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Part of James Atlas's Icons series, a revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time
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Interviews with the acclaimed director of the films Dune, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire and the hit TV series Twin Peaks
"The informal movement that critics like to call the Berlin School, " as director Christoph Hochhäusler puts it, is a loose affiliation of filmmakers who emerged around the time the Berlin Wall fell. The founding figures--Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, and Angela Schanelec--and their younger colleagues are not bound by a manifesto or by any singular aesthetic. Nonetheless, their observant portrayals of characters in flux offer a compelling cinematic expression of the search for new identities in a time of societal change. The films of the Berlin School have resonated profoundly since the mid-1990s, making it one of the most influential auteur movements to emerge from Europe in the new millennium.
For decades the Village Voice set the benchmark for passionate, critical, and unique film coverage. Including reviews by some of America’s most respected critics, The Village Voice Film Guide compiles spirited landmark reviews of the Voice’s selection of the 150 greatest films ever made. Collecting some of the best writing on film ever put on paper, this is a perfect book for film buffs.
In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific, Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence. In particular, she examines how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand remember, re-tell, and deploy this violent history in their work. As Pacific peoples negotiate their paths towards sovereignty and chart their postcolonial futures, these writers play an invaluable role in invoking and commenting upon the various uses of the histories of colonial resistance, allowing themselves and their readers to imagine new futures by exorcising the past. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific is a valuable addition to the fields of Pacific and Postcolonial Studies and also contributes to struggles for cultural decolonization in Oceania: contemporary writers’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture, Najita argues, provides a powerful tool for navigating a decolonized future.
This volume re-evaluates theories of genre and spectatorship in light of a critic-defined tendency in recent art cinema, coined ‘extreme cinema’. In Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema, Bordun argues that the films of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas and French director Catherine Breillat expand generic classifications. Bordun contends that their films make it apparent that genre is not established prior to the viewing of a work but is recollected and assembled by spectators in ways that matter for them in both personal and experiential terms. The author deploys contemporary film theories on the senses, both phenomenological and affect theory, and partakes in close readings of the films’ forms and narratives. The book thus adds to the present literature on extreme cinema and film theory, yet sets itself apart by fully deploying genre theory alongside the methodological and stylistic approaches of Stanley Cavell, Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, and Eugenie Brinkema.
Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at...
Director David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on the role of creating the sounds himself. This concise study explores what makes Lynch’s sonic imprint distinct, breaking down three different sound styles that create Lynch’s sound aesthetic across his films. Showing how sound offers new insights into the aesthetic and narrative work of Lynch’s filmmaking, this book highlights new dimensions in the work of a key American auteur and deconstructs the process of building a unique sound world.
This edited collection offers an interdisciplinary study of Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of a TV program that has attracted the attention (and appreciation) of spectators, fans, and critics for over two decades. The book takes readers into several distinct areas and addresses the different approaches and the range of topics invited by the multidimensionality of the subject itself: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural, and the personal. The eighteen chapters constituting the volume are academic in their approach to the subject and in their methodology, whether they apply a historical, psychoanalytical, film studies, or gender studies perspective to the text under examination. The variety and range of perspectives in these aforementioned chapters reflect the belief that a study of the full complexity of Twin Peaks: The Return, as well as a timely assessment of the critical importance of the program, requires both an interdisciplinary perspective and the fusion of different intellectual approaches across genres. The chapters demonstrate a collective awareness of the TV series as a fundamental milestone in contemporary culture.