Comprised of fourteen chapters, the book opens with studies of Louis Feuillade, Jean Painleve, Jean Vigo and Georges Franju. In each case the author finds original points of reference and cross-reference to other film-makers, and visual artists, particularly within modernism. Successful as free-standing short essays on their subject, the chapters also situate the work of these film-makers less within the context of French cinema history, than within other cinema histories and intellectual traditions. This is an important gesture both in terms of the general architecture of the book, and in...

Federico Fellini was one of the most inventive of film-makers and he remains one of the best loved. This volume offers and approach to Fellini's work and to the practice of film criticism.

This book is at once a detailed study of a range of individual filmmakers and an exploration of the modernism in which they are situated. It consists of fifty categories arranged in alphabetical order, among which are Allegory, Bricolage, Classicism, Contradiction, Desire, Destructuring and Writing. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects and juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework. The apparent arbitrary order and...