America's Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures
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This book argues that recognition of the corporate studio's role as author of Hollywood motion pictures enables original interpretations of Hollywood films and provides a deeper understanding of their cultural, political, and commercial objectives.
The American Film Industry
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Upon its original publication in 1976, The American Film Industry was welcomed by film students, scholars, and fans as the first systematic and unified history of the American movie industry. Now this indispensible anthology has been expanded and revised to include a fresh introductory overview by editor Tino Balio and ten new chapters that explore such topics as the growth of exhibition as big business, the mode of production for feature films, the star as market strategy, and the changing economics and structure of contemporary entertainment companies. The result is a unique collection of essays, more comprehensive and current than ever, that reveals how the American movie industry really worked in a century of constant change-from kinetoscopes and the coming of sound to the star system, 1950s blacklisting, and today's corporate empires.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City
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The films of Orson Welles inhabit the spaces of cities-from America's industrializing midland to its noirish borderlands, from Europe's medieval fortresses to its Kafkaesque labyrinths and postwar rubblescapes. His movies take us through dark streets to confront nightmarish struggles for power, the carnivalesque and bizarre, and the shadows and light of human character. This ambitious new study explores Welles's vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban transformation, race relations and fascism, the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism, and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture. It focuses on the personal and political foundation of Welles's cinematic cities-the way he invents urban spaces on film to serve his dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes. The book's critical scope draws on extensive research in international archives and builds on the work of previous scholars. Viewing Welles as a radical filmmaker whose innovative methods were only occasionally compatible with the commercial film industry, this volume examines the filmmaker's original vision for butchered films, such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), and considers many projects the filmmaker never completed-an immense "shadow oeuvre" ranging from unfinished and unreleased films to unrealized treatments and screenplays.
Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age
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The illustrious line-up in this volume includes Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett, the sophisticated husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the Astaire-Rogers writer Allan Scott, and many more.
Casablanca: Script and Legend
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This volume contains the complete screenplay as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how the Oscar-winning movie was made, by one of its writers, Howard Koch. Charles Champlin, Roger Ebert, Umberto Eco, and others contribute incisive analyses of the movie
The Casablanca Man: The Career of Michael Curtiz
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Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Mansurveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at Warner Brothers. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearceand Captain Bloodamong them - Robertson explores Curtiz' practical creative struggles and his friendships and rivalries with other film celebrities including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of future stars. Casablanca Manis the first comprehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and, linking his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, Robertson firmly re-establishes Curtiz' true standing in the history of cinema.ehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and, linking his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, Robertson firmly re-establishes Curtiz' true standing in the history of cinema.
Cinematography
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How does a film come to look the way it does? And what influence does the look of a film have on our reaction to it? The role of cinematography, as both a science and an art, is often forgotten in the chatter about acting, directing, and budgets. The successful cinematographer must have a keen creative eye, as well as expert knowledge about the constantly expanding array of new camera, film, and lighting technologies. Without these skills at a director's disposal, most movies quickly fade from memory. Cinematography focuses on the highlights of this art and provides the first comprehensive overview of how the field has rapidly evolved, from the early silent film era to the digital imagery of today. The essays in this volume introduce us to the visual conventions of the Hollywood style, explaining how these first arose and how they have subsequently been challenged by alternative aesthetics. In order to frame this fascinating history, the contributors employ a series of questions about technology (how did new technology shape cinematography?), authorship (can a cinematographer develop styles and themes over the course of a career?), and classicism (how should cinematographers use new technology in light of past practice?). Taking us from the hand-cranked cameras of the silent era to the digital devices used today, the collection of original essays explores how the art of cinematography has been influenced not only by technological advances, but also by trends in the movie industry, from the rise of big-budget blockbusters to the spread of indie films. The book also reveals the people behind the camera, profiling numerous acclaimed cinematographers from James Wong Howe to Roger Deakins. Lavishly illustrated with over 50 indelible images from landmark films, Cinematography offers a provocative behind-the-scenes look at the profession and a stirring celebration of the art form. Anyone who reads this history will come away with a fresh eye for what appears on the screen because of what happens behind it.
Citizen Kane
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Citizen Kane's reputation as one of the greatest films of all time is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? Laura Mulvey, in a fresh and original reading, illuminates the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, relating it to Welles's political background and its historical context. In a lucid and perceptive critique she also investigates the psychoanalytic structure that underlies the film's presentation of Kane's biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as 'dollar-book Freud.' In her foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Laura Mulvey focuses on the film's politics, highlighting the contemporary 'rhymes' in Kane's portrayal of a scandal-prone press baron in a time of economic crisis.
Conversations with Cinematographers
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David A. Ellis has interviewed some of the most influential and highly regarded cameramen of the last half century and more, and he has assembled these exchanges in Conversations with Cinematographers. While their names may not be known by the general public, these men and their work have left indelible imprints on the silver screen. Among those interviewed are several award-winning artists: - Douglas Slocombe (Kind Hearts and Coronets, Julia, Raiders of the Lost Ark) - Oswald Morris (The Guns of Navarone, Fiddler on the Roof, Oliver ) - Christopher Challis (A Shot in the Dark, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Top Secret ) - Billy Williams (Women in Love, The Wind and the Lion, Gandhi) - Freddie Francis (Sons and Lovers, The Elephant Man, Glory) - Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission, The Reader) - John De Borman (The Full Monty, Hamlet, An Education) - Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day's Night, Frenzy, Star Wars) - Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The African Queen) - Nicolas Roeg (Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd, Petulia) - Alex Thomson (Excalibur, Legend, Hamlet) - Walter Lassally (Tom Jones, Zorba the Greek, Heat and Dust) - Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire, The Last King of Scotland, 127 Hours) Along with several camera operators who were also interviewed, these cinematographers recount their experiences on sets and reveal what it was like to work with some of the most acclaimed directors of all time, including Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed, John Huston, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. With valuable insight into the craft of moviemaking, this collection of interviews will appeal to film professors, scholars, and students, as well as anyone with an interest in the art of cinematography.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
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With its jagged, stylised sets, menacing shadows and themes of murder, madness and delirium, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) remains the source and essence of German Expressionist cinema. Fusing carnival spectacle with the paranoia of the psychological thriller, it centres on the haunting, sexually ambivalent presence of Conrad Veidt as Cesare - the somnambulist exploited as an instrument by the sinister Dr. Caligari. David Robinson challenges long accepted versions of the history and reception of Caligari and redefines its relationship to the larger phenomenon of Expressionist art. His reassessment of the relative contributions of director, designers and writers becomes a fascinating detective story, as he investigates the status and significance of the single surviving copy of the original script, which came to light only in the late 1980s when almost all those involved in the production were dead. This second edition features a new introduction that considers the place of German Expressionist cinema within the European revival of Gothic at the turn of the twentieth century, and original cover artwork by Ben Goodman.
Discovering Orson Welles
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Of the dozens of books written about Orson Welles, most focus on the central enigma of Welles's career: why did someone so extravagantly talented neglect to finish so many projects? Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has long believed that to dwell on this aspect of the Welles canon is to overlook the wealth of information available by studying the unrealized works. Discovering Orson Welles collects Rosenbaum's writings to date on Welles--some thirty-five years of them--and makes an irrefutable case for the seriousness of his work, illuminating both Welles the artist and Welles the man. The book is also a chronicle of Rosenbaum's highly personal writer's journey and his efforts to arrive at the truth. The essays, interviews, and reviews are arranged chronologically and are accompanied by commentary that updates the scholarship. Highlights include Rosenbaum's 1972 interview with Welles about his first Hollywood project, Heart of Darkness; Rosenbaum's rebuttal to Pauline Kael's famous essay "Raising Kane"; detailed essays and comprehensive discussions of Welles's major unfinished work, including two unrealized projects, The Big Brass Ring and The Cradle Will Rock; and an account of Rosenbaum's work as consultant on the 1998 re-editing of Touch of Evil, based on a studio memo by Welles.
The Encyclopedia of Film Composers
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For more than a century, original music has been composed for the cinema. From the early days when live music accompanied silent films to the present in which a composer can draw upon a full orchestra or a lone synthesizer to embody a composition, music has been an integral element of most films. By the late 1930s, movie studios had established music departments, and some of the greatest names in film music emerged during Hollywood's Golden Age, including Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Bernard Herrmann. Over the decades, other creators of screen music offered additional memorable scores, and some composers--such as Henry Mancini, Randy Newman, and John Williams--have become household names. The Encyclopedia of Film Composers features entries on more than 250 movie composers from around the world. It not only provides facts about these artists but also explains what makes each composer notable and discusses his or her music in detail. Each entry includes Biographical materialImportant datesCareer highlightsAnalysis of the composer's musical styleComplete list of movie credits This book brings recognition to the many men and women who have written music for movies over the past one hundred years. In addition to composers from the United States and Great Britain, artists from dozens of other countries are also represented. A rich resource of movie music history, The Encyclopedia of Film Composers will be of interest to fans of cinema in general as well as those who want to learn more about the many talented individuals who have created memorable scores.
Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity
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Film and Video Editing
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This book traces the history and current practice in film and television arguing that a solid base of knowledge of the craft of the skill is essential for the proper application of the new techniques.
Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner
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Film Form
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Twelve essays written between 1928 and 1945 that demonstrate key points in the development of Eisenstein's film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium. Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Jay Leyda; Index; photographs and diagrams.
The Films of Ingmar Bergman
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This volume provides a concise overview of the career of one of the modern masters of world cinema. Jesse Kalin defines Bergman's conception of the human condition as a struggle to find meaning in life as it is played out. For Bergman, meaning is achieved independently of any moral absolute and is the result of a process of self-examination. Six existential themes are explored repeatedly in Bergman's films: judgment, abandonment, suffering, shame, a visionary picture, and above all, turning toward or away from others. Kalin examines how Bergman examines these themes cinematically, through close analysis of eight films: well known favorites such as Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Fanny and Alexander; and important but lesser known works, such as Naked Night, Shame, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.
Film Theory and Criticism
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First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors
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First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors presents a new collection of twelve interviews with award-winning film editors who discuss the art and craft of editing in the twenty-first century. As a follow-up to the successful First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (now celebrating its 20th anniversary), this new volume explores the transition of editing from the age of celluloid to the digital age. These extraordinarily articulate editors share their passion about film, offer detailed practical examples from their films to explain their process as well as their challenges, and imbue each interview with unique personality, humor, and cinematic insights. First Cut 2 continues the tradition of the first volume by interviewing both fiction and documentary editors, contributing to a rich, holistic appreciation of editing. It also introduces a significant interview with an independent filmmaker/editor to emphasize today's multiple opportunities for aspiring filmmakers to make their own "small films" and achieve success. Together with the first volume, First Cut 2 offers a panoramic survey of film editing and preserves its history through the voices of its practitioners. The stories told will engage students, inform general filmgoers, and even enlighten industry professionals.
First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors
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First Cut offers an opportunity to learn what film editing really is, and to learn from the source. Gabriella Oldham's interviews with twenty-three award-winning film editors give a full picture of the complex art and craft of editing a film. Filled with animated anecdotes and detailed examples, this is the first book to provide a comprehensive treatment of both documentary and feature film editing.
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
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A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel, has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997.
A Hidden History of Film Style: Cinematographers, Directors, and the Collaborative Process
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The image that appears on the movie screen is the direct and tangible result of the joint efforts of the director and the cinematographer. A Hidden History of Film Style is the first study to focus on the collaborations between directors and cinematographers, a partnership that has played a crucial role in American cinema since the early years of the silent era. Christopher Beach argues that an understanding of the complex director-cinematographer collaboration offers an important model that challenges the pervasive conventional concept of director as auteur. Drawing upon oral histories, early industry trade journals, and other primary materials, Beach examines key innovations like deep focus, color, and digital cinematography, and in doing so produces an exceptionally clear history of the craft. Through analysis of several key collaborations in American cinema from the silent era to the late twentieth century--such as those of D. W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer, William Wyler and Gregg Toland, and Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Burks--this pivotal book underlines the importance of cinematographers to both the development of cinematic technique and the expression of visual style in film.
Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet
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Gervais shows also how Bergman's work resonates in a much broader sphere than the personal. His films, which are without equal in the history of cinema in quality, consistency, and relevance, are crucial moments in an ongoing conversation with western culture in its frenetic evolution since World War II. Gervais situates Bergman within the tensions of modernism and the western tradition that have manifested themselves in the twentieth century from existentialism, through deconstruction, and into postmodernism. Bergman's films are experienced as incarnations, meditations, explorations, and aesthetic objects that reflect, comment on, conflict with, or embrace the movements that produced them.
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
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The Magic World of Orson Welles
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Prodigy. Iconoclast. Genius. Exile. Orson Welles remains one of the most discussed figures in cinematic history. In the centenary year of Welles's birth, James Naremore presents a revised third edition of this incomparable study, including a new section on the unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind . Naremore analyzes the political and psychological implications of the films, Welles's idiosyncratic style, and the biographical details--both playful and vexing--that impacted each work. Itself a historic film study, The Magic World of Orson Welles unlocks the soaring art and quixotic methods of a master.
Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film
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Academy Award--winning director Michael Curtiz (1886--1962) -- whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954) -- was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering output of 180 films surpasses that of the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined total of films directed by George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks. In the first biography of this colorful, instinctual artist, Alan K. Rode illuminates the life and work of one of the film industry's most complex figures. He begins by exploring the director's early life and career in his native Hungary, revealing how Curtiz shaped the earliest days of silent cinema in Europe as he acted in, produced, and directed scores of films before immigrating to the United States in 1926. In Hollywood, Curtiz earned a reputation for his explosive tantrums, his difficulty communicating in English, and his disregard for the well-being of others. However, few directors elicited more memorable portrayals from their casts, and ten different actors delivered Oscar-nominated performances under his direction. In addition to his study of the director's remarkable legacy, Rode investigates Curtiz's dramatic personal life, discussing his enduring creative partnership with his wife, screenwriter Bess Meredyth, as well as his numerous affairs and children born of his extramarital relationships. This meticulously researched biography provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most talented filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.
On Story - Screenwriters and Their Craft
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Orson Welles in Focus
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Through his radio and film works, such as The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Orson Welles became a household name in the United States. Yet Welles's multifaceted career went beyond these classic titles and included lesser-known but nonetheless important contributions to television, theater, newspaper columns, and political activism. Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts examines neglected areas of Welles's work, shedding light on aspects of his art that have been eclipsed by a narrow focus on his films. By positioning Welles's work during a critical period of his activity (the mid-1930s through the 1950s) in its larger cultural, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts, the contributors to this volume examine how he participated in and helped to shape modern media. This exploration of Welles in his totality illuminates and expands our perception of his contributions that continue to resonate today.
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies
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The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics
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"During their prolific thirty-four-year collaboration, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the screenplays for some of our most treasured films, including It's a Wonderful Life, The Thin Man, Easter Parade, Father of the Bride, Naughty Marietta, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Legendary movies, indeed, but writing both the play and screenplay for The Diary of Anne Frank was their crowning achievement. In The Real Nick and Nora, the couple's nephew, David L. Goodrich, unites a assemblage of anecdotes featuring some of the most talented writers and brightest stars of the American stage and screen as he crafts a portrait of the duo's life, love, and lasting influence on Broadway and Hollywood."--BOOK JACKET.
Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era
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Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the German studio and of Weimar cinema in general. Readers can revisit the careers of such acclaimed directors as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst and examine the debuts of such international stars as Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Marlene Dietrich. Training a keen eye on Weimer cinema's unusual richness and formal innovation, this anthology is an essential guide to the revolutionary styles, genres, and aesthetics that continue to fascinate us today.
What Is Cinema? Volume I
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André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."
The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and their Guild
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Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists.nbsp;The Writersnbsp;is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America.nbsp; Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers--including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson--The Writersnbsp;delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild. With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media.nbsp;The Writersnbsp;spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.
