Writing in the late 1930s, New York journalist Joseph Mitchell observed: ''Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America's only original contribution to the theater.'' In Body and Soul, Peter Stanfield's arguments echo Mitchell's observation. Stanfield begins by exploring how Hollywood used blackface minstrelsy to represent an ......
Wong Kar-Wai traces this immensely exciting director's perennial themes of time, love, and loss, and examines the political implications of his films, especially concerning the handover of former British colony Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. This book is the first in any language to cover all of Wong's work, from his first film, As ......
Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and passionate filmmakers working in France today, Claire Denis has continued to make beautiful and challenging films since the 1988 release of her first feature, Chocolat. Judith Mayne's comprehensive study of these films traces Denis's career and discusses her major feature films in rich detail. Born ......
William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the ''culture industry,'' and the works he produced for itincluding short stories, adaptations, and screenplaysbore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a ......
With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for ''small'' films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of transtextural ......
With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for ''small'' films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of transtextural ......
In his astute and deeply informed film reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum regularly provides new and brilliant insights into the cinema as art, entertainment, and commerce. Guided by a personal canon of great films, Rosenbaum sees, in the ongoing hostility toward the idea of a canon shared by many within the field of film studies, a missed ......
In Narrated Films, Avrom Fleishman explores the distinctive literary techniques often used by filmmakers to tell their stories. Through close viewings of ingeniously paired films, Fleishman documents five narrational practices in the cinema: voice-over (Orpheus and Sunset Boulevard); dramatized narration, in which the film is a story that one ......
Nelson Pereira dos Santos is the first book in English to provide a full critical discussion of the films of Latin America's most important living director. A leader of the Cinema Novo movement, dos Santos is responsible for some of Brazil's most socially important and artistically engaging movies. Through a discussion of his films Darlene J. ......
