FILM CULTURE
January, 1955 Volume 1 No. 1
"Film Culture" on Film Art: Interviews and Statements, 1955-1971 brings together nineteen directors-Aldrich, Antonioni, Brakhage, Breer, Buñuel, Cukor, Dassin, Dreyer, Fellini, Huston, Leacock, Lubitsch, Melville, Milestone, Pasolini, Richter, Rossellini, Sternberg, and Vertov-who are among the leading auteurs in the history of cinema. Also included, in an appendix, are interviews with the cinematographer Boris Kaufman, the screenwriter Charles Spaak, and the playwright Arthur Miller. The interviews were all commissioned for the legendary American movie journal Film Culture, which was founded by Adolfas Mekas and his brother Jonas in 1954 and became best known for exploring the avant-garde cinema in depth. (Film Culture ceased publication in 1996; during its existence, the magazine produced 79 issues.)
Conducted in Film Culture's famously critical and committed style, the interviews in this volume catch each director or practitioner at a crucial juncture in his development as an artist, and stand as a historical record of the dominance of the Euro-American tradition in cinematic art-whether of the narrative or experimental kind. This is the first such collection of its kind in English, edited with a contextualizing introduction, critical biographies, career filmographies, and a comprehensive index by R. J. Cardullo.
R. J. Cardullo was for twenty years, from 1987 to 2007, the regular film critic for the Hudson Review in New York. He is the author or editor of a number of volumes, including Film Analysis: A Casebook (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists (SUNY Press, 2008), and In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art (McGill-Queens UP 2004). Cardullo is also the chief American translator of the film criticism of the Frenchman André Bazin, with several volumes to his credit. His own film criticism has been translated into such languages as Russian, German, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Korean, and Romanian. After earning his doctoral degree from Yale University, Cardullo taught for four decades at the University of Michigan, Colgate, Wesleyan, and New York University, as well as outside the United States.
