Malcolm St. Clair was a master director of sophisticated silent comedy. This book traces his career, from his start as a Mack Sennett Keystone Kop, through the action-adventures of the early 1920s, his work with Buster Keaton, the grand and elegant sophisticated comedies for Paramount in the '20s (Are Parents People?, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Canary Murder Case), his transition to sound films, and the comedies for 20th Century-Fox. Includes a 16 page photo insert.

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Authorship and Aesthetics' examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. 'French Hitchcock' looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. 'Poetics and Politics of Identity' explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work, and the final section, 'Death and Transfiguration' addresses teh manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece Psycho.

Joss Whedon's short-lived series Firefly developed a fierce following while it aired on FOX from 2002 to 2003. After its cancellation, fans cried foul and demanded more, which eventually led to the 2005 feature film follow-up Serenity. The series and film were celebrated for their mixing of science fiction and western iconography, dystopic settings, underdog storylines, and clever and fast-paced dialogue. Firefly and Serenity have inspired many books and essays, but despite this, relatively few publications have focused specifically on Serenity, with Firefly often standing at the forefront of critical and scholarly consideration. It is certainly difficult to divorce the film from the series, but numerous features of Serenity do set it apart. In the first collection of essays devoted specifically to Serenity, authors from around the world offer various perspectives on the film, treating it as a text worthy of consideration on its own terms and touching on everything from formal properties, to narrative completion, to genre, to race, to systems of power, and everything in between.

A NEW, REVISED EDITION OF THE ULTIMATE NORA EPHRON COLLECTION, PACKED WITH WIT, WISDOM AND COMFORT, WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS 'The perfect introduction to the iconic writer' STYLIST INCLUDING: * Nora's much-loved essays on everything from friendship to feminism to journalism * Extracts from her bestselling novel Heartburn * Scenes from her hilarious screenplay for When Harry Met Sally * Unparalleled advice about friends, lovers, divorces, desserts and black turtleneck sweaters 'It's got a little bit of everything, from witty essays on feminism, beauty, and ageing to profiles of empowering female figures' ELLE *PRAISE FOR NORA EPHRON* 'So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don't know how she did it' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE 'Nora's exacting, precise, didactic, tried-and-tested, sophisticated-woman-wearing-all-black wisdom is a comfort and a relief' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Nora Ephron is the funniest, cleverest, wisest friend you could have' NIGELLA LAWSON 'I am only the one of millions of women who will miss Nora's voice' LENA DUNHAM

Best known for powerful 1950s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) brought to all his work a distinctive style that led to his reputation as one of twentieth-century film's great directors. Sirk worked in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany's UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and '50s. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions provides an overview of his entire career, including Sirk's work on musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies, and westerns. One of the great ironists of the cinema, Sirk believed rules were there to be broken. Whether defying the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or arguing with studios that insisted characters' problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, what Sirk called "emergency exits" for audiences, Sirk always fought for his vision. Offering fresh insights into all of the director's films and situating them in the culture of their times, critic Tom Ryan also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including his own conversations with the director. Furthermore, his enlightening study undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk's films, as well as providing a critical survey of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director's "rediscovery" in the late 1960s up to the present day.

Twelve years ago, Amores Perros erupted in the cinemas across the world and announced the arrival of Mexican film-makers. The film-makers profiled in that book have now come of age and have made a decisive impact on the international cinema scene The last few years Mexican film-makers winning the Best Director Oscars 5 times, and Best Picture 4 times: Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity and Roma. Alejandro Inarritu with Birdman and The Revenant Guillermo del Toro with The Shape of Water This revised edition of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema brings this astounding story up to date, as well as profiling the next generation, waiting in the wings.

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.

"Scripting Hitchcock" explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: "Psycho, The Birds, " and "Marnie." Drawing from extensive interviews with the screenwriters and other film technicians who worked for Hitchcock, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick illustrate how much of the filmmaking process took place not on the set or in front of the camera, but in the adaptation of the sources, the mutual creation of plot and characters by the director and the writers, and the various revisions of the written texts of the films. Hitchcock allowed his writers a great deal of creative freedom, which resulted in dynamic screenplays that expanded traditional narrative and defied earlier conventions. Critically examining the question of authorship in film, Raubicheck and Srebnick argue that Hitchcock did establish visual and narrative priorities for his writers, but his role in the writing process was that of an editor. While the writers and their contributions have generally been underappreciated, this study reveals that all the dialogue and much of the narrative structure of the films were the work of screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Joseph Stefano, and Evan Hunter. The writers also shaped American cultural themes into material specifically for actors such as Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and Tony Perkins. This volume gives due credit to those writers who gave narrative form to Hitchcock's filmic vision.

We know what actors do. We know what writers do. But what does a movie producer do, other than arrange financing for films and accept Academy Awards? Featuring in-depth interviews with 13 top movie producers, including eight who have won Oscars for Best Picture, this book describes how they nurture a project from concept to casting to screen. They are entrepreneurs, essentially creating a new business every time they start work on a feature film. They possess an array of skills and talents and the resilience and the fortitude to not take ""no"" for an answer. Interviewees include Marc Abraham, Tony Bill, Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa, Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford, Mark Johnson, Arnold Kopelson, Alan Ladd, Jr., Michael London, Fred Roos, Paula Wagner and Jim Wilson.

Claire Denis is one of France's most acclaimed and original filmmakers. Since her remarkable debut success with "Chocolat "(1986), she has produced an impressive series of features which have been intriguing, visually striking, and often highly controversial--including "Beau Travail" (2000) and "Trouble Every Day" (2001). Beugnet provides a thematic and stylistic framework within which to consider Denis' work, as well as a comprehensive analysis of individual films. She highlights the resonance of Denis' films in relation to ongoing debates about French national identity and culture, and issues of postcolonial identity, alienation and transgression, as well as examining their exploration of the interface between sexuality, desire and sensuality.This is an essential introduction to Denis, and a sophisticated and illuminating study of her work to date.

This new textbook is an abridgment of the authors earlier Woody Allens Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (McFarland, 1997; "invaluable"--Choice.) Five main topics are explored: the desire of many of his characters to ground their lives in traditional ethical values despite their realization that such values may no longer be certain; the opposition between pessimism and optimism throughout his films; gender issues relating to romantic love, sexual desire, and the ongoing changes in our cultural expectations of both men and women; the idea that contemporary American society is rapidly descending into barbarism precisely because of societal failure to maintain a sense of individual moral responsibility; and a critique of psychoanalysis as a method for understanding human behavior.

The first full-length account of the life and work of Joseph H. Lewis, the noted director of films such as My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and The Halliday Brand (1957). Because most commentators and interviewers have focused on Lewis' contributions to film noir and particularly Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, Nevins tries to give equal time to Lewis' early B westerns and television series episodes, including episodes of The Rifleman and Gunsmoke that he directed at the end of his career. Nevins's narrative is interspersed with Lewis's own reflections on his life and career, adding a personal element that enlivens the text. A detailed filmography includes Lewis's editorial work, feature films, and episodes of TV series.

In 1978 animation director Yoshiyuki Tomino set forth to change the Japanese animation industry. For decades prior, Japanese science fiction had churned out numerous tales of semi-autonomous robots that would often come to the aide of humanity, but as someone who worked on a number of those works, Tomino came to the realization that he wanted to see a more realistic robot narrative. His vision was one where the robot while just slightly more human in appearance, was utilized more as a tool manipulated by man. With renowned artist Yoshikazu Yasuhiko by his side, and occasionally as his artistic rival, Tomino would change the way the whole world came to see Japanese animation and the broader toy and comics industries built around it. This evolution would be a war in its own right! Battles were fought in the offices of the animation studio! Conflicts were equally as heated in the recording booth!

"Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers" explores the different ways in which Italian American directors from the 1920s to the present have responded to their ethnicity. While some directors have used film to declare their ethnic roots and create an Italian American "imagined community," others have ignored or even denied their background. Jonathan J. Cavallero examines the films of Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino with a focus on what the films reveal about each director's view on Italian American identities. Whereas Capra's films highlight similarities between immigrant characters and WASP Americans, Scorsese accepts his ethnic heritage but also sees it as confining. Similarly, many of Coppola's films provide a nostalgic treatment of Italian American identity, but with little criticism of the culture's more negative aspects. And while Savoca's movies reveal her artful ability to recognize how ethnic, gender, and class identities overlap, Tarantino's films exhibit a playfully postmodern engagement with Italian American ethnicity. Cavallero's exploration of the films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino demonstrates how immigrant Italians fought prejudice, how later generations positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors, and how the American cinema, usually seen as a cultural institution that works to assimilate, has also served as a forum where assimilation was resisted.

Yorkshire-born Ken Annakin was one of the greatest international film directors. The last of the English directors to make it in the international arena (others included Hitchcock and Lean), this autobiography traces Annakin's career from his early British films through to Hollywood. He has directed, written and produced over 50 feature films in Africa, India, Malaysia, Scandinavia, China, Europe and the United States. His films include: Swiss Family Robinson, The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Annakin's autobiography will include personal and revealing insights into many film personalities, including:

Claudette Colbert

David Niven

Rod Steiger

Henry Fonda

Robert Ryan

Julie Christie

Charles Bronson

Peter Ustinov

Walt Disney

Edward G. Robinson

Raquel Welch

Tony Curtis

Olivia de Havilland

Charlton Heston

Robert Wagner

Peter Sellers

Darryl Zanuck

Terry Thomas

This book is forthright and pulls no punches; it will soon become a classic among director's autobiographies. Detailing his own frustrations with sex-mad producers, drug-addicted actors, and unions which sabotaged multi-million dollar feature films, Annakin details a career of dizzying highs and bleak lows. This master of "family entertainment" also sounds a clarion call for a return to motion pictures which are fun for the whole family. So You Wanna Be A Director? is an entertaining and witty travelogue, as well as an important document of film history.

Started in Shanghai in the 1920s, the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio began to dominate the worldwide Chinese film market after moving its production facilities to Hong Kong in 1957. Drawing together scholars from such diverse disciplines as history, cultural geography, and film studies, "China Forever" addresses how the Shaw Brothers raised the production standards of Hong Kong cinema, created a pan-Chinese cinema culture and distribution network, helped globalize Chinese-language cinema, and appealed to the cultural nationalism of the Chinese who found themselves displaced and unsettled in many parts of the world during the twentieth century. Contributors are Timothy P. Barnard, Cheng Pei-pei, Ramona Curry, Poshek Fu, Lane J. Harris, Law Kar, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Lilly Kong, Siu Leung Li, Paul G. Pickowicz, Fanon Che Wilkins, Wong Ain-ling, and Sai-shing Yung.

As the first full-length study on Paul Schrader's films, this book examines the different styles of his work and the multiple influences on which it draws. A defining feature of Schrader's career is his capacity to engage in a range of collaborations and production contexts while returning to a consistent set of themes, character types, and dramatic scenarios. Going beyond the affirmation of a directorial vision, Schrader creates a cinema driven by issues of obsession, memory, and the difficult nature of experience. Representative of a new generation of American writer-directors of the 1970s, Schrader's films highlight the tension between old and new ways of telling a story and between the maintenance of commercial formulas and openness to individual expression. George Kouvaros draws on a personal interview conducted with Schrader and the director's prior commentary to trace common motivations and impulses behind such well-known films as "Light Sleeper," "American Gigolo," "Affliction, Auto Focus," "Taxi Driver," and "Patty Hearst," Kouvaros reads Schrader's films not only in terms of a number of important themes such as male obsession and estrangement, but also in regard to harder to define issues that include melancholia, trauma, and the complex linkages of violence and guilt that bind individuals to places and each other.

In Francois Truffaut's opinion The Innocents was 'the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America'. Tennessee Williams said of The Great Gatsby: 'a film whose artistry even surpassed the original novel'. The maker of both films was Jack Clayton, one of the finest English directors of the post-war era and perhaps best remembered for the trail-blazing Room at the Top which brought a new sexual frankness and social realism to the British screen. This is the first full-length critical study of Clayton's work. The author has been able to consult and quote from the director's own private papers which illuminate Clayton's creative practices and artistic intentions. In addition to fresh analyses of the individual films, the book contains new material on Clayton's many unrealised projects and valuably includes his previously unpublished short story 'The Enchantment' - as poignant and revealing as the films themselves. This is a personal and fascinating account of the career and achievement of an important, much-loved director that should appeal to students and film enthusiasts. -- .

Pop culture icon and media mogul Oprah Winfrey has produced or starred in ten films and telefilms. In this collection, the contributors use film, music, masculinity, black feminist, and cultural studies to examine the role Winfrey has played as actress, and in some cases producer, of films that interpret works published by African American writers between 1937 and 1996. Their essays critically examine representations of African Americans and sexuality, blues, class, inter-racial and intra-racial prejudices, and their intersection with Winfrey's influence as interpreter and mediator of African American literature and culture to diverse audiences.

Hitchcock's previously untold origin story. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," the one that anticipated all the others. And yet the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, even by Hitchcock himself. The First True Hitchcock focuses on the twelve-month period that encompassed The Lodger's production in 1926 and release in 1927, presenting a new picture of this pivotal year in Hitchcock's life and in the wider film world. Using fresh archival discoveries, Henry K. Miller situates Hitchcock's formation as a director against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, and its most visible export-film. The previously untold story of The Lodger's making in the London fog-and attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sun-is the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock.

BAFTA-AWARD winning documentary-maker, Christopher Nupen has made more than 80 films on classical music and musicians. Here, he tells the story of his varied and often astonishing life and invites us to share his view of `Listening through the Lens'. The book comes with a 13 minute DVD showcasing a selection of his finest films. His pioneering portrait-films count among their subjects Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pre, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Nathan Milstein, Andres Segovia, Yevgeny Kissin, Karim Said, and Daniil Trifonov, many of whom have become lifelong friends. His 1969 film The Trout is legend. His film We Want the Light has won some of the most prized awards in documentary making, including the Jewish Cultural Award for Film and Television, 2003/2004.

Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989) is one of the most popular and celebrated examples of the African-American new black film wave. Set during the hottest day of a hot summer in New York City, the film's ensemble cast, including Lee himself, brilliantly play out the edgy negotiations and dramas of a racially and culturally diverse working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Contrary to Hollywood's markedly cautious treatment of 'race' and its confinement to the South and the past, Do The Right Thing offers a nuanced portrayal of black urban life.From hip-hop fashions, Afrocentric colors and rap music, to police brutality, gentrification, non-white immigration, de-industrialization and joblessness, Do The Right Thing depicts it all, from a contemporary, African-American point of view. In his insightful study of the film, Ed Guerrero discusses how it epitomizes Spike Lee's powerful impact on the representation of race and difference in America, the progress of black film-making and the rise of multicultural voices in the media. This new edition includes a foreword by the author reflecting on Lee's subsequent film-making career and on an America in which African-Americans still contend with racial discrimination and police brutality. Guerrero emphasizes Lee's especially timely understanding of black film-making as a complex act, mixing the skills of art, politics, and business in order to fashion a creative practice that confronts institutional discrimination and power relations head on.

Glorious Catastrophe presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Jack Smith from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Dominic Johnson argues that Smith's work offers critical strategies for rethinking art's histories after 1960. Heralded by peers as well as later generations of artists, Smith is an icon of the New York avant-garde. Nevertheless, he is conspicuously absent from dominant histories of American culture in the 1960s, as well as from narratives of the impact that decade would have on coming years. Smith poses uncomfortable challenges to cultural criticism and historical analysis, which Glorious Catastrophe seeks to uncover. The first critical analysis of Smith's practices across visual art, film, performance, and writing, the study employs extensive, original archival research carried out in Smith's personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the life and art of Jack Smith, and the greater histories that he interrupts, including those of experimental arts practices, and the development of sexual cultures.

*** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER "I loved it. An amazing book." - Louis Theroux "A rip-roaring read. It left me breathless." - Chris Evans, Virgin Radio "Raw, savagely honest, as dramatic as any of his movies." - Mail on Sunday "A tremendous book - readable, funny and harrowing." - The Sunday Times "Riveting." - The New York Times "A fascinating exposure of Stone's inner life and his powerful, all devouring energy and genius that drove him to become one of the world's greatest filmmakers." - Sir Anthony Hopkins "... a Hollywood movie in itself." - Spike Lee Chasing the Light is Oliver Stone's intimate and ground-breaking filmmaker's memoir - and a razor-sharp insider's tour of Hollywood during its 70s and 80s upheaval. With disarming honesty, he takes us from a childhood on New York's Upper East Side through the combat zones of Vietnam, inside the clandestine worlds of Chinatown's gang lords and Miami's cocaine trade - and behind the glittering and often drug-addled Los Angeles movie society scene. And from Midnight Express through Scarface, and Salvador he discovers his own dogged determination, a marked rebellious streak and a drive to make controversial films that matter. How he strung together the realistic, radical and ultimately box office smash Platoon is in itself a 10-year adventure of financial intrigue, perseverance and near-death experiences that culminates in the depths of the Philippine jungle with Stone pushing himself, the crew and young cast almost beyond breaking point. Written fearlessly with intense detail and colour, this is what it's like to make films on the edge.

Albert Maysles has created some of the most influential documentaries of the postwar period. Such films as "Salesman, ""Gimme Shelter, " and "Grey Gardens" continue to generate intense debate about the ethics and aesthetics of the documentary form. In this in-depth study, Joe McElhaney offers a novel understanding of the historical relevance of Maysles. By closely focusing on Maysles's expressive use of his camera, particularly in relation to the filming of the human figure, this book situates Maysles's films within not only documentary film history but film history in general, arguing for their broad-ranging importance to both narrative film and documentary cinema. Complete with an engaging interview with Maysles and a detailed comparison of the variant releases of his documentary on the Beatles ("What's Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A." and "The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit"), this work is a pivotal study of a significant filmmaker.