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Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written ... More

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written books and articles, and continues to make films. However, his reputation outside of the German-speaking world still largely rests on his films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This book assembles thirty of the author's essays, speeches, glossaries, and interviews, revolving around the capacity for differentiation and the need for orientation toward ways out of catastrophic modernity. The volume brings together some of the author's most fundamental statements on literature, film, pre- and post-cinematic media, and social theory, nearly all for the first time in English translation. Together, these works highlight a career-spanning commitment to unorthodox, essayistic thinking.Less

When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited

Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (eds)

The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies ... More

The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.Less

Philip Kaufman

Annette Insdorf

American director Philip Kaufman is hard to pin down: a visual stylist who is truly literate, a San Franciscan who often makes European films, he is an accessible storyteller with a sophisticated ... More

American director Philip Kaufman is hard to pin down: a visual stylist who is truly literate, a San Franciscan who often makes European films, he is an accessible storyteller with a sophisticated touch. Celebrated for his vigorous, sexy, and reflective cinema, Kaufman is best known for his masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the astronaut saga The Right Stuff. His latest film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. This book argues that the stylistic and philosophical richness of Kaufman's cinema makes him a versatile auteur. It demonstrates Kaufman's skill at adaptation, how he finds the precise cinematic device for a story drawn from seemingly unadaptable sources, and how his eye translates the authorial voice from books that serve as inspiration for his films. Closely analyzing his movies to date (including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers, and Quills) the book links them by exploring the recurring and resonant themes of sensuality, artistic creation, codes of honor, and freedom from manipulation. While there is no overarching label or bold signature that can be applied to his oeuvre, the book illustrates the consistency of themes, techniques, images, and concerns that permeates all of Kaufman's works.Less

Gay Directors, Gay Films?: Pedro Almodóvar, Terence Davies, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters

Emanuel Levy

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of ... More

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the “queering” of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the “North American” attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the “European” perspectives of Pedro Almodóvar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.Less

Studying French Cinema

Sarah Perks, Isabelle Vanderschelden, and Andy Willis

Taking a text-led approach, with the emphasis on more recent popular films, Studying French Cinema is directed at non-specialists such as students of French, film studies, and the general reader with ... More

Taking a text-led approach, with the emphasis on more recent popular films, Studying French Cinema is directed at non-specialists such as students of French, film studies, and the general reader with an interest in post-war French cinema. Each of the chapters focuses on one or more key films from the ground-breaking films of the nouvelle vague (Les 400 coups, 1959) to contemporary documentary (Etre et avoir, 2002) and puts them into their relevant contexts. Depending on the individual film, these include explorations of childhood, adolescence and coming of age (Les 400 coups, L'Argent de poche); auteur ideology and individual style (the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda); the representation of recent French history (Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir les enfants); transnational production practices (Le Pacte des loups); and popular cinema, comedy and gender issues (e.g. Le Diner de cons). Each film is embedded in its cultural and political context. Together, the historical discussions provide an overview of post-war French history to the present. Useful suggestions are made as to studies of related films, both those discussed within the book and outside.Less

Julien Duvivier

Ben McCann

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world’s great film filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his ... More

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world’s great film filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace patterns of continuity and change, and explore critical assessments of his work over time. Throughout a five-decade career, Duvivier zigzagged between multiple genres – film noir, comedy, literary adaptation – and made over sixty films. His career intersects with important historical moments in French cinema, like the arrival of sound film, the development of the ‘poetic realism’, the exodus to America during the German Occupation, the working within the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s, and the return to France and to a much-changed film landscape in the 1950s. Often dismissed as a marginal figure in French film history, this groundbreaking book illustrates Duvivier’s eclecticism, technical efficiency and visual fluency in films such as Panique (1946) and Voici le temps des assassins (1956) alongside more familiar works like La Belle Equipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937). It will particularly appeal to scholars and students of French cinema looking for examples of a director who could comfortably straddle the realms of the popular and the auteur.Less

Robert Guédiguian

Joseph Mai

This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes ... More

This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes the case that Guédiguian’s work represents one of the most discretely original but radical projects of contemporary French cinema: to make politically committed films with friends, predominately in a local space, over a long period of time. The book starts with a consideration of the philosophy of friendship and its relation to politics, relation, difference, time, and space. It concentrates on Guédiguian’s early life in the Estaque neighbourhood of Marseilles, where he became politically active and developed the friendships that would continue in his filmmaking, as well as Guédiguian’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. It then examines the political pessimism of the 1980s through Guédiguian’s four early films. The book examines the turn toward local activism and utopianism in the 1990s, and follows Guédiguian’s work as it spreads into diverse experimentation with genres and registers in more recent work. It emphasises Guédiguian’s political assessments and his frequent meditations on history, violence, and utopia. But it returns consistently to the underlying themes of friendship, and thus intervenes at the crossroads of affect, politics, philosophy, and art.Less

Gary Larson and The Far Side

Kerry D. Soper

This book explores Gary Larson’s unlikely career as the creator of the groundbreaking, syndicated panel cartoon, The Far Side. To help contemporary readers understand the controversial qualities and ... More

This book explores Gary Larson’s unlikely career as the creator of the groundbreaking, syndicated panel cartoon, The Far Side. To help contemporary readers understand the controversial qualities and cultural significance of Larson’s work, the author recreates the historical context in which The Far Side first emerged: the early 1980s when “family-friendly” mainstream mediums like the newspaper comics page were largely intolerant of alternative worldviews or irreverent brands of comedy. As a self-taught cartooning auteur with a morbid sense of humor and subversively scientific perspective on life, Larson resisted or bypassed most of the established rules about “appropriate” art and comedy on the Funnies Page. That independence allowed him to introduce a set of innovative aesthetic devices, comedic tones, and philosophical frames that challenged and delighted many readers, while upsetting and confusing others. In sum, this book reminds old fans and new readers of the ways that Larson’s iconoclastic work and career effectively broadened the culture’s palate for alternative comedy, profoundly shaping the worldviews and comedic sensibilities of a generation of cartoonists, comedy writers and every day readers.Less

Todd Solondz

Julian Murphet

This book is a comprehensive study and appraisal of the career of Todd Solondz, one of the key figures of independent cinema in the 1990s, whose box office fortunes have been in decline ever since ... More

This book is a comprehensive study and appraisal of the career of Todd Solondz, one of the key figures of independent cinema in the 1990s, whose box office fortunes have been in decline ever since that heyday. The book argues that this decline is a fitting analogue for the story of American independent cinema more generally and the declining rate of US corporate profit at large. Tracking the long arc of Solondz's seven major feature-length films, the book isolates certain persistent motifs and themes—the fascination with suburban “junkspace,” the logic of repetition with disappointing variations, the stylistic and formal category of “left classicism,” the indulgence of subjective fantasy counterpointed by an insistence on discomfiting long takes, and the thematic obsession with the “gift of shit”—to account for Solondz's art of diminishing returns under the rubric of satire. The book is more than a simple auteur study in that it establishes a new understanding of the stakes of independent cinema in today's context of economic crisis and decline. It argues that no other contemporary film artist has explored as astutely and perversely the contradictions of aesthetics under the conditions of senile capitalism.Less

Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema

Jennifer O'Meara

This book examines the centrality of dialogue to American independent cinema, arguing that it is impossible to separate small budgets from the old adage that ‘talk is cheap’. Focusing on the 1980s ... More

This book examines the centrality of dialogue to American independent cinema, arguing that it is impossible to separate small budgets from the old adage that ‘talk is cheap’. Focusing on the 1980s until the present, particularly on films by writer-directors like Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater, the book demonstrates dialogue’s ability to engage audiences and bind together the narrative, aesthetic and performative elements of selected cinema. When compared to the dialogue norms of more mainstream cinema, the verbal styles of these independent writer-directors are found to be marked by alternations between various extremes, particularly those of naturalism and hyper-stylization, and between the poles of efficiency and excess. More broadly, these writer-directors are used as case studies that allow for an understanding of how dialogue functions in verbally experimental cinema, which, this book contends, is more often found in ‘independent’ or ‘art’ cinema. In questioning the association of dialogue-centred films with the ‘literary’ and the ‘un-cinematic’, the book highlights how speech in independent cinema can instead hinge on what is termed ‘cinematic verbalism’: when dialogue is designed and executed in complex, medium-specific ways. More broadly, the book provides a framework for analysing dialogue design and execution that can be readily applied to other films and filmmakers. It also highlights how speech can be central to cinema without overshadowing its medium-specific components. In so doing, the book develops new connections between film dialogue, reception studies, independent cinema and auteur studies.Less

Kim Ki-duk

Hye Seung Chung

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. ... More

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian “extreme” cinema, and Kim has been labeled a “psychopath” and “misogynist” in South Korea. Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, the book challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression). The book argues that the power of Kim's cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture, channel, and convey the raw emotions of protagonists who live on the bottom rungs of Korean society. It provides historical and postcolonial readings of victimization and violence in Kim's cinema, which tackles such socially relevant topics as national division in Wild Animals and The Coast Guard and U.S. military occupation in Address Unknown. The book also explores the religious and spiritual themes in Kim's most recent works, which suggest possibilities of reconciliation and transcendence.Less

Lars von Trier

Linda Badley

Scandinavia's foremost living auteur and the catalyst of the Dogme 95 movement, Lars von Trier is arguably world cinema's most confrontational and polarizing figure. Willfully devastating audiences, ... More

Scandinavia's foremost living auteur and the catalyst of the Dogme 95 movement, Lars von Trier is arguably world cinema's most confrontational and polarizing figure. Willfully devastating audiences, he takes risks few filmmakers would conceive, mounting projects that somehow transcend the grand follies they narrowly miss becoming. Challenging conventional limitations and imposing his own rules, he restlessly reinvents the film language. He has cultivated an insistently transnational cinema, taking inspiration from sources that range from the European avant-garde to American genre films. This book provides a stimulating overview of Trier's career while focusing on his more recent work, including the controversial Gold Heart Trilogy (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark), the as-yet unfinished USA Trilogy (Dogville and Manderlay), and individual projects such as the comedy The Boss of It All and the incendiary horror psychodrama Antichrist.Closely analyzing the films and their contexts, the book draws on a range of cultural references and critical approaches, including genre, gender, and cultural studies, performance theory, and trauma culture. Two revealing interviews that Trier granted during crucial stages of Antichrist's development are also included.Less