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.

This book features extended conversations with Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) and interviews with his family members, friends and colleagues-including Salvador Dali, Louis Aragon and Fernando Rey-conducted by Max Aub in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Notorious for inventing fanciful versions of his life and his creative output, Bunuel was hard put to deceive the astute Max Aub, who shared Bunuel's background in Spain, in Paris during the Spanish Civil War, and in Mexico, where they were friends and collaborators. Originally published in Spain in 1985, this translated (the first in English) and expanded edition (with several significant interviews and a detailed index not found in the original) provides a detailed picture of Bunuel's life and art. Extensive notes contextualise the conversations and acknowledge the discoveries of recent studies on Bunuel.

Mark Lewis' work functions as a critique of cinema, encouraging the viewer's awareness of the cliches, conventions and fragmentary nature of film, and how it has been constructed historically. In so doing, he also acknowledges its suggestive power, and the alluring, seductive visual qualities of the medium, whilst maintaining a certain critical distance in his extraction and re-evaluation of its components. This catalogue provides a survey of Lewis' film works from 1995-2000.

Hitchcock Annual, volume 23, includes essays on Hitchcock's use of silence in his films, civilians at war in his World War II trilogy, melodrama and the Christian imagination in Under Capricorn, filming thought and feeling in Strangers on a Train, and remaking the romance in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as "Scanners" and "A History of Violence" which aim to disturb, surprise, and challenge audiences. He has also repeatedly drawn on literary fiction for inspiration, adapting themes from authors like William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Patrick McGrath for the big screen; "David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker?" is the first book to explore how underground and mainstream fiction have influenced--and can help illuminate--his labyrinthine films.
Film scholar Mark Browning examines Cronenberg's literary aesthetic not only in relation to his films' obvious source material, but by comparing his movies to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and Bret Easton Ellis. This groundbreaking volume addresses Cronenberg's narrative structures and his unique conception of auteurism, as well as his films' shocking psychological frameworks, all in the broader context of film adaptation studies. "David Cronenberg" is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking. ""David Cronenberg" is a work that attempts to illuminate and unravel the connection between the great Canadian auteur and his literary influences."--"Film Snob Weekly""" ""David Cronenberg" is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking."--"Video Canada"""
"" ""

Tim Burton is one of the most inventive filmmakers in the world. From his early work as an animator for Disney studios to his distinctive takes on iconic characters like Batman and Alice in Wonderland, Burton's skewed vision of the world has informed all of his films. Imbuing his films with a comically dark tone, Burton provides a twisted slant on conventional storytelling. In The Tim Burton Encyclopedia, Samuel J. Umland looks at all aspects of this idiosyncratic storyteller's films, which frequently display childlike wonder and a macabre humor. Entries in this volume focus on Burton's artistic inspirations as well as creative personnel behind the camera, including writers, cinematographers, costume designers, art directors, and other collaborators, notably his frequent composer Danny Elfman. Recurring actors are also represented, such as Michael Keaton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Jack Nicholson, and, of course, Johnny Depp. Film entries include all of his features such as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Big Fish, and Dark Shadows. Each entry is followed by a bibliography of published sources, both in print and online. Featuring entries focused on every stage of Burton's career-including early animated shorts like Frankenweenie and his work as a producer-this volume provides indispensable information about one of the most distinctive filmmakers of the past three decades. Comprehensive and entertaining, The Tim Burton Encyclopedia will appeal to scholars, researchers, and fans of this singular director's work.

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of history and politics. Yet Rohmer was almost fifty years old when Maud was released and had already had a career as the editor of Cahiers du Cinema, a position he lost in a political takeover in 1963. The interviews in this book offer a range of insights into the theoretical, critical, and practical circumstances of Rohmer's remarkably coherent body of films, but also allow Rohmer to act as his own critic, providing us with an array of readings concerning his interest in setting, season, color, and narrative. Alongside the application of a theoretical rigor to his own films, Rohmer's interviews also discuss directors as varied as Godard, Carne, Renoir, and Hitchcock, and the relations of film to painting, architecture, and music. This book reproduces little-known interviews, such as a debate Rohmer undertakes with Women and Film concerning feminism, alongside detailed discussions from Cahiers and Positif, many produced in English here for the first time.

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre.

Kurt Kren was a vital figure in Austrian avant-garde cinema of the postwar period. His structural films--often shot frame-by-frame following elaborately prescored charts and diagrams--have influenced filmmakers for decades, even as Kren himself remained a nomadic and obscure public figure. Kurt Kren, edited by Nicky Hamlyn, Simon Payne, and A. L. Rees, brings together interviews with Kren, film scores, and classic, out-of-print essays, alongside the reflections of contemporary academics and filmmakers, to add much-needed critical discussion of Kren's legacy. Taken together, the collection challenges the canonical view of Kren that ignores his underground lineage and powerful, lyrical imagery.

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and theory in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno as well as in the "Objectivist" movement, a crucial group within American modernist poetry whose members included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, with connections to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoit Turquety locates common practices and explores a singular aesthetic approach where a work of art is conceived as an object, the artist an anonymous artisan, and where the force of politics and formal research attempt to reconcile with one another.

Tracking Loach presents a ground-breaking and unique contribution to the study of cinema. Archibald was granted unprecedented access to observe one of world cinema's most celebrated and controversial filmmakers, Ken Loach, while he was making the 2012 feature The Angels Share, which received The Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This book draws on this knowledge to offer a first-hand account of the director's celebrated working methods, supplemented with insights gleaned from the British Film Institute's Loach archive, and analysis of his wider output and film-related political activity. Archibald has been 'Tracking Loach' for over three decades, as film viewer, film critic and film academic, and this inside perspective not only offers fresh insights into Loach's films and how they are made, but also highlights the benefits of production studies to the understanding of cinema more broadly.

Eschewing the idea of film reviewer-as-solitary-expert, Jonathan Rosenbaum continues to advance his belief that a critic's ideal role is to mediate and facilitate our public discussion of cinema. Portraits and Polemics presents debate as an important form of cinematic encounter whether one argues with filmmakers themselves, on behalf of their work, or with one's self. Rosenbaum takes on filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Richard Linklater, Manoel De Oliveira, Mark Rappaport, Elaine May, and Bela Tarr. He also engages, implicitly and explicitly, with other writers, arguing with Pauline Kael-and Wikipedia-over Jacques Demy, with the Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviewers of Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, with David Thomson about James L. Brooks, and with many American and English film critics about misrepresented figures from Jerry Lewis to Yasujiro Ozu to Orson Welles. Throughout, Rosenbaum mines insights, pursues pet notions, and invites readers to join the fray.

A spectacular and comprehensive authorized retrospective of Oscar-winning visual effects master Phil Tippett, founder and namesake of iconic Tippett StudioFrom Star Wars to Jurassic Park and RoboCop to Starship Troopers, special effects master Phil Tippett has brought his magic to some of the most iconic films of all time. His unparalleled career in visual effects spans more than 40 years, with two Academy Awards, one BAFTA, and two Emmys. This stunning book celebrates Tippett's career, from early Super 8 explorations through his groundbreaking work with Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks, and beyond. While Tippett's first love remains the stop-motion animation that made him a Hollywood legend, he was present at the birth of big-screen digital effects, and his genius has evolved with the times. In 1984 he founded Tippett Studio, which has come to specialize in digital effects.Packed with over a thousand behind-the-scenes photographs, Mad Dreams and Monsters includes never-before-published stories from the master himself and a veritable who's who of visual effects luminaries-a must-have for movie fans, film students, and anyone who's ever been captivated by movie magic.

William Friedkin is the director of genre-defining works such as The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), controversial productions like Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011), as well as understudied films including The Birthday Party (1968), Sorcerer (1977) and The Hunted (2003). This book, the first scholarly study of Friedkin's films, reveals how they confront the ambiguities of law and morality, issues of subjectivity and problems of faith, while raising key questions around emotion and narrative in the cinema.Placing his work in the historical contexts of the Vietnam War and Nixon's presidency, ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin also examines the director's representations of sex and violence after the dismantling of the Production Code and in light of the rise and fall of New Hollywood cinema.

A queer auteur who plays with generic conventions, Francois Ozon is one of France's most prolific and best known international directors, who has built a filmography that not only engages in the representation of non-normative sexualities, kinship and violence, but also makes room for social outcasts and marginalised communities. This edited collection brings together renowned and emergent scholars to investigate further questions of minority, queerness, (queer) intertextuality and gender representations, as well as secrecy, transgression and intimacy in his films, offering the most up-to-date study of Francois Ozon's cinema.

Ivan Dixon's 1973 film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, captures the intensity of social and political upheaval during a volatile period in American history. Based on Sam Greenlee's novel by the same name, the film is a searing portrayal of an American Black underclass brought to the brink of revolution. This series of critical essays situates the film in its social, political, and cinematic contexts and presents a wealth of related materials, including an extensive interview with Sam Greenlee, the original United Artists' press kit, numerous stills from the film, and the original screenplay. This fascinating examination of a revolutionary work foregrounds issues of race, class, and social inequality that continue to incite protests and drive political debate.

This is the first sustained critical collection on Albert Brooks, one of the key but under-examined figures in American stand-up, television comedy and Hollywood film comedy. Analysing every film written and directed by Albert Brooks, including Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981) and Lost in America (1985), as well as a number of his acting and voice-over roles, his stand-up comedy albums, talk show appearances and writing, the book argues that Albert Brooks not only merits a wider viewership, both critical and popular, but also that his career offers a useful lens through which to understand American film and culture since the late 1960s.

Learn about the visual and performing arts in The Movie Book. Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Movies in this overview guide to the subject, brilliant for beginners looking to learn and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Movie Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Movies, with: - More than 100 of the best movies ever made worldwide - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts - A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout - Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understanding The Movie Book is the perfect introduction to the rich history of cinema like never before - from the golden age of black-and-white films to international art-house and 21st-century sci-fi, aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Here you'll discover more than 100 of the best movies ever made, uncovering the key themes and big ideas behind the world's most celebrated cinematic gems. Your Movie Questions, Simply Explained This book brings cinema to life with iconic quotes and film stills, posters, biographies of directors, actors, and actresses, along with narrative timelines and images exploring key themes. If you thought it was difficult to learn about the best cinematic masterpieces, The Movie Book presents key information in an easy to follow layout. Learn everything about your favourite movies, as well as celebrated classics and the films to watch before you die, through iconic quotes and stills, posters, biographies, memorabilia and narrative timelines, through superb mind maps and step-by-step summaries. The Big Ideas Series With millions of copies sold worldwide, The Movie Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.

In the New Yorker, Stephen Schiff has described Fred Schepisi (b. 1939) as "probably the least-known great director working in the mainstreamAmerican cinema-a master storyteller with a serenely muscular style that can make more flamboyant moviemakers look coarse and overweening." Schepisi's launch in Australia during the country's film renaissance of the 1970s and his ongoing international work have rightfully earned him a reputation as an actors' director. But he has also become a skillful stylist, forging his own way as he works alongside a talented team of collaborators. This volume includes twenty interviews with Schepisi andtwo with longtime collaborators, cinematographer Ian Baker and composer Paul Grabowsky. The interviews trace the filmmaker's career from his beginnings in advertising, through his two early Australian features-The Devil's Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith-to his subsequent work in the United Statesand beyond on films as various as Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation, Empire Falls, Last Orders, and Eye of the Storm. Schepisi's films are diverse thematically and visually. In what is effectively a master class on film direction, Schepisi discusses his creative choices and his workwith actors and collaborators behind the scenes. In the process, he provides a goldmine of insights into his films, his filmmaking style, and what makes him tick as an artist.

In the course of a decades-spanning career as a filmmaker, Terrence Malick has carved out a distinctive cinematic aesthetic. Central to this style is the use of sound. James Wierzbicki offers the first comprehensive study of Malick's soundtracks, arguing that they create a distinctive sonic style throughout his oeuvre and exploring how that style functions. Considering voice, noise, and music as elements in the soundtrack, this concise book enriches our understanding of one of our most philosophical filmmakers, and of the interplay between the sonic and visual elements in film.

ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' 100 BEST SUMMER READS OF 2020 'It's hard to beat Susanna Moore's Miss Aluminium' Vogue 'A sharp-edged summery treat' Hadley Freeman 'Unlike any Hollywood memoir you'll have read' Metro At seventeen, Susanna Moore left her home in Hawai'i, with no money, no belongings and no prospects. But in Philadelphia, an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises. Her journey takes her from New York to Los Angeles where she becomes a model and meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. She works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and is given a screen test by Mike Nichols. But beneath Miss Aluminium's glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl's insatiable hunger to learn. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies and of a young woman's hard-won arrival at selfhood.

For more than three decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have produced some of the most unique and thought-provoking works in modern cinema. In broad comedies such as Raising Arizona, violent thrillers like No Country for Old Men, and black comedies such as Fargo, the filmmakers have offered brilliant takes on a variety of film genres. One of the most distinctive features of their movies is their skewed view of America itself. In The Coen Brothers' America, M. Keith Booker discusses feature films produced by the pair since their 1984 debut Blood Simple. The author focuses on how the Coen brothers' films engage with American cultural history and are embedded in specific geographical settings. From New York to Los Angeles, from Texas to Minnesota, the Coens capture the essence of real locations from unusual angles, which often make the films appear as if they are taking place in an alternate reality. In addition, many of the brothers' films are steeped in America's cultural past, from the deep south of the 1930s in O Brother, Where Art Thou to the Greenwich Village of the 1960s in Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coens make particularly effective use of films from Hollywood's Golden Age, producing their own updated versions of such genres as film noir (The Man Who Wasn't There), the Western (True Grit), and screwball comedy (The Hudsucker Proxy)-not to mention their idiosyncratic depictions of Hollywood itself in Barton Fink and Hail Caesar! This book also explores how the Coens draw upon cultural phenomena outside of film, including literature, music, and television. Approaching each film within the framework of Ethan and Joel's overall vision. The Coen Brothers' America provides an entertaining look at the pair's work that will appeal to scholars and fans alike.