As the first full-length study on Paul Schrader's films, this book examines the different styles of his work and the multiple influences on which it draws. A defining feature of Schrader's career is his capacity to engage in a range of collaborations and production contexts while returning to a consistent set of themes, character types, and dramatic scenarios. Going beyond the affirmation of a directorial vision, Schrader creates a cinema driven by issues of obsession, memory, and the difficult nature of experience. Representative of a new generation of American writer-directors of the 1970s, Schrader's films highlight the tension between old and new ways of telling a story and between the maintenance of commercial formulas and openness to individual expression.
 
George Kouvaros draws on a personal interview conducted with Schrader and the director's prior commentary to trace common motivations and impulses behind such well-known films as Light Sleeper, American Gigolo, Affliction, Auto Focus, Taxi Driver, and Patty Hearst. Kouvaros reads Schrader's films not only in terms of a number of important themes such as male obsession and estrangement, but also in regard to harder to define issues that include melancholia, trauma, and the complex linkages of violence and guilt that bind individuals to places and each other.

“A good movie,” John Cassavetes has remarked, “will ask you questions you don’t already know the answers to.” And in his films, Cassavetes is as good as his word. Taking up the radical question that Cassavetes’s films consistently pose—specifically, where is the line between actor and character, fiction and reality, film and life?—George Kouvaros reveals the unique and illuminating position that Cassavetes’s work occupies at the intersection of filmmaking and film theory.Central to any understanding of Cassavetes’s achievement is the issue of performance. Looking at the work of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself in films such as Faces, A Woman under the Influence, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Kouvaros shows how performative instances—gestures, words, or glances—open up intimations of dramas belonging neither strictly to these films nor to the everyday worlds in which they are immersed. A major reassessment of the filmmaker as a formal experimenter, Where Does It Happen? gives Cassavetes his due as a filmmaker whose critical place in the modern cinema is only now becoming clear. George Kouvaros is senior lecturer in the School of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the University of New South Wales, Australia.