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. -- .

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.

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.

*** 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.

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world's great filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace patterns of continuity and change, and explore critical assessments of his work over time. His career began in the silent era and ended as the French New Wave was winding down. In between, Duvivier made over sixty films in a long and at times difficult career. He was adept at literary adaptation, biblical epic, and film noir, and this groundbreaking volume illustrates in great detail Duvivier's eclecticism, technical efficiency and visual fluency in works such as Panique (1946) and Voici le temps des assassins (1956). It will particularly appeal to scholars and students of French cinema looking for examples of a director who could straddle the realms of the popular and the auteur. -- .

Offers not only an analytical study of the films of Herzog, perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century and in the present. Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few books devoted to his films, and none addressing his entire career to date. Until now. Forgotten Dreams offers not only an analytical study of Herzog's films but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century. It argues that his films re-envision and help us better understand a critical stream in Romanticism, and places the films in conversation with other filmmakers, authors, and philosophers in order to illuminate that critical stream. The result is a lively reconnection with Romantic themes and convictions that have been partly forgotten in the midst of Germany's postwar rejection of much of Romantic thought, yet are still operative in German culture today. The film analyses will interest scholars of film, German Studies, and Romanticism as well as a broader public interested in Herzog's films and contemporary German cultural debates. The book will also appeal to those interested in the ongoing renegotiation - by Western and other cultures - of relationships between reason and passion, civilization and wild nature, knowledge and belief. Laurie Ruth Johnson is Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

'One of the best things published about cinema.' Sight & Sound

Herzog was once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important director alive. Famous for his frequent collaborations with mercurial actor Klaus Kinski - including the epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the terrifying Nosferatu - and more recently with documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss, Herzog has built a body of work that is one of the most vital in post-war German cinema. Here, he reflects on his legendary and inspiring career.

This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader. -- .

The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963) defies easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to 2013, when he retired from big-screen movie-making to focus on other pursuits including television, the director's output resembles nothing less than an elaborate experiment. Soderbergh's Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean's Eleven movies, Contagion and Magic Mike appear just as risky and outside-the-box as low-budget exercises such as Schizopolis, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience. This updated edition details key career moments: his creative crisis surrounding his fourth film, The Underneath; his rejuvenation with the ultra-low-budget free-style Schizopolis; the mainstream achievements Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean's Eleven films; and his continuing dedication to pushing his craft forward with films as diverse as conspiracy thrillers, sexy dramas, and biopics on Che Guevara and Liberace. Spanning twenty-five years, these conversations reveal Soderbergh to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just beginning to make movies. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself.

'What a life! What a career!' Harold Pinter 'Boorman is one of the world's great directors, a master storyteller.' Paul Auster John Boorman is one of cinema's authentic visionaries whose travels have taken him from London in the Blitz to the pinnacle of Hollywood success: the man behind filmes such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, Hope and Glory, and The General. Conclusions continues the story of his life that Boorman began with Adventures of a Suburban Boy and shares what has happened since its publication: films made (such as the award-winning The General) and unmade; new knowledge about the craft of film-making; and, ultimately, the story of of his kith and kin, including the death of his cherished elder daughter. Wielding a metaphorical Excalibur, Boorman's career has been a continual search for the truth that only art can convey, and this memoir shows him at his finest.

Budd Boetticher was a bullfighter, a bull talker, a pleasant madman and a talented journeyman who could, with the right material and passion, make a minor Western film classic as easily as he could kill a bull. But of course, pain and passion mixed together naturally in both arenas. This is a film-by-film look at his cinematic career, from his days as an assistant's assistant on the set of Hal Roach comedies to his last documentary some 45 years later. This is the first book to examine each of his 34 films in detail, with interviews with those who worked with him providing extra spice and insight.

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.

Twenty years since its release, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut remains a complex, visually arresting film about domesticity, sexual disturbance, and dreams. It was on the director's mind for some 50 years before he finally put it into production. Using the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts, London, and interviews with participants in the production, the authors create an archeology of the film that traces the progress of the film from its origins to its completion, reception, and afterlife. The book is also an appreciation of this enigmatic work and its equally enigmatic creator.

Prolific director Howard Hawks made films in nearly every genre, from gangster movies like ""Scarface"" to comedies like ""Bringing Up Baby"" and ""Monkey Business"" and westerns like ""Rio Bravo."" In this new edition of a classic text, author Robin Wood explores the ways in which Hawks pushed the boundaries of each genre and transformed the traditional forms in new, interesting, and creative ways. This reprint also contains an exciting new introduction by Wood, which shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally changing. Since its original publication in 1972, Wood's ""Howard Hawks"" has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions of the director. The provocative chapters demonstrate the ways in which Hawks's films were affected by the director's personality and way of looking at and feeling things, and by his celebration of instinct, selfrespect, group responsibility, and male camaraderie. Wood's connections between the professionalism of Hawks's action films and comedies, with their ""lure of irresponsibility,"" has become a standard way of conceptualizing Hawks's films and the model to which all later critical work has had to respond. This book remains as contemporary as when it was first released, although it is grounded in the auteur period of its publication.

In 1980, Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas traveled to Lebanon to film a documentary of interviews with Palestinians of the refugee camps around Beirut about their dreams. The Dream: A Diary of the Film is Malas's haunting chronicle of his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh. It also describes the filmmaking process, from the research stage to the film's unofficial release, in Shatila Camp, before it reached a global audience. In vivid and poetic detail, Malas provides a snapshot of Palestinian refugees at a critical juncture of Lebanon's bloody civil war, and at the height of the PLO's power in Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion and the PLO's subsequent expulsion. Malas probes his subjects' dreams and existential fears with an artist's acute sensitivity, revealing the extent to which the wounds and contingencies of Palestinian statelessness are woven into the tapestry of a fragmented Arab nationalism. Although he halted his work on the film in 1982, following the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, he completed it in 1987, turning 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, but they are preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now in digital code. The Dream is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Palestinians in the modern Middle East, and for students and scholars of Arab filmmaking, politics, and literature.

Kelly Reichardt's 1994 debut River of Grass established her gift for a slow-paced realism that emphasizes the ongoing, everyday nature of emergency. Her work since then has communed with--yet remained apart from--postwar European realisms, the American avant-garde, independent film, and the emerging slow cinema movement. Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour read such Reichardt films as Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves to consider the root that emergency shares with emergence --the slowly unfolding or the barely perceptible. They see Reichardt as a filmmaker preoccupied with how environmental and economic crises affect those living on society's fringes. Her spare plots and slow editing reveal an artist who recognizes that disasters are gradual, with effects experienced through duration rather than sudden shock. Insightful and boldly argued, Kelly Reichardt is a long overdue portrait of a filmmaker who sees emergency not as a break from the everyday, but as a version of it.

Discover the secrets of Christopher Nolan's Tenet with this exclusive behind-the-scenes look at 2020's most anticipated film. In 2020, director Christopher Nolan returns with Tenet, an action epic evolving from the world of international espionage. This deluxe book takes fans through the full creative journey that brought Tenet to the screen, from the genesis of Nolan's uniquely imaginative script through to the cutting edge techniques used to realise the film's innovative action sequences. Featuring exclusive interviews with the director and his crew, including producer Emma Thomas and production designer Nathan Crowley, The Making of Tenet is a can't-miss companion to Nolan's thrilling new masterpiece.

'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

This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader. -- .