Secrets of Screen Directing: The Tricks of the Trade is a practical guide which bridges the gap between classroom learning and the realities of being on a set. Author Patrick Tucker uses insights and techniques gained from over 40 years of directing both screen and stage to open up the craft of effectively telling stories, exploring the reality of a directing career with practical day to day solutions and problem-solving methods for working directors. This book addresses the fact that most professional directors spend their careers directing other writers' scripts, and deals with the practicalities of working on continuing dramas. Following the Director's mantra of 'show, not tell' it contains over 300 illustrations, diagrams, paperwork examples and floor plans, with lists and charts throughout. Covering planning, preparation, and shooting a project, it delves beyond just script construction and into the nuts and bolts of screen directing. Directors at any level are always under huge time constraints, and this book provides immediate and simple solutions to working under such restrictions. This is an ideal resource for filmmaking students and early career directors to refer to when encountering a problem, as well as all those screen enthusiasts, actors and writers, who want to know what directors actually do.

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

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

The 1976 premiere of Face to Face came at the height of director-screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's career. Prestigious awards and critical acclaim had made him into a leading name in European art cinema, yet today Face to Face is a largely overlooked and dismissed work. This book tells the story of its rise and fall. It presents a new portrait of Bergman as a political artist exploring a new medium with huge public impact: television. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, feminism, and alternative psychotherapy, he made a series of portraits of the modern bourgeois family focusing on the plight of women; Face to Face followed in the tracks of The Lie (1970) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). By his workbooks, engagement planners, and other archival material, we can trace his investigation into the heart of repressive family structures to eventually glimpse a way out. This volume culminates in an extensive study of the two-year process from the first outlines of the screenplay to the reception and aftermath of Face to Face. It thus offers a unique insight into Bergman's world, his ideas and artistry during a turbulent time in cinema history.

The Pixels of Paul Cezanne is a collection of essays by Wim Wenders which he presents his observations and reflections on the fellow artists who have influenced, shaped and inspired him.

"How are they doing it?" is the key questions Wenders asks as he looks at the dance work of Pina Bausch, the paintings of Cezanne, Edward Hopper of Andrew Wyeth, or the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelanelo Antonioni, Ozu, Anthony Mann, Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller.

He finds the answer by writing about them, trying to understand their individual perspective, and, in the process revealing his own art of perception, in texts of rare poignancy.

Monster Cinema introduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters. Some are gigantic, like King Kong or the kaiju in Pacific Rim, while others are microscopic. Some monsters appear uncannily human, from serial killers like Norman Bates to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And of course, other movie monsters like demons, ghosts, vampires, and witches emerge from long folklore traditions. Film expert Barry Keith Grant considers what each type of movie monster reveals about what it means to be human and how we regard the world. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, Grant presents us with an eclectic array of monster movies, from Nosferatu to Get Out. As he discovers, although monster movies might claim to be about Them!, they are really about the capacity for horror that lurks within each of us.

Bringing together a range of theoretical and critical approaches, this edited collection is the first book to examine representations of the body in Eastern European and Russian cinema after the Second World War. Drawing on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, the book focuses on three areas: the traumatized body, the body as a site of erotic pleasure, and the relationship between the body and history. Critically dissecting the different ideological and aesthetic ways human bodies are framed, 'The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia' also demonstrates how bodily discourses oscillate between complicity and subversion, and how they shaped individuals and societies both during and after the period of state socialism.

Based on rare archival documents and films, this anthology is the first to focus primarily on the use of official and colonial documentary films in the South and South-East Asian regions. Drawing together a range of international scholars, the book sheds new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in the colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial period. Covering diverse geographical and colonial contexts in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Hong Kong, and focusing on under-researched or little-known films, it demonstrate the complex set of relations between the colonisers and the colonised throughout the region.

The New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and 1970s is celebrated as a time when maverick directors bucked the system. Against the backdrop of counterculture sensibilities and the prominence of auteur theory, New Hollywood directors such as Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola seemed to embody creative individualism. In Post-Fordist Cinema, Jeff Menne rewrites the history of this period, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood's corporate project. Menne traces the surprising affinities between auteur theory and management gurus such as Peter Drucker, who envisioned a more open and flexible corporate style. In founding production companies, New Hollywood filmmakers took part in the creation of new corporate models that emphasized entrepreneurial creativity. For firms such as Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions, Altman's Lion's Gate Films, the Zanuck-Brown Company, and BBS Productions, the counterculture ethos limbered up the studio system's sclerotic production process-with striking parallels to how management theory conceived of the role of the individual within the firm. Menne offers insightful readings of how films such as Lonely Are the Brave, Brewster McCloud, Jaws, and The King of Marvin Gardens narrate the conditions in which they were created, depicting shifting notions of work and corporate structure. While auteur theory allowed directors to cast themselves as independent creators, Menne argues that its most consequential impact came as a management doctrine. An ambitious rethinking of New Hollywood, Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the "creative economy."

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.

A Radio 4 Book of the Week. 'Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.' New York Times 'Best True Crime of 2022' In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world's first motion picture in Leeds, England. In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector - a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera - Le Prince stepped on a train in France - and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found. Le Prince's family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis's work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince's own son was dead under suspicious circumstances - and modern Hollywood was being born. Paul Fischer's new book excavates one of the Victorian age's great unsolved mysteries, and in the process offers a revelatory rewriting of the birth of motion pictures.

From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet distinguished themselves as two of Europe's most inventive, generous, and uncompromising filmmakers. From Machorka-Muff (1963) through These Encounters of Theirs (2006), and in the subsequent solo work of Jean-Marie Straub, they developed groundbreaking and unique approaches to film adaptation, performance, sound recording, cinematography, and translation in films made across Germany, Italy, and France - including such modern classics as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), Moses and Aaron (1974), Class Relations (1983), and Sicilia! (1999). On the occasion of the first complete North American retrospective of their films in more than two decades, this volume traces the history of Straub's and Huillet's work, placing their films in the specific cultural, linguistic, and critical contexts in which they were produced and providing an account of their distribution and reception in the English-speaking world.

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

Hitchcock Annual: Volume 20 contains essays on Hitchcock and C. A. Lejeune; Easy Virtue in context; the West coast setting of and cultural anxiety in The Birds; Hitchcockian aspects of Balachander's The Doll; and Kent Jones's Hitchcock/Truffaut. It also contains an index of the Hitchcock Annual, volumes 1-20.

By the end of 1914, Charlie Chaplin had become the most popular actor in films, and reporters were clamoring for interviews with the comedy sensation. But no reporter had more access than Fred Goodwins. A British actor who joined Chaplin's stock company in early 1915, Goodwins began writing short accounts of life at the studio and submitted them to publications. In February 1916 the British magazine Red Letter published the first of what became a series of more than thirty-five of Goodwins's articles. Written in breezy prose, the articles cover a two-year period during which Chaplin's popularity and creativity reached new heights. Only one copy of the complete series is known to exist, and its recent rediscovery marks a significant find for Chaplin fans. Charlie Chaplin's Red Letter Days: At Work with the Comic Genius is a vivid account of the ebb and flow of life at the Chaplin studio. Goodwins was an astute observer who deepens our understanding of Chaplin's artistry and sheds new light on his personality. He also provides charming and revealing portraits of Chaplin's unsung collaborators, such as his beloved costar Edna Purviance, his burly nemesis Eric Campbell, and other familiar faces that populate his films. Goodwins depicts Chaplin in the white heat of artistic creation, an indefatigable imp entertaining and inspiring the company on the set. He also describes gloomy, agonizing periods when Chaplin was paralyzed with indecision or exhaustion, or simply frustrated that it was raining and they couldn't shoot. Reproduced here for the first time, the articles have been edited by film historian David James and annotated by Chaplin expert Dan Kamin to highlight their revelations. Illustrated with a selection of rare images that reflect the Chaplin craze, including posters, sheet music, and magazine covers, Charlie Chaplin's Red Letter Days provides a fascinating excursion into the private world of the iconic superstar whose films move and delight audiences to this day. It will appeal to movie fans, comedy buffs, and anyone who wants to know what really went on behind the scenes with Chaplin and his crew.

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.

The prevalence of loss and mourning, and of charged relationships with parents or parental figures has had a surprising influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers' work . To date, however, little attention has been given to these themes. In The Melancholy Lens, author Tony Pipolo offers a detailed look at the significant role of underlying biographical and psychological factors in specific works by leading avant-garde filmmakers. Covering a range of filmmakers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr, The Melancholy Lens takes a sensitive approach to understand the motivations of each filmmaker as related to a given work. Pipolo argues, for example, that the work of Deren and Brakhage lends itself to a more aggressive appreciation of psychoanalytic principles. The Deren films studied-Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time-are read as varying responses to the death of her father, with whom she had a strained relationship. Tortured Dust-the final film Brakhage made about his first family-was, by his own account, a work of contention and desperation. The elusiveness of Gregory Markopoulos' The Mysteries cannot conceal its naked obsession with death any more than it can diminish the film's poignancy. Robert Beavers' Sotiros is an especially rich and vivid exposure of a vulnerable chapter in the filmmakers's life. In the final two chapters on Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr, Pipolo looks outward for artistic motivation to show how both filmmakers' fascination with the history of film and video manifests as a melancholic view of greater history in their work. In the afterword, the author considers later figures whose work is kindred to the theme of this book, among them Nathaniel Dorsky, Phil Solomon, David Gatten, and Lewis Klahr.

At least three of director Jacques Tourneur's films-Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man-are recognized as horror classics. Yet his contributions to these films are often minimized by scholars, with most of the credit going to the films' producer, Val Lewton. A detailed examination of the director's full body of work reveals that those elements most evident in the Tourneur-Lewton collaborations-the lack of monsters and the stylized use of suggested violence-are equally apparent in Tourneur's films before and after his work with Lewton. Mystery and sensuality were hallmarks of his style, and he possessed a highly artistic visual and aural style. This insightful critical study examines each of Tourneur's films, as well as his extensive work on MGM shorts (1936-1942) and in television. What emerges is evidence of a highly coherent directorial style that runs throughout Tourneur's works.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, chosen by Tom Stoppard "A revelation."-Marc Weingarten, Washington Post Acclaimed film director Billy Wilder's early writings-brilliantly translated into English for the first time Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as "Billie") published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. From a humorous account of Wilder's stint as a hired dancing companion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dispatches from the international film scene, to his astute profiles of writers, performers, and political figures, the collection offers fresh insights into the creative mind of one of Hollywood's most revered writer-directors. Wilder's early writings-a heady mix of cultural essays, interviews, and reviews-contain the same sparkling wit and intelligence as his later Hollywood screenplays, while also casting light into the dark corners of Vienna and Berlin between the wars. Wilder covered everything: big-city sensations, jazz performances, film and theater openings, dance, photography, and all manner of mass entertainment. And he wrote about the most colorful figures of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Prince of Wales, actor Adolphe Menjou, director Erich von Stroheim, and the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Film historian Noah Isenberg's introduction and commentary place Wilder's pieces-brilliantly translated by Shelley Frisch-in historical and biographical context, and rare photos capture Wilder and his circle during these formative years. Filled with rich reportage and personal musings, Billy Wilder on Assignment showcases the burgeoning voice of a young journalist who would go on to become a great auteur.

Despite his iconic status, Kurosawa's life story remains an enigma and art imitates life with its own "Rashomon" effect. To discover Kurosawa, Paul Anderer guides us through the ruins of a defeated country and a shattered family. He brings to life the dynamic energy of Tokyo in the 1920s and the city's impact on the young Kurosawa. He resurrects the spectre of Kurosawa's older brother, Heido, a star in the silent film industry, who leads a colourful, rebellious life until his despairing, tragic end. Anderer brings these formative years into focus and looks beyond the aura of Kurosawa's enduring fame. Kurosawa's Rashomon brings Kurosawa and his vivid, challenging world to life.

At a moment when superheroes dominate pop culture, Gary Bettinson takes us back to the first comic book blockbuster. Superman: The Movie - The 40th Anniversary Interviews is a revealing behind-the-scenes portrait of the personalities and expertise that went into making this landmark of Hollywood cinema. Marking 40 years since the film's release, this book presents all-new interviews with the cast and crew, including Richard Donner (director), Ilya Salkind (producer), Pierre Spengler (producer), Margot Kidder (actor), Marc McClure (actor), Jeff East (actor), Sarah Douglas (actor) and Jack O'Halloran (actor). The book serves as a rare insider account of an acclaimed blockbuster that was steeped in controversy throughout production. With refreshing candour, the interviewees cast light on the making and legacy of Superman: The Movie. Charting the film's inception through to its runaway release, this book provides a valuable insight into the practical logistics and day-to-day realities of mounting a big-budget production at a time when high-concept Hollywood blockbusters were only just emerging as a genre.

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

In his famous interpretation of Vincent Van Gogh's painting A Pair of Peasant's Shoes (1886), Heidegger argues that shoes tell us all we need to know about the world of the person who walks in them. In the case of Van Gogh's painting, we learn this not through a description of the pair of shoes, nor by a report on how to make shoes, but by looking at the shoes. Heidegger thus gestures towards the power of the visual arts to show us human truths through images of footwear and the feet they conceal or reveal, a power that finds its fullest expression in the cinema. From Chaplin's meal of boots (The Gold Rush, 1925), through Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes (1948) and Dorothy's ruby slippers (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), to Julia Roberts' pvc thigh-highs (Pretty Woman, 1990), Marty McFly's power-lacing Nikes (Back to the Future, 1985) and the slim, spike-heeled stiletto that graces the poster for The Devil Wears Prada (2006), shoes are not only some of the cinema's most enduring icons; they also serve as characterisations, plot devices, soundtracks, metaphors and philosophical touchpoints. This book anaylses their significnace through a range of approaches drawn from the fields of Film Studies, Philosophy, Cultural History, Fashion, Cultural Studies and Politics.

A former playwright with only two movies under his belt, Anthony Minghella took Hollywood by storm in 1996 with "The English Patient," a universally lauded epic described by Roger Ebert as "[A] poetic, evocative film . . . told with sweep and visual richness." This robust romance garnered nine Academy Awards, amongst them Best Picture and Best Director. His follow-up, "The Talented Mr. Ripley," combined stunning vistas with the masterful suspense of studio-era Hollywood; praised by the "New York Times'" Janet Maslin as a "hypnotic, sensually charged adaptation," the film also found the attention of the Academy, receiving five nominations. With yet another ambitious adaptation creating tremendous buzz--Charles Frazier's best-selling "Cold Mountain"--Minghella is well on his way to becoming one of the most respected directors of the decade.
A thorough craftsman painstakingly involved with each step of the moviemaking process, Minghella here shares knowledge gleaned from years of experience as a musician and writer for the theater. Praised for his ability to adapt the psychological density of the novel to the silver screen, he discusses the screenwriting process at length, imparting valuable lessons regarding pacing and narrative with a refreshing perspective as unique as the characters that pass before his lens.

Independent Female Filmmakers collects original and previously published essays, interviews, and manifestos from some of the most defining and groundbreaking independent female filmmakers of the last 40 years. Featuring material from the seminal magazine The Independent Film and Video Monthly-a leading publication for independent filmmakers for several decades-as well as new interviews conducted with the filmmakers, this book, edited by Michele Meek, presents a unique perspective into the ethnically and culturally diverse voices of women filmmakers whose films span narrative, documentary, and experimental genres and whose work remains integral to independent film history from the 1970s to the present. Independent Female Filmmakers also includes a biographical profile of each filmmaker, as well as an online resource with links to additonal interviews and a sample course syllabus. The filmmakers in this book include: * Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, The Kids Are All Right) * Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Real Genius, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) * Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, Stranger Inside) * Miranda July (The Future, Me And You And Everyone We Know) * Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, Wild Man Blues) * Maria Maggenti (The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love) * Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water) * Trinh T. Minh-ha (Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, Night Passage) . . . and more!

The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema from 1957 to 1963, Eric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.