Contemporary North American Film Directors
Contemporary North American Film Directors

Author: Yoram Allon

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 9781903364529

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"Encompassing the careers of up to 600 directors - over 60 new to this edition - working in the US and Canada today, this volume is an invaluable reference for students, researchers and enthusiasts of film and popular culture. Each entry provides biographical information as well as insightful textual and thematic analysis of the director's work. In comprehensively covering a wide range of film-makers - from more established mainstream luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Kathryn Bigelow, through independent mavericks like Hal Hartley, Atom Egoyan, Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, to innovative emerging talents including Marc Forster (Monster's Ball), Todd Field (In the Bedroom) and David Gordon Green (George Washington) - the shifting landscape of contemporary film-making is brought into sharp focus." Sur la 4e de couv.

Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater

Author: David T. Johnson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-03-30

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0252036921

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This title provides an incisive analysis of popular American filmmaker, Richard Linklater.

Jane Campion
Jane Campion

Author: Kathleen McHugh

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007-05

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0252074475

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Spike Lee
Spike Lee

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2014-02-15

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0252095405

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Since the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989, Spike Lee has established himself as a cinematic icon. Lee's mostly independent films garner popular audiences while at the same time engaging in substantial political and social commentary. He is arguably the most accomplished African American filmmaker in cinematic history, and his breakthrough paved the way for the success of many other African Americans in film. In this first single-author scholarly examination of Spike Lee's oeuvre, Todd McGowan shows how Lee's films, from She's Gotta Have It through Red Hook Summer, address crucial social issues such as racism, paranoia, and economic exploitation in a formally inventive manner. McGowan argues that Lee uses excess in his films to intervene in issues of philosophy, politics, and art. McGowan contends that it is impossible to watch a Spike Lee film in the way that one watches a typical Hollywood film. By forcing observers to recognize their unconscious enjoyment of violence, paranoia, racism, sexism, and oppression, Lee's films prod spectators to see differently and to confront their own excess. In the process, his films reveal what is at stake in desire, interpersonal relations, work, and artistic creation itself.

Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick

Author: Lloyd Michaels

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0252075757

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For a director who has made only four feature films over three decades, Terrence Malick has sustained an extraordinary critical reputation as one of America’s most original and independent filmmakers. In this book, Lloyd Michaels analyzes each of Malick’s four features in depth, emphasizing both repetitive formal techniques such as voiceover and long lens cinematography as well as recurrent themes drawn from the director’s academic training in modern philosophy and American literature. Michaels explores Malick’s synthesis of the romance of mythic American experience and the aesthetics of European art film. He performs close cinematic analysis of paradigmatic moments in Malick’s films: the billboard sequence in Badlands, the opening credits in Days of Heaven, the philosophical colloquies between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, and the epilogue in The New World. This richly detailed study also includes the only two published interviews with Malick, both in 1975 following the release of his first feature film.

Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader

Author: George Kouvaros

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2008-05-23

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0252075080

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A searing study of an important American writer-director

Contemporary Film Directors
Contemporary Film Directors

Author: L. Andrew Cooper

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-11-13

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 025203709X

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Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. This book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, it places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock.

Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors
Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors

Author: Yoram Allon

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9781903364215

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The guide encompasses the careers of over 350 directors from the last 20 years. A must for any film studies library, it is a unique reference to the changing dynamics of these cinemas.

Philip Kaufman
Philip Kaufman

Author: Annette Insdorf

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0252093976

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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(premiering May 2012 on HBO), stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. In this study, Annette Insdorf argues that the stylistic and philosophical richness of Kaufman's cinema makes him a versatile auteur. She 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), Insdorf 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, she illustrates the consistency of themes, techniques, images, and concerns that permeates all of Kaufman's works.