Nicolas Roeg is one of the most distinctive and influential film-makers of his generation. The generation of film-makers who define contemporary movie-making - Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), James Marsh (Man on Wire), and Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), all acknowledge their debt to the work of Nicolas Roeg. Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball. Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.

A keen observer of manners and mores, Mike Leigh has been hailed as a celebrator of "ordinary" people, yet it wasn't until relatively recently that audiences have been able to appreciate the full body of his work. In discussing all his films from "Bleak Moments" and "High Hopes" through "Naked, " the Oscar-nominated "Secrets and Lies" and "Topsy Turvy, " to "All or Nothing, " Garry Watson considers this claim, examining the films'influence and their effect.

At the same time, he takes on the very concepts of "the real" and "the ordinary" in regard to Leigh's work, challenging much perceived thinking among critics and moviegoers alike. To what category does the director's work really belong? Is it British Realism? The avant garde? Through careful textual detail and wider social and literary comparison with the works of Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot, he argues ultimately for the aritistic and cultural significance of Leigh's work as one of Britian's most respected filmmakers.

Spike Lee has directed, written, produced, and acted in dozens of films that present an expansive, nuanced, proudly opinionated, and richly multifaceted portrait of American society. As the only African-American filmmaker ever to establish a world-class career, Lee has paid acute attention to the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. But white men and women also play important roles in his movies, and his interest in class, race, and urban life hasn't prevented his films from ranging over broad swaths of the American scene in stories as diverse as the audiences who view them. His defining trait is a willingness to raise hard questions about contemporary America without pretending to have easy answers; his pictures are designed to challenge and provoke us, not ease our minds or pacify our emotions. The opening words of his 1989 masterpiece "Do the Right Thing" present his core message in two emphatic syllables: "Wake up ""Spike Lee's America" is a vibrant and provocative engagement not only with the work of a great filmmaker, but also with American society and politics.

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the "queering" of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the "North American" attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the "European" perspectives of Pedro Almodovar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.

The films of Darren Aronofsky invite emotional engagement by means of affective resonance between the film and the spectator's lived body. Aronofsky's films, which include a rich range of production from Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan, are often considered "cerebral" because they explore topics like mathematics, madness, hallucinations, obsessions, social anxiety, addiction, psychosis, schizophrenia, and neuroscience. Yet this interest in intelligence and mental processes is deeply embedded in the operations of the body, shared with the spectator by means of a distinctively corporeal audiovisual style. Bodies in Pain looks at how Aronofsky's films engage the spectator in an affective form of viewing that involves all the senses, ultimately engendering a process of (self) reflection through their emotional dynamics.

Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America. J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making--and legal unmaking--of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters. Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of "Flaming Creatures" is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features "Normal Love" and "No President," as well as shorter film fragments.

Jacques Tati is widely regarded as one of the greatest postwar European filmmakers. He made innovative and challenging comedies while achieving international box office success and attaining a devoted following. In Play Time, Malcolm Turvey examines Tati's unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Turvey argues that Tati captured elite and general audiences alike by combining a modernist aesthetic with slapstick routines, gag structures, and other established traditions of mainstream film comedy. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. Turvey also analyzes Tati's sardonic view of the bourgeoisie and his complex and multifaceted satire of modern life. Tati's singular and enduring achievement, Turvey concludes, was to translate the democratic ideals of the postwar avant-garde into mainstream film comedy, crafting a genuinely popular modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director's films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati's work.

The tradition of British realism has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, where films by directors such as Duane Hopkins, Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows and Clio Barnard have suggested a markedly poetic turn. This new realism rejects the instrumentalism and didacticism of filmmakers like Ken Loach in favour of lyrical and often ambiguous encounters with place, where the physical processes of lived experience interacts with the rhythms of everyday life. Taking these 5 filmmakers as case studies, this book seeks to explore in depth this new tradition of British cinema - and in the process, it reignites debates over realism that have concerned scholars for decades.

This book explores the creation and destruction of Abel Gance's most ambitious film project, and seeks to explain why his meteoric career was so nearly extinguished at the end of silent cinema. By 1929, Gance was France's most famous director. Acclaimed for his technical innovation and visual imagination, he was also admonished for the excessive length and expense of his productions. Gance's first sound film, La Fin du Monde (1930), was a critical and financial disaster so great that it nearly destroyed his career. But what went wrong? Gance claimed it was commercial sabotage whilst critics blamed the director's inexperience with new technology. Neither excuse is satisfactory. Based on extensive archival research, this book re-investigates the cultural background and aesthetic consequences of Gance's transition from silent filmmaking to sound cinema. La Fin du Monde is revealed to be only one element of an extraordinary cultural project to transform cinema into a universal religion and propagate its power through the League of Nations. From unfinished films to unrealized social revolutions, the reader is given a fascinating tour of Gance's lost cinematic utopia.

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. -- .

Twenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellant; one seductive, the other infectious. With case studies of films like I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, as well as TV programmes like Angel and The Walking Dead, this book challenges these popular assumptions and reveals the increasing interconnection of undead genres. Exploring how the figure of the vampire has been infused with the language of science, disease and apocalypse, while the zombie text has increasingly been influenced by the trope of the 'reluctant' vampire, Stacey Abbott shows how both archetypes are actually two sides of the same undead coin. When considered together they present a dystopian, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of twenty-first century existence.

This important new contribution to studies on authorship and film explores the ways in which shared and disputed opinions on aesthetic quality, originality, and authorial essence have shaped receptions of Lynch's films. It is also the first book to approach David Lynch as a figure composed through language, history, and text.
Tracing the development of Lynch's career from cult obscurity with Eraserhead, to star auteur through the release of Blue Velvet, and TV phenomenon Twin Peaks, Antony Todd examines how his idiosyncratic style introduced the term "Lynchian" to the colloquial speech of new Hollywood and helped establish Lynch as the leading light among contemporary American auteurs. Todd explores contemporary manners and attitudes for artistic reputation building, and the standards by which Lynch's reputation was dismantled following the release of Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, only to be reassembled once more through films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire . In its account of the experiences at play in the encounter between ephemera, text, and reader, this book reveals how authors function for pleasure in the modern filmgoer's everyday consumption of films.

Style. Beauty. Passion. Vision.These are just a few of the words often used to describe the films of the single most celebrated director in Italy, and one of the most important directors the world has ever known,Federico Fellini. Fifty years since their initial releases, his films of the 1960s still inspire, shock, and delight. More than just encapsulating the '60s, these films also helped define the style of the decade. With a staggering twelve Academy Award nominations between his four feature films during this period, Fellini reached the heights of fame, film artistry, and worldwide prominence. Studied, analyzed, and re-released over the years, these films continue to amaze each new generation that discovers them. Their impeccable style makes them timeless. Their images make them unforgettable. Their passion brings them to life. And their singular vision makes them unique in all of cinema. Fellini: The Sixties is a stunning photographic journey through the director's most iconic classics: La Dolce Vita , 81/2 , Juliet of the Spirits , and Fellini Satyricon . Carefully selected imagery from the Independent Visions photographic archive, many published here for the first time, illuminate these films as they have never been seen before, and reveal fascinating details of the director's working style and ebullient personality. With more than 150 photographs struck from original negatives, these images spring to life from the page with the depth and quality of the films themselves. Complemented with insightful essays from contemporary writers, Fellini: The Sixties is a true testament to the man and his work, a remarkable compendium of the legendary filmmaker's greatest achievements.About TCM:Turner Classic Movies is the definitive resource for the greatest movies of all time. It engages, entertains, and enlightens to show how the entire spectrum of classic movies, movie history, and movie-making touches us all and influences how we think and live today.

This collection of exciting new research on British cinema of the 1960s reconsiders and reframes the film culture that emerged from that tumultuous decade. Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes. With perspectives and insights from established scholars and new critical voices, Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered draws on under-explored archival resources to explore four key research areas: stars and stardom; creative collaborations in filmmaking; developments in genre and film style; and how the cinema of the period both responded and contributed to social and cultural transformation in the 1960s.

John Hill's definitive study looks at the career and work of British director Ken Loach. From his early television work ("Cathy Come Home") through to landmark social realsim films ("Kes") and modern examinations of British society ("Looking For Eric") this landmark study reveals Loach as one of the great European directors.

This book is about the British film-maker Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was a highly influential personality within British cinema, mostly famous for landmark films like This Sporting Life (1963) and If....(1968). Lindsay Anderson Revisited deals primarily with hitherto unexplored aspects of his career: his biographical background in the British upper class, his devoted film criticism, and his angry relationship to contemporary society in general. Thus, the book contains chapters about his childhood in India, his writings about John Ford, his relationship to French star Serge Reggiani, his work on TV in the 1950s, his troubles with the British film establishment, and his gradually emerging preoccupation with being Scottish, not English. Also featured are chapters written by close friends of Anderson, who died in 1994, dwelling on his penchant for controversy and quarrel, but also on his remarkable artistic talent and commitment.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La cienaga. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms. -- .

The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundations's And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, " Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.

'Darkly comic, beautifully written and full of surprises' Daily Mail 'Really funny. David is a great writer' Paula Hawkins, Good Housekeeping 'A riotously good novel, witty and earnest, brimming with sharply drawn characters and creeping suspense. David Thewlis is a fabulous writer' Anna Bailey, Sunday Times bestselling author of Tall Bones 'A deliciously smart, hilarious human drama with the pace and intrigue of a gripping thriller. One of the year's most memorable novels' B P Walter, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Dinner Guest Celebrated director Jack Drake can't get through his latest film (his most personal yet) without his wife Martha's support. The only problem is, she's dead... When Jack sees Betty Dean - actress, mother, trainwreck - playing the part of a crazed nun on stage in an indie production of The Devils, he is struck dumb by her resemblance to Martha. Desperate to find a way to complete his masterpiece, he hires her to go and stay in his house in France and resuscitate Martha in the role of 'loving spouse'. But as Betty spends her days roaming the large, sunlit rooms of Jack's mansion - filled to the brim with odd treasures and the occasional crucifix - and her evenings playing the part of Martha over scripted video calls with Jack, she finds her method acting taking her to increasingly dark places. And as Martha comes back to life, she carries with her the truth about her suicide - and the secret she guarded until the end. A darkly funny novel set between a London film set and a villa in the south of France. A mix of Vertigo and Jonathan Coe, written by a master storyteller. PRAISE FOR DAVID THEWLIS'S FICTION 'David Thewlis has written an extraordinarily good novel, which is not only brilliant in its own right, but stands proudly beside his work as an actor, no mean boast' Billy Connolly 'Hilarious and horror-filled' Francesca Segal, Observer 'A fine study in character disintegration... Very funny' David Baddiel, The Times 'Exquisitely written with a warm heart and a wry wit... Stunning' Elle 'Queasily entertaining' Financial Times 'A sharp ear for dialogue and a scabrously satiric prose style' Daily Mail 'Laugh-out-loud, darkly intelligent' Publishers Weekly 'This is far more than an actor's vanity project: Thewlis has talent' Kirkus

Placing Robbe-Grillet's filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique. Now available in paperback, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet's contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged. -- .

Richard Roud's Godard, first published in 1967 as 'Number One' in the seminal Cinema One series, was the first monograph on the great film-maker to be published in English, and one that reveals a unique intimacy between the author and his subject. Roud's provocative and far-reaching analysis shows an intuitive understanding of the aesthetic, intellectual and political context in which Godard worked, paying particular attention to his 'political' cinema, including the ferocious masterpiece Weekend (1967). In his foreword to this reissue, Michael Temple provides an overview of film criticism on Godard, arguing that, more than forty years since its publication, Roud's book remains at the forefront of writings on the director. Temple pinpoints how Roud was uniquely placed as a contemporary of Godard's to follow the film-maker's career from one explosive film to the next, charting the course of the Godardian star even as Roud's own career as a critic and festival programmer was unfolding. He contends that Roud's study was 'a pure product - and a faithful reflection - of a certain tendency in British film culture at the end of the 1960s: cinephile, progressive, European, intellectual, metropolitan.' For Temple, Roud's work remains a lucid summary of what Godard had already achieved by the end of the 1960s, and provides a suggestive model of cultural criticism with which to approach subsequent aspects of Godard's multimedia artistic adventure.

Richard Roud's Godard, first published in 1967 as 'Number One' in the seminal Cinema One series, was the first monograph on the great film-maker to be published in English, and one that reveals a unique intimacy between the author and his subject. Roud's provocative and far-reaching analysis shows an intuitive understanding of the aesthetic, intellectual and political context in which Godard worked, paying particular attention to his 'political' cinema, including the ferocious masterpiece Weekend (1967). In his foreword to this reissue, Michael Temple provides an overview of film criticism on Godard, arguing that, more than forty years since its publication, Roud's book remains at the forefront of writings on the director. Temple pinpoints how Roud was uniquely placed as a contemporary of Godard's to follow the film-maker's career from one explosive film to the next, charting the course of the Godardian star even as Roud's own career as a critic and festival programmer was unfolding. He contends that Roud's study was 'a pure product - and a faithful reflection - of a certain tendency in British film culture at the end of the 1960s: cinephile, progressive, European, intellectual, metropolitan.' For Temple, Roud's work remains a lucid summary of what Godard had already achieved by the end of the 1960s, and provides a suggestive model of cultural criticism with which to approach subsequent aspects of Godard's multimedia artistic adventure.

Available in paperback for the first time, this is a full-length study of the films of Francois Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong's passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon's seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects both his protagonists and his audiences. A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon's alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations. Revealing Ozon as a highly adept 'fan' of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon's importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves. -- .