Thrust into the international spotlight in 1966 when "The Hunt," his critique of the Franco regime, won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (b. 1932) has remained an abiding presence and frequent victor at worldwide cinema competitions ever since.

Best known in the United States for his Flamenco trilogy--"Blood Wedding," "Carmen," and "A Love Bewitched"--he also received Oscar nominations for "Mama Turns a Hundred," "Carmen," and "Tango." Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively complex. In many of his films, such as "Cria" and "Goya in Bordeaux," he creates sophisticated expressions of time and space by fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination.

"Carlos Saura: Interviews" collects interviews the filmmaker has given in Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. All of the conversations appear here in English for the first time, and, as such, they represent a treasure trove of comments by Saura on his own work.

Covering the entire spectrum of his career, including his latest film "Bunuel and King Solomon's Table," the interviews discuss his early contributions to the New Spanish Cinema, his documentaries and documentary-like urban films, his cinematic essays on historical figures, his dance films, his adaptations of literary and theatrical works, and the films rooted in his personal reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War.

In addition, the collection touches upon Saura's efforts as a photographer, opera director, and novelist and explores his friendship with filmmaker Luis Bunuel. These interviews disclose Saura's amazingly consistent approach to his cinema, his role as an auteur, and the principles on which his creativity and intuition continue to build in innovative ways.

Linda M. Willem is professor of Spanish at Butler University. She is the author of "Galdos's Segunda Manera: Rhetorical Strategies and Affective Response" and editor of "A Sesquicentennial Tribute to Galdos." Her work has been published in "Literature/Film Quarterly," "Bulletin of Hispanic Studies," "Latin American Literary Review," "Letras Peninsulares," and "Critica Hispanica."

Focussing on costume in performance, this reader brings together key texts, case studies and interviews. Exploring costume's role and function in a variety of theoretical, historical, conceptual and practical contexts, this exciting volume also reflects on the broader relationship between costume and visual culture throughout.

Brian De Palma (b. 1940) isn't your average Hollywood director.

For years he reigned as the "master of the macabre," the man who massacred the class of '76 in "Carrie" and stalked Angie Dickinson in "Dressed to Kill." By the mid-1980s De Palma found himself assaulting his audience and critics, daring them to watch a chainsaw enter a man's skull in "Scarface" and a power drill disembowel a defenseless woman in "Body Double."

What drove De Palma to such extremes? In the late 1960s, he wanted to be the next Jean-Luc Godard and revolutionize American cinema. Instead, he found himself ostracized when Warner Bros. removed him from "Get to Know Your Rabbit," his first Hollywood feature. De Palma sought the refuge of Alfred Hitchcock until the late 1970s ("Sisters," "Obsession"), when his surreal approach to horror became a genre unto itself ("Carrie," "The Fury," "Dressed to Kill"). Ironically, just as De Palma achieved the success that his fellow Movie Brats George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg had enjoyed since the mid-1970s, he could not hide his resentment toward Hollywood. After battling with the MPAA in the 1980s, he gradually became part of the mainstream with the success of "The Untouchables" and "Mission: Impossible," although he never suppressed his desire to make audiences aware of his camera-eye and his dark, penetrating worldview.

"Brian De Palma: Interviews" follows De Palma's fortunes as he makes the difficult transition from underground filmmaker to celebrity auteur. In profiles and q&a interviews, he emerges as a fascinating figure of excess and ambivalence. De Palma is not afraid to share his opinions about censorship, violence, feminism, American culture, and the fate of cinema in the twenty-first century.

How has light influenced the staging of theatre throughout history? What does light contribute to performance? How does it make meaning? This collection explores the creative potential of light in the theatre. Through a wide range of extracts from historical accounts, new research and rare documents, some presented for the first time in English, Scott Palmer provides new ways of thinking about lighting as a creative performance practice. Focusing on elements such as: * the emergence of lighting design in the theatre * equipment and techniques * the dramaturgy of light * its impact on actor, audience and playhouse * the semiotics and phenomenology of light in performance the book reveals why light has such a profound effect on the audience's experience of a theatrical event.

This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre', metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.

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."

Gaining a view behind the scenes into the jobs and personalities of people who work in the theatre is a privilege afforded to few. This book grants that privilege to all its readers. Twenty-one highly respected backstage professionals are interviewed, from artistic director to wig maker, working in all kinds of theatres in Britain and the United States. Their stories inform and entertain as they describe what they do and how they got to do it. Their anecdotes and observations intrigue and amuse as they reminisce about working with people such as Alan Bennett, Judi Dench, Placido Domingo, Ian McKellen and Andrew Lloyd Webber, to name just a few. Whether you enjoy watching theatrical performances and want to know more about them, or you would like to work in the theatre, Backstage Stories is the book for you.>

"Really does enable anyone from first year student to the established lighting designer to learn more and improve" Focus, the Journal of the Association of Lighting Designers New technologies have made lighting more prominent in live performances of all kinds, not just stage theatre, and in many courses lighting has been subsumed into 'performance lighting'. Performance Lighting Design is a practical guide to the art and technique of lighting for the stage, concerts, and live events. The book will also cover the use of projected images in performance including projected scenery on the West End stage, in fringe shows, and on the stadium "rock" stage, as well as the use of images from live camera and from other sources as "performers". The book will serve students of lighting design and will also be accessible to anyone with an awareness of technical theatre. Practical knowledge is combined with aesthetic and theoretical considerations. The book will also address the difficult area of getting inspiration and evolving design ideas through a broad range of performance genre. The author will discuss the pros and cons of several computer based techniques, and incorporate 25 years of his own professional experience in the UK and Europe.

For more than thirty years, the Wing has produced the "Working in the Theatre" seminars, a series that features the greatest names in theatre. It is now available in book form for the first time, compact, and at an affordable paperback price.Spanning the range of these seminars, with a concentration on the most recent shows and current stars, the information, anecdotes, gossip (yes!), heartaches and triumphs are all here.We learn: what a career in the theatre is really about, from inspiration to a Tony or Pulitzer Prize; how actors prepare; what actors have found to be the best techniques; how writers get their work staged; and, how playwrights and cast interact with the director.

Throughout the Americas, performances deriving from medieval European rituals, ceremonies, and festivities made up a crucial part of the cultural cargo shipped from Europe to the overseas settlements. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth, England, to Newfoundland, bringing with him "morris dancers, hobby horses, and Maylike Conceits" for the "allurement of the savages" and the "solace of our people." His voyage closely resembled that of twelve Franciscan friars who in 1524 had arrived in what is now Mexico armed with a repertoire of miracle plays, religious processions, and other performances. These two events, although far from unique, helped shape initial encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples; they also marked the first stages of the process that would lead by no means smoothly to a distinctively American culture.Ritual Imports is a groundbreaking cultural history of European performance traditions in the New World, from the sixteenth century to the present. Claire Sponsler examines the role of survivals and adaptations of medieval drama in shaping American culture from colonization through nation building and on to today's multicultural society. The book's subjects include New Mexican matachines dances and Spanish conquest drama, Albany's Pinkster festival and Afro-Dutch religious celebrations, Philadelphia's mummers and the Anglo-Saxon revival, a Brooklyn Italian American saint's play, American and German passion plays, and academic reconstructions of medieval drama. Drawing on theories of cultural appropriation, Ritual Imports makes an important contribution to medieval and American studies as well as to cultural studies and the history of theater."

The aim of this book is to demystify the technology of stage lighting, and it does so by uniting its text with quotations from literature, thus setting a common ground for the perception and understanding of light, in our daily lives as well as on stage.

The films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us.

His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including "Metropolis" and "M." In America he made some of the most notable crime movies ("Fury"), noir films ("The Big Heat"), and Westerns ("The Return of Frank James") of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent.

Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself.

This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. "For me," he said, "cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century."

How Theater Managers Manage brings together the stories, beliefs, and experiences of a few seasoned theater managers. Through them, a portrait and a concept emerge depicting what they have unknowingly practiced throughout their careers. Designed to be a stepping stone for new theater managers, this book covers a wide variety of topics including budgeting theater costs, gross potentials and ticket prices, show contracts, settlements, and emergency and security procedures, to name a few. A sample budget, building forms, and show and performance forms are also included. While most of the experiences in this book relates to commercial theater, many of the ideas put forth can be applied to not-for-profit theater and facility management.

This collection of interviews provides a revealing self-portrait of Martin Ritt (1914-1990), America's preeminent maker of social films and one of the most sensitive portraitists of the rural South.

Ritt's Hollywood career began in 1958 with "Edge of the City" and ended in 1990 with the release of "Stanley and Iris." In all, he directed twenty-six movies, including some of Hollywood's most enduring films--"Hud," "Hombre," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," "The Brotherhood," "The Molly Maguires," "The Front," and "Norma Rae."

Although he gave mostly boilerplate interviews to the press when promoting a movie, Ritt provided more revealing interviews for seminars, oral histories, and documentary filmmakers. The most significant of these, published here for the first time, create a close-up portrait of this distinguished director of plays and films.

Ritt speaks eloquently about his years with the Group Theatre and recreates the passion of the director Harold Clurman. He tells how the Group shaped his ideas about art and the communal nature of the theatrical enterprise, which he extended into his work in film. He speaks of his relationship with Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan, and he talks in detail about his experiences with the blacklist, directing and acting in TV during its Golden Age, his career as a theater director, and his experiences working with such actors as Paul Newman, Sally Field, Sophia Loren, Orson Welles, and Robert De Niro. Ritt discusses his philosophy of directing, the place of film in the history of art, his quarrels with "auteur theory," and the influence of his politics on his work.

Gabriel Miller, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of "The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man" (University Press of Mississippi). Articles by him have appeared in the "Los Angeles Times," "American Book Review," and "Literature/Film Quarterly," among other publications.

Nacido en Teheran en 1940, Abbas Kiarostami, iniciado profesionalmente como disenador grafico, paso inmediatamente a realizar filmes publicitarios, forjandose una solida reputacion en este campo que acabaria abandonando por la prevalencia de las presiones comerciales sobre cualquier otra consideracion. Su ingreso en el Centro para el Desarrollo Intelectual de Ninos y Adolescentes hace que, de una manera un tanto fortuita, "se ponga" a dirigir su primera pelicula, Pan y Callejuela, un corto de no mas de 10 minutos. Pero no es hasta 1977 cuando debuta en el cine comercial, en un momento de gran efervescencia creadora, severa crisis industrial y fuertes tensiones politicas que desembocarian en 1979 con la Revolucion Islamica. Este libro reconstruye y estudia la obra cinematografica de Abbas Kiarostami, no de una manera aseptica o neutra, sino que ofrece una interpretacion de la misma y una imagen coherente del cineasta y de su filmografia.

The Stage Lighting Handbook is well established as the classic practical lighting guide. The book explains the process of designing lighting for all forms of stage production and describes the equipment used. This new edition includes up-to-date information on new equipment and discusses its impact on working methods.

In a Hollywood career that spanned more than thirty years, Martin Ritt (1914-1990) directed twenty-six films. Among them were some of Hollywood's most enduring works--"Hud," "Hombre," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," "The Molly Maguires," "The Front," and "Norma Rae."

In addition to displaying a passionate commitment to social issues, Ritt's body of work represents a sustained exploration of the American myth and American national character. This study of his films shows how his work articulates the communal, agrarian ideal and its perversion as industrialism and urbanism have denatured the landscape.

Encompassing a hundred years of American life, these films follow the common man through the chronology of social history, including the arrival of the railroads in the West, coal mining in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, Jack Johnson's rise as the first black heavyweight champion of the boxing world, the television blacklist, spying and the Cold War, trade unions, and the war in Vietnam. The subjects he treats project a cultural framework for examining what America means as a nation and as an experience.

The sixties was the decade of Ritt's most sustained achievement. This period culminated in his masterpiece, "The Molly Maguires," perhaps the finest film ever made on the subject of American labor. In the first detailed analysis of this great realistic film "The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man" shows that its greatness lies in Ritt's complex interweaving of love and friendship, the labor struggle, the story of the immigrant dream, and the ideal of upward mobility.

The book includes analyses of all twenty-six films, including such early works as "Edge of the City" and "The Long Hot Summer," as well as such later successes as "Norma Rae," "Sounder," and "Murphy's Romance." Ritt's work in theater, notably in the Group Theatre, which he joined in 1937, and his being blacklisted from television during the 1950s, informed his directorial philosophy throughout his career. Many recognize him as America's finest director of social films.

Here is a practical, accessible introduction to one of the most complex jobs in theatre. Linda Apperson clearly and concisely leads the reader through the procedures and responsibilities of stage management, from auditions to closing night. What is "blocking"? How do you "call" a show? Who is the technical director, and why do you want him or her as your best friend? How can you tame (or endure) a prima donna? When is the best time to offer advice to the actors? Ms. Apperson answers these and countless other questions in a resource book that will become a constant companion for both the novice and the experienced theatre person. Especially useful is her attention to personal relationships among actors and crew. She insists that working to create an atmosphere of respect backstage will improve the show onstage, and she shows precisely how this is done, based upon her years of experience in managing the stage. Stage Managing and Theatre Etiquette includes samples of prompt scripts and other essential stage manager's tools.

Take Stage! is the first comprehensive "how-to" book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. Controversial and anecdotal, Take Stage! is written for the lesbian with no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, selecting the script, booking space, and assembling a staff, the book includes chapters on issues of special interest to lesbians. Take Stage! includes information on how to challenge the "isms"-lookism, racism, classism, ageism, and other prejudices with which lesbian culture is currently engaged. It also looks at problems of accountability in non-hierarchal structures, boundary-setting among all-volunteer staffs, sabotage via hidden agendas or disassociative behaviors, horizontal hostility, and internalized homophobia. The appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. From the decision to produce the play to opening night and touring, Take Stage! covers all the bases and provides a healthy dose of moral support.

Now in its second edition, Designing for the Theatre has established itself as the authoritative introduction to the processes of design for the theatre. Covering the contribution which can be made by costume, sets, props and lighting to a stage production, the author explains the purpose and process involved in their design. Included in this second edition are new photographs and drawings illustrating some of the most exciting and diverse current trends in stage design.

Too often directors and stage designers approach the architectural layout of theatres as obstructive to the creative process. Condee's book teaches theater professionals to work creatively within even the most restrictive theatrical space and transform it into an asset rather than an obstacle. Condee has interviewed hundreds of prominent American and British directors, designers, and actors, and provides photographs and groundplans of major American theatres. Each chapter tackles a different set of problems, offering thoughtful solutions to common obstacles. Theatrical Space is not only a useful textbook for students of theatre, but also a valuable resource for all directors and designers, both young and experienced. Paperback edition available April 2002. Cloth version previously published in 1995.