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18 books match the query 'Director'

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Birth of a Nation

Robert Lang

Rutgers University Press, 1993

The Birth of a Nation (1915) remains the most controversial American film ever made, and its director, D. W. Griffith, one of the most extraordinary figures in film history. It was the first true feature film and did more than any other to launch Hollywood both as an industry and as an idea. The film consolidated a trend in cinematic technique and an approach to dramatic narrative that define American cinema to this day. As a great but ideologically troubled film that offers us a reflection of ourselves as Americans, The Birth of a Nation continues to intrigue, challenge, infuriate, and awe.

Robert Lang's introduction to this volume explores in fascinating detail the warped view of history that this great film presents. Griffith, a Southerner, was intent on resurrecting, idealizing, and justifying the South. In The Birth of a Nation, it is racism that unites the white North and South; the protection or abolition of slavery is not the divisive issue. In a powerful synthesis of spectacle and narrative, Griffith seeks to give the Southern cause a sense of glamour and high purpose. Lang considers the film as a historical melodrama, and by examining Griffith's "historiography as ideological practice," he traces the way in which the bloody, traumatic reality of the Civil War and Reconstruction becomes melodramatic myth. This unparalleled guide to The Birth of a Nation offers a shot-by-shot continuity script; a biographical sketch of the director; a sampling of contemporary reviews; a series of essays by distinguished critics including James Chandler, Michael Rogin, Janet Staiger, and Mimi White; and a filmography and bibliography.

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Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard, Director

Dudley Andrew

Rutgers University Press, 1988

Breathless, a low-budget film, came to be regarded as one of the major accomplishments of the French New Wave cinema of the early sixties. It had a tremendous influence on French filmmakers and on world cinema in general. Beyond its significance in film history, it was also a film of considerable cultural impact. In Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard captured the spirit of a disillusioned generation and fashioned a style, which drew on the past, to parade that disillusionment.
In his introduction, Dudley Andrew brilliantly explains what Godard set out to accomplish in Breathless. He illuminates the intertextual and cultural references of the film and the tensions within it between tradition and innovation. This volume also features, for the first time in English, the complete and accurate continuity script of Breathless, together with Francois Truffaut's surprisingly detailed original treatment. Also included are an in-depth selection of reviews and criticism in French and English; a brief biographical sketch of the director's life that covers the development of his career, as well as a filmography and selected bibliography.

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Bringing Up Baby

Howard Hawks, Director

Mast, Gerald

Rutgers University Press, 1988

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the essence of thirties screwball comedy. It is also quintessential Howard Hawks, treating many of the director's favorite themes, particularly the loving war between the sexes. Bringing Up Baby features Katharine Hepburn as a flaky heiress and Cary Grant as an absentminded paleontologist, roles in which they come into their own as stars and deliver particularly fine comic performances. Pauline Kael has called the film the "American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy." The comparison is based on the quick repartee and witty dialogue, a hallmark of Hawks's work and well conveyed here by Gerald Mast's transcription from the screen.

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Charlie Chaplin, Director

Donna Kornhaber

Northwestern University Press, 2014

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.

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Chimes at Midnight

Orson Welles, Director

Lyons, Bridget G

Rutgers University Press, 1988

Among the films inspired by Orson Welles's lifelong involvement with Shakespeare, the greatest is Chimes at Midnight (1966). It is a masterly conflation of the Shakespearean history plays that feature Falstaff, the great comic figure played by Welles himself in the film. For Welles, the character was also potentially tragic: the doomed friendship between Falstaff and Prince Hal becomes an image of the end of an age. To this epic subject Welles brings the innovative film techniques that made him famous in Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai,"and Touch of Evil.

This volume offers a complete continuity script of Chimes at Midnight, including its famous battle sequence. Each shot is described in detail and is keyed to the original Shakesperian sources, thus making the volume an invaluable guide to Welles as an adaptor and creator of texts. The first complete transcription of the continuity script of Chimes is accompanied by the editor's critical introduction on Welles's transformation of Shakespeare; a special interview with Keith Baxter, one of the film's principal actors, which discusses its production history; reviews and articles; and a biographical sketch of Welles, a filmography, and a bibliography.

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Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director

New Perspectives

Leonard Engel

University of Utah Press, 2007

In his recent films — Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby — Clint Eastwood has revealed himself as a greater figure than moviegoers had imagined him to be. While he has been an exceptionally successful actor, creating iconic characters in two genres, Western and detective films, as a director, his recent films have reached a surprising power, depth, and maturity.

The contributors to this volume revisit and examine his career as an actor and director, and are part of a growing critical evaluation of Eastwood's films. A common thread, however, is their respect for his cinematic storytelling. They examine how he put his individual stamp on particular genres, while extending and enriching our understanding of his achievements.

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For the Director

Research Essays in Honor of James B. Griffin

Edited by Charles E. Cleland

University of Michigan Press, 1977

In 1975, James B. Griffin retired as director of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. During his three decades as director and professor, he had become one of the leading archaeologists in North America and had tremendous influence over the next generation of archaeological research. To honor the man and his work, nineteen scholars contributed essays to this volume. Contributors include Ted Bank, Richard Wilkinson, Donald Janzen, George Quimby, and H. Martin Wobst. Richard Ford and Volney Jones compiled a guide to Griffin’s extensive published works.

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Ida Lupino, Director

Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition

Grisham, Therese

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Dominated by men and bound by the restrictive Hays Code, postwar Hollywood offered little support for a female director who sought to make unique films on controversial subjects. But Ida Lupino bucked the system, writing and directing a string of movies that exposed the dark underside of American society, on topics such as rape, polio, unwed motherhood, bigamy, exploitative sports, and serial murder.

The first in-depth study devoted to Lupino’s directorial work, this book makes a strong case for her as a trailblazing feminist auteur, a filmmaker with a clear signature style and an abiding interest in depicting the plights of postwar American women. Ida Lupino, Director not only examines her work as a cinematic auteur, but also offers a serious consideration of her diverse and long-ranging career, getting her start in Hollywood as an actress in her teens and twenties, directing her first films in her early thirties, and later working as an acclaimed director of television westerns, sitcoms, and suspense dramas. It also demonstrates how Lupino fused generic elements of film noir and the social problem film to create a distinctive directorial style that was both highly expressionistic and grittily realistic. Ida Lupino, Director thus shines a long-awaited spotlight on one of our greatest filmmakers.

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Imitation of Life

Douglas Sirk, Director

Fischer, Lucy

Rutgers University Press, 1991

Douglas Sirk (Claus Detler Sierck) was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1900. He made nine films before fleeing Nazi Germany, eventually coming to America. His best-known films, made during the 1950s—all of them melodramas—were Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, The Tarnished Angels, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life (made in 1958, released in 1959).

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.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Don Siegel, director

LaValley, Al

Rutgers University Press, 1989

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a low-budget science fiction film that has become a classic. The suspense of the film lies in discovering, along with Miles, the central character (played by Kevin McCarthy), who is "real" and who is not, and whether Miles and Becky (played by Dana Wynter) will escape the pod takeover. As the center of the film moves outward from a small-town group of neighbors to the larger political scene and institutional network (of police, the FBI, hospital workers), the ultimate question is whether "they" have taken over altogether. Although Invasion can be interpreted in interesting ways along psychological and feminist lines, its importance as a text has centered primarily on political and sociological readings. In his introduction to this volume, Al LaValley explores the politics of the original author of the magazine serial story on which the film is based, Don Siegel; and of its screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring. And he looks at the ways the studio (Allied Artists) tried to neutralize certain readings by tacking on an explanatory frame story. The commentary section includes readings by Stephen King, Peter Biskind, Nora Sayre, and Peter Bogdanovich. A section of postproduction documents reproduced here (many for the first time) includes many written by Wanger and Siegel. The volume also contains two previously unpublished framing scripts written for Orson Welles. For students and individual enthusiasts, the contextual materials are particularly interesting in showing how crucial the postproduction history of a film can be. A filmography and bibliography are also included in the volume. Al LaValley is the director of film studies at Dartmouth. He is the author of many articles on film and editor of Mildred Pierce in the Wisconsin screenplay series.

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Letter from an Unknown Woman

Max Ophuls, Director

Wexman, Virginia

Rutgers University Press, 1986

The fifth title in the Rutgers Films in Print Series, "Letter from an Unknown Woman" is directed by Max Ophuls and based on the novella by Stefan Zweig. It is the story of Lisa, a young girl who rejects the constricting life of her small town and family in order to dedicate her life to a musician, Stefan. The film's elegant fin-de-siecle Viennese setting, lyrical camera work, dispassionate and ironic point of view, and fine performances by Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan elevate what could have been a mere tearjerker into one of Ophuls's finest works.

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.

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Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa, Director

Richie, Donald

Rutgers University Press, 1987

Rashomon is one of the greatest of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's films, the winner of the 1951 Venice Festival prize and the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1952. It features Toshiru Mifune, the best-known Japanese actor in the West, as the bandit, an accused rapist and murderer. At the beginning of the film, a woodcutter, priest, and commoner happen to meet at the ruined gate--Rashomon--outside the city of Kyoto. This tale of rape and murder is first seen through the eyes of the woodcutter and the priest, both of whom have been touched by the events. The cynical, detached commoner, "everyman," listens to and comments upon their stories.

The central section of the film, a series of flashbacks and tales within tales, consists of the same events retold by the husband (speaking through a medium, from the grave), the wife, the bandit, and the woodcutter. Each tells what happened--or possibly, what should have happened. The film deals with multiple truths; Richie summarizes the director's point of view in the introduction: "the world is illusion, you yourself make reality, but this reality undoes you if you submit to being limited by what you have made."

The sixth title in the Rutgers Film in Print Series and the first Japanese film, this volume brings together for the first time the full continuity script of Rashomon; an introductory essay by Donald Richie; the Akutagawa stories upon which the film is based; critical reviews and commentaries on the film; a filmography; and a bibliography.

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Shoot the Piano Player

Francois Truffaut, Director

Brunette, Peter

Rutgers University Press, 1993

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.

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The Director and Other Stories from Morocco

By Leila Abouzeid

University of Texas Press, 2006

New stories by Leila Abouzeid, the noted Moroccan writer, constitute an event for both East and West, for, as in her critically acclaimed novel, Year of the Elephant, the author cuts across cultural and national boundaries to offer fiction that has meaning for both Western and Middle Eastern readers. The stories in this volume deal with issues both traditional and modern-relations between parents and children, between husbands and wives, and between citizens of newly independent Morocco and its new nationalist representative government.

Independence from French colonial rule has brought many changes to Morocco—some more beneficial than others. Women have entered the work force in great numbers, a development which has brought them new freedoms, but which has also caused problems within the traditional family. Abouzeid shows us how these changes have affected ordinary men and women, how small everyday events loom large in individual lives. To her crisp style, reminiscent of some Western realist novelists, she adds elements of Arabic fiction—the oral story-telling technique, for example.

Abouzeid writes first in Arabic, which she has stated is a political choice. This makes her a literary pioneer in North Africa, where, until recently, most authors wrote in French. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea has written an introduction for this book, setting the stories in historical context.

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