You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace: the story was the germ of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976). Executives at Columbia hated the script, but when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who were flying high after the triumphs of Mean Streets (1973) and The Godfather Part II (1974), signed up, Taxi Driver became too good a package to refuse. Scorsese transformed the script into what is now considered one of the two or three definitive films of the 1970s. De Niro is mesmerising as Travis Bickle – pent-up, bigoted, stead...
A collection of film essays by the well-respected critic, Noël Carroll.
Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace: the story was the germ of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976). Executives at Columbia hated the script, but when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who were flying high after the triumphs of Mean Streets (1973) and The Godfather Part II (1974), signed up, Taxi Driver became too good a package to refuse. Scorsese transformed the script into what is now considered one of the two or three definitive films of the 1970s. De Niro is mesmerising as Travis Bickle – pent-up, bigoted, stead...
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938) is one of the most controversial films ever made. Capitalising on the success of Triumph of the Will (1935), her propaganda film for the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl secured Hitler's approval for her grandiose plans to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The result was a work as notorious for its politics as celebrated for its aesthetic power. This revised edition includes new material on Riefenstahl's film-making career before Olympia and her close relationship with Hitler. Taylor Downing also discusses newly-available evidence on the background to the film's production that conclusively proves that the film was directly commissioned by Hitler and funded through Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, commissioned independently from the Nazi state by the Olympic authorities. In writing this edition, Taylor Downing has been given access to a magnificent new restoration of the original version of the film by the International Olympic Committee.
This long-awaited comprehensive monograph on James Nares brings together his paintings and films. Upon his arrival in New York in 1974, British-born James Nares became a central member of the city's vibrant No Wave art scene, making experimental Super 8 films, playing in downtown bands, and staging live performances. The following decade, he turned to painting, using handmade brushes to create monumental strokes that are almost three-dimensional in their detail and depth. Today, Nares continues to employ the mediums of film and paint to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time, as seen in his 2011 video Street, exhibited to great acclaim at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This definitive monograph, produced in close collaboration with the artist, surveys the entirety of Nares's career. Lushly illustrated, including paintings, photographs, and stills that have never before been published, the book features essays by leading film critic Amy Taubin, cultural writer Glenn O'Brien, and innovative film curator Ed Halter in addition to an illuminating conversation between Nares and longtime friend and fellow artist Christopher Wool.
Philip L. Simpson provides an original and broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. The fictional serial killer, with a motiveless, highly individualized modus operandi, is the latest manifestation of the multiple murderers and homicidal maniacs that haunt American literature and, particularly, visual media such as cinema and television. Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary myth...
This book provides current and incoming filmmakers with a comprehensive overview of how to create business and marketing plans to prepare their movies for distribution. Nicholas LaRue combines experienced insights into aesthetics and creativity with logical data-driven conclusions to provide an analysis of independent film promotion. The book first presents a view of sales and marketing in the independent film industry, as well as exploring the new digital tools available to filmmakers and tried-and-true methods that have served industry professionals well for years in promoting their films. This is then complemented by a wide array of testimonials from veteran filmmakers (Kevin Smith, Brea Grant, Joe Lynch, Roger Corman, and more) as well as interviews from film festival directors, publicists, film critics, and other industry professionals, who provide insights into working within the independent film industry. Given this diversity of perspective, this text will be an integral resource for new indie filmmakers, as well as those wishing to perfect their craft in whatever facet of independent filmmaking promotion they choose to pursue.
Collected interviews with the director of The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Married to the Mob, and other films
Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . . An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis's Psycho, Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.
Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation-but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions. By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure. As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.