Since his death in 1989, John Cassavettes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero—a renegade loner who fought the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having already established himself as an actor, he struck out as a filmmaker in 1959 with Shadows, and proceeded to build a formidable body of work, including such classics as Faces, Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Gloria. In Cassavettes on Cassavettes, Ray Carney presents the great director in his own words—frank, uncompromising, humane, and passionate about life and art.

The Films of Mike Leigh is the first critical study of one of the most important and eccentric directors of British independent filmmaking. Although active since 1971, Leigh has only come to the attention of an international audience in the 1990s through films such as Secrets and Lies, and Career Girls. The authors examine Leigh's working method and films in the intellectual and social contexts in which they were created. All of Leigh's major box office successes are analyzed, interpreted, and shown to be among the finest examples of cinema.

The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies is the first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.

The Films of Mike Leigh is the first critical study of one of the most important and eccentric directors of British independent filmmaking. Although active since 1971, Leigh has only come to the attention of an international audience in the 1990s through films such as Secrets and Lies, and Career Girls. The authors examine Leigh's working method and films in the intellectual and social contexts in which they were created. All of Leigh's major box office successes are analyzed, interpreted, and shown to be among the finest examples of cinema.

The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies is the first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.

Serious literary artists such T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf loom large in most accounts of the literary art of the first half of the 20th century. And yet, working in the shadows casts by these modernists were science fiction, horror, and fantasy writers like "the Weird Tales Three": H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. These three writers did not publish in artistically ambitious little magazines like The Dial, The Smart Set and The Little Review, but instead in commercial pulp magazines like Weird Tales. Contrary to stereotypes about pulp fiction and those who wrote it, however, the Weird Tales Three were serious literary artists that used their fiction to speculate about philosophical questions, the function of art, and the brevity of life.

This book uses the tools of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and other fields to address challenges faced by women and girls around the world, both historically and in modern day, with an emphasis on intersectionality.