Andrzej Wajda is considered one of Poland's - many would say the world's - greatest film directors. During the thirty-five years of his activity in film, theatre or television, his work, whether strong or weak, always arouses strong emotions and provokes intense debates in the media. His films deal with historical and political issues concerning Polish character and the nature of political power. Controversial, painful, stimulating and cinematically beautiful, they never fail to fully engage the spectator. This is particularly true for his major political films, which form the basis of the study. Applying Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the author shows how a creative interaction between the image on the screen and the viewer is established through Wajda's films. At the same time, she offers a detailed analysis of the historical events leading up to the collapse of the Socialist system in Poland. Janina Falkowska graduated in English from the University of Poznan, Poland, and received her PhD from McGill University. She now teaches film at the University of Western Ontario.

An essential text on filmmaking that every student, scholar, and teacher of films should own. In it, some of the motion picture industry's most important directors including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Howard Hawks, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, Blake Edwards, Francois Truffaut, and Rene Clair answer questions on the decisions that all directors must make before filming a movie, questions that help the reader understand the concept of filmmaking. They cover all aspects of filmmaking including script choices, planning, casting, actor choices, editing, rehearsing, and music scoring. Garnett also elicited vital information on the directors' source of inspiration, how they started their career, their philosophy of filmmaking, and their objectives for making their films."

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.

Ridgeway (Reggie) Callow began his film career in the early 1930s and for four decades worked as an assistant director on some of the most memorable films in Hollywood history. In the early 1970s, over a period of several months, film historian Rudy Behlmer conducted interviews with Callow, and the result is this edited version of many hours of relatively informal conversations recorded between the two men. In these extracts, Callow recounts what it was like to work on such celebrated films as Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Sound of Music, recalling the work of filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, David O. Selznick, Michael Curtiz, John Huston, Carol Reed, Lewis Milestone, and Robert Wise. Callow also provides first-hand knowledge and inside information about stars of the period, including Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Grace Kelly, James Cagney, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Julie Andrews, and others. Callow does not romanticize the glamour of Hollywood or echo carefully nurtured myths of legendary pioneer creative figures but rather recounts the workaday world of film business with revelations about major productions and personalities.

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948-The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them-all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges's achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs. In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic's insight and a fan's enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges's work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director's major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads-discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight-and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges's movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers-and funnier than ever.

In John Dahl and Neo-Noir: Examining Auteurism and Genre, Paul Monaco provides a focused inquiry into the first three feature films that director John Dahl made for theatrical release: Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993), and The Last Seduction (1994). Subsequent to their releases, these three films became identified in academic film criticism as neo-noir, and Dahl was labeled a "noir-meister" who made "a cottage industry of neo-noir." The importance of these three films, and Monaco's investigation of them, is how they illuminate a modern director's creative process in relation to an emerging genre. Dahl is rightly recognized for his directorial vision and his creative style. His approach to film direction, and his distinctiveness of vision, is thoroughly explored in the book. Using interviews with the professionals with whom Dahl has worked closely, Monaco also explores basic notions about auteurism and how genre is defined. Considering Dahl's extensive directing for television alongside his first three films, John Dahl and Neo-Noir ultimately demonstrates how this groundbreaking director is a prime example of a modern "director for hire."

Film Studies in China 2 is a collection of selected articles chosen from issues of the journal Contemporary Cinema published throughout the year and translated for an English-speaking audience. As one of the most prestigious academic film studies journals in China, Contemporary Cinema has been active not only in publishing Chinese scholarship for Chinese readers but also in reaching out to academics from across the globe. This anthology hopes to encourage a cross-cultural academic conversation on the fields of Chinese cinema and media studies. Following the successful release of the first volume this is the second collection to be released in the Film Studies in China series.

Gilles Deleuze represents the most widely referenced theorist of cinema today. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. From one of the foremost theorists following Deleuze in the world today, Deleuze and Lola Montes offers a detailed explication of Gilles Deleuze's writings on film - from his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Building on this foundation, Rushton provides an interpretation of Max Ophuls's classic film Lola Montes as an example of how Deleuzian film theory can function in the practice of film interpretation.

A clear and insightful analysis of the life and work of American director and coreographer, Stanley Donen.

Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row illuminates the work of this under-appreciated film auteur through 21 new essays penned by a range of scholars from around the globe. Ulmer, an immigrant to Hollywood who fell from grace in Tinseltown after only one studio film, became one of the reigning directors of Poverty Row B-movies. Structured in four sections, Part I examines various contexts important to Ulmer's career, such as his work at the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), and his work in exploitation films and ethnic cinema. Part II analyzes Ulmer's film noirs, featuring an emphasis on Detour (1945) and Murder Is My Beat (1955). Part III covers a variety of Ulmer's individual films, ranging from Bluebeard (1944) and Carnegie Hall (1947) to The Man from Planet X (1951) and Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957). Part IV concludes the volume with a case study of The Black Cat (1934), offering three different analyses of Ulmer's landmark horror film.

Over the past two decades, independent director Gregg Araki has emerged as one of the most intriguing auteurs of contemporary U.S. cinema. A leading figure of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Araki is known for his innovative, eye-opening, and at-times-controversial films aimed primarily at queer audiences. Images for a Generation Doomed: The Films and Career of Gregg Araki explores the films and career trajectory to date of this New Queer Cinema pioneer. Offering in-depth analyses of films such as The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, and Splendor, Kylo-Patrick R. Hart demonstrates how, over the course of the 1990s, the director's cinematic offerings became increasingly devoid of their early subversive potential. Hart goes on to argue that as the 1990s progressed, Araki's films were largely irrelevant to the cultural project of providing groundbreaking on-screen representations of non-heterosexual individuals living in the age of AIDS. However, Hart sees Mysterious Skin as evidence of Araki's successful attempt at reestablishing his cinematic and cultural relevancy in relation to the approaches and subject matter of contemporary queer cinema in the new millennium.

Neil Hurley demonstrates Hitchcock's covert preoccupation with spiritual themes conscience, guilt, false accusation, crises as catalysts of character development, personal romance, the salvation of nations, and the "unjustly accused." This last theme is linked in profound ways to Hitchcock's secular Christ types, who find purpose and undiscovered courage and companionship in having to disprove falsely imputed guilt in I Confess, The Wrong Man, Veritgo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy. (The last three also feature feminine Christ parallels who undergo Passion/Resurrection experiences marked with visual religious clues.)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock's sixth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. It seems likely that one of the reasons he liked Shadow so much is that is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system, a meticulous cause and effect chain that melds its various scenes and sequences together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters. This scrupulously organized film operates as a masterclass on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analysing the film's narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and 'family values', Diane Negra shows how the film's impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film's terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director's emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life and opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.

Theatre and film director Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) is known chiefly as a technical innovator and stylist. His stage credits include the original Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess (1935), and Oklahoma (1943); his sixteen completed films include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Golden Boy (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), and Silk Stockings (1957). In the theatre, Mamoulian integrated the various contributory arts of the American musical, transforming the near variety-show format of musicals into a dramatic unity of plot, character, music, and dance. He thus opened the stage to what would later be termed the "golden age" of the American book musical of the 1950s and 60s. In early sound films, Mamoulian restored mobility to the camera, rediscovered montage, redefined close-ups, split-screen, and dissolves, invented the voice-over, and was first to use multitrack sound recording. He directed the first live-action Technicolor film, Becky Sharp (1935). Spergel introduces previously undisclosed personal documents about the Mamoulian that necessitate a re-examination of Mamoulian's own statements about his life. He shows that the central theme in Mamoulian's art and life, as he describes it to overcome the world and embrace truth extended to the telling of his own history. Mamoulian believed he could alter that history through stylized presentation, idealizing the truth, and thereby raising numerous questions about historiography in general.

Considered the "King of Poverty Row," Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was an auteur of B productions. A filmmaker with an individual voice, Ulmer made independent movies before that category even existed. From his early productions like The Black Cat (1934) and Yiddish cinema of the late 1930s to his final films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ulmer created enduring works within the confines of economic constraints. Almost forgotten, Ulmer was rediscovered first in the 1950s by the French critics of the Cahiers du Cinema and then in the early 1970s by young American directors, notably Peter Bogdanovich. But who was Edgar G. Ulmer? The essays in this anthology attempt to shed some light on the director and the films he created-films that are great possibly because of, rather than despite, the many restrictions Ulmer endured to make them. In The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer, Bernd Herzogenrath has assembled a collection of essays that pay tribute to Ulmer's work and focus not only on his well-known films, including Detour, but also on rare gems such as From Nine to Nine and Strange Illusion. In addition to in-depth analyses of Ulmer's work, this volume also features an interview with Ulmer's wife and an interview Ulmer gave in 1965, in which he comments on actors Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, as well as fellow directors Tod Browning and James Whale.

Tsui Hark, one of China's most famous film artists, is little known outside of Asia even though he has directed, produced, written, or acted in 64 films over the last twenty years, some of which are considered to be classics of modern Asian cinema. This work, the first of its kind about Tsui Hark, begins with a biography of the man and a look at his place in Hong Kong and world cinema, his influences, and his thematic obsessions. Each major film of his career is then reviewed, with thematic comparisons made among them (lesser films are included but receive smaller reviews). Also provided are production details, comments from Tsui Hark himself, box office and awards information, anecdotes, and various other particulars. Also included are a complete listings of Hong Kong locations where information on Tsui Hark can be found, and where his films can be found outside of Hong Kong.

Exploitation filmmakers played a significant role in revolutionizing American cinema during the 1960s and early 1970s, churning out a string of independent Westerns, biker films, nudie-cuties and horror flicks in record times and often on shoestring budgets. With titles like ""Horror of the Blood Monsters"", ""Cycle Savages"" and ""The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant"", these films pushed the boundaries of acceptable on-screen violence and nudity and kept the American theater industry afloat as several major studios teetered on the brink of financial collapse.This work tells the story of that 'other' Hollywood through interviews with 16 directors, performers, screenwriters, and stuntmen who helped bring these zero-budget films to the screen against incredible odds. The interviews give insights into exploitation filmmaking from the perspectives of pioneering directors Al Adamson and Jack Hill, actors Jenifer Bishop and Robert Dix, and stuntmen Gary Kent and Gary Littlejohn, and others. The work includes more than 50 photographs, including many rare behind-the-scenes images of the filmmakers on set.

Sergio Leone's renown as a filmmaker rests upon a fistful of films, most notably the three Westerns he made with Clint Eastwood in the mid-1960s: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). While the success of these movies ensured Leone's reputation would endure, the few films he made following The Man with No Name Trilogy culminating in his American gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) with Robert DeNiro would solidify Leone's place as one of the great visionaries of his time. In this enhanced revision of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Robert C. Cumbow examines the work of this Italian filmmaker who made his mark re-envisioning the American Western. This volume includes a greatly expanded introduction and contains newly revised essays in which Cumbow analyzes the transition from "peplum" films to westerns in the Italian popular tradition. The book also examines each of Leone's major films as director, as well as the swan song Italian Western My Name Is Nobody, which Leone co-wrote and guided as producer. Cumbow also studies Leone's compositional style and the influence of Catholicism and the Italian grand opera tradition on his work. He provides a critical evaluation of Leone's style in reshaping the Western genre (and later, the crime film), as well an assessment of the influences on Leone's work, and his continuing impact on subsequent generations of film makers. Additional features of this book include thumbnail comments on the professionals who most frequently made up Leone's cast and crew, as well as an entire chapter devoted to composer Ennio Morricone. The book also includes an exhaustive bibliography, discography, and filmography, completely updated for this new edition. For fans and scholars seeking original and illuminating discussion of his work, The Films of Sergio Leone provides a critical appreciation of this master stylist."

Chantal Akerman is widely acclaimed as one of cinema's boldest visionaries. A towering figure in women's and feminist film-making, she produced a diverse and intensely personal body of work ranging from minimalist portraits of the everyday to exuberant romantic comedies, and from documentaries and musicals to installation art. This book traces the director's career at the crossroads between experimental and mainstream cinema, contextualising her work within the American avant-garde of the 1970s, European anti-naturalism, feminism and the post-modern aesthetics. While offering an in-depth analysis of her multi-faceted film style, it also stresses the social and ethical dimension of her work, especially as regards her representation of marginal groups and her exploration of exilic and diasporic identities. Particular attention is given to the inscription of the Holocaust and of Jewish memory in her films. -- .

Few other contemporary Hollywood filmmakers fit the category of "genre stylist" as well as Michael Mann, the director of such films as Heat, The Insider, Ali, Collateral, Manhunter, Thief, and Miami Vice. Mann's film style marks him as a director who chooses the iconographic backdrop of a genre as a canvas upon which he and his collaborators can craft a unique cinematic vision. The Cinema of Michael Mann traces the innovative and under-explored stylistic contours of Mann's work, the director's inflection upon and innovation within preexisting genre frameworks, and the relationship of both style and genre to issues of authorship and film criticism. Steven Rybin's critical study of Mann's cinema, and the importance of the filmmaker's themes to our contemporary world, is valuable for both film scholars and cinephiles alike.

Few other contemporary Hollywood filmmakers fit the category of 'genre stylist' as well as Michael Mann, the director of such films as Heat, The Insider, Ali, Collateral, Manhunter, Thief, and Miami Vice. Mann's film style marks him as a director who chooses the iconographic backdrop of a genre as a canvas upon which he and his collaborators can craft a unique cinematic vision. The Cinema of Michael Mann traces the innovative and under-explored stylistic contours of Mann's work, the director's inflection upon and innovation within preexisting genre frameworks, and the relationship of both style and genre to issues of authorship and film criticism. Steven Rybin's critical study of Mann's cinema, and the importance of the filmmaker's themes to our contemporary world, is valuable for both film scholars and cinephiles alike.

Satyajit Ray is usually credited with ushering modernity into the tradition-bound Indian Cinema. Suranjan Ganguly's book examines six of Ray's major films focusing on issues such as human subjectivity, the importance of education, the emancipation of women, the rise of the new middle class, and the crisis of identity in post-Independence India. He provides close readings of the following films: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Apur Sansar (1959), Charulata (1964), Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), and Pratidwandi (1970). All six films relate to Ray's interest in how a culture acquires a composite, hybrid shape through the fusion of history and modernity. By placing Ray's films within the socio-historical and cultural contexts of Indian modernity, Ganguly offers a radically different approach, which will enable Western readers to engage more fully with the filmmaker's work.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.