Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.
Because of the special stamp he put on his melodramas, Sirk's best works transcend the constraints of their genre. In them, he both exemplified and critiqued postwar, conservative, materialistic life and its false value systems. There is much in Sirk, particularly in Imitation of Life, that is of interest to us today. The time seems to be right for a new look at the film, its reception amidst scandal over the affairs of its star—Lana Turner—the relationships between its mothers and daughters, the tensions between its men and its women, the friendships between its black and white women, and the ambiguous, controversial approach of Sirk to his material.
This volume includes the complete continuity script of the film, critical commentary and published reviews, interviews with the director, and a filmography and bibliography. It also includes an excellent introduction by Lucy Fischer.
This volume provides a detailed transcription of the 1948 film. Notes appended to the film's continuity script detail all the significant differences between the finished film and the shooting script.
Wexman's introductions to each of the book's sections discuss the history of the film's reception and provide an overview of the central issues the film has raised. A cross section of commentary by well-known critics attests to the film's enduring position as a central text for cinema study. These essays acknowledge the film's significance as a preeminent example of Ophuls's art, as an important woman's film, and as a representative of the classic Hollywood style. A biographical sketch of Ophuls, the entire Zweig novella, a bibliography and other background materials are also included.
When it appeared in 1960, the inspired fun of François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player shocked and delighted critics and audiences around the world. Its sudden shifts of tone and mood, its willful play with genre stereotypes, and its hilarious in-jokes clearly signaled that Jean-Luc Godard's equally innovative Breathless was not a fluke. The two films heralded the arrival of the so-called New Wave, sharing with other New Wave films an insistence on low-budget, location shooting and, above all, on cinema as the personal statement of an author. These films had a tremendous impact on all filmmaking.
Peter Brunette's introduction to this book gives us new insight into the film, based in part on revisualizing it in terms of recent postmodern and poststructuralist thinking. He argues, in effect, that Truffaut was one of the directors who paved the way for a postmodern aesthetic. The volume also contains a complete and accurate continuity script of the film (based on the authoritative, wide-screen version), a series of interviews with Truffaut (including one by Hélène Laroche Davis, previously unpublished), a large number of reviews and essays, a filmography, and selected bibliography.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press