With a career spanning over seventy years, Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira may be the oldest active filmmaker in the world today. Known for his distinctive formal techniques and philosophical treatment of themes such as frustrated love, nationhood, evil, and divine grace, the director's work has run consistently against the mainstream. Focusing primarily on his feature films, Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive oeuvre, locating his work within the broader context of Portuguese and European...

At a time when gimmicky, action-driven blockbusters ruled Hollywood, Jim Jarmusch spearheaded a boom in independent cinema by making low-budget films focused on intimacy, character, and new takes on classical narratives. His minimal form, peculiar pacing, wry humor, and blank affect have since been adopted by directors including Sophia Coppola, Hal Harley, Richard Linklater, and Wong Kar-Wai. Juan A. Suarez's Jim Jarmusch analyzes the director's work from three mutually implicated perspectives: in relation to independent...

James Morrison's Roman Polanski offers one of the most comprehensive and critically engaged treatments ever written on Polanski's work. Tracing the filmmaker's remarkably diverse career from its beginnings to the present, the book provides commentary on all the major films in their historical, cultural, social, and artistic contexts. By locating Polanski's work within the genres of comedy and melodrama, Morrison argues that the director is not merely obsessed with the theme of repression, but that his true interest is in the...

From Jane Campion's early award-winning short films on through international sensation The Piano and beyond, Kathleen McHugh traces the director's distinctive visual style as well as her commitment to consistently renovating the conventions of "women's films." By refusing to position her female protagonists as victims, McHugh argues, Campion scrupulously avoids the moral structures of melodrama, and though she often works with the narratives, mise-en-scene, and visual tropes typical of...

This is the first book on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the popular and critically acclaimed director of films such as Amelie, Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement, Alien Resurrection, and City of Lost Children. Jeunet's work exemplifies Europe's engagement with Hollywood, while at the same time making him a figurehead of the critically overlooked, specifically French tradition of the cinema of the fantastic.

Having garnered both commercial success and critical esteem in genres such as science fiction, fantasy, romantic comedy, and the war epic, Jeunet's work nevertheless...