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Feng Xiaogang is regarded as the most successful commercial film director since the middle of the 1990s. His films were so popular that they even surpassed imported Hollywood blockbusters at the box office. Critics applauded him for being able to make profitable films, but he was not generally respected as a film director. Some of the critics characterized Feng's film as lacking depth, sincerity, and passion. His films were seen as mechanisms that manipulate audiences to generate and maximize profits. Feng was criticized as not aiming for the best, but aiming for the most profitable. However, a closer look at his films reveals that they are far from mindless escapist productions of a dream factory. Feng's films instead were reflections of the changing socio-political context of Chinese cinema since the mid-1990s and the nation-wide growth of popular cinema wherein the once politically infused cinema that was intended as political propaganda or for international audiences became cinema that addressed the domestic needs of the audiences. This introduction provides an overview of Feng Xiaogang's career. It traces Feng's humble beginnings from being a director with little professional training in scriptwriting and film directing to his growth as one of China's most influential directors. In this section are narratives of how Feng dealt with independent production, censorship, financial difficulties, and competition. Following the chronicle of Feng's rise to being one of China's most influential film directors are reviews of his cinema culled from both English and Chinese publications. This introduction also provides the methodology and the general structure of this study.

This chapter considers the subject of this book: the work of a contemporary Spanish film director, Daniel Calparsoro, in auteurist terms. This study of Calparsoro discusses not only Calparsoro's films but also the Spanish cinema of today and the ways in which it is studied, written about and presented. It aims to make explicit some of the ways in which certain films and production processes are implicitly deemed more desirable, more worthy of attention by academics, critics and audiences. It offers an overall presentation of Calparsoro and his total corpus of work to date in relation to trends and traditions within Spanish cinema, serving to problematise these. Thus Calparsoro is discussed against the background of specific developments in Spanish cinema since 1995, how both the film industry and critics perceived these developments, and how perceptions changed after Spanish cinema arguably fell into crisis from 2002. Calparsoro's style makes the critics uncomfortable, suggesting that, regardless of his own putative roots in an earlier Spanish cinema, his deviation from the increasing convergence of Spanish cine social and slick commercialism has irritated the critics, indicating in turn that their expectations, if not his, have changed.

This chapter analyzes the films of Spike Lee. Lee's films employ types of excess such as unconventional shots, extreme characters, and improbable scenes to intervene in critical issues that trouble the contemporary world—the question of the subject's singularity, the role that fantasy plays in structuring our reality, the political impact of passion, the power of paranoia in shaping social relations, the damage that the insistence on community inflicts, the problem of transcendence, and the struggles of the spectator. Above all, Lee is known for being a political filmmaker and the concept of excess holds the key to understanding the politics of his films. Excess has enabled Lee to create a varied corpus of films that treat a broad spectrum of fundamental social and political problems. These films include She's Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), and Malcolm X (1992).

This chapter presents a commentary on François Ozon's entire film career to date. It suggests that despite tremendous diversity in terms of cinematic choices (on generic, formal, and thematic levels), Ozon's oeuvre is decidedly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. The moving fabrics mentioned above are a leitmotif that visually represents the permeability of those frontiers. The chapter begins by exploring the director's own path to filmmaking before considering the colorful cast of characters in the short films that Ozon wrote and directed between 1988 and 1998. It then moves on to an analysis of his feature films: Sitcom (1998), Les amants criminels (1999), 8 femmes (2002), Sous le sable (2000), Swimming Pool (2003), Le temps qui reste (2005), Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000), 5x2 (2004), and Ricky (2009).

This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various directions taken by the British film during the period of his career, and he is regarded as one of the most underrated film directors in British film history. Although not ignored by scholars and critics, Asquith's work has certainly not had anything like the attention enjoyed by his most distinguished contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and neither has it had the consideration devoted to figures such as Michael Powell and David Lean. The selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture, and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.

This chapter analyzes the films of Christian Petzold. Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in Germany. Five of his last eight films have won Best Film from the Association of German Film Critics (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2012). It is not only the critics, however, who admire Petzold's work: his breakthrough The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000) won the Federal Film Prize in Gold, the equivalent of a best-film prize for its year, an unusual recognition for an art-house film. His films consistently explore new and transformational modes of individualities, especially the compromised, even tainted, character of desire in the wake of economic adaptability, accommodation, and mobility. This kind of adaptability, productive desire, and subsequent movement are emphatically historicized in Petzold's cinema, in which history regularly intrudes upon individuals' dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit.

This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.

This chapter analyzes the careers of David Cronenberg and George A. Romero, charting the evolution of two notable horror film auteurs from their origins in what the rhetoric of crisis has construed for many as the golden days of 1970s neo-horror, all the way toward the present. It suggests that while Cronenberg’s movies have come to exhibit that staid minimalism expected from a “mature” director of international stature, Romero’s recent films feature a joyful yet dour return to the exuberance of his genre’s g(l)ory days.

This chapter presents a commentary on Lars von Trier's film career. It argues that unlike auteurs shaped by existing conditions, trends, or movements within or outside the mainstream industry, Trier is self-authorized, his career “a prototype auteurist initiative,” a project “not primarily to make films but to construct Lars von Trier, the auteur filmmaker.” If his films are identified by auteurist trademarks as trilogies and movements, he systematically violates commandments like the lynchpin of continuity editing, the 180-degree rule. More characteristic yet, though, is his propensity for making 180-degree turns, whether between trilogies or within films. The remainder of the chapter focuses on Trier's work, including his student films, his television commercials from the late 1980s, and films such as The Idiots (1998), Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), and The Boss of It All (2006).

This chapter presents a commentary on Mike Leigh's film career. It attempts to reclaim him from the kindly ghetto in which he has been placed by his well-meaning enthusiasts. Leigh is typically considered an unassuming crafter of little movies, who has written little or nothing that we would consider theory, or even criticism. However, it is shown that Leigh is a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative dimensions. The recurrent simplifications of what his cinema is, and what his cinema does, result in part from the mode in which he works, or the mode in which he is said to work: realism. The films examined in this chapter include The Short and Curlies (1987), Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), Career Girls (1997), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), and Another Year (2010).

This chapter focuses on the new generation of largely college-educated ‘movie brats’ who were central to the shift from the modernist art cinema to blockbuster fantasies in the late 1970s. The period from 1975 to 1980 is also distinguished by considerable power acquired by successful directors. One figure who is often seen as especially representative of these processes was Stephen Spielberg. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Tales of the Silent Blast: Star Wars and Sound’ by Gianluca Sergi, which analyzes the sound design of Star Wars, a film that was pivotal within the industry through its exploration of the ‘dynamic potential’ of new sound technologies.

This chapter presents a profile of the French film director Maurice Pialat. Pialat's work inspires comparison with legendary figures such as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, yet he does not have the international reputation one might expect, given his gifts as a director and his importance in French cinema history. Pialat's death in 2003 inevitably situated him as a filmmaker of the 1980s, the decade in which his work began to receive serious critical attention and attracted a broader public. Yet by 1983, when A nos amours won the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc and the César for best film, he had been making films for over twenty years. Perhaps one of the most telling moments in Maurice Pialat's ongoing relationship with film and the French film-going public was the scandal at Cannes over the attribution of the Palme d'or in 1987. If the name Pialat is not without significance to the French filmgoing public, it is partly because he acquired the reputation of a singularly difficult and demanding director, who provoked and psychologically abused his actors and collaborators.

“The Case of Lars von Trier vs. Susanne Bier” focuses on the public conflict between Denmark’s leading international film directors, which has developed almost entirely through von Trier’s defamation of Bier in widely published anti-Semitic statements. In this chapter, Pétur Valsson outlines the history of von Trier’s and Bier’s relationship, which includes personal and professional ties that illustrate the closely knit nature of the Danish film industry. Valsson then questions the role of Jewish identity in each director’s work and professional persona, concluding that Bier’s more direct experience of Jewish culture contrasts with von Trier’s fetishization of Jewishness, which was shattered by his late-in-life discovery that his biological father was not Jewish as he had thought. Valsson suggests that the simultaneity of Bier’s career ascendance and von Trier’s discovery of mistaken identity unfortunately resulted in von Trier’s very public misogynist and anti-Semitic comments, to which Bier refused to respond, characterizing them as ridiculous.

This chapter chronicles the rise of John Lasseter's career and the groundbreaking animated films he directed, revealing ways he and his colleagues at Pixar changed the direction of commercial animation forever. Lasseter is the much-celebrated chief creative officer for Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios. He is also one of the best known and most successful animators in the world. He has contributed to the revival of character animation and helped propel a return to feature-length animation in Hollywood and beyond. Moreover, Lasseter may have done more to foster thinking, embodied computer-generated characters than anyone else. The chapter details the creation of films such as Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998), and Cars (2006).

This chapter examines the films of Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh's twenty feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles. They range from his 1989 breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, about the sex lives of four twenty-somethings, to social-problem films such as Erin Brockovich and The Informant! (2009). Even the cost of making his films has shown great variety, ranging from the six-figure budget for Schizopolis (1996) to the star-studded Ocean's series blockbusters (2001, 2004, 2007) that averaged nearly one hundred million dollars to produce. The eclecticism in Soderbergh's movies would appear to invalidate a claim to the distinctive style typical of film authorship. However, the chapter argues that the variety of his work and the commercial viability of some of his films are prominent aspects of his individual style.

This chapter presents a commentary on David Lynch's film career. It focuses on how plastic is the prime matter of his filmmaking, essential to his understanding of cinema. It takes up plasticity's capacity for infinite transformation as an architectural and design dynamic, a feature of mise-enscène, and a mode of fashioning and psychologizing cinematic space. It then explores the emotional registers of plasticity, attempting to explain a key affective paradox in Lynch's work: the way it seems both so manifestly insincere and so emotionally powerful, so impersonal and so intense. Finally, it considers Lynch's persistent tendency to think of forms of media and forms of life as related species. Here, plastic is useful for conceptualizing his picture of the human organism as malleable and heterogeneous. The films examined in this chapter include Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Lost Highway (1997).

This chapter focuses on the eccentric and heterogeneous experiences, interests, and influences that contributed to the development of Sergio Leone’s authorial identity, particularly in the sword-and-sandal and Spaghetti Western genres. It investigates the exceptional intersection of cultural, technical, stylistic, and ideological influences coming from different, often contradictory, directions, creating a complete portrait of the artist. The chapter provides an overview of Leone’s career, and it also emphasizes his experience in roles other than that of film director, from assistant director on De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and many Hollywood epics, to producer of films such as My Name is Nobody (1973) by Tonino Valerii and Fun is Beautiful (1980) by Carlo Verdone. The chapter therefore reconstructs Leone’s background and puts it into communication with the historical, cultural, and cinematic national and international contexts from Fascism up to the director’s death in 1989.

This chapter recounts Capra’ army experiences during World War II. Capra accepted his wartime anonymity, managing to subordinate his ego to a higher loyalty. He performed brilliantly in carrying out official policy, surrendering his increasingly troublesome creative independence and transforming himself into a cog in the American propaganda machine. While in service, Capra’s Why We Fight series of troop indoctrination films won him great praise and honor, yet his own name never appeared on the screen.