From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.

    In opposition to these positions, Modleski asserts that Hitchcock is deeply ambivalent towards his female characters. The Women Who Knew Too Much examines both the director's complex attitude toward femininity, and the implications of that attitutde for the audience. The book represents a significant contribution to the debates in film theory around the issue of gender and film spectatorship; in particular, it seeks to complicate the view that women's response to patriarchal cinema can only be masochistic, while men's response is necessarily sadistic.Applying the theories of psychoanalysis, mass culture, and a broad range of film (and) feminist criticism, Modleski offers compelling readings of seven Hitchcock films from various periods in his career.

    The notes gathered over a long career and polished to a sharp edge documented the teachings and directions that Hauser shared privately with a host of theatrical and cinematic figures, including Sir Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, Kevin Spacey, and many others who called Hauser their director, mentor, teacher, or boss.Now, the former student has expanded and enhanced his mentor's private notes into a book-length format suitable for anyone searching for the timeless gems of the director s craft. Drawing on years of training, decades of experience, and the distilled wisdom of leading practitioners, Notes on Directing is filled with enduring good advice expressed in assertive, no-nonsense language. More than a how-to, this is a tool for directors looking to better translate the page to the stage or to the screen. With one hundred and thirty directives supported with explanatory commentary, helpful examples, and rare quotes, this deceptively slim volume has the impact of a privileged apprenticeship to a great master.Whether you are a student or a professional, a playgoer, moviegoer, or enthusiast, Notes on Directing provides a thrilling glimpse into the hidden process of creating a live, shared experience.

    His list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire (stage and screen), All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll, America America, to name only a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. Kazan’s insights into these and other classic stage works shaped their subsequent productions—and continue to do so. There is no directorial achievement in America equal to his.This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s method: how he uncovered for himself the “spine” or core of each script and each character; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; how he determined the specifics of his production, from casting and costuming to set design and cinematography. And we see how he worked with writers on scripts and with actors on interpretation.The final section, “The Pleasures of Directing”—essays Kazan was writing in his last decade—is informal, provocative, candid, and passionate; a wise old pro sharing the secrets of his craft, advising us how to search for ourselves in each project, how to fight the system, and how to have fun doing it.Published in Kazan’s centenary year, this monumental, revelatory book, edited by Robert Cornfield, is essential reading for everyone interested in American movies and theatre.

    In Filmish, Ross's cartoon alter-ego guides readers through the annals of cinematic history, introducing us to some of the strange and fascinating concepts at work in the movies. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme - the body, architecture, language - and explores an eclectic mix of cinematic triumphs, from A Trip to the Moon to Aliens. Sitting within the tradition of bestselling non-fiction graphic novels like Scott McClouds Understanding Comics and the Introducing...series, Filmish tackles serious issues - sexuality, race, censorship, propaganda - with authority and wit, throwing new light on some of the greatest films ever made.

    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

    Caligari" to Richard Shickel on the cult of Greta Garbo.

    In the past fifty years especially, ideas about time and duration have reinstated narrative in art, via filmmaking and video, the theatricality of happenings, performance and installation art, digitally manipulated photography, and virtual reality.This pioneering book, originally published in 1999 under the title New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, discusses the most influential artists internationally—from Eadweard Muybridge to Robert Rauschenberg, Bill Viola, and Pipilotti Rist—and those seminal works that have radically transformed the map of world art. For this new and expanded edition, the book has been brought completely up to date to include the latest in digital work as technology takes art in new directions.

    Viki King's Inner Movie Method is a specific step-by-step process designed to get the story in the writer's onto the page. This method guides the would-be screenwriter through the writing of a movie. It answers such questions as:How to clarify the idea you don't quite have yetHow to tell if your idea is really a movieHow to move from what you want to say saying itHow to stop getting ready and startOnce you know what to write, the Inner Movie Method will show you how to write it. It also addresses such issues as:How to pay the rent while paying your duesWhat to say to your spouse when you can't come to bedHow to keep going when you think you can'tFor accomplished screenwriters honing their craft, as well as those who never before brought their ideas to paper, How to Write a Movie in 21 Days is an indispensable guide. And Viki King's upbeat, friendly style is like having a first-rate writing partner every step of the way.