The career of Federico Fellini lasted for forty years and made him perhaps the most illustrious of all the filmmakers to have come out of Italy. Those forty years saw the appearance of titles that have carved out a permanent niche in the memory of generations of film lovers. Fellini, a richly illustrated book written and edited by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland), taps into the sources of his fertile imagination and brings the vital power of his work into the limelight providing insight into the obsessions and motivations of the man behind La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8¿.This book and the exhibition aim to reveal the universe of the filmmaker and the sources of his rich imagination, and to highlight the essential power of his work. The story of Fellini’s themes and obsessions is, twenty years after his death, told by movie stills, set photos and his drawings, as well as by archive material and posters.The fantasy world of Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini made so many of his films, is revealed through previously unseen behind-the-scenes pictures that were taken by photographers such as Gideon Bachmann, Deborah Beer, Pierluigi Praturlon and Paul Ronald.The publication includes four main chapters. Popular Culture concentrates on Fellini’s many sources of inspiration within the day-to-day popular culture of the time. This includes not only the steadily more prevalent mass media, but also such manifestations as the circus, rock music, cartoons and Catholic or political parades. Fellini at Work shows us the director on the film set, instructing his actors, working together with costume designers, behind the camera, and so on. The City of Women concerns Fellini’s most important subject and obsession: Woman, in all her many guises. Finally, Biographical Imagination presents Fellini in the guise of various doppelgangers, each reflecting a different aspect of his personality. Particular attention is given to his ‘Book of Dreams’ in which he recorded his dreams in words and drawings.

This book offers not only an in-depth study of Feng Xiaogang as a cinematic auteur but also a comprehensive and informative discussion of the industrial transformation of mainstream Chinese cinema under party-state regulation from the 1990s to the 2010s. It argues that Feng is not simply a commercially and artistically successful auteur but also a strategist who manages to achieve such success by his ability to negotiate governmental and market expectations. The negotiation facilitates his New Year filmmaking and dynamically affects the textual form of the resulting works. Feng engages in this textual construction, through which he delivers his own interpretations of the Chinese film industry’s state-led commercialisation, cultural policy, film regulation, and even political campaigns, establishes his authorship and restores his creative authority. Through this book, readers will comprehend the edges and limitations of auteur studies in order to understand the current cultural landscape of the film industry.

This book offers not only an in-depth study of Feng Xiaogang as a cinematic auteur but also a comprehensive and informative discussion of the industrial transformation of mainstream Chinese cinema under party-state regulation from the 1990s to the 2010s. It argues that Feng is not simply a commercially and artistically successful auteur but also a strategist who manages to achieve such success by his ability to negotiate governmental and market expectations. The negotiation facilitates his New Year filmmaking and dynamically affects the textual form of the resulting works. Feng engages in this textual construction, through which he delivers his own interpretations of the Chinese film industry’s state-led commercialisation, cultural policy, film regulation, and even political campaigns, establishes his authorship and restores his creative authority. Through this book, readers will comprehend the edges and limitations of auteur studies in order to understand the current cultural landscape of the film industry.

If you’ve picked up this book, it’s most likely that you have an interest in movies over-and-above the typical audience member. Perhaps a screenwriter, producer or director looking to improve your work, always searching for any insight that will result in better cinematic storytelling. If that’s the case, then good news: this is the book for you. It asks a deceptively straightforward question. Why do we make feature films?

Is it to entertain? To move and audience? To tell a powerful story? For fame and fortune?

You may have answered yes to each, but those answers don’t account for the practice overall. Most books about screenwriting and directing are primarily concerned with craft and technique, but how can you truly understand filmmaking – or make the best films - unless you know what purpose it really serves.

So what’s the secret? As the title of this book suggests, making feature films is fundamentally the practice of making a very specific type of argument. To see how this works, we will deep-dive into how filmmakers are trained and taught to think about filmmaking, and what traditions they knowingly or unknowingly follow. We will look at hundreds of films and some major case studies, including Toy Story 3, Schindler’s List, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Amour, and mother!,  to explore how and what films argue, and why knowing this can both unlock both a greater appreciation of the form, and improve the impact your films make. 
 

More than any other set of films from the classical era, the Hollywood film noir is known for its lighting: the cast shadows, the blinking street signs, the eyes sparkling in the darkness. Each effect is rich in symbolism, evoking a world of danger and doppelgangers. But what happens if we set aside the symbolism? This book offers a new account of film noir lighting, grounded in a larger theory of Hollywood cinematography as emotionally engaging storytelling. Above all, noir lighting is dynamic, switching from darkness to brightness and back again as characters change, locations shift, and fates unfold. Richly illustrated, Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting features in-depth analyses of eleven classic movies: The Asphalt Jungle, Sorry, Wrong Number, Odds against Tomorrow, The Letter, I Wake Up Screaming, Phantom Lady, Strangers on a Train, Sweet Smell of Success, Gaslight, Secret beyond the Door, and Touch of Evil.

The story of the Star Film Ranch and its pioneering crew, who created the first “authentic” Westerns filmed in Texas.

In 1910, the Méliès Star Film Company of Manhattan set up a moving-picture studio outside San Antonio, the first in Texas. Determined to make the most authentic Westerns possible, the company filmed there for a little over a year. In that brief time, it created more than seventy single-reel films, leaving a lasting mark on moviemaking.

Film historians Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson return to a moment when on-location filmmaking was emerging as an artform. We meet producer Gaston Méliès, older brother of early-cinema legend Georges Méliès, and his cast and crew of young innovators, old hands, and genuine cowboys—like seventeen-year-old Edith Storey, the tomboy star who helped to ignite modern celebrity culture, and Francis Ford, who learned the art of film directing on the job and mentored his younger brother, Hollywood legend John Ford. The First Movie Studio in Texas traces the company’s trials and accomplishments, its influence on the depiction of race and gender in Western filmmaking, its surviving works, and its crowning achievement: The Immortal Alamo (1911), the earliest cinematic depiction of that famous battle.

Finally recovered from the shadows, the forgotten Méliès brother proves to be one of the key founders of the Western myth on screen.

An interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the working dramaturgy of The Ravel Trilogy.

This book frames the playtexts of The Ravel Trilogy—Bolero (2014), Concerto (2016), and Solo (2018)—alongside a series of reflective essays and provocations on contemporary dramaturgy and musicology from academics and artists in drama, music, linguistics, and fine art. It contextualizes the themes and approaches of the trilogy and serves as a critical companion to a body of devised work, stimulating a debate about dramaturgy and composition and inviting discussion about post-dramatic theater's relationship to music.

This publication marks the culmination of the trilogy and its critical legacy, exploring the work through the dual lenses of postdramatic theater and research questions articulated and addressed by the practice-research undertaken by its co-creators. The dramaturgical context for The Ravel Trilogy and the reflective essays around it allow the editors to explore the relationship between theater and music, raising questions about practice-research and notions of creating playtexts from musical scores. In this volume, Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith reflect on making and performing The Ravel Trilogy and the process of researching, devising, and presenting work inspired by music where score becomes script and dynamics become stage directions.