Nominated for both an Academy Award for scriptwriting and a National Book Award, John Sayles has written screenplays, teleplays, short stories, and novels and has worked as a script doctor for a virtual who's who of Hollywood film and television talent. He has acted in films and on stage and even directed a music video for Bruce Springsteen.

In making movies, Sayles has handled subjects as diverse as seventies activists in "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" (1980); a 1920s Appalachian miners' strike in "Matewan" (1987); the 1919 Black Sox scandal in "Eight Men Out" (1988); the Selkies of Ireland in "The Secret of Roan Inish" (1994); and Latin American guerilla warfare in "Men with Guns" (1997).

Conducted over a period of twenty years, these interviews span Sayles's career as a writer, director, and sometimes actor. Whether he is interviewed in "The Progressive," "Film Comment," "Sight and Sound," or Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone Magazine," Sayles is always direct and candid. In each conversation, he cuts to the core of the film business and to the meat of what he is trying to accomplish as an artist.

Known for his fiercely independent vision, his authentic characters, and his provocative observations on the human condition, Sayles demonstrates in these interviews what an endurably original director and artist he is. As he tells "Sight and Sound," "First of all, I'm not afraid of failure. I don't get upset if people don't like it. I'm doing it because I'm interested. . . "Return of the Secaucus Seven"] was the start, because even if I hadn't got it released, at least I've made a movie I wanted to make."

Diane Carson is Professor of Film Studies at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and Adjunct Professor of Film at Webster University, both in St. Louis, Missouri. A film critic for "Riverfront Times" and KDHX in St. Louis, she is also the editor of "Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism."

These interviews cover the career to date of Neil Jordan (b. 1950), easily the most renowned filmmaker working in contemporary Irish cinema. Jordan began as a fiction writer, winning the distinguished Guardian Fiction Prize for his very first book of short stories, Night in Tunisia, in 1976. His film debut was made during the peak of the Troubles in Ireland, and he addresses the sectarian violence head-on in his first outing, Angel (1982). This film also marked Jordan's long-time association with the actor Stephen Rea who has appeared in nine of the director's films and is often seen as Jordan's doppelganger. Angel was awarded the London Evening Standard Most Promising Newcomer Award, the first of many accolades. These include the London Critics Circle Award for Best Film and Best Director for The Company of Wolves (1984), Best Film at the BAFTAs, as well as an Academy Award for Best Screenwriter for The Crying Game (1992), Best Film at the Venice Film Festival for Michael Collins (1996), Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival for The Butcher Boy (1997), and a BAFTA for Best Screenplay for The End of the Affair (1999). The director continued to publish works of fiction as well as writing the scripts for most of his feature films, and in 2011 he produced a highly regarded novel, Mistaken, set in Jordan's home turf of Dublin and featuring characters who are duplicates of one another as well as mysterious arrivals and departures at the home of the Irish author of Dracula, Bram Stoker. The filmmaker has most recently produced, written, and directed the television series The Borgias (starring Jeremy Irons) and completed his fourteenth feature film, Byzantium, the story of a mother and daughter vampire duo, recalling his earlier work on Interview with the Vampire (1994). Carole Zucker, Charlotte, Vermont, is professor of cinema at Concordia University in Montreal and an instructor of acting workshops at the Flynn Center for Education in Burlington, Vermont. Her previous books include The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival and In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting.

Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors. Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.

A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. Whether working with talking dolls in a homemade short (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) or with Oscar-winning performers in an HBO miniseries (Mildred Pierce), Haynes has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. In all his films, Haynes works to portray the struggles of characters in conflict with the norms of society. Many of his movies focus on female characters, drawing inspiration from genres such as the woman's film and the disease movie (Far from Heaven and Safe); others explore male characters who transgress sexual and other social conventions (Poison and Velvet Goldmine). The writer-director has drawn on figures such as Karen Carpenter, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Bob Dylan in his meditations on American and British music, celebrity, and the meaning of identity. His 2007 movie I'm Not There won a number of awards and was notable for Haynes's decision to cast six different actors (one of whom was a woman) to portray Dylan. Gathering interviews from 1989 through 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes. JULIA LEYDA, Tokyo, Japan, is associate professor of English at Sophia University. She has published in Television and New Media, Bright Lights Film Journal, La Furia Umana, Contemporary Women's Writing, Cinema Journal, and other journals.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

Until the first edition of "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been.

This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work--including "Amistad," "Saving Private Ryan," "A. I. Artifucial Intelligence," "Minority Report," "The Terminal" and "Munich"--has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter.

"Steven Spielberg: A Biography" brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.

This is an electrifying biography, by one of America's foremost film scholars, of the controversial director Elia Kazan (1909-2003), that looks at the man and his art in the context of the social, political, and cultural environments in which he lived and worked. From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. In that role, he manifestly shaped the conception and writing, as well as the presentation, of many of the period's iconic works, reshaping the values of the stage and bringing a new realism and intensity of performance to the screen. His various achievements include the original Broadway productions of "All My Sons", "A Streetcar Named Desire", and "Death of a Salesman" and such Hollywood films as "Brando's Streetcar", "On the Waterfront", "East of Eden", and "Splendor in the Grass". These enormously popular works, in turn, shaped the social, sexual, and political ideas of a generation. The result is an intelligent and lively biography and social history.

Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman is the first musical examination of Bergman's style as an auteur filmmaker. It provides a comprehensive examination of all three aspects (music, sound effects, and voice) of Bergman's signature soundtrack-style. Through examinations of Bergman's biographical links to music, the role of music, sound effects, silence, and voice, and Bergman's working methods with sound technicians, mixers, and editors, this book argues that Bergman's soundtracks are as superbly developed as his psychological narratives and breathtaking cinematography. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book bridges the fields of music, sound, and film.

One of Canada's premier cinematic exports, Guy Maddin (b. 1956) is an award-winning filmmaker with a rising reputation. Known for his autobiographical tales---hidden deeply within comical, absurd, and surrealistic narratives---Maddin has earned international acclaim, including a lifetime achievement award at the Telluride Film Festival at the age of thirty-nine.

Possessing a deep knowledge of silent cinema, modernist artists, and novelists, Maddin's seemingly amateurish visual style and unusual subjects (patriphagia in "The Dead Father," incest in "Careful") obscure the surprisingly literate sources for his films. These include novelists Knut Hamsun ("Twilight of the Ice Nymphs") and Kazuo Ishiguro ("The Saddest Music in the World"), the Royal Winnipeg Ballet ("Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary"), and the films of Erich von Stroheim ("Archangel").

"Guy Maddin: Interviews" collects pieces published between 1990 and 2009 and offers the reader a whirlwind tour of Maddin's offbeat career in his own words, as solicited by a range of journalists, scholars, and fellow filmmakers. Maddin is a charming, erudite, and candid conversationalist who is frank about his own perceived drawbacks, his good fortune, and the often high art culture that motivates his cinematic explorations.

A philosopher-filmmaker, Kathleen Collins decisively redefined the parameters of African American film with The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982). This book uses detailed analyses of Collins's films to contextualise her work in the African American, feminist and world film traditions, and it highlights her contribution to each of these canons. Exploring the philosophical aspects of Collins's films and placing her in a genealogy of African American auteurs, Geetha Ramanathan argues that Collins uses film to integrate diverse elements of African American culture, showing how the medium can transform the visual and become a site of convergence for ideas on philosophy, otherness, art, aesthetics and the craft of filmmaking.

Mai Elizabeth Zetterling (1925-94) is among the most exceptional postwar female filmmakers. Born in Sweden, she lived in England and France for most of her life, making her directorial debut in 1964 with the Swedish art film Loving Couples after a fraught transition from working in front of the camera as a successful actress. Critics have compared her work to that of Ingmar Bergman, Luis BuNuel, and Federico Fellini, but Zetterling had a distinct style - alternately radical and reactionary - that straddled the gendered divide between high art and mass culture. Tackling themes of sexuality, isolation, and creativity, her documentaries, short and feature films, and television works are visually striking. Her oeuvre provoked controversy and scandal through her sensational representations of reproduction and motherhood. Mariah Larsson provides a lively and authoritative take on Zetterling's legacy and complicated position within film and women's history. A Cinema of Obsession provides necessary perspective on how the breadth of an artist's collected works keeps gatekeepers from recognizing their achievements, and questions why we still distinguish between national and global visual cultures and the big and small screens in the #MeToo era.

"Whenever they see a Merchant-Ivory name, they the audience] go with the expectation that this will be something interesting, exciting, entertaining, and they are satisfied with that." --Ismail Merchant Merchant-Ivory: Interviews gathers together for the first time interviews made over the past five decades with director James Ivory (b. 1928), producer Ismail Merchant (1936-2005), and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b. 1927). Beginning with their earliest work in India and ending with James Ivory's last film, The City of Your Final Destination (2009), the book traces their careers together, while offering valuable insights into their creative filmmaking process. The volume serves as a corrective to the prevailing critical orthodoxy attached to Merchant-Ivory's work, which tends to regard them as being solely concerned with historically accurate costumes and settings. As independent filmmakers, they have developed an idiosyncratic approach that resists facile classification. This book shows how Merchant-Ivory have always taken considerable care in casting their films, as well as treating actors with respect. This is a deliberate policy, designed to bring out one of the triumvirate's principal thematic concerns--the impact of the "clash of cultures" on individuals. Partly this has been inspired by their collective experiences of living and working in different cultures. They do not offer any answers to this issue; rather they believe that their task is simply to raise awareness, to make filmgoers conscious of the importance of cultural sensitivities that assume paramount significance in any exchange, whether verbal or nonverbal. Laurence Raw, Ankara, Turkey, is professor of English at Ba kent University. He is author of several books, including Adapting Henry James: Gender, Fiction, and Film; The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia; and Impressions of the Turkish Stage.

Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence.

Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations--"2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), "Barry Lyndon" (1975), "The Shining" (1980), "Full Metal Jacket" (1987), and "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999)--are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.

With her gripping film The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her latest movie, which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. She is one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless (1982) reflected those academic origins, but subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark (1987), the female vigilante movie Blue Steel (1989), and the surfer crime thriller Point Break (1991) demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking. The first volume of Bigelow's interviews ever published, Peter Keough's collection covers her early success with Near Dark, the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days (1995) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), and her triumph with The Hurt Locker. In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to renowned directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill. Peter Keough, Boston, Massaschusetts, is film editor at the Boston Phoenix. He is the editor of Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship and has published in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Sight & Sound.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews features talks with the master director of such classics as All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa, and Cleopatra. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) was a creative force in Hollywood from the end of the silent film era through the early years of the Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s. Displaying the wit, insight, and daring that were the hallmarks of his movies, Mankiewicz explores his films and his approach to writing and directing. These interviews span the period from his greatest Hollywood triumphs-he won four Oscars in two years-to just shortly before his death in 1993. From the time he arrived in 1929 through his last film Sleuth in 1972, he had a front-row seat to Hollywood history. This volume offers a hard-to-find, wide-ranging discussion between Mankiewicz and Gary Carey. A Michel Ciment interview appears here in English for the first time. The book will become a welcome resource for admirers of Mankiewicz and his work as well as those interested in the history of classic Hollywood. A writer based in Brooklyn, Brian Dauth has published in Senses of Cinema and MR Zine.

Ever since his first feature film I Killed My Mother premiered at Cannes, every film from the 29-year-old director Xavier Dolan has generated significant critical interest. A recipient of numerous awards, Dolan has recently taken his career to an international level with The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. As the first book-length study about Dolan, with case studies of key films like Mommy (2014), Tom at the Farm (2013) and It's Only the End of the World (2016), this volume explores the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas. In particular, it uses Dolan's cinema as a departure point to reconsider the position of Quebec film and cultural imaginary within a global cinematic culture, as well as the intersections between national, millennial and queer filmmaking.

Film -- Biography

Even twenty years after his death and nearly fifty or more years after his creative peak, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is still arguably the most instantly recognizable film director in name, appearance, vision, and voice. Long ago, through a combination of timing, talent, genius, energy, and publicity, he made the key transition from proper noun to adjective that confirms celebrity and true stature. It is a rare filmwatcher indeed who cannot define "Hitchcockian."

As the director of such films as "Psycho," "North by Northwest," "Spellbound," "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "To Catch a Thief," "Notorious," and "The Birds," Hitchcock has become synonymous with both stylish, sophisticated suspense and mordant black comedy. He was one of the most interviewed directors in the history of film. Among the hundreds of interviews he gave, those in this collection catch Hitchcock at key moments of transition in his long career--as he moved from silent to sound pictures, from England to America, from thrillers to complex romances, and from director to producer-director.

These conversations dramatize his shifting attitudes on a variety of cinematic matters that engaged and challenged him, including the role of stars in a movie, the importance of story, the use of sound and color, his relationship to the medium of television, and the attractions and perils of realism.

His engaging wit and intelligence are on display here, as are his sophistication, serious contemplation, and playful manipulation of the interviewer.

Sidney Gottlieb, a professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, is the editor of "Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews."

The British Film Industry in 25 Careers tells the history of the British film industry from an unusual perspective - that of various mavericks, visionaries and outsiders who, often against considerable odds, have become successful producers, distributors, writers, directors, editors, props masters, publicists, special effects technicians, talent scouts, stars and, sometimes, even moguls. Some, such as Richard Attenborough and David Puttnam, are well-known names. Others, such as the screenwriter and editor Alma Reville, also known as Mrs Alfred Hitchcock; Constance Smith, the 'lost star' of British cinema, or the producer Betty Box and her director sister Muriel, are far less well known. What they all have in common, though, is that they found their own pathways into the British film business, overcoming barriers of nationality, race, class and gender to do so. Counterpointing the essays on historical figures are interviews with contemporaries including the director Amma Asante, the writer and filmmaker Julian Fellowes, artist and director Isaac Julien, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, and media entrepreneur Efe Cakarel, founder of the online film platform MUBI, who've come into today's industry, adjusting to an era in which production and releasing models are changing - and in which films are distributed digitally as well as theatrically.

Fifty Hollywood Directors introduces the most important, iconic and influential filmmakers who worked in Hollywood between the end of the silent period and the birth of the blockbuster. By exploring the historical, cultural and technological contexts in which each director was working, this book traces the formative period in commercial cinema when directors went from pioneers to industry heavyweights.

Each entry discusses a director s practices and body of work and features a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. Entries include:

• Frank Capra
• Cecil B DeMille
• John Ford
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Fritz Lang
• Orson Welles
• DW Griffith
• King Vidor

This is an indispensible guide for anyone interested in film history, Hollywood and the development of the role of the director."

The only Japanese director to have won the Palme d'Or from Cannes more than once, and second only to Ozu Yasujiro in the number of times he has won the prestigious Kinema Jumpo Best One award, the late Imamura Shohei was one of Japan's leading and most controversial film directors. This book is one of the first to study all of Imamura's major films alongside his television and theatrical documentaries, focusing on his major themes and concerns. By giving shape to Imamura's career, the book positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

Although Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) holds an undisputed place in the pantheon of major filmmakers, mention of his name unjustly evokes images of monolithic gloom and despair. All of his pictures, including his comedies, deal seriously with faith, morality, and mortality, but audiences and critics too often neglect the extraordinary wit and vitality that can be found in "Wild Strawberries," "Scenes from a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander," and many others.

In "Ingmar Bergman: Interviews," the director discusses various stages of his career and the many facets of his work. The man and his films are revealed to be funny, full of life, and surprising as well as thoughtful, complex, and profound. In interviews with important writers, critics, and filmmakers, including James Baldwin, Michiko Kakutani, John Simon, and Vilgot Sjoman, Bergman describes a grand vision that justifies his affinity with Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Dostoyevsky. The volume begins with a 1957 piece, conducted just as he completed his early masterpiece "The Seventh Seal," and ends in 2002, as he was preparing to direct "Saraband," his latest film.

Raphael Shargel is associate professor of English at Providence College, where he teaches literature and film. From 1997 to 2006, he was film critic for the "New Leader." He has also written about film for MSNBC.com and reviewed movies on local radio.

One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painting. An intermittently practicing artist in his own right, Pasolini studied under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, whose lessons marked a life-long affinity for figurative painting and its centrality to a particular cinematic sensibility. Pasolini set out wilfully to "contaminate" art criticism with semiotics, dialectology, and film theory, penning catalogue essays and exhibition reviews alongside poems, autobiographical meditations, and public lectures on painting. His fiercely idiosyncratic blend of Communism and classicism, localism and civic universalism, iconophilia and aesthetic "heresy," animated and antagonized Cold War culture like few European contemporaries. This book offers numerous texts previously available only in Italian, each accompanied by an editorial note elucidating its place in the tumultuous context of post-war Italian culture. Prefaced by the renowned art historian T.J. Clark, a historical essay on Pasolini's radical aesthetics anchors the anthology. One hundred years after his birth, Heretical Aesthetics sheds light on one of the most consequential aspects of Pasolini's intellectual life, further illuminating a vast cinematic and poetic corpus along the way.

For more than fifteen years the "Hitchcock Annual" has offered groundbreaking and authoritative scholarship on Hitchcock, becoming the journal of record for Hitchcock studies. Wallflower Press is proud to announce a new partnership with this prestigious publication, resulting in "The Hitchcock Annual Anthology," which features contributions from such leading critics as Charles Barr, Thomas Elsaesser, Bill Krohn, Mark Rappaport, Michael Walker, Robin Wood, and Slavoj Zizek. The anthology includes essays on Hitchcock's entire oeuvre, from his early silents to his late American masterpieces, and overviews of Hitchcock criticism, as well as interviews with and discussions between Hitchcock's collaborators.

Before he was the Academy Award-nominated director of "The Last Picture Show" (1971), Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) interviewed some of cinema's great masters: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and others. Since becoming an acclaimed filmmaker himself, he has given countless interviews to the press about his own career.

This volume collects thirteen of his best, most comprehensive, and most insightful interviews, many long out-of-print and several never-before-published in their entirety. They cover more than forty years of directing, with Bogdanovich talking candidly about his great triumphs, such as "The Last Picture Show" and "What's Up, Doc? " (1972), and his overlooked gems, such as "Daisy Miller" (1974) and "They All Laughed" (1981).

Assembled by acclaimed critic Peter Tonguette, also author of a new critical biography of Bogdanovich, these interviews demonstrate that Bogdanovich is not only one of America's finest filmmakers, but also one of its most eloquent when discussing film and his own remarkable movies.

The representation of gender in film remains an intensely debated topic, particularly in academic considerations of US mainstream cinema where it is often perceived as perpetuating rigid, binary views of gender, and reinforcing patriarchal, dominant notions of masculinity and femininity. While previous scholarly discussion has focused on visual or narrative portrayals of gender, this book considers the ways that film sound - music, voice, sound effects and silence - is used to represent gender. Taking a socio-historical approach, Heidi Wilkins investigates a range of popular US genres including screwball comedy, the road movie and chick flicks to explore the ways that film sound can reinforce traditional assumptions about masculinity and femininity, impart ambivalent meanings to them, or even challenge and subvert the notion of gender itself. Case studies include His Girl Friday, Easy Rider and Bridesmaids.