Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville

Author: Ginette Vincendeau

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1838716548

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Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.


Melville on Melville

Melville on Melville

Author: Jean-Pierre Melville

Publisher: London : Secker and Warburg [for] the British Film Institute

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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International Noir

International Noir

Author: Homer B. Pettey

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0748691111

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Ranging from Japanese silent films and women's films to French, Hong Kong, and Nordic New Waves, this book explores the influence of noir on international cinematic traditions and challenges prevailing film scholarship. It includes extensive bibliography and filmographies for recommended reading and viewing.


The Cinema of France

The Cinema of France

Author: Phil Powrie

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9781904764465

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An in-depth look at some of the best and most influential French films of all time, The Cinema of France contains 24 essays, each on an individual film. The book features works from the silent period and poetic realism, through the stylistic developments of the New Wave, and up to more contemporary challenging films, from directors such as Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Luc Besson. Set in chronological order, The Cinema of France provides an illuminating history of this essential national cinema and includes in-depth studies of films such as Un Chien Andalou (1929), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Le Samouraï (1967), Shoah (1985), Jean de Florette (1986), Les Visiteurs (1993) and La Haine (1995).


The Legacy of World War II in European Arthouse Cinema

The Legacy of World War II in European Arthouse Cinema

Author: Samm Deighan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-05-28

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1476683522

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World War II irrevocably shaped culture--and much of cinema--in the 20th century, thanks to its devastating, global impact that changed the way we think about and portray war. This book focuses on European war films made about the war between 1945 and 1985 in countries that were occupied or invaded by the Nazis, such as Poland, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Germany itself. Many of these films were banned, censored, or sharply criticized at the time of their release for the radical ways they reframed the war and rejected the mythologizing of war experience as a heroic battle between the forces of good and evil. The particular films examined, made by arthouse directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Larisa Shepitko, among many more, deviate from mainstream cinematic depictions of the war and instead present viewpoints and experiences of WWII which are often controversial or transgressive. They explore the often-complicated ways that participation in war and genocide shapes national identity and the ways that we think about bodies and sexuality, trauma, violence, power, justice, and personal responsibility--themes that continue to resonate throughout culture and global politics.


Eastern Approaches to Western Film

Eastern Approaches to Western Film

Author: Stephen Teo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 135011331X

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Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Aesthetics and Reception in Cinema offers a renewed critical outlook on Western classic film directly from the pantheon of European and American masters, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Ford, Leo McCarey, Sam Peckinpah, and Orson Welles. The book contributes an “Eastern Approach” into the critical studies of Western films by reappraising selected films of these masters, matching and comparing their visions, themes, and ideas with the philosophical and paradigmatic principles of the East. It traces Eastern inscriptions and signs embedded within these films as well as their social lifestyle values and other concepts that are also inherently Eastern. As such, the book represents an effort to reformulate established discourses on Western cinema that are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Although it seeks to inject an alternative perspective, the ultimate aim is to reach a balance of East and West. By focusing on Eastern aesthetic and philosophical influences in Western films, the book suggests that there is a much more thorough integration of East and West than previously thought or imagined.


Masculine Singular

Masculine Singular

Author: Geneviève Sellier

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-03-25

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0822388979

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Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.


European Film Noir

European Film Noir

Author: Andrew Spicer

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1526141361

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European Film Noir is the first book to bring together specialist discussions of film noir in specific European national cinemas. Written by leading scholars, this groundbreaking study provides an authoritative understanding of an important aspect of European cinema and of film noir itself, for too long considered as a solely American form. The Introduction reviews the problems of defining film noir, its key characteristics and discusses its significance to the development of European film, the relationship of specific national films noirs to each other, to American noir and to historical and social change. Eight chapters then discuss film noir in France, Germany, Britain and Spain, analysing both earlier developments and the evolution of neo-noir through to the present. A further chapter explores film noir in Italian cinema where its presence is not so well defined. Each piece provides a critical overview of the most significant films in relation to their industrial and social contexts. European Film Noir is an important contribution to the study of European cinema that will have a broad appeal to undergraduates, cinéastes, film teachers and researchers.


Hollywood Exiles in Europe

Hollywood Exiles in Europe

Author: Rebecca Prime

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0813562635

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Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces like Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films like The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, director). At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American “lost generation” and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material, Hollywood Exiles in Europe suggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema’s changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.