Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - Direction & Production

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...

"To read Rainer's screenplays is to rediscover, even reinvent, the films all over again, but more importantly to realize that images and mise-en-scene are as key to how Rainer's films work as is language." --The Independent

"The scripts record the unique structure of Rainer's] films, the stresses, strains, and crackling of voices layering over and into one another. Their publication is an important moment for feminist film." --Cineaste

"Rainer's films are not highly accessible but are important to the critical imagination as an example of the sustained exploration of political...

Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema--academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media--create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to...

"Johnson and Petrie have produced an admirable book. Anyone who wants to make sense of Tarkovsky s films a very difficult task in any case must read it." The Russian Review

"This book is a model of contextual and textual analysis.... the Tarkovsky myth is stripped of many of its shibboleths and the thematic structure and coherence of his work is revealed in a fresh and stimulating manner." Europe-Asia Studies

" This book, ] with its wealth of new research and critical insight, has set the standard and should certainly inspire other writers to keep on trying to collectively...

Stanley Kubrick ranks among the most important American film makers of his generation, but his work is often misunderstood because it is widely diverse in subject matter and seems to lack thematic and tonal consistency. Thomas Nelson's perceptive and comprehensive study of Kubrick rescues him from the hostility of auteurist critics and discovers the roots of a Kubrickian aesthetic, which Nelson defines as the "aesthetics of contingency."

After analyzing how this aesthetic develops and manifests itself in the early works, Nelson devotes individual chapters to Lolita, Dr. Stangelove,...

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...