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Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema by
Body Double explores the myriad ways that film artists have represented the creative process. In this highly innovative work, Lucy Fischer draws on a neglected element of auteur studies to show that filmmakers frequently raise questions about the paradoxes of authorship by portraying the onscreen writer. Dealing with such varied topics as the icon of the typewriter, the case of the writer/director, the authoress, and the omnipresent infirm author, she probes the ways in which films can tell a plausible story while contemplating the conditions and theories of their making. By examining many forms of cinema, from Hollywood and the international art cinema to the avant-garde, Fischer considers the gender, age, and mental or physical health of fictionalized writers; the dramatized interaction between artists and their audiences and critics; and the formal play of written words and nonverbal images. By analyzing such movies as Adaptation, Diary of a Country Priest, Naked Lunch, American Splendor, and Irezumi, Fischer tracks the parallels between film author and character, looking not for the creative figure who stands outside the text, but for the one who stands within it as corporeal presence and alter-ego.
The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmaker or Auteur? by
Roger Corman is an ambiguous artistic figure. On the one hand, he is notorious for shooting and producing his films quickly, cheaply and with blatant disregard for safety measures, which, together with his ability to issue a dozen new films every year and his impressive filmography, have earned him the titles of "shlockmeister" and "the King of the B's" among film journalists. On the other hand, he became the youngest American director to be given a film retrospective at the prestigious Cinématèque Française in Paris, one of his directorial efforts - House of Usher - was selected for preservation.
Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique by
How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch. Ranging from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to James Cameron's Avatar, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, Closely Watched Films focuses on exemplary works of fourteen film directors whose careers together span the history of the narrative film. Lively and down-to-earth, this concise introduction provides a broad, complete, and yet specific picture of visual narrative techniques that will increase readers' excitement about and knowledge of the possibilities of the film medium. Shot-by-shot analyses of short passages from each film ground theory in concrete examples. Fabe includes original and well-informed discussions of Soviet montage, realism and expressionism in film form, classical and modern sound theory, the classic Hollywood film, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, auteur theory, modernism and postmodernism in film, political cinema, feminist film theory and practice, and narrative experiments in new digital media. Encompassing the earliest silent films as well as those that exploit the most recent technological innovations, this book gives us the particulars of how film--arguably the most influential of contemporary forms of representation--constitutes our pleasure, influences our thoughts, and informs our daily reality. Updated to include a discussion of 3-D and advanced special effects, this tenth anniversary edition is an essential film studies text for students and professors alike.
Eric Rohmer's Film Theory (1948-1953): From 'école Scherer' to 'politique des auteurs' by
In the 1950s, a group of critics writing for 'Cahiers du Cinéma' launched one of the most successful and influential trends in the history of film criticism: auteur theory. Though these days it is frequently usually viewed as limited and a bit old-fashioned, a closer inspection of the hundreds of little-read articles by these critics reveals that the movement rested upon a much more layered and intriguing aesthetics of cinema. This book is a first step toward a serious reassessment of the mostly unspoken theoretical and aesthetic premises underlying auteur theory, built around a reconstruction of Eric Rohmer's early but decisive leadership of the group, whereby he laid down the foundations for the eventual emergence of their full-fledged auteurism.
John Ford by
John Ford is a monumental figure in Hollywood and world cinema. Throughout his long and varied career spanning the silent and sound era, he produced nearly 150 films of which Iron Horse (1924), Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) are classics of cinema. Ford was also an influential figure in developing, and extending Hollywood's traditions. Stylistically Ford was instrumental in developing new camera techniques, atmospheric lighting and diverse narrative devices. Thematically, long before it became conventional wisdom, Ford was exploring issues that concern us today, such as gender, race, the treatment of ethnic minorities and social outcasts, the nature of history and the relationship of myth and reality. For all these reasons, John Ford the man and his films reward thought and study, both for the general reader and the academic student. Ford's pictures express the world in which they were made, and have contributed to making what Hollywood is today. This book illustrates the excitement, importance, influence, creativity, deviousness and complexity of the man and his films.
John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era by
Fresh perspectives on some of the most influential films of John Ford. The Western is arguably the most popular and enduring form in cinematic history, and the acknowledged master of that genre was John Ford. His Westerns, including The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have had an enormous influence on contemporary U.S. films, from Star Wars to Taxi Driver. In John Ford Made Westerns, nine major essays by prominent scholars of Hollywood film situate the sound-era Westerns of John Ford within contemporary critical contexts and regard them from fresh perspectives. These range from examining Ford's relation to other art forms (most notably literature, painting, and music) to exploring the development of the director's reputation as a director of Westerns. While giving attention to film style and structure, the volume also treats the ways in which these much-loved films engage with notions of masculinity and gender roles, capitalism and community, as well as racial, sexual, and national identity. Contributors include Charles Ramirez Berg, Matthew Bernstein, Edward Buscombe, Joan Dagle, Barry Keith Grant, Kathryn Kalinak, Peter Lehman, Charles J. Maland, Gaylyn Studlar, and Robin Wood. Contents Part I Introduction, Gaylyn Studlar & Matthew Bernstein "'Shall We Gather at the River?': The Late Films of John Ford," Robin Wood "Sacred Duties, Poetic Passions: John Ford and Issue of Femininity in the Western," Gaylyn Studlar "The Margin as Center: The Multicultural Dynamics of John Ford's Westerns," Charles Ramirez Berg "Linear Patterns and Ethnic Encounters in the Ford Western," Joan Dagle "How the West Wasn't Won: the Repression of Capitalism in John Ford's Westerns," Peter Lehman "Painting the Legend: Frederic Remington and the Western," Edward Buscombe "'The Sound of Many Voices': Music in John Ford's Westerns," Kathryn Kalinak "John Ford and James Fenimore Cooper: Two Rode Together," Barry Keith Grant "From Aesthete to Pappy: The Evolution of John Ford's Public Reputation," Charles J. Maland Part II--Dossier Emanuel Eisenberg, "John Ford: Fighting Irish," New Theater, April 1936 Frank S. Nugent, "Hollywood's Favorite Rebel," Saturday Evening Post, July 23, 1949 John Ford, "John Wayne--My Pal," Hollywood, no. 237 (March 17, 1951), translated from the Italian by Gloria Monti Bill Libby, "The Old Wrangler Rides Again," Cosmopolitan, March 1964 "About John Ford," Action 8.8 (Nov.-Dec. 1973)
The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood by
The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions. Beginning with the commercial success of Easy Rider in 1969, and ending two years later with the critical and commercial failure of that film's twin progeny, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Nicholas Godfrey surveys a key moment that defined the subsequent aesthetic parameters of American commercial art cinema. The book explores the role that contemporary critics played in determining how the movies of this period were understood and how, in turn, strategies of distribution influenced critical responses and dictated the conditions of entry into the rapidly codifying New Hollywood canon. Focusing on a small number of industrially significant films, this new history advances our understanding of this important moment of transition from Classical to contemporary modes of production.
Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema by
Omnibus films bring together the contributions of two or more filmmakers. Does this make them inherently contradictory texts? How do they challenge critical categories in cinema studies? What are their implications for auteur theory? As the first book-length exploration of internationally distributed, multi-director episode films, David Scott Diffrient's Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema fills a considerable gap in the history of world cinema and aims to expand contemporary understandings of authorship, genre, narrative, and transnational production and reception. Delving into such unique yet representative case studies as If I Had a Million (1932), Forever and a Day (1943), Dead of Night (1945), Quartet (1948), Love and the City (1953), Boccaccio '70, (1962), New York Stories (1989), Tickets (2005), Visions of Europe (2005), and Paris, je t'aime (2006), this book covers much conceptual ground and crosses narrative as well as national borders in much the same way that omnibus films do. Omnibus Films is a particularly thought-provoking book for those working in the fields of auteur theory, film genre and transnational cinema, and is suitable for advanced students in Cinema Studies.
Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture by
Jeff Menne rewrites the history of the New Hollywood boom of the late 196s and 197s, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood's corporate project. Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the "creative economy."