Individual film directors Books

Book SynopsisStanley Kubrick reexamines this internationally renowned director’s work in the context of the unique cultural milieu from which he emerged. Digging deep into rare archives to reveal insights about Kubrick’s life and times, Nathan Abrams also offers an in-depth analysis of classics like Lolita, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket.Trade Review"Stanley Kubrick is outstanding in its approach and the material it covers. As a pioneer work, anyone investigating Kubrick in the future would not be able to overlook Abrams' findings and arguments." -- Marat Grinberg * coeditor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen *"With imagination and intellectual rigor, using archival research and close readings of the films, Nathan Abrams explores Stanley Kubrick’s relationship with his Jewishness in this exceptionally readable and convincing book." -- Robert P. Kolker * author of The Extraordinary Image *"Brilliantly documents and analyzes Kubrick's Jewish sensibility by locating him in the lifelong context of his Jewish cultural and intellectual milieu. Abrams breaks acres of new ground. Essential reading." -- Geoffrey Cocks * author of The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust *“A must-read for anyone interested in Kubrick, this original and provocative study combines wonderfully perceptive film analyses with extensive archival research and a dazzling display of cultural-historical and biographical knowledge.” -- Peter Krämer * author of BFI Film Classics on Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey *"Written by Nathan Abrams, a superstar of contemporary Kubrick studies, this wonderfully knowledgeable and scholarly account of the great director’s Jewishness is the most original film book I’ve read for many years." -- I.Q. Hunter * author of Cult Film as a Guide to Life: Fandom, Adaptation, and Identity *"Stanley Kubrick’s films all had one thing in common: Jewishness" by Nathan Abrams * The Conversation *" [A] pathbreaking new book." * Tablet Magazine *"The Secret Jewish History Of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’" by Nathan Abrams * Forward *"In Nathan Abrams’s Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, [an] exploration of the contradictions of Kubrick’s relation to Jewish identity, the film is seen through the lens of Biblical allusion and Kabbalistic interpretation." * Wall Street Journal *"Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, by Michael Benson" by Nathan Abrams * Times Higher Education *Jewish Views podcast interview with Nathan Abrams * Jewish Views Podcast *"An impressive work of original scholarship, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual presents an exceptionally informative study of one of the twentieth century's most renowned and yet misunderstood film directors." * Midwest Book Review *"No film or Jewish history holding should be without this different approach to Kubrick's film magic." * Donovan's Literary Services *"Weekly Book List, May 25, 2018" by Nina Ayoub mention of Stanley Kubrick * Chronicle of Higher Education *"Kubrick's Universe," the Stanley Kubrick podcast - 9 Stanley Kubrick New York Jewish Intellectual with Nathan Abrams * Kubrick's Universe podcast *"[An] extraordinarily entertaining new book." * Village Voice *"Abrams combines close readings of the films with intensive, archival research into the source material— scripts, production documents, and Kubrick’s personal papers and artifacts—which collectively tell a Jewish story." * Jewish Review of Books *"Kubrick, the enigmatic Jew," by Nathan Abrams * Jewish Chronicle *"Lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay, Burning Secret, is found 60 years on" by Dan Alberge * The Guardian/Observer *"Scholar reveals morbid roots of lost Stanley Kubrick script," by JP O'Malley * The Times of Israel * "Abrams...[identifies] each and every Jewish allusion in Kubrick’s oeuvre that he can find." * Times Literary Supplement *"The power of the book as a whole...will be riveting reading for anyone who loves Kubrick's film." * Jerusalem Post Magazine *"Abrams asserts that if you look closely enough, the tension between being a cultural and religious Jew turns up frequently in Kubrick’s work." * Jewish Journal *"Abrams...makes a very convincing case that while Kubrick posed as an atheist technocrat filmmaker who wanted his films to appeal to worldwide audiences, among the many things he was burying in their subtexts were 'the concerns of Jewish intellectuals in the post-Holocaust world'....Ultimately though, are Abrams’ assumptions correct? Many of them ring true and likely are." * PJ Media *"How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick?" by Nathan Abrams * Zocalo Public Square *"Every scholar and devotee of Kubrick will want to read Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual." * Film Quarterly *"Irresistible reading." * Cineaste *"Nathan Abrams’ recent and remarkably insightful book published by Rutgers University Press in 2018." * Senses of Cinema *"No stone is unturned, no link untraced. Fans will revisit Kubrick’s movies with increased appreciation of the depth and complexity that make them compelling, and new ideas to fuel speculations. Academics will find plenty to rekindle debates about matters such as authorship, genre, adaptation, context and audience address, making this a significant intervention beyond the sub-field of Kubrick studies." * Shofar *"No stone is unturned, no link untraced. Fans will revisit Kubrick’s movies with increased appreciation of the depth and complexity that make them compelling, and new ideas to fuel speculations. Academics will find plenty to rekindle debates about matters such as authorship, genre, adaptation, context, and audience address, making this a significant intervention beyond the subfield of Kubrick studies." * H-Judaic *"Abrams’s study—this is not the least of its virtues—encourages us to revisit the films with a refreshed, enlightened eye. This is what any serious and good work of film criticism should do." * Senses of Cinema *"We’re still finding Jewish clues in Kubrick’s work 20 years after his last film," by Nathan Abrams https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/were-still-finding-jewish-clues-in-kubricks-work-20-years-after-his-last-film/ * Times of Israel *"Readers interested in a systematic dissection of how Jewish themes are coded in Kubrick's work are directed to Nathan Abrams' Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual." * Pop Matters *"As he digs deep into rare Kubrick archives to reveal insights about the director’s life and times, film scholar Nathan Abrams also provides a nuanced account of Kubrick’s cinematic artistry. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of one of Kubrick’s major films, including Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick thus presents an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century’s most renowned and yet misunderstood directors." * Jewish Book World *"Stanley Kubrick as American film master," by Aaron Howard * Jewish Herald-Voice *"Abrams’s book is a towering achievement in the ever-burgeoning literature on Kubrick. It genuinely reveals new perspectives on Kubrick through its ability to read the autobiographical allusions present in all of his films, and it provides a vital argument as to the importance of the director’s Jewish ancestry on his art." * Modern Jewish Studies *"Abrams offers fine-grained readings and interpretations of Kubrick’s career as a photographer and director, including insights into Kubrick’s process of development and production. Abrams is particularly attuned to the paradoxical pattern of Kubrick’s erasure of overt Jewish representation from source material while simultaneously interweaving Jewish themes, symbols, and cultural textures into his art." * Journal of Religion and Film *"Abrams dug through the archives to provide a detailed re-examination of Kubrick’s films through the context of his Jewish background. The book details themes and concepts such as masculinity and ethical responsibility. Abrams also explores Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity, and how his reluctance to be pegged as an 'ethnic' director manifested in the removal of Jewish references and characters from stories he adapted." * IndieWire *Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Looking to Killing2 The Macho Mensch3 Kubrick’s Double4 Banality and the Bomb5 Kubrick and Kabbalah6 A Mechanical Mensch7 A Spatial Odyssey8 Dream Interpretation9 Men as Meat10 Kubrick’s CodaEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIntroduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters. 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.Trade Review"Barry Keith Grant is an ideal guide in this wide-ranging survey of monsters in the movies. He leaps across genres, periods, and critical traditions with authority and verve."— Adam Lowenstein, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film "This is far more than a very handy guidebook to monsters in the movies. Barry Keith Grant’s prose is lucid, and informed by a keen intelligence and exhaustive scholarship demonstrating his mastery of the genre. This is a great read!"— Christopher Sharrett, author of The Rifleman "Barry Keith Grant’s Monster Cinema is an 'unnaturally' fine book, providing readers with a concise, engaging, and perceptive historical and ideological overview that attests to the enduring power of this genre."— Lester D. Friedman, coauthor of Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives "The book is highly recommended, because, as Grant himself notes, our survival depends on understanding monsters—in other words, on understanding ourselves." — Science Fiction ReviewsTable of ContentsContents 1 Meeting Movie Monsters: Monsters R Us 2 Human Monsters 3 Natural Monsters 4 Supernatural Monsters Acknowledgments Further Reading Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisMonster Cinema introduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters, from gigantic beasts to microscopic parasites, from grotesque demons to normal-looking serial killers. Film expert Barry Keith Grant considers what each type of movie monster might reveal about how we regard the natural, the supernatural, and the human. Trade Review"This is far more than a very handy guidebook to monsters in the movies. Barry Keith Grant’s prose is lucid, and informed by a keen intelligence and exhaustive scholarship demonstrating his mastery of the genre. This is a great read!" -- Christopher Sharrett * author of The Rifleman *"Barry Keith Grant’s Monster Cinema is an 'unnaturally' fine book, providing readers with a concise, engaging, and perceptive historical and ideological overview that attests to the enduring power of this genre." -- Lester D. Friedman * coauthor of Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives *"Barry Keith Grant is an ideal guide in this wide-ranging survey of monsters in the movies. He leaps across genres, periods, and critical traditions with authority and verve." -- Adam Lowenstein * author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film *"The book is highly recommended, because, as Grant himself notes, our survival depends on understanding monsters—in other words, on understanding ourselves." * Science Fiction Reviews *Table of ContentsContents 1 Meeting Movie Monsters: Monsters R Us 2 Human Monsters 3 Natural Monsters 4 Supernatural Monsters Acknowledgments Further Reading Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisContains twenty in-depth studies of prominent New Zealand directors, producers, actors, and cinematographers. This book displays the diversity of filmmaking in New Zealand and highlights the specific industrial, aesthetic, and cultural concerns that have created a film culture of international significance.

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Book SynopsisProlific director Howard Hawks made films in nearly every genre, from gangster movies like ""Scarface"" to comedies like ""Bringing Up Baby"" and ""Monkey Business"" and westerns like ""Rio Bravo."" This work explores the ways in which Hawks pushed the boundaries of each genre and transformed the traditional forms in interesting and creative ways.

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Book SynopsisOne of world cinema's most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodvar has been delighting, provoking, arousing, shocking, and-above all-entertaining audiences around the globe since he first burst on the international film scene in the early 1980s. All about Almodvar

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Book SynopsisOne of the most prolific and respected directors of the Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905-69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. This book illuminates Naruse's contributions to Japanese and world cinema.Trade Review“The Cinema of Naruse Mikio presents not only a deft and subtle run-through of the world of an important auteur, but also a virtual encapsulation of the intellectual history of Japanese cinema during its most important period, the 1930s–60s. Catherine Russell contextualizes Naruse in the commercial situation in which he worked and in the historical, social, political, and intellectual project of mid-twentieth-century Japan. I came away firmly believing that Naruse was more attuned to how modernity was leaving its indelible marks on Japanese women than any other director of classical Japanese cinema. For students of feminist film criticism, Russell’s book is an absolute must.”—David Desser, author of Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema“A confluence of many forces produced the great (and stereotypical) triumvirate of Japanese cinema: Kurosawa/Mizoguchi/Ozu. However, even as these three took their positions at the forefront of auteurism, a fourth name was regularly invoked and too often ignored. Perhaps this was to be expected. Naruse Makio’s films lacked period color for those searching for Oriental spectacle. Likewise, scholars celebrating formal inventiveness mistook Naruse’s cinematic style for pedestrian convention. Those who looked at the director’s films closely, however, knew that this was an extraordinary body of films and for a good many reasons. Catherine Russell looked closer than anyone, and has discovered a critical framework that provides us solid footing for exploring Naruse’s modern world. Working meticulously through all sixty-seven extant films, Russell gradually reveals a director and team of technicians and actors exploring the contradictions, hopes, and disappointments of modern Japan—particularly for women, who participate in and contribute to modernity both on and off Naruse’s screen. The Cinema of Naruse Mikio is a vivid and long-needed survey of the director’s life work and the everyday landscape of twentieth-century Japan.”—Abé Mark Nornes, author of Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary“A confluence of many forces produced the great (and stereotypical) triumvirate of Japanese cinema: Kurosawa/Mizoguchi/Ozu. However, even as these three took their positions at the forefront of auteurism, a fourth name was regularly invoked and too often ignored. Perhaps this was to be expected. Naruse Makio’s films lacked period color for those searching for Oriental spectacle. Likewise, scholars celebrating formal inventiveness mistook Naruse’s cinematic style for pedestrian convention. Those who looked at the director’s films closely, however, knew that this was an extraordinary body of films and for a good many reasons. Catherine Russell looked closer than anyone, and has discovered a critical framework that provides us solid footing for exploring Naruse’s modern world. Working meticulously through all sixty-seven extant films, Russell gradually reveals a director and team of technicians and actors exploring the contradictions, hopes, and disappointments of modern Japan—particularly for women, who participate in and contribute to modernity both on and off Naruse’s screen. The Cinema of Naruse Mikio is a vivid and long-needed survey of the director’s life work and the everyday landscape of twentieth-century Japan.”—Abé Mark Nornes, author of Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary“Even for those who read Japanese and are familiar with Naruse Mikio’s work, Catherine Russell’s book contributes to a new understanding of his cinema. Russell shows how Naruse’s films contributed to Japanese modernity as a cultural movement, and, using feminist film criticism and Miriam Hansen’s influential concept of ‘vernacular modernism,’ she traces how his films illuminate female subjectivity throughout the studio era.”—Daisuke Miyao, author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational StardomTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction: The Auteur as Salaryman 1 1. The Silent Films: Women in the City, 1930-1934 39 2. Naruse as P.C.L.: Toward a Japanese Classical Cinema, 1935-1937 81 3. Not a Monumental Cinema: Wartime Vernacular, 1938-1945 131 4. The Occupation Years: Cinema, Democracy, and Japanese Kitsch, 1945-1952 167 5. The Japanese Woman's Film of the 1950s, 1952-1958 226 6. Naruse in the 1960s: Stranded in Modernity, 1958-1967 315 Conclusion 398 Notes 405 Filmography 431 Bibliography 435 Index 447

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Book SynopsisMax Evans, one of Sam Peckinpah’s best friends, experienced the director’s mercurial character and personal demons firsthand. In this enthralling memoir we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah’s abusive behaviour.Trade ReviewDirector Sam Peckinpah, the mad genius of film, managed to drive away almost everyone who worked with him or drank with him. Max Evans stayed loyal to the end. His graphic reflections in Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends make you wonder how he did it." —Richard Gaughran, James Madison University "A remarkable memoir by a true westerner, Max Evans, on the wild, turbulent life and career of the great Sam Peckinpah, a man who created so much, and destroyed so much, in his all-too-brief life." —John L. Simons, coauthor of Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study

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Book SynopsisA Companion to Steven Spielberg provides an authoritative collection of essays exploring the achievements and legacy of one of the most influential film directors of the modern era.Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors x Acknowledgements xvii Film and Television Programs: Steven Spielberg (chronological) xviii 1 Introduction 1Nigel Morris Part One Industry and Agency 25 2 Spielberg as Director, Producer, and Movie Mogul 27Thomas Schatz 3 Producing the Spielberg “Brand” 45James Russell Part Two Narration and Style 59 4 Magisterial Juvenilia: Amblin’ and Spielberg’s Early Television Work 61Nigel Morris 5 Finding His Voice: Experimentation and Innovation in Duel, The Sugarland Express, and 1941 103James Kendrick 6 Creating a Cliff hanger: Narration in The Lost World: Jurassic Park 122Warren Buckland 7 Steven Spielberg and the Rhetoric of an Ending 137Michael Walker 8 The Spielberg Gesture: Performance and Intensified Continuity 159Steven Rybin Part Three Collaborations and Intertexts 173 9 Spielberg–Williams: Symphonic Cinema 175Jack Sullivan 10 Spielberg and Kubrick 195Peter Krämer 11 Spielberg and Adaptation 212I.Q. Hunter 12 “A very cruel death of innocence”: Notes Toward an Appreciation of Spielberg’s Film of Empire of the Sun 227Neil Sinyard Part Four Themes and Variations 241 13 “Who am I, David?”: Motherhood in Spielberg’s Dramas of Family Dysfunction 243Linda Ruth Williams 14 Close Encounters of the Paternal Kind: Spielberg’s Fatherhoods 258Murray Pomerance 15 Spielberg and Rockwell: Realism and the Liberal Imagination 276Frederick Wasser 16 Too Brave for Foolish Pride: Violence in the Films of Steven Spielberg 291Stephen Prince Part Five Spielberg, History, and Identity 305 17 Morality Tales? Visions of the Past in Spielberg’s History Plays 307Sarah Barrow 18 “Britain’s Secret Schindler”: The Impact of Schindler’s List on British Media Perceptions of Civilian Heroes 320Erin Bell 19 The (M)orality of Murder: Jews, Food, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich 336Nathan Abrams and Gerwyn Owen 20 You Must Remember This: History as Film/Film as History 353Lester D. Friedman 21 Violence and Memory in Spielberg’s Lincoln 374Robert Burgoyne and John Trafton Part Six Spielberg in the Digital Age 387 22 The Spielberg Effects 389Dan North 23 Spielberg and Video Games (1982 to 2010) 410Grethe Mitchell Part Seven Reception 433 24 Sharks, Aliens, and Nazis: The Crisis of Film Criticism and the Rise of Steven Spielberg 435Raymond J. Haberski, Jr. 25 Spielberg, Fandom, and the Popular Appeal of His Blockbuster Movies 452Lincoln Geraghty 26 Steven Spielberg and the Rise of the Celebrity Film Director 466Kirsty Fairclough and Andy Willis Index of Film and Television Programs 479 Index 488

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Book SynopsisBLAKE EDWARDS Blake Edwards: Film Director as Multitalented Auteur is the first critical analysis to focus on the dramatic works of Blake Edwards. Best known for successful comedies such as The Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers, Blake Edwards wrote, produced, and directed serious works in radio, television, film, and theater for seven decades. Although hit films such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and 10' remain popular, many of Edwards's dramas have been forgotten or marginalized. In this unique book, William Luhr and Peter Lehman draw on original research from numerous set visits and personal interviews with Edwards and many of his creative and business collaborators to explore his dramas, radio and television work, theatrical productions, one-man art shows, and unproduced screenplays. In-depth chapters analyze non-comedic films including Experiment in Terror, Days of Wine and Roses, and The Tamarind Seed, the theatrical fTable of ContentsList of Figures ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv Chapter 1 Introduction: “Call Me Blake.” 1 Chapter 2 The Early Period (1948–1962) 29 Chapter 3 Mister Cory (1957) 64 Chapter 4 Experiment in Terror (1962) 77 Chapter 5 Days of Wine and Roses (1962) 92 Chapter 6 Gunn (1967) and Peter Gunn (1989) 108 Chapter 7 Wild Rovers (1971) 129 Chapter 8 The Carey Treatment (1972) 152 Chapter 9 Julie (1972) 171 Chapter 10 The Tamarind Seed (1974) 194 Chapter 11 Sunset (1988) 210 Chapter 12 The Late Period: Play It Again, Blake 234 Appendix 1: Books on Blake Edwards 261 Appendix 2: The Interviews 263 Index 265

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Book SynopsisThis new edition of A Hitchcock Reader aims to preserve what has been so satisfying and successful in the first edition: a comprehensive anthology that may be used as a critical text in introductory or advanced film courses, while also satisfying Hitchcock scholars by representing the rich variety of critical responses to the director''s films over the years. a total of 20 of Hitchcock''s films are discussed in depth - many others are considered in passing section introductions by the editors that contextualize the essays and the films they discuss well-researched bibliographic references, which will allow readers to broaden the scope of their study of Alfred Hitchcock Trade Review"The rewritten introductions to each section update scholarship on Hitchcock, engaging the reader in current debates among Hitchcock scholars and fans." (CHOICE, 2009) "The detail is extraordinary and the insights remarkable and the director? He would have been flattered, but still retorted "Oh it's only a movie!"" (M/C Reviews, May 2009)Table of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition xi A Brief Chronology xiii Notes on Contributors xv Acknowledgments xx Introduction xxiii Part one: Taking Hitchcock Seriously 1 1. Hitch and His Public 17Jean Douchet 2. Hitchcock’s Imagery and Art 25Maurice Yacowar 3. Retrospective 35Robin Wood 4. Hitch as Matrix-Figure: Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema 47John Orr Part two: Hitchcock in Britain 69 5. Hitchcock’s The Lodger 75Lesley W. Brill 6. Criticism and/as History: Rereading Blackmail 85Leland Poague 7. Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!: Theater, Authorship, and the Presence of the Camera 96William Rothman 8. Consolidation of a Classical Style: The Man Who Knew Too Much 107Elisabeth Weis 9. Through a Woman’s Eyes: Sexuality and Memory in The 39 Steps 114Charles l. P. Silet 10. Rematerializing the Vanishing “Lady”: Feminism, Hitchcock, and Interpretation 126Patrice Petro Part three: Hitchcock in Hollywood 137 11. All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt 145James McLaughlin 12. The Moral Universe of Hitchcock’s Spellbound 156Thomas Hyde 13. Notorious: Perversion par Excellence 164Richard Abel 14. Strangers on a Train 172Robin Wood Part four: The Later Films 183 15. Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism 199Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson 16. Finding the Right Man in The Wrong Man 212Marshall Deutelbaum 17. Male Desire, Male Anxiety: The Essential Hitchcock 223Robin Wood 18. A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock, and Vertigo 234Marian E. Keane 19. North by Northwest 250Stanley Cavell 20. “Oh, I See.…”: The Birds and the Culmination of Hitchcock’s Hyper-Romantic Vision 264John P. Mccombe 21. Mark’s Marnie 280Michele Piso 22. The Queer Voice in Marnie 295Lucretia Knapp 23. Rituals of Defilement: Frenzy 312Tania Modleski Part five: Hitchcock and Film Theory: A Psycho Dossier 327 24. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion 341Raymond Bellour 25. Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing 361Christopher D. Morris 26. On Being Norman: Performance and Inner Life in Hitchcock’s Psycho 368Deborah Thomas Index 377

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Book SynopsisA Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship.Trade Review"This account includes interesting points of view that compliment and supplement one another as they shed light on a complex film practice and its practitioner." (NeoPopRealism Journal, 2011)Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors viii Acknowledgments xiv Introduction 1 Brigitte Peucker Part I Life and Work 15 1 The Other Planet Fassbinder 17 Juliane Lorenz 2 R. W. Fassbinder: Prodigal Son, Not Reconciled? 45 Thomas Elsaesser 3 Rainer "Maria" Fassbinder: Cinema between Literature and Life 53 Leo A. Lensing 4 Five Fassbinder Scenes 67 Wayne Koestenbaum Part II Genre; Influence; Aesthetics 77 5 Imitation, Seriality, Cinema: Early Fassbinder and Godard 79 Laura McMahon 6 Exposed Bodies; Evacuated Identities 101 Claire Kaiser 7 Redressing the Inaccessible through the Re‐Inscribed Body: In a Year with 13 Moons and Almodóvar’s Bad Education 118 Victor Fan 8 Nudity and the Question: Chinese Roulette 142 Eugenie Brinkema 9 Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority 159 Brian Price 10 Fassbinder's Work : Style, Sirk, and Queer Labor 181 John David Rhodes 11 A Nagging Physical Discomfort: Fassbinder and Martha 204 Joe McElhaney 12 Beyond the Woman's Film: Reflecting Difference in the Fassbinder Melodrama 226 Nadine Schwakopf 13 Through the Looking Glass: Fassbinder's World on a Wire 245 Brad Prager Part III Other Texts; Other Media 267 14 Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition, and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz 269 Elena del Rio 15 In Despair : Performance, Citation, Identity 290 Brigitte Peucker 16 Declined Invitations: Repetition in Fassbinder's Queer "Monomusical" 313 Caryl Flinn 17 Fassbinder's France: Genet's Miseen Scène in Fassbinder's Films 333 Olga Solovieva 18 Un-framing the Image: Theatricality and the Art World of Bitter Tears 352 Brigitte Peucker 19 A Novel Film: Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest 372 Elke Siegel 20 Swearing and Forswearing Fidelity in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz 398 Paul Coates Part IV History; Ideology; Politics 421 21 "There Are Many Ways to Fight a Battle": Young Fassbinder and the Myths of 1968 423 Eric Rentschler 22 A Generation Later and Still Unrepresentable?: Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction 441 Frances Guerin 23 Two Kinds of Excess: Fassbinder and Veit Harlan 461 Laura J. Heins 24 Jolie Laide: Fassbinder, Anti‐Semitism, and the Jewish Image 485 Rosalind Galt 25 Impossible, Impolitic: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Fassbinder's Asynchronous Bodies 502 Elena Gorfinkel 26 "So Much Tenderness": Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Günther Kaufmann, and the Ambivalences of Interracial Desire 516 Tobias Nagl and Janelle Blankenship 27 Rainer, Rosa, and Werner: New Gay Film as Counter-Public 542 Randall Halle 28 Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends and Gay Politics in the 1970s 564 Ronald Gregg 29 Querelle's Finality 579 Roy Grundmann Selected Bibliography 604 Index 623

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Book SynopsisA Companion to Werner Herzog represents more than two dozen original scholarly essays examining five decades of cinematic contributions by one of the world s most acclaimed and innovative filmmakers.Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors viii Acknowledgments xiv Werner Herzog’s Companions: The Consolation of Images 1 Brad Prager Part I Critical Approaches and Contexts 33 1 Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity 35 Brigitte Peucker 2 Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves 58 Lúcia Nagib 3 The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic 80 Timothy Corrigan Part II Herzog and the Inter-arts 99 4 Werner Herzog’s View of Delft: Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life 101 Kenneth S. Calhoon 5 Moving Stills: Herzog and Photography 127 Stefanie Harris 6 Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera 149 Lutz Koepnick 7 Coming to Our Senses: The Viewer and Herzog’s Sonic Worlds 168 Roger Hillman 8 Death for Five Voices : Gesualdo’s “Poetic Truth” 187 Holly Rogers 9 Demythologization and Convergence: Herzog’s Late Genre Pictures and the Rogue Cop Film in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans 208 Jaimey Fisher Part III Herzog’s German Encounters 231 10 “I don’t like the Germans”: Even Herzog Started in Bavaria 233 Chris Wahl 11 Herzog’s Heart of Glass and the Sublime of Raw Materials 256 Noah Heringman 12 The Ironic Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Embodied Vision in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner 281 Roger F. Cook 13 Tantrum Love: The Fiendship of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog 301 Lance Duerfahrd Part IV Herzog’s Far-Flung Cinema Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond 327 14 Werner Herzog’s African Sublime 329 Erica Carter 15 Didgeridoo, or the Search for the Origin of the Self: Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines 356 Manuel Köppen 16 A March into Nothingness: The Changing Course of Herzog’s Indian Images 371 Will Lehman 17 The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened 393 Eric Ames 18 The Veil Between: Werner Herzog’s American TV Documentaries 416 John E. Davidson 19 Herzog’s Chickenshit 445 Rembert Hüser 20 Encountering Werner Herzog at the End of the World 466 Reinhild Steingröver Part V Toward the Limits of Experience Philosophical Approaches 485 21 Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness 487 Randall Halle 22 Werner Herzog’s Romantic Spaces 510 Laurie Johnson 23 The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking 528 Matthew Gandy 24 Portrait of the Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire 547 Guido Vitiello 25 Herzog and Human Destiny: The Philosophical Purposiveness of the Filmmaker 566 Alan Singer Filmography 587 Compiled by Chris Wahl Index 611

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Book SynopsisThis is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America s most prominent contemporary filmmakers. The first reference of its kind, this book contains contributions from influential scholars in North America and Europe.Table of ContentsContributors viii Introduction: Artistic Solutions to Sociological Problems 1 Aaron Baker Part One The Pious Auteur 15 1 How Scorsese Became Scorsese: A Historiography of New Hollywood’s Most Prestigious Auteur 17 Marc Raymond 2 Smuggling Iconoclasm: European Cinema and Scorsese’s Male Antiheroes 38 Giorgio Bertellini and Jacqueline Reich 3 Italian Films, New York City Television, and the Work of Martin Scorsese 53 Laura E. Ruberto 4 The Imaginary Museum: Martin Scorsese’s Film History Documentaries 71 Robert P. Kolker 5 Images of Religion, Ritual, and the Sacred in Martin Scorsese’s Cinema 91 David Sterritt Part Two Social Contexts and Conflicts 115 6 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Italianamerican: Gender, Ethnicity, and Imagination 117 Aaron Baker 7 Mobsters and Bluebloods: Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in the Perspective of his Italian American Films 133 Robert Casillo 8 Off -White Masculinity in Martin Scorsese’s Gangster Films 173 Larissa M. Ennis 9 Irish-American Identity in the Films of Martin Scorsese 195 Matt R. Lohr 10 Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Television Authorship in Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues and Boardwalk Empire 214 Jonathan J. Cavallero Part Three Form and the Filmmaking Process 237 11 Martin Scorsese and the Music Documentary 239 Michael Brendan Baker 12 Martin Scorsese Rocks 259 Giuliana Muscio 13 Music as Cultural Signifier of Italian/American Life in Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets 277 Anthony D. Cavaluzzi 14 When Marty Met Bobby: Collaborative Authorship in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver 292 R. Colin Tait 15 Scorsese’s Landscape of Mortality 312 Murray Pomerance 16 Borderlines: Boundaries and Transgression in the City Films of Martin Scorsese 331 Brendan Kredell Part Four Major Films 353 17 Mean Streets as Cinema of Independence 355 Stefan Sereda 18 Taxi Driver and Veteran Trauma 373 Michael D. High 19 Filming the Fights: Subjectivity and Sensation in Raging Bull 396 Leger Grindon 20 The Last Temptation of Christ: Queering the Divine 420 Daniel S. Cutrara 21 The Cinematic Seduction of Not a “Good Fella” 442 Bambi Haggins 22 Hugo and the (Re-)Invention of Martin Scorsese 459 Guerric DeBona Index 480

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Book SynopsisLeading film studies scholars explore the astonishing range of Michael Curtiz, the most prolific director of studio-era Hollywood, whose nearly one hundred films include Casablanca, White Christmas, and Mildred Pierce.Trade Review2018 brings an aptly titled essay collection, The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz. . . Perhaps pointedly, none of the essayists focus on Casablanca (1942). Instead, The Many Cinemas examine genres Curtiz worked in, his handling of political messages and his relations with actors. * Shepherd Express *The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz goes a long way to explaining and clarifying how and why the uncanny medium of cinema makes it a fair claim that filmmakers such as Michael Curtiz were actually painters with light and sound. It’s just that their paintings spoke and moved like living things, because that’s what they were: darkly shining reflections from behind the mirror. * Critics at Large *The twenty essays here amply demonstrate how rich and productive readings of a director's work can be when due attention is paid to easing out the complex webs of collaboration, studio/commercial pressures, external factors (such as censorship), and cultural discourse that contribute to the shaping of film content and reception. * Western Historical Quarterly *Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz (R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance) 1. Bending It Like Curtiz: Gender and Genre in The Scarlet Hour and The Helen Morgan Story (Rebecca Bell-Metereau) 2. Making a Life with Father (David Desser) 3. The Jewish Jazz Singer Remakes His Voice: Michael Curtiz's Update of the Warner Bros. Classic (Seth Friedman) 4. "Don't Fence Me In": The Making of Night and Day (Mark Glancy) 5. Long Love the Queen: Bette Davis, Curtiz, and Female Melodrama (David Greven) 6. Double-Time in America: Yankee Doodle Dandy (Julie Grossman ) 7. Mildred Pierce: From Script to Screen (Kristen Hatch) 8. Curtiz at Sea: Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Sea Wolf, and The Breaking Point (Nathan Holmes) 9. Curtiz in the White House (Bill Krohn) 10. The Spectacle of the Ages: Noah's Ark (Katharina Loew ) 11. Jazz Me Blues: Lo-Fi, Fantasy, Audiovisuality in Young Man with a Horn (Robert Miklitsch) 12. A Setting Sun: The Egyptian (Deron Overpeck) 13. King Creole: Michael Curtiz and the Great Elvis Presley Industry (Landon Palmer) 14. Michael Curtiz's Political Cinema of Sorts (R. Barton Palmer) 15. Curtiz's New Western Aesthetic (Homer B. Pettey) 16. Michael Curtiz's Gamble for Christmas (Murray Pomerance) 17. Film Performance before and after the Code: Mandalay and Stolen Holiday (Steven Rybin) 18. "A Mass of Contradictions": Michael Curtiz and the Women's Film (Michele Schreiber) 19. Devil-May-Care: Curtiz and Flynn in Hollywood (Constantine Verevis) 20. Uncanny Effigies: Early Sound Cinema and Mystery of the Wax Museum (Colin Williamson) Michael Curtiz Filmography Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisA master of gritty horror, Tobe Hooper captured on-screen an America in constant crisis and upended myths of prosperity to reveal the country's internal decay.

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Book SynopsisWhat makes Brian De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, Douglas Keesey takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films.Trade ReviewBy cunningly projecting De Palma's life side-by-side with his films, Douglas Keesey has brought to light the hidden, deep desires of a film director previously categorized as a purely genre filmmaker. Thanks to Keesey, I can now rewatch De Palma's films with new eyes."" - Paul Duncan, film historian.""Brian De Palma's Split-Screen is an insightful and highly scholarly book. It is the best book so far on the life and works of De Palma. It is a very well researched book and provides deep analysis of De Palma's works. It should be on the university curriculum for film studies. It is a must-read for everyone interested in the life and works of Brian De Palma and cinema in general."" - The Washington Book Review

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Book SynopsisWong Kar-wai's signature style - experimental, emotive, character-driven, and timeless - remains apparent throughout his films. This volume includes interviews that appear in English for the first time, including some that appeared in Hong Kong magazines now out of print. The interviews cover each of Wong’s feature films.

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Book SynopsisThrough dozens of interviews, a detailed chronology and filmography, and a selection of Dorothy Arzner's own writings - including her unfinished autobiography this volume offers major insights into and an in-depth examination of the life and career of one of the few women to direct films during Hollywood's Golden Age.

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewLupack writes lucidly and with engagement as she champions her subject. Silent Serial Sensations casts new light on the formative years of American filmmaking. * Shepherd Express *Lupack's account is especially adept at placing the Whartons in the context of the movie industry's rapid evolution. [She] reminds us of the modern impulses at work in early film production, provides a glimpse of the first 'empowered' women of the screen, and shows how current film has adapted prior techniques. Overall, the book is a model of solid historical research, clearly written, and tellingly tied to the broader story of American film. * Technology & Culture *The rise and fall of the Wharton Brothers acts rather well as a microcosm for the rapid changes in the American film industry during the 1910s, and the book takes the necessary space to put their achievements in the context of the film world at the time and within society in general. Barbara Tepa Lupack's spotlight on the Wharton brothers makes for an entertaining read, and the book is a fine addition to the existing literature not only on silent serials of the 1910s but also on filmmaking of the period as a whole. * Early Popular Visual Culture *An important contribution to the ongoing task of rewriting early American cinema history, Silent Serial Sensations offers a timely, informative study of the heady opportunities and perilous risks of local or regional commercial filmmaking as the Hollywood industry was consolidating its national and global power in the 1910s. * The Journal of American History *It is in the pages of Lupack's wonderful book that my odd sensation of their tightly crafted and dynamic presentation of artfully devised delayed gratification as borne out by this exhaustively devoted film historian. She arrives at her most startling revelations even before her storied saga gets underway, in a preface and introduction that situate the Whartons as true aesthetic visionaries rather than merely or solely sensationalists. She does so by showing us how they literally invented a serial format that was still almost half a century away and wouldn't fully materialize until the advent of dramatic television experiments * Critics At Large *Lupack's study offers valuable insight into a lost history of the film industry in Upstate New York. Lupack concludes that her study reveals the Whartons' 'profound impact on the early serial picture' while restoring 'Ted and Leo Wharton to the classical narrative of early filmmaking.' Lupack's Silent Serial Sensations reframes the history of the early film industry beyond the traditional narratives focused on New York City and New Jersey. * New York History *In Silent Serial Sensations Lupack unpacks the astounding story of overlooked film producers Theodore and Leopold Wharton and their thrilling, even magical, contributions to early cinema. Lupack grounds her discussion, and the Wharton brothers themselves, in the evolution of silent film.Delving into fascinating primary sources-including business records and early motion picture periodicals-Lupack assembles a remarkable portrait of the duo's independent experiments in action serials. She does so with aplomb, writing in a readable and engaging style. In illuminating this neglected part of film history, Lupak has created a scholarly sensation.Essential. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Sensation of the Serial 1. Seeking "Old Opportunity" 2. Taking a Parallel Path 3. Bringing Essanay's "Special Eastern" to Ithaca 4. Taming and Reframing Buffalo Bill 5. Going Independent 6. Exploiting Elaine 7. Extending Elaine 8. Establishing Roots in Renwick Park 9. Unraveling Myra's Mysteries 10. Asking Beatrice 11. Preparing for War 12. Moving into Feature Filmmaking 13. Staring into The Eagle's Eye 14. Leaving Ithaca 15. Heading West

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Book SynopsisAn archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean PainlevéBefore Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects. Zoological Surrealism draws from Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints. From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.Trade Review"Reading Jean Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The ‘cinematic nature’ of Painlevé’s world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether."—Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene "A remarkable study of Jean Painlevé’s cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill’s study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought."—Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems of Modernity: Dr. Normet’s Serum: Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog and The Vampire5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins and The Blood of the BeastsConclusion: Unfinished Revolutions, Untimely NatureAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe second in a series: the master filmmaker’s prose scenarios for four of his notable filmsOn the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: “With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema.” And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker’s genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog’s signature fashion—more prose poem than screenplay, transcribing the vision unfolding before him as if in a dream—the four scenarios here (three never before translated into English) reveal an iconoclastic craftsman at the height of his powers.Along with his template for the film poem Fata Morgana (1971), this volume includes the scenarios for Herzog’s first two feature films, Signs of Life (1968) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), along with the hypnotic Heart of Glass (1976). In a brief introduction, Herzog describes the circumstances surrounding each scenario, inviting readers into the mysterious process whereby one man’s vision becomes every viewer’s waking dream.Trade Review"Enigmatic and imaginative, Herzog creates an unfamiliar world in each screenplay through his evocative prose."—Publishers Weekly "This follow-up to the previous collection, Scenarios, will please Herzog’s fans and intrepid readers of short fiction." —Library JournalTable of ContentsSigns of Life Even Dwarfs Started SmallFata MorganaHeart of Glass

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Book SynopsisFor the first time in English, and in his signature prose poetry, the film scripts of four of Werner Herzog’s early works “Herzog doesn’t write traditional scripts,” Film International remarked of the master filmmaker’s Scenarios I and II. “Instead, he writes scenarios which are like a hybrid of film, fiction, and prose poetry.”Continuing a series that Publishers Weekly pronounced “compulsively readable . . . equal parts challenging and satisfying, infuriating and enlightening,” Scenarios III presents, for the first time in English, the shape-shifting scripts for four of Werner Herzog’s early films: Stroszek; Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night; Where the Green Ants Dream; and Cobra Verde. We can observe Herzog’s working vision as each of these scenarios unfolds in a form often dramatically different from the film’s final version—as, in his own words, Herzog works himself up into “this kind of frenzy of high-caliber language and concepts and beauty.”With Scenarios I and II, this volume completes the picture of Herzog’s earliest work, affording a view of the filmmaker mastering his craft, well on his way to becoming one of the most original, and most celebrated, artists in his field.

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Book SynopsisA brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Trade Review "Condensed and intimate, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a systematic and insightful method to approach the queerness of Tsai Ming-liang's cinema, presenting a renewed understanding of queerness and queering in relation to the cinema as a medium and to queer politics and power relations that are specific to East and Southeast Asian cinemas"—Victor Fan, author of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy is an elucidating work... Apart from that it sheds new light on one of Taiwan’s best-known filmmakers, it lays out a new way of interpreting Tsai’s works that draws on history, the urban fabric, affect, while opening the way for creative readings of Tsai. The book adds to and also builds on our understanding of Tsai, while also pushing beyond, and being more than that."—Brian Hioe, No Man Is an Island "In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas de Villiers illuminates Tsai’s complicated and opaque filmography by unpacking the complex intersectional pieces of the director’s identity and thematic output."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisA brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Trade Review "Condensed and intimate, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a systematic and insightful method to approach the queerness of Tsai Ming-liang's cinema, presenting a renewed understanding of queerness and queering in relation to the cinema as a medium and to queer politics and power relations that are specific to East and Southeast Asian cinemas"—Victor Fan, author of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy is an elucidating work... Apart from that it sheds new light on one of Taiwan’s best-known filmmakers, it lays out a new way of interpreting Tsai’s works that draws on history, the urban fabric, affect, while opening the way for creative readings of Tsai. The book adds to and also builds on our understanding of Tsai, while also pushing beyond, and being more than that."—Brian Hioe, No Man Is an Island "In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas de Villiers illuminates Tsai’s complicated and opaque filmography by unpacking the complex intersectional pieces of the director’s identity and thematic output."—Film Quarterly

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Book SynopsisBen Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.In 1932, Hechtsolidified his legend as ""the Shakespeare of Hollywood"" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe's Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious! and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando's career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe's memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.Table of Contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Prelude: The Lost Land of Boyhood Part I: THE NEWSPAPERMAN The Chicago School of Journalism Chapter 1: The Chicago School Chapter 2: Shades of Black: The Stages of Hecht's Cynicism Chapter 3: Propagandist in Training Chapter 4: The Journalist and the Gangster Part II: THE WRITER The Chicago Renaissance and Hollywood Chapter 5: The Chicago Renaissance: Little Children of the Arts Chapter 6: Crying in the Wilderness Chapter 7: The Un-Jewish Jew Chapter 8: Return Part III: THE ZIONIST From Humanist to Public Enemy Chapter 9: Jewish Knights: The Bergson Group Chapter 10: "Champion in Chains" Chapter 11: Campaign for a Jewish Army Chapter 12: "A Challenge to the Soul of Men" Chapter 13: "One of the Greatest Crimes in History" Chapter 14: Blood and Fire Chapter 15: Only Thus Part IV: THE MEMOIRIST Writing about L.A.'s Al Capone Chapter 16: "Some Kind of Strength" Chapter 17: Champion in Chains, Revisited Chapter 18: The Old New Journalist Chapter 19: Time Out for Psychology Conclusion Selected Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder introduces scholars and students to the controversial and prolific but brief career of a filmmaker hailed as one of the New German Cinema's most talented exponents. Combining a chronological survey with a thematic exploration, Wallace Steadman Watson reviews the entirety of Fassbinder's artistic output, focusing specifically on fifteen of the filmmaker's thirty-eight feature-length works. Watson's interpretations of these films, all of which he studied in Germany, scrutinise the financial constraints, material conditions, and script development involved in their production.Watson draws on a wide assortment of Fassbinder interviews—many of which are not available in English—and on theoretical and critical approaches employed in the Frankfort School, performance and reception theories, gay and lesbian film theory, and studies of melodrama and camp. Watson also incorporates his own interviews with Fassbinder's mother and with the woman who served as Fassbinder's film editor and companion during the final four years of his life.

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Book SynopsisBritish filmmaker Mike Leigh began his career in the 1970s as a playwright and theater director. Later he made a number of films of varying lengths for British television and then moved into feature film production. Although well established in the U. K., he slowly gained a reputation in the United States, where, at first, his work was known to a relatively small number of filmgoers and critics. Such major films as High Hopes and Life Is Sweet attracted little attention in America. With the release of Secrets and Lies, however, the audience for Leigh's films increased dramatically. Mike Leigh: Interviews collects published conversations from the past seven years. Not just a close-up encounter with Leigh, they also express both his unusual work style and the emotional and intellectual toughness that characterizes his distinct approach to filmmaking. As Leigh speaks in these interviews, he reveals what is unique in his work, particularly that his films do not begin with a script. Explaining this approach, he discusses how he begins by assembling a few actors who talk, improvise, create characters, and gradually develop a story that contains their actions. Before the camera rolls, a tentative script is set, but many months may pass before the script is finished and the shooting begins. Among those he talks with in these interviews are Jay Carr of the Boston Globe, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, and Judy Stone, the longtime critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Leigh is asked to discuss politics, social attitudes, and religion--all of which give his films a unique signature.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together an exceptional array of interviews, profiles, and press conferences tracing the half century that Orson Welles (1915- 1985) was in the public eye. Originally published or broadcast between 1938 and 1989 in worldwide locations, these pieces confirm that Welles's career was multidimensional and thoroughly inter-woven with Welles's persona.Several of them offer vivid testimony to his grasp on the public imagination in Welles's heyday, including accounts of his War of the Worlds broadcast. Some interviews appear in English for the first time. Two transcriptions of British television interviews have never before appeared in print. Interviewers include Kenneth Tynan, French critic André Bazin, and Gore Vidal.The subjects center on the performing arts but also embrace philosophy, religion, history, and, especially, American society and politics. Welles confronts painful topics: the attempts to suppress Citizen Kane, RKO's mutilation of The Magnificent Ambersons, his loss of directorial authority, his regret at never having run for political office, and his financial struggles. ""I would have sold my soul"" to play Marlon Brando's role as Don Corleone in The Godfather, he tells a BBC interviewer.Welles deflates the notion of the film director's omnipotence, insisting that it is only in the editing studio that he possesses ""absolute control."" With scholarly erudition, Welles revels in the plays of Shakespeare and discusses their adaptation to stage and screen. He assesses rival directors and eminent actors, offers penetrating analyses of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, and The Third Man, and declares that he never made a film that lacked an ethical point-of-view. These conversations reveal the majestic mind and talent of Welles from a fresh perspective.

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Book SynopsisThroughout his career Oliver Stone (b. 1946) has broken traditions and challenged audiences with a series of daring, angry, violent, and often confrontational films. Politically charged movies such as Nixon (1995), JFK (1991), and Wall Street (1987), and his Vietnam trilogy of Platoon (1986), Born on the 4th of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993) provoke and enrage critics and audiences from all ideological walks. In a short time, Stone has established himself as one of the most admired and most reviled directors in American cinema. Ranging from 1981 to 1997, the fifteen conversations featured in Oliver Stone: Interviews reveal a man frustrated by what he sees as the hypocrisies of American politics, of conservatism, and of the Hollywood film industry. But the conflicts and tensions these issues generate spellbind him. In the interviews, Stone comes off as a man as brash, outspoken, confident, and complicated as his movies. His obsessions -- the 1960s, the ways in which Vietnam shaped the country, the nature of violence, and the role of the media in shaping it -- resurface again and again, no matter what film Stone is discussing. Though the subjects of Nixon, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, The Doors (1991), and Heaven and Earth are rooted in the turbulent 1960s, Stone as interviewee and filmmaker is firmly entrenched in the present. He fiercely discusses how the attitudes and political effects of the 1960s have defined later decades and generations, as he talks about his satire of the stock market (Wall Street, 1987) and media exposure (Natural Born Killers, 1994). Bolts of the director's raw wit and enthusiasm for the cinema shine through all of Stone's ferocious rage. Stone loves writing as well as directing. Whether discussing his screenplays written for other directors -- which include Scarface (1983), Midnight Express (1978), or Conan the Barbarian (1982, with director John Milius) -- or his own films, Stone emphasizes how crucial screenwriting is to making great movies. ""Directing is a natural extension of writing,"" he says in a 1987 interview with Michel Ciment. ""A director can always pull through with noise everywhere and his colleagues around. I don't think a good director can make a good film with a bad screenplay, but a bad director can deliver an acceptable film if he has a good screenplay. So for me, that's the number one priority."" Charles L. P. Silet is a professor of English at Iowa State University.

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Book SynopsisThis is the first collection of interviews with John Ford (1895--1973), whom many aficionados of fine films consider not only the major American filmmaker but also one of the most extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century. Among the world's filmmakers who have been devotees of Ford's work are Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Wim Wenders, and Orson Welles, who, when asked from whom he learned how to make Citizen Kane, exclaimed ""John Ford, John Ford, John Ford!"" And yet, Ford, unquestionably a giant of the international film world, is far less known, his genius less recognized, although his accomplishments comprise perhaps the best film biography of all time (Young Mr. Lincoln), the best war film (They Were Expendable), a masterly romance (The Quiet Man), a sublime film of childhood (How Green Was My Valley), classic adaptations from fiction (The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home), and the American Western, on which he left his indelible signature (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers). Although his was a brilliant career, Ford was not a self-promoter. He refused to discuss his film art. In fact, with interviewers he proved to be gruff and impatient. With those who asked him intellectual questions he was downright cantankerous. His sarcasm, impatience, and occasional mean-spiritedness were quick to surface during interviews. The legend is that he was the interviewee from hell. Yet there were times when he let the walls down and spoke openly and even generously. This book includes at least a dozen such lucid encounters with him, many reprinted for the first time. Also for the first time, several French interviews have been translated into English and show how with French critics Ford enjoyed making conversation. Included too are interviews newly discovered and not listed previously in any bibliography, as well as his poignant and revelatory interviews granted when he knew he was dying. Gerald Peary, a professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston, is a film critic for the Boston Phoenix and editor of Quentin Tarantino: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

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Book SynopsisIn full command of both Hollywood stylistics and camp aesthetics, Spain's Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1951) has become a master of the audacious and the unorthodox, of the permissive and the polemical. Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews documents the 22-year-long cinematic career of the most internationally celebrated Spanish art-film director since Luís Buñuel. Many of these interviews, from French, Italian, and Spanish periodicals, appear for the first time in English. Almodóvar's early cinematic ventures in Super 8 and 16mm in the 1970s marked and memorialized the rise of the Movida, Madrid's underground vanguard artistic movement. Almodóvar's critical success in his native Spain came with What Have I Done to Deserve This? Almodóvar made his mark in the United States with his kitschy, melodramatic comedy and Academy Award nominee Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and his outlandish and irreverently funny Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! For all its taboo-breaking plots, eccentric characterizations, and explosive palettes, Almodóvar's cinema of excess has matured into one of tender compassion. All About My Mother, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and of Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, and his fourteenth feature to date, Talk to Her, winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, 2003, cement Almodóvar's commitment to characters on the margins and to social critique. Covering more than two decades, the interviews collected here trace Almodóvar's journey from the small village of Calzada de Calatrava to Madrid, from his humble and Catholic provincial upbringing to his superstar status as Spain's leading postmodern auteur. Originally published in Spain, France, Italy, and the United States, these conversations disclose as much about Almodóvar's personal biography as they do about his thematic universe, his directorial personality, and his maturing style. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi is assistant professor of media arts at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the co-editor of Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of interviews with the renowned filmmaker, animator, artist, and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe covers the phases of his career from his early work as a cartoonist and animator through his most recent and most difficult projects.Among many subjects, Gilliam discusses his formative years as an artist and humor-magazine cartoonist, his move from the United States to England, his entry into British television, and his success as resident animator for the Monty Python's Flying Circus television show.As co-director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and as director of Jabberwocky Gilliam made his advent as a maker of feature films, followed by such popular movies as Time Bandits and The Fisher King. A mixture of critical acclaim and film-studio animosity greeted his epic Brazil. Gilliam discusses all these, as well as the damage The Adventures of Baron Munchausen did to his career and the disasters that plagued his attempt to film a time-travel comedy called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote after the commercial disappointment of his unexpectedly acerbic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In his conversations with a diverse array of interviewers Gilliam talks about an eclectic succession of topics, including his idiosyncratic tastes in painting and architecture, his fascination with the art and history of medieval Europe, his outspoken hostility for the commercial film industry, his views on comedy, fantasy, and film, and his philosophical perspectives on contemporary society.""I like the idea,"" he says, ""of actual demons sucking your brains out--envy and greed, these things being tangible. It's somehow on a common level, a more sensible way of dealing with the world. . . .""Trade Review"I like the idea of amazing and astounding people. That's great, and that's what I do for a living." - Terry Gilliam"

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Book SynopsisThe imagination of Walt Disney (1901-1966) is still seen in theme parks throughout the world bearing his name, on numerous live-action films and television specials, on toys and assorted merchandise, and on an international corporation known both for the high quality of its creative output and its ubiquity. Walt Disney: Conversations collects interviews and profiles of the man who created Mickey Mouse, and produced such full-length animated classics as Snow White, Cinderella, Fantasia, Bambi, The Lady and the Tramp, Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio, along with countless short cartoons. Bringing together over twenty pieces from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, this book traces Disney's career from the early classic Steamboat Willie to the construction of Disneyland, and the live-action ventures The Mickey Mouse Club and Mary Poppins. Walt Disney: Conversations shows how Disney saw his productions as shapers of popular culture and reveals how firmly he understood the issues of his time. Featuring an interview conducted by producer Cecil B. DeMille, Disney's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and rarely seen pieces from the Disney corporation's archives, Walt Disney: Conversations reveals a complex visionary whose impact on animation, live-action film, television, and theme parks has never been equaled.

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Book SynopsisRoman Polanski (b. 1933) arrived on the international scene in 1962 with his first feature film, Knife in the Water, and his face would be on the cover of Time magazine by the end of that year. His vibrant, disturbing, and often violent films--including the psychological thriller Rosemary's Baby, the film noir classic Chinatown, and the somber Holocaust drama The Pianist--have entertained and sometimes infuriated audiences. Stylistically unsettling and thematically varied, Polanski's films have established him as one of the most talented and controversial European filmmakers of his generation. Polanski's life has been troubled. He survived the Krakow ghetto and the Holocaust, but his mother died at Auschwitz. His wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered in 1968 by members of Charles Manson's cult. After years of success in the United States, he fled the country in 1978 when he was convicted for having sex with a minor. He hasn't returned to America since that time. In Roman Polanski: Interviews, the acclaimed director talks openly about how incidents in his life have and have not influenced his artistic vision. This collection of interviews spans nearly forty years and comprises translations from French, German, and Spanish newspapers and magazines and transcripts of British and American television and radio appearances.

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Book SynopsisBeginning in 1957 with the release of his directorial debut The Left Handed Gun, Arthur Penn (b. 1922) quickly became an iconoclastic and influential American film director. Moving deftly between comedy and tragedy, realism and absurdity, his films Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, and Night Moves speak to the troubled times--the 1960s and 1970s--in which they were made while remaining timeless in their unsettling portrayal of characters on the margins of society. Arthur Penn: Interviews is the first collection to explore every stage of the director's career. These conversations span forty-five years, from his first in-depth discussion with Cahiers du cinéma in 1963 to a new interview from 2007, and reveal Penn's ever-changing ideas on the nature of film and filmmaking. This volume also presents newly translated interviews from European film periodicals, published in English for the first time.

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Book SynopsisThe films of Jonathan Demme (b. 1944) reflect his ebullient personality and are often infused with his love for Caribbean culture, pop music, fashion, and characters who reveal offbeat tastes and depths. He emerged from the 1970s American Renaissance that produced Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and others. His movies are funny, humane, and often unclassifiable by genre. With conversations from the 1970s to the present, Jonathan Demme: Interviews focuses on Demme's artistry, on his filmmaking philosophy, and especially on his progressive social and political concerns and how these have influenced the subject matter he has chosen to film. Although best known for his Oscar-winning dramas The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme has also achieved acclaim for comedies (Married to the Mob; Something Wild), documentaries (The Agronomist; My Cousin Bobby; Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains), and concert performance films (Stop Making Sense; Neil Young: Heart of Gold). In this volume, he discusses his troubles with studios, his need to balance documentaries with fiction films, his early work as a critic and publicist, and his apprenticeship with Roger Corman working on ""B"" movies.

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Book SynopsisWilliam Wyler (1902-1981) was one of the most honored and successful directors from Hollywood's golden age. One of the film industry's most influential artists, he received three Academy Awards, twelve nominations for his direction and five nominations for his work as a producer. No film director in history has guided more actors to Academy Award nominations (thirty-one). During his fifty-year career, he directed some of Hollywood's most enduring films--among them Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives, Funny Girl, Jezebel, The Letter, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, Roman Holiday, and Wuthering Heights.William Wyler: Interviews spans his career and includes three previously unpublished exchanges. Despite the accolades, Wyler has not received the kind of academic and critical appraisal lavished on contemporaries such as John Ford, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, George Stevens, and Billy Wilder. In his later interviews he seems good-natured about this neglect, but it clearly rankled. He dismisses detractors by explaining that he was always interested in trying out new forms, variety being more important to him than mining the same territory.

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Book SynopsisRoger Corman (b. 1926) is known by many names-craftsman, artist, maverick, schlock-meister, mini-mogul, mentor, cheapskate, and King of the B's. Yet his commitment to filmmaking remains inspired. He learned his craft at the end of the studio system, only to rebel against Hollywood and define himself as the true independent. And the list of directors and producers who learned under his tutelage--Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, and many more--is astonishing.Collected here are many of the most honest and revealing interviews of his epic career, several of which have never been seen in print. Roger Corman: Interviews brings into focus a life committed to the entertaining art of motion pictures.Corman's rare talent combined artistic drive with business savvy, ensuring a successful career that was constantly in motion. At a remarkable pace more akin to silent movies than modern Hollywood, he directed over fifty films in less than fifteen years, some entertaining (Not of This Earth), trendsetting (The Wild Angels), daring (The Intruder), workmanlike (Apache Woman), stylized (The Masque of the Red Death) and even profound (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes). In a single year, Corman famously shot a cult classic in two and a half days (The Little Shop of Horrors), reinvigorated the American horror film with a dash of Poe and Price (House of Usher)--and still turned out a few more films shot across the globe. Recently awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime contribution to cinema, the self-made Corman has created a legacy as a defining filmmaker.

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Book SynopsisThe legendary Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) had many identities. He first broke into Hollywood as a fresh-faced young actor in the 1950s, redefined himself as a rebel director with Easy Rider in the late 1960s, and became a bad boy outcast for much of the 1970s. He returned in the 1980s with standout performances in films like Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, was one of the great blockbuster baddies of the 1990s, and ended his career as a ubiquitous actor in genre movies.Hopper, however, was much more than just an actor and director: he was also a photographer, a painter, and an art collector--not to mention a longtime hedonist who kicked his addiction to drugs and alcohol and became a poster boy for sobriety.Dennis Hopper: Interviews covers every decade of his career, featuring conversations from 1957 through to 2009, and not only captures him at the significant points of his tumultuous time in Hollywood but also focuses on the lesser-known aspects of the man. In this fascinating and highly entertaining volume--the first ever collection of Hopper's interviews--he talks in depth about film, photography, art, and his battles with substance abuse and, in one instance, even takes the role of interviewer as he talks with Quentin Tarantino.

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Book SynopsisThese 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 doppelgänger. 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 the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire (1994).

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Book SynopsisWith 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, Zero Dark Thirty, 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 reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark, the female vigilante movie Blue Steel, and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break 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 and K-19: The Widowmaker; 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 such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.

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Book SynopsisAnthony Minghella: Interviews is an illuminating anthology of in-depth conversations with this important contemporary film director and producer. The collection explores Minghella's ideas on every aspect of the cinematic creative process including screenwriting, acting, editing, the use of music in film, and other topics concerning the role of the film director. Minghella (1954-2008) was a highly regarded British playwright (Made in Bangkok), and television writer (Inspector Morse) before turning to film directing with his quirky, highly regarded first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, in 1990. He went on to direct an extraordinary trilogy of large-scale films, all adapted from significant works of contemporary literature. Minghella's 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's poetic novel The English Patient was the director's most critically and commercially successful film and went on to win dozens of awards around the world, including nine academy awards. Minghella followed this film with his entertaining, elegant adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film that enjoyed great critical and commercial success and featured some of the best acting of the 1990s by its talented cast of young, rising stars, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Minghella's ambitious adaptation of Charles Frazier's American Civil War romance, Cold Mountain, was released in 2003, and firmly marked Minghella as a director of intimate, yet large-scale epic cinema worthy of David Lean. Although Minghella was a successful film director and producer, he was also an important part of the cultural life of the U.K. He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2001 for his contributions to culture, and he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the British Film institute from 2004 to 2007.

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