In considering Jane Campion's early award-winning short films on through international sensation The Piano and beyond, Kathleen McHugh traces the director's distinctive visual style as well as her commitment to consistently renovating the conventions of "women's films." By refusing to position her female protagonists as victims, McHugh argues, Campion scrupulously avoids the moral structures of melodrama, and though she often works with the narratives, mise-en-scene, and visual tropes typical of that genre, her films instead invite a distanced or even amused engagement.
Jane Campion concludes with four brief, revelatory interviews and a filmography. Campion spoke twice with Michel Ciment—after the screening of her short and medium-length films at the Cannes Film Festival 1986, and three years later, after the Cannes screening of Sweetie. Judith Lewis narrates a Beverly Hills interview with Campion that followed the release of Holy Smoke, and Lizzie Francke's interview, reprinted from Sight and Sound,centers on Campion's film In the Cut, adapted from Susanna Moore's novel.
A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James R. Naremore
For well over a decade, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have produced highly original and ethically charged films that immerse their audiences in an intense and embodied viewing experience. Their work has consistently attracted international recognition, including the rare feat of two Palmes d'Or at Cannes.
In this first book-length study of the Belgian brothers, Joseph Mai delivers sophisticated close analyses of their directorial style and explores the many philosophical issues dealt with in their films (especially the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas). Mai discusses the Dardennes' varied and searching career from its inception in the late 1970s, starting with the working-class political consciousness and lost utopias of their documentary period; passing through their transition toward fictional narrative, experimental techniques, and familial themes; and finishing with a series of in-depth and philosophically informed interpretations of the brothers' more recent work. In such highly influential films such as La promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and The Child, the brothers have recast filmmaking through what Mai calls a "sensuous realism"--realism capable of touching the audience with the most compelling problems and moral dilemmas of contemporary society. This volume also features an interview in which the Dardennes discuss their approach to film production and the direction of actors.
At a time when gimmicky, action-driven blockbusters ruled Hollywood, Jim Jarmusch spearheaded a boom in independent cinema by making now-classic low-budget films like Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train. Jarmusch's films focused on intimacy, character, and new takes on classical narratives. His minimal form, peculiar pacing, wry humor, and blank affect have since been adopted by directors like Sofia Coppola, Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, and Tsai Ming-liang.
Juan A. Suárez identifies and describes an abundance of aesthetic influences on Jarmusch, delving into the director's links to punk, Structural film, classic street photography, hip-hop, beat literature and art, and the New York pop vanguard of the late 1970s. At the same time, he analyzes Jarmusch's work from three mutually implicated perspectives: in relation to independent filmmaking from the 1980s to the present; as a form of cultural production that appropriates existing icons, genres, and motifs; and as an instance of postmodern politics.
A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James R. Naremore
Films like The Eternal Daughter and the diptych The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II have cemented Joanna Hogg’s reputation as an original voice in contemporary cinema. Her rigorous and quiet style draws on the histories of film and art to tell stories that weave autobiography with studies in human opacity.
Shonni Enelow analyzes Hogg’s six feature films around the concepts of turning away, the reality effect, and the impossible encounter. Throughout, Enelow explores the tension between absorption, in which characters are immersed in a diegetic fiction, and self-reflexivity, as the filmmaker comments on her techniques of representation. An in-depth interview with Hogg delves into the director’s process, approach to creating character, and use of artistic and literary references.
Sophisticated and innovative, Joanna Hogg illuminates the work of one of today’s most original filmmakers.
R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers' unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this "generic" framework is the central focus of this book.
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