have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation. Creating work in the tradition of Czech surrealists Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Trnka, Russian animator Yuri Norstein and Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk, they practice a design aesthetic influenced by Polish graphic artists such as Jan Lenica, Roman Cieslewicz, Franciszek Starowieyski and Henryk Tomaszewski. Since 1971, they have produced over forty-five moving images, including features, music videos, dance films, documentaries and signature personal works, and have designed sets and projections for opera, drama and concert performances. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art - the first presentation of the Quay Brothers work in all their fields of creative activity - this richly illustrated publication presents their betterknown films as well as previously unseen moving image works and a little-known body of works on paper, including graphic design, drawings, typography and notebooks for films.

In these eight sparkling biographies, Stan Brakhage brings us into intimate acquaintance with some of America's most influential independent filmmakers. With insight and sharp detail, Brakhage puts the lives and works of these filmic visionaries into personal focus. We meet Jerome Hill, born to inherit railroads and banks but destined to forge his artistic vision into a lasting film statement. And Marie Menken who, against the odds of a miserable and brutal marriage, developed a film aesthetic that revolutionized the very essence of independent filmmaking. Then James Broughton, the inveterate San Franciscan, whose irrepressible sense of whimsy and profound grasp of classical symbols combined to create some of the most vital filmworks of the last four decades; Christopher MacLaine, the "Artaud of North Beach"; Maya Deren, known to independent filmmakers as "the mother of us all"; Sidney Peterson, sophisticated, erudite, shy, the gentleman of the avant-garde film world; and two of Brakhage's most prominent contemporaries, Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs.

These filmmakers are members of one of the most radical of 20th-century art movements; and yet as radical and individual as they are, their films and their lives are a continuous source of inspiration, not only to young, developing film-artists, but to the makers of commercial movies and videos as well. Brakhage presents them and their work in portraits that are at once critical and anecdotal. One comes away from Film at Wit's End as one leaves an enjoyable, lively evening among friends.

Since 2007 Mia Hansen-Love has directed a series of meditative film dramas about families, love, vulnerability and growing up, all of them exceptionally attentive to film's ability to convey the passing of time, separation and loss. As the first book-length study of the films of Mia Hansen-Love, this volume introduces her cinema to both an academic and a general readership. Exploring her move from acting, via criticism, to directing, the book first investigates the complexity of her situation as a female auteur based in France. With detailed readings of her films up to Maya (2018), it then examines the precariousness of their families, their emphasis on vulnerability, failure, adversity and resilience, the particular candour of Hansen-Love's filming style, and the vital parts played by music and time in her cinema. It concludes that her cinema may best be regarded as a thoroughly contemporary one, distinguished by a tendency to transcendence that is both ethical and aesthetic.

Asia's film industries have undergone significant transformation in the last 30 years. From bilateral co-production agreements to pan-Asian financing, Asian cinema has assumed a regional identity well beyond its constituent national cinemas. This book explores the collaborative models of film production, distribution, exhibition and reception that have enabled greater co-operation and integration between Asia's film industries. In doing so, it contributes to the burgeoning international fields of transnational and world cinema, providing a fresh perspective on Asian cinema through the lens of comparative film studies.

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.

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan's greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye.The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda's films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics.An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda's oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.

This new edition of "A Hitchcock Reader" aims to preserve what has been so satisfying and successful in the first edition: a comprehensive anthology that may be used as a critical text in introductory or advanced film courses, while also satisfying Hitchcock scholars by representing the rich variety of critical responses to the director's films over the years.
a total of 20 of Hitchcock's films are discussed in depth - many others are considered in passing
section introductions by the editors that contextualize the essays and the films they discuss
well-researched bibliographic references, which will allow readers to broaden the scope of their study of Alfred Hitchcock

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?

This book offers a comprehensive film-by-film analysis of Spain's most famous living director, Pedro Almodovar. It shows how Almodovar's films draw on various national cinemas and genres, including Spanish cinema of the dictatorship, European art cinema, Hollywood melodrama and film noir. It also argues that Almodovar's work is a form of social critique, his films consistently engaging with and challenging stereotypes about traditional and contemporary Spain in order to address Spain's traumatic historical past and how it continues to inform the present. Drawing on scholarship in both English and Spanish, the book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of film studies and Hispanic studies, scholars of contemporary cinema and general readers with a passion for the films of Pedro Almodovar. -- .

Since his death in 1989, John Cassavettes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero—a renegade loner who fought the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having already established himself as an actor, he struck out as a filmmaker in 1959 with Shadows, and proceeded to build a formidable body of work, including such classics as Faces, Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Gloria. In Cassavettes on Cassavettes, Ray Carney presents the great director in his own words—frank, uncompromising, humane, and passionate about life and art.

Actress, singer, indie icon and embodiment of Parisian cool, Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of the most intriguing yet understated stars of our time. This book, the first detailed study of Gainsbourg, charts the trajectory of her star persona across four decades, from her early work with her father and ground-breaking collaboration with Claude Miller to her more recent collaborations with Lars von Trier and music producers like Beck and Air. The book combines textual analysis of performance, costume, place, characterisation and narrative with archival research and extra-cinematic materials to interrogate the construction of Gainsbourg's persona. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of her career to date, it examines her circulation in a transnational context and across a range of media platforms, exploring notions of gender, beauty and nationality in relation to her embodiment of femininity, Frenchness and transnationality. -- .

Both politically and aesthetically, the contemporary German and Austrian film landscape is a far cry from the early days of the medium, when critics like Siegfried Kracauer produced foundational works of film theory amid the tumult of the early twentieth century. Yet, as Leila Mukhida demonstrates in this innovative study, the writings of figures like Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in fact remain an undervalued tool for understanding political cinema today. Through illuminating explorations of Michael Haneke, Valeska Grisebach, Andreas Dresen, and other filmmakers of the post-reunification era, Mukhida develops an analysis centered on film aesthetics and experience, showing how medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scene can help to cultivate political sensitivity in spectators.

A striking, design-led reference book. A-Z Great Film Directors features Andy Tuohy's portraits of 52 directors significant for their contribution to cinema including kings of world cinema Wong Kar-Wai and Akira Kurosawa, arthouse pioneers Fritz Lang and David Lynch as well as the often under-appreciated female directors Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion. With text by film journalist Matt Glasby, each director's entry will also have a summary of the essential things you need to know about them, why they're important, a list of their must-see films, and a surprising fact or two about them, as well as images of their key films throughout. So, whether you're already a film afficionado or looking for a helpful cheat to pass convincingly as an arthouse fan, you'll love this guide to international directors, past and present.

An archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean Painleve Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painleve, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist's eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painleve and his assistant Genevieve Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects. Zoological Surrealism draws from Painleve's early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painleve's archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of "cinema's Copernican vocation"-how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints. From Painleve's engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo's concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painleve's early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.