Its focus is on formalism - how the forms of the film create meaning. It is updated with recent films and personalities for students.

    Hugely prolific in his first decade--Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and Made in USA are just a handful of the seminal works he directed--Godard introduced filmgoers to the generation of stars associated with the trumpeted sexuality of postwar movies and culture: Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Anna Karina.As the sixties wore on, however, Godard's life was transformed. The Hollywood he had idolized began to disgust him, and in the midst of the socialist ferment in France his second wife introduced him to the activist student left. From 1968 to 1972, Europe's greatest director worked in the service of Maoist politics, and continued thereafter to experiment on the far peripheries of the medium he had transformed. His extraordinary later works are little seen or appreciated, yet he remains one of Europe's most influential artists.Drawing on his own working experience with Godard and his coterie, Colin MacCabe, in this first biography of the director, has written a thrilling account of the French cinema's transformation in the hands of Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol--critics who toppled the old aesthetics by becoming, legendarily, directors themselves--and Godard's determination to make cinema the greatest of the arts.

    In concrete terms it explains how you can create your own success and, in the process, entertain, delight, challenge, and uplift this generation and the ones to come.

    Phrases like "phone home" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation.Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The blockbuster creator of E.T., Jaws, and Schindler's List talks about dreams and the almighty dollar."I'm not really interested in making money," he says. "That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal, and I've had a tough time proving that to people."Ranging from Spielberg's twenties to his mid-fifties, the interviews chart his evolution from a brash young filmmaker trying to make his way in Hollywood, to his spectacular blockbuster triumphs, to his maturation as a director seeking to inspire the imagination with meaningful subjects.The Steven Spielberg who emerges in these talks is a complex mix of businessman and artist, of arrogance and insecurity, of shallowness and substance. Often interviewers will uncover the director's human side, noting how changes in Spielberg's personal life -- marriage, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage -- affect his movies. But always the interviewers find keys to the story-telling and filmmaking talent that have made Spielberg's characters and themes shape our times and inhabit our dreams."Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about," he says. "Whether you watch eight hours of Shoah or whether it's Ghostbusters, when the lights go down in the theater and the movie fades in, it's magic."

    A guide to more than one hundred of the most popular and controversial cult classic films ever made includes coverage of All About Eve, Tarzan and His Mate, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

    In the past decade, Hollywood has endured a cataclysm on a par with the end of silent film and the demise of the studio system. Stars and directors have seen their power dwindle, while writers and producers lift their best techniques from TV, comic books, and the toy biz. The future of Hollywood is being written by powerful corporate brands like Marvel, Amazon, Netflix, and Lego, as well as censors in China.Ben Fritz chronicles this dramatic shakeup with unmatched skill, bringing equal fluency to both the financial and entertainment aspects of Hollywood. He dives deeply into the fruits of the Sony hack to show how the previous model, long a creative and commercial success, lost its way. And he looks ahead through interviews with dozens of key players at Disney, Marvel, Netflix, Amazon, Imax, and others to discover how they have reinvented the business. He shows us, for instance, how Marvel replaced stars with “universes,” and how Disney remade itself in Apple’s image and reaped enormous profits.But despite the destruction of the studios’ traditional playbook, Fritz argues that these seismic shifts signal the dawn of a new heyday for film. The Big Picture shows the first glimmers of this new golden age through the eyes of the creative mavericks who are defining what our movies will look like in the new era.

    According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored." So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, "Film as a Subversive Art" analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.

    But with so much variety between an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a Nora Ephron romantic comedy, how can everyday viewers determine what makes a good movie?In Talking Pictures, veteran film critic Ann Hornaday walks us through the production of a typical movie—from writing the script and casting to the final sound edit—and explains how to evaluate each piece of the process. How do we know if a film is well-written, above and beyond snappy dialogue? What constitutes a great screen performance? What goes into praiseworthy cinematography, editing, and sound design? And what does a director really do? Full of engaging anecdotes and interviews with actors and filmmakers, Talking Pictures will help us see movies in a whole new light—not just as fans, but as film critics in our own right.

    He also surveys the historical origins of the archetypal monsters, such as vampires, zombies, and werewolves, and takes you behind the scenes to discover the secrets of those special-effects wizards who created such legendary frighteners as King Kong, Dracula, and Halloween's Michael Myers. With more than 1000 stunning movie stills and posters, this book is sure to keep even the most intense fright-seekers at the edge of their seats for hours!

    From screenwriting & budgeting to marketing, Simens provides encyclopedic, precise, & creative instruction for putting your vision up on the screen.

    Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional depth.

    Complete guide for Producers for film and tv projects

    Aspiring directors, cinematographers, editors, and producers, many of whom are now working professionals, learned the craft of visual storytelling from Shot by Shot, the most com-plete source for preplanning the look of a movie.The book contains over 800 photos and illustrations, and is by far the most comprehensive look at shot design in print, containing storyboards from movies such as Citizen Kane, Blade Runner, Dead-pool, and Moonrise Kingdom. Also introduced is the concept of A, I, and L patterns as a way to sim-plify the hundreds of staging choices facing a director in every scene.Shot by Shot uniquely blends story analysis with compositional strategies, citing examples then il-lustrated with the storyboards used for the actual films. Throughout the book, various visual ap-proaches to short scenes are shown, exposing the directing processes of our most celebrated au-teurs — including a meticulous, lavishly illustrated analysis of Steven Spielberg’s scene design for Empire of the Sun.

    In the animator's own words, accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished photographs, sketches, and storyboards from his personal archive, this book details Harryhausen's entire film career, from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers to Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. In words and images, this book explains the basics of special effects and stop-motion animation, along the way telling entertaining tales of working with the film stars of the day, such as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Lionel Jeffries. Film buffs will relish such revelations as how Raquel Welch was picked up by a flying dinosaur in One Million Years B.C., why the octopus in Mysterious Island was really only a sixtopus, and what Medusa's blood was made from in Clash of the Titans.

    Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker in its depth, originality, and insight. Encompassing and illuminating Ford’s myriad complexities and contradictions, McBride traces the trajectory of Ford’s life from his beginnings as “Bull” Feeney, the nearsighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-honored career, as America’s national mythmaker. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford’s films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands.