A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about the complex relationships between men and women; Day of the Idiots, a visually baroque, operatic and highly dramatic film about madness; The Kingdom of Naples, Schroeter’s visually stunning depiction of Italy in the post-war years; and Palermo or Wolfsburg, for which Schroeter won the Golden Bear, an epic film about love, violence, and cultural malaise. But Valente also addresses Schroeter's early experimental films that don't get as much attention, such as Aggression, Neurasia, and Argila, all of which are about the struggle between repression and desire, and Deux, a late work that Schroeter considered his masterpiece, a film about the double and the ways in which identity is formed by integrating the abject part of ourselves with the good. Valente concludes with an analysis of Nuit de Chien, Schroeter's final film, a powerful summation of a live devoted to art, music, literature, and film. When the Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Schroeter's ouevre in 2012, there was hardly anything in English on his films and only one film available on DVD in the US, such that Schroeter's work as a director has remained largely invisible in the English-speaking world. A Credible Utopia repairs this lacuna in film history, and, in a detailed and intimate reading of Schroeter's queer ouevre, links all these films together through Schroeter's desire for a “credible utopia,” despite our shared awareness of disaster, torture, viciousness, and political corruption in the world.

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Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book - the first of its kind in English - comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections between art, politics, and social change.

Alexander Kluge is vooral bekend als een van de oprichters van de Nieuwe Duitse Cinema. In de afgelopen vijftig jaar was hij naast filmmaker ook schrijver en tv-producent. Dit boek biedt de lezer een uitgebreide inleiding tot de belangrijkste thema's, problemen en ideeën uit Kluges baanbrekende films, televisie- en literaire producties. Het brede overzicht van teksten in deze collectie - met inbegrip van artikelen en verhalen van Kluge, kritische essays door gerenommeerde internationale wetenschappers, televisietranscripten en interviews met Kluge zelf - is waardevol voor studenten en wetenschappers op het gebied van film-, televisie- en literatuurstudies, en voor diegenen die geïnteresseerd zijn in de raakvlakken tussen kunst, politiek en sociale verandering.

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Ingmar Bergman is worldwide known as a film and stage director. Yet no-one has attempted to compare his stage and screen activities. In Between stage and screen Egil Törnqvist examines formal and thematical correspondences and differences between a number of Bergman's stage, screen, and radio productions. In the prologue Bergman's spiritual and aesthetic heritage and his position in the twentieth century media landscape is outlined. In the epilogue the question is answered to what extent one can speak of Bergman's directorial 'method' irrespective of the chosen medium.

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Fabulations nocturnes est un essai d’intercession. Ce n’est pas simplement un livre à propos du cinéaste Apichatpong Weerasethakul, bien qu’il se penche de près sur son œuvre. C’est plutôt un livre qui interroge en profondeur quoi d’autre pourrait être en cause dans la mise en place des conditions de collaboration entre deux genres – le cinéma et l’écriture.Ce projet collectif est animé d’un intérêt commun pour la pragmatique de la fabulation et son geste spéculatif générateur d’un peuple à venir. Les concepts d’écologie, de vitalité et d’opacité ont surgi de la rencontre avec le dramscape d’Apichatpong pour venir articuler un ethos de fabulation qui décadre l’expérience, recompose la subjectivité et défixe le temps.

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Wes Craven’s »A Nightmare on Elm Street« (1984) enjoys cult status today more than ever. The mere thought of its main character Freddy Krueger still sends shivers down the spines of many viewers – and brings a grin to the faces of die-hard slasher fans. Katharina Rein subjects this undisputed genre classic to an intensive reading in which she traces the central moments of the disturbance. Using selected sequences from the film, she uncovers the workings of disruption in the horror genre. Contrary to widespread perceptions, she understands them, following Michel Serres, not as obstructive but as productive. As Rein shows, it is this productivity that has contributed significantly to the enduring success and film historical significance of »A Nightmare on Elm Street«.

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This volume focuses on contemporary Algerian feminist documentary filmmaker Habiba Djahnine as a ‘memory-bearer’ who gives voice to her compatriots to tell their own stories in her films. It provides the reader with exposure to key issues in contemporary Algerian culture and history (colonial, the Algerian War, the Black Decade of the 1990s), memory and women’s and human rights. The book gives a brief overview of Algerian cinema, Algerian women filmmakers and situates Djahnine’s oeuvre and its significance within the North African context. It examines her work as a feminist, teacher and poet and how she transmits this locally and transnationally. The book also explores how Djahnine uses documentary film form for personal and autobiographical explorations of Algerian history, culture, memory and trauma.

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In Hitchcock’s Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock’s body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock’s films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock’s Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

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Among the abundant Alfred Hitchcock literature, Hitchcock's Motifs has found a fresh angle. Starting from recurring objects, settings, character-types and events, Michael Walker tracks some forty motifs, themes and clusters across the whole of Hitchcock's oeuvre, including not only all his 52 extant feature films but also representative episodes from his TV series. Connections and deeper inflections that Hitchcock fans may have long sensed or suspected can now be seen for what they are: an intricately spun web of cross-references which gives this unique artist's work the depth, consistency and resonance that justifies Hitchcock's place as probably the best know film director ever. The title, the first book-length study of the subject, can be used as a mini-encyclopaedia of Hitchcock's motifs, but the individual entries also give full attention to the wider social contexts, hidden sources and the sometimes unconscious meanings present in the work and solidly linking it to its time and place.

In de overvloed aan Hitchcock-boeken, heeft Hitchcock's Motifs een nieuwe invalshoek weten te vinden. Uitgaande van terugkerende objecten, decors, karakters en gebeurtenissen heeft Michael Walker zo'n veertig motieven, thema's en clusters geïdentificeerd in het gehele oeuvre van Hitchcock. Niet alleen komen alle 52 bestaande bioscoopfilms daarbij aan bod, maar ook representatieve episodes uit zijn televisieseries. Connecties en diepere betekenissen die Hitchcockfans misschien allang voorvoelden of vermoeden, komen eindelijk in hun volle betekenis aan het licht. Ze vormen een complex web van kruisverwijzingen die het werk van deze unieke kunstenaar de diepte, samenhang en weerklank geven en Hitchcock's positie rechtvaardigen als een van de meest bekende filmregisseurs ooit. Het boek kan gebruikt worden als een mini-encyclopedie van Hitchcock motieven, maar in de individuele lemma's wordt ook volop aandacht besteed aan de bredere sociale context, de verborgen bronnen en de soms onbewuste betekenissen in het werk waarmee het duidelijk verankerd wordt in de eigen context.

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This book on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman contains eighteen new scholarly chapters on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors—some Swedish, others American or British—have written extensively on Bergman before, some for decades. Bergman is one of the most written-about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as was seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived at that time with the aim of presenting fresh angles on his work, although several chapters also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, such as philosophy and psychology. Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy thus addresses a number of essential topics which have not featured in Bergman studies before, such as the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also deals at length with Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and with his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature, as well as with the intermedial relations to his films that this perspective inevitably entails. Finally, the book addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics. Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman remains a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander; but some rarer material, including Hour of the Wolf, The Lie, and Autumn Sonata, is discussed as well.

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Since 1957 the Film Museum in Amsterdam has been in possession of the Desmet Collection which contains the estate of the Dutch cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956). The collection comprises almost nine hundred European and American films in all genres, a collection of publicity material and a dauntingly large business archive. These three sources form the basis of this first comprehensive reconstruction of Desmet's career: from his nomadic beginnings as a traveling showman, working the seasonal fairgrounds of the Netherlands and Belgium, to his successful switch to permanent cinema operation and film distribution. The history of Desmet's career offers not simply an abstract of an individual character and his personal ambitions and motivations, but also epitomizes transformations in the world of cinema as an industry. Between 1907 and 1916 the world of cinema experienced radical structural change which Desmet not only witnessed but also helped to bring about. Given the insufficiencies of Dutch film production, Desmet became a link between film production abroad and film exhibition in the Netherlands. Desmet is not merely representative of the rise of the permanent movie house and the coming of the film distributor. This book shows how his fortunes also encapsulate a series of structural changes within the new culture of permanent cinema and film distribution. In film distribution these changes embraced the introduction of film rental, the advent of the long feature film, the introduction of the monopoly distribution system and the periodic transformation of the products on offer. In the business of cinema operation change involved specialization, the creation of fixed theater venues, the development of a theater hierarchy, expansions of scale, the introduction of trade journals and the gradual legitimization of cinema as a popular cultural institution. These transformations were not confined to the Netherlands but were also taking place in the rest of Europe. Indeed, they were first set in motion by other European countries, and in order fully to understand Desmet it is necessary to situate him in his larger European context. In this original and wide-ranging study Ivo Blom uses the career of Jean Desmet as a means of exploring the history of cinema from the ground-level position of film distribution and exhibition. His copiously illustrated and scrupulously documented exposition swells into an epic narrative that offers a richer, more rounded -indeed 'truer' - account of early urban cinema culture than is possible from the confined perspective of production-based film histories.

De levensloop van de Nederlandse bioscoopeigenaar en filmdistributeur Jean Desmet (1875-1956) biedt niet alleen inzicht in een excentrieke persoonlijkheid, maar staat ook model voor de veranderingen in de filmwereld als geheel. Door buitenlandse filmproducties voor vertoning naar Nederland te brengen leverde Desmet een substantiële bijdrage aan de radicale veranderingen die tussen 1907 en 1916 plaatsvonden in de filmindustrie. Het Filmmuseum in Amsterdam is sinds 1957 in het bezit van de Desmet-verzameling waarin de nalatenschap van deze excentrieke filmliefhebber bewaard is gebleven. Dit materiaal vormde het uitgangspunt van deze originele studie waarin Ivo Blom aan de hand van Desmet's levensverhaal de geschiedenis van de filmdistributie en -vertoning vertelt. Zijn rijk geïllustreerde en grondig gedocumenteerde uiteenzetting is uitgegroeid tot een episch verhaal dat - meer dan een productie-georienteerde geschiedenis - een rijk en afgerond beeld schetst van de vroege stadse filmcultuur.

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Filmmaker and theoretician Jean Epstein profoundly influenced film practice, criticism and reception in France during the 1920s and well beyond. His work not only forms the crux of the debates of his time, but also remains key to understanding later developments in film practice and theory. Epstein's film criticism is among the most wide-ranging, provocative and poetic writing about cinema and his often breathtaking films offer insights into cinema and the experience of modernity.This collection - the first comprehensive study in English of Epstein's far-reaching influence - arrives as several of the concerns most central to Epstein's work are being reexamined, including theories of perception, realism, and the relationship between cinema and other arts. The volume also includes new translations from every major theoretical work Epstein published, presenting the widest possible historical and contextual range of Epstein's work, from his beginnings as a biology student and literary critic to his late film projects and posthumously published writings.

Filmmaker en -theoreticus Jean Epstein beïnvloedde sterk de filmpraktijk, -kritiek en -receptie in Frankrijk en ver daarbuiten tijdens de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw. Zijn werk vormde niet alleen de kern van de debatten in die tijd, maar is ook een sleutel voor het begrijpen van latere ontwikkelingen in de filmpraktijk en -theorie. Epsteins filmkritieken zijn uiteenlopende, uitdagende en poëtisch geschreven teksten, en zijn vaak adembenemende films bieden belangrijke en moderne inzichten in de cinema. Dit boek verschijnt op het moment dat een aantal van de thema's die centraal staan in het werk van Epstein opnieuw wordt onderzocht, met inbegrip van de theorie van de waarneming, realisme en de relatie tussen cinema en de andere kunsten. De kritische essays vormen een waardevolle inleiding tot het creatieve oeuvre van Epstein.

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Dutch director Marleen Gorris is known chiefly for two films: A Question of Silence (1982), her fiercely feminist first film, in which three women meet by chance in a women’s clothing boutique and ritually murder its male owner; and Antonia’s Line (1995), her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which traces four generations of Antonia’s female ‘line’ in the matriarchal community she establishes in postwar rural Holland. Both have been extensively discussed, though rarely together, and appear on university syllabuses. Her second Dutch language film, Broken Mirrors (1984), and her five films in English, however, have received far less, and in some cases no critical attention. Using feminist reformulations of ideas of vulnerability and resistance, this first book-length study of her films examines their revisionings of narrative, time and space, and the possibilities they present of other narratives, other subjectivities and other relationships.

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Nocturnal Fabulations is an essay in intercessing. This is not a book that is simply ‘about’ Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though it does engage his work in detail. It is a book that deeply questions what else might be at stake in setting up the conditions for collaboration across two genres: cinema and writing.This collective project is animated by a shared curiosity in the pragmatics of fabulation and its speculative gesture of bringing forth a people to come. In an encounter with Apichatpong’s cinematic dreamscape, the concepts of ecology, vitality and opacity emerge to articulate an ethos of fabulation that deframes experience, recomposes subjectivity and unfixes time.

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Animator Norman McLaren is best known for his experimental films using pioneering techniques and his work as founder of the animation department of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), but little mention is made of his Scottish heritage or his personal life. Nichola Dobson examines some of the key events and people in his life through a close examination of his key works and his personal papers, and discusses how influential they were. By using archive material to discover his personal identity and close readings of his films, Norman McLaren rediscovers one of the most important figures in animation history. Divided into thematic chapters of significant areas of influence, Dobson analyzes his formative years growing up in Scotland and his relationship with fellow Scot, John Grierson; the international travel which influenced him politically and creatively; the creative arts which played a vital part of his life; his collaborations with other artists and his complex, and rarely discussed, personal life. Each of these chapters considers his key films during those periods with a close detailed analysis and a further examination of his life through his correspondence with family and close friends. By featuring this previously un-published material, the book allows much of the consideration of the work to be in McLaren's own words and offers a deep insight into his vast output of films over nearly 50 years.

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Princess Mononoke (1997) is one of anime’s most important films. Hayao Miyazaki’s epic fantasy broke domestic box office records when it came out in Japan, keeping pace with the success of Hollywood films like Titanic (1997). Princess Mononoke was also the first of Studio Ghibli’s films to be distributed outside Japan as part of a new deal with Disney subsidiary Buena Vista International. Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the release of the film, Rayna Denison curates this new collection to critically reflect on Princess Mononoke’s significance within and beyond Japanese culture. The collection investigates the production, and re-production, processes involved in the making of Princess Mononoke into a global phenomenon and reevaluates the film’s significance within a range of global markets, animation techniques, and cultures. In revisiting this undeniably important film, the collection sheds light on the tensions within anime and the cultural and social issues that Princess Mononoke explores, from environmental protection to globalization to the representation of marginalized groups. In this remarkable new collection, Princess Mononoke is examined as a key player during a major turning point in Japanese animation history.

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The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as Europa, Europa (1990) to episodes of the HBO series The Wire. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland’s authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women’s, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland’s career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

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Scorsese and Religion explores and analyzes the religious vision of filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre, showing that Scorsese cannot be properly understood without reflecting on the ways that his religious interests are expressed in and through his art.; Readership: This book will appeal to scholars, students, and non-specialist readers interested in film’s relation to philosophy, theology, and Christian spirituality.

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One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevskii and Ivan the Terrible. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa.This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein’s writings is the first-ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema’s birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted, —urges˜ cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself.
The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world’s most qualified Eisenstein scholars.

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Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement is the first film-philosophy book on “radical, pioneer, visionary’ (Dargis 2013) filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the films she edited and directed. The book draws on film analysis, archival research, dance and film theory, and creative practice expertise, to think through Clarke’s work as a dancer turned multi-award-winning editor and director of dancefilm, fiction, documentary, and video art. This account of Clarke’s creative oeuvre offers the reader insight into a too long overlooked filmmaker. Its creative practice and distributed cognition framework provides tools for dismantling some of the exclusionary aspects of authorship theories and offers a novel method for analysis of films, filmmaking practices and cultures of film production.

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The impact of French film critic André Bazin (1918-1958) on the development of film studies, though generally acknowledged, remains contested. A passionate initiator of film culture during his lifetime, his ideas have been challenged, defended and revived throughout his afterlife. Studying Film with André Bazin offers an entirely original interpretation of major concepts from Bazin’s legacy, such as auteur theory, realism, film language and the influence of film on other arts (poetry and painting in particular). By examining mostly unknown and uncollected texts, Blandine Joret explains Bazin’s methodology and adopts it in a contemporary reading, linking his ideas to major philosophical and scientific frameworks as well as more recent media practices such as advertising, CGI, 3D cinema and Virtual Reality. In tune with 21st-century concerns in media culture and film studies, this book addresses a wide readership of film scholars, students and cinephiles.

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This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone’s personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Stone’s life and work in terms of war, politics, money, love and corporations. This allows the authors both to provide a synthesis of earlier and later film work as well as locate that work within Stone’s developing critique of government. The book explores the development of aesthetic changes in Stone’s filmmaking and locates those changes within ongoing academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider debates about Hollywood and the film industry. All of this is explored with detailed reference to the films themselves and related to a set of wider concerns that Stone has sought to grapple with -the American Century, exceptionalism and the American Dream, global empire, government surveillance and corporate accountability. The book concludes with a perspective on Stone’s ‘brand’ as not just an auteur and commercially viable independent filmmaker but as an activist arguing for a very distinct kind of American exceptionalism that seeks a positive role for the US globally whilst eschewing military adventurism.

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His critically acclaimed debut feature, Hideouts (1986), established screenwriter and director Wolfram Paulus (1957–2020) as an important voice of New Austrian Film. Paulus devoted his career to chronicling his homeland and its inhabitants. Over the course of the 1990s, he transitioned from stylistically ambitious character studies for cinema to TV films with broad public appeal. Drama and comedy were his preferred genres. He also directed children’s films and dwelled on historical topics, mostly from the National Socialist period. Beyond the well-known fictional features, Paulus created experimental and documentary works. Moreover, he was a committed pedagogue and produced many educational films with pupils. This edited collection offers interdisciplinary perspectives on Paulus’ multifaceted oeuvre, which has previously received little scholarly attention. The chapters examine production and reception, motifs and aesthetic strategies, film education and unmade projects. This is complemented by a detailed filmography and interviews with Wolfram Paulus and his colleagues.

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