Filmmaking and production Books

Book SynopsisIn these twenty-one interviews, filmmaker Peter Greenaway expresses his film aesthetic and discusses his combat with the dominant Hollywood style of filmmaking. His films have run unmistakably against the main current of present cinematic practice, from the short film Windows in the mid-seventies, to his more popular but nonetheless challenging films such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Pillow Book in the nineties. In this collection the ever-controversial Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema. For him such films tell stories or they translate literature with its linear narrative onto a medium that he feels should be preeminently visual. He finds that, instead of foregrounding the image and the composition of visual elements as in the long history of painting, Hollywood-style directors seem mesmerized by the ""and then and then"" narrative. In these provocative interviews Greenaway tells of his ambition to make cinema a medium based more on image than on narrative. He explains his painterly approach in such films as Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, defends his use of total nudity of both sexes, and declares that traditional literary-based cinema is dead. He believes that the most creative imaginations, the most innovative technologies, and the greatest financial resources are being devoted to television and the Internet and that Hollywood moviemaking is no longer in the vanguard. ""If you go into the basilica of St. Peter in Rome,"" he says, ""and sit through a service near the high altar of Bernini, you will experience a synthesis of stone, light, music, incense. It is a form of total art, which is what the cinema of the 20th century was supposed to be, even if it only rarely lives up to this ideal."" Vernon Gras is a professor of English and cultural studies at George Mason University. Marguerite Gras was a legislative research staffer at the U.S. House of Representatives, 1974-1991.

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Book SynopsisSidney Lumet (b. 1924) is considered one of the most gifted and socially conscious American filmmakers of his generation. His best-known movies--including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, 12 Angry Men, and Network--have garnered him an Honorary Academy Award in 2005, multiple Oscar nominations for Best Director, the D. W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement, and numerous other tributes. This book features over twenty interviews with the director, including an interview conducted by the editor for this volume. One of the few mainstream directors who works outside of Hollywood, Lumet discusses how his home base, New York City, fuels his films. Candid, outspoken and occasionally brash, Lumet talks passionately and clearly about his work with great actors (among them Al Pacino, Faye Dunaway, River Phoenix, and Sean Connery) and acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. Insisting that moviemaking is collaborative, Lumet often notes his determination to find styles that serve the many different kinds of stories he has told, such as the social drama The Pawnbroker, the crime films Prince of the City and Serpico, the intimate family piece Garbo Talks, the play adaptation Long Day's Journey into Night, and the television series 100 Centre Street. Joanna E. Rapf is professor of English and of film and video studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. She is the author of On the Waterfront and Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography, and her work has appeared in Film Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Post Script, and Journal of Popular Culture.

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Book SynopsisDirector John Woo (b. 1946) reinvented the modern action movie and helped open the door for Asian filmmakers to the Western world. His hyper-violent, highly choreographed style made him a box office powerhouse, a respected auteur, and a revered figure among fellow directors. First discovered by Western audiences through his Hong Kong films The Killer and Hard Boiled, Woo introduced the world to a new brand of psychologically frenzied action film. After coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Woo produced a trilogy of hard-charging action films--Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II--that were both popular and critically acclaimed. But Woo's signature bullet ballets, his kinetic, blood-spattered action sequences, represent a dichotomy in the director's philosophy. John Woo: Interviews reveals a peace-loving, devoutly religious man at odds with his reputation as the master of cinematic violence. Unprecedented access to the director helped editor Robert K. Elder create in John Woo: Interviews the first authoritative English-language chronicle of Woo's career. Robert K. Elder writes about film, the arts, travel, and music for the Chicago Tribune. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Premiere, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Gear, the Oregonian, and many other publications. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Elder teaches film at the Facets Film School in Chicago.

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Book SynopsisJoel and Ethan Coen (b. 1954, 1957) started their careers in obscurity on a shoestring budget cajoled from family and friends in Minneapolis. Working entirely outside the studio system, the Coen brothers scored an unlikely first success in 1984 with their postmodern noir film Blood Simple. Two decades and nearly a dozen movies later, the Coens are now among the best-known writer/directors in Hollywood, turning out major studio releases featuring such stars as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Hanks. The Coens' films all share a distinctive, quirky ambience that critics have come to identify as ""that Coen brothers feeling."" Tricky moving camera work, frequent use of the voiceover, homages to directors and cinematic genres, a fascination with unexpected and off-kilter violence, and omnipresent black humor are all defining elements of the Coens' cinematic world. From such highly stylized movies as Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There to more mainstream but dark comedies such as Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coens are equally at home with existential despair and comic exuberance and are known for scripts packed with an obvious love for language. This collection of their most important interviews spans twenty years and is the most comprehensive published on the brothers.

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Book SynopsisMoviegoers often assume Frank Capra's life resembled his beloved films (such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life). A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs! But as Joseph McBride reveals in this meticulously researched, definitive biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy. Using newly declassified U.S. government documents about Capra's response to being considered a possible ""subversive"" during the post-World War II Red Scare, McBride adds a final chapter to his unforgettable portrait of the man who gave us It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe.Trade Review"Masterly, comprehensive, and frequently surprising." (Barry Gewen, the New York Times Book Review)"

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Book SynopsisDiscover the wands of your favorite Harry Potter characters.In the Harry Potter films, each wand is as unique as the witch or wizard who wields it. From Hermione Granger’s elegant, vine-wrapped wand to the bone-inlaid wands of the Death Eaters, each was designed and crafted by the filmmakers to reflect its owner’s identity. Harry Potter: The Wand Collection is a visual guide to these magical wands, their makers, and the characters who mastered them. Profiles of each wand feature stunning new photography of the original props, wand statistics, insights from the cast and crew, and other filmmaking secrets from the Warner Bros. archive. This collectible volume is an ideal resource for both wand-wielding veteran fans seeking to learn the history behind these beloved items and a new generation just beginning their journey into the wizarding world. 

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Book SynopsisThe film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was one of the most remarkable and visionary in cinema. They made an extraordinary range of films, from The Spy in Black and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. With champions like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and revived critical interest worldwide, they now find new generations of admirers. This illuminating new book looks closely at these classic films to explore their complex relationship to national identity, and their interest in exile, borderlands, utopias, escapism, art and fantasy. Moor reveals for example how the visual imagery of the films of the Second World War question current cinematic styles and how post war films like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman are in their highly expressive use of design, music and dance utterly international in character.Trade Review'Powell and Pressburger made beautiful, deviant and mongrel films that are famously un-pindownable. Moor's book challenges this belief in their rootlessness and shows how they fit into the movie genres, social history, empire, gender, nation, literature and iconography. He's particularly good on the postwar films, and brilliant on David Niven.' Mark Cousins 'Andrew Moor does full justice to the richness of their great films of the 1940s, and relates them in fascinating ways to the events of this pivotal decade in twentieth-century British history.' Charles Barr 'Essential reading for anyone engaging with the work of Powell and Pressburger.' Screen 'Eclectic and intellectually stimulating. - This book is clearly a labour of love, but that only adds to its worth and readability.' Historical Journal of Film and Television ' - A valuable text for both students and academics that is pertinent for study relating to postmodernism, cultural geography, postcolonial studies, gender studies, film studies, and the affect/effect of cinematic spaces on the spectator.' Journal of Popular Film and Television

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Book SynopsisThe phenomenon of time was a central preoccupation of Tarkovsky throughout his career. His films present visions of time by temporal means - that is, in time. Tarkovsky does not represent time through coherent argument, Nariman Skakov proposes, rather he presents it and the viewer experiences the argument. This book explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from Ivan's Childhood (1962) to Sacrifice (1986). Dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries and delusions are phenomena which present alternative spatio-temporal patterns; they disrupt the linear progression of events and create narrative discontinuity. Each chapter is dedicated to the discussion of one of Tarkovsky's seven feature films and in each, one of these phenomena functions as a refrain. Skakov discusses the influence of the flow of and lapses in space and time on the viewer's perception of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe. He opens and closes his original and fascinating book on Tarkovsky's cinema by focusing on the phenomenon of time that is discussed extensively by the filmmaker in his main theoretical treatise Sculpting in Time, as well as in a number of interviews and public lectures.Trade Review'An illuminating long take of the creative work of one of the most enigmatic and thought-provoking filmmakers of the twentieth century. The book sets high standards not only for thinking about Tarkovsky, but for writing about cinema as such. By combining a reflection on the cinematic and the philosophical, this book transforms the boundaries of both.' - Dragan KujundA ic, Professor of Film and Media Studies and Slavic Studies, University of Florida; 'Before this book, Tarkovsky's preoccupation with "sculpting in time" had become a critical cliche. Here Skakov brings it alive again, offering a fresh, theoretically-informed and entirely original approach. He reveals Tarkovsky's work as creating "textural" temporality, offers fresh readings of the key films, and a compelling theoretical framework.' - Emma Widdis, Head of Department of Slavonic Studies, Cambridge UniversityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Transliteration Preface: On Space(s) and Time(s) 1. Dreams of Ivan’s Childhood 2. Visions of Andrei Rublev 3. Phantasies of Solaris 4. Memories of Mirror 5. Revelations of Stalker 6. Recollections of Nostalghia 7. Illusions of Sacrifice Postscript Endnotes Filmography and Credits Bibliography Index

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