Individual film directors, film-makers Books

Few filmmakers have taken the principle of the 'talking picture' so far as Eric Rohmer, the internationally reknowned director of the Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles. Occasionally dismissed as precious or overly...

Mathieu Kassovitz is arguably the most important filmmaker to have emerged from French cinema in the past two decades. As a director, his work often engages with highly controversial socio-political issues whilst still managing to attract and connect...

One of the most gifted directors of the post New Wave, Maurice Pialat is frequently compared to such legendary filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. A quintessentially realist filmmaker, who, like Bresson, was also trained as a painter, Pialat's...

The career of Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey spanned over four decades and several countries. A self-proclaimed Marxist and veteran of the 1930s Soviet agit-prop theater, he collaborated with Bertholt Brecht before directing noir B-pictures in Hollywood. A...

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de...

Claire Denis is one of France's most acclaimed and original filmmakers. Since her remarkable debut success with 'Chocolat' (1986), she has produced an impressive series of features which have been intriguing, visually striking, and often highly...

This is the first comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, examining the artistic and cultural influences which shaped his films.Asquith's silent...

Carol Reed is one of the truly outstanding directors of British cinema, and one whose work is long overdue for reconsideration. This major study ranges over Reed's entire career, combining observation of general trends and patterns with detailed analysis...

This book traces the career of Roy Ward Baker, one of the great survivors of the British film and television industry. He directed the landmark British film Morning Departure (1949), worked at Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood in the early 1950s where...

"Leos Carax" is a study of the films of this popular "enfant terrible" of contemporary French cinema. The key ingredients and influences of Carax's four films (including "Les Amants du Pont Neuf" and "Pola X") are examined here: Paris, pop music,...

Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This is the first ever book-length study of his work, combining detailed analysis of all his films with a persuasive and stimulating...

This text analyzes one of the central partnerships in British film history, that of Frank Lauder and Sidney Gilliat, the screenwriters of films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed, who became the producer-writer-directors of a succession of well-loved and famous...

Terence Fisher is best known as the director who made most of the classic Hammer horrors - including "The Curse of Frankenstein", "Dracula" and "The Devil Rides Out". But there is more to Terence Fisher than Hammer horror. In a 25 year career, he...

Jean Vigo is one of the legendary figures of world cinema, whose films L'Atalante and Zero de conduite still inspire young audiences today.Film historian Michael Temple explores Vigo's intense career and asks why it has had such a long-lasting impact on...

Although his films "The Innocents" and "The Great Gatsby" were highly thought of by Fran ois Truffaut and Tennessee Williams respectively, British director Jack Clayton was perhaps best remembered for "Room at the Top", which brought a new sexual...

This is a study of the work of Lance Comfort who made many films between 1941 and 1965. There was the success of his second feature as director, "Hatter's Castle" (1941) and when he returned to this melodcramatic vein in 1945 he made a series of studies...

Before the turn of the 20th-century, even before the first cinemas, Georges Melies began making movies. He directed, edited, produced, designed and starred in over 500 films between 1896 and 1912. Elizabeth Ezra explodes several myths about Melies's role...

Coline Serreau became famous in 1985 when her third film, Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Baby), the most successful French film of the 1980s. She was already known in France for her major contribution to feminist documentaries with the...

Luc Besson is considered one of the hottest international properties to emerge from the new wave of French film directors in the 1980s. His films represent the conflicts and tensions of a postmodern age, and are perceived as signs of their times. This is...

Agnes Varda, one of the major French film-makers of the last 40 years, is here celebrated by Alison Smith, by examining both the early films and the later successes, such as "Sans toit ni loi" (1985), "Jane B. par Agnes V." (1987) and "Jacquot de Nantes"...

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman's birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman's films and writings with...

How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?You've Got Red on You, the horror-comedy whose fan base continues to grow and grow. The book reveals how a group of friends...

The Coen Bros. have attracted a wide following and been rewarded with Oscars and other honors. Some of their films are cult favorites and box office hits, such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. Yet the team of filmmaking brothers...

A re-examination of the films of Antonio Pietrangeli from a feminist perspectiveOne of the founding fathers of neorealism in the postwar period in Italy, Antonio Pietrangeli went on to focus his lens upon the female subject. Eight of his ten full-length...

Though long ignored or dismissed by film critics and scholars, Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) was among the most influential auteurs of his era. This comprehensive overview of Pagnol's career, now available in paperback, highlights his unique place in French...

Yukio Mishima was the most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century: prodigiously talented, dazzlingly prolific and a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. Yet in 1970 Mishima shocked the world with a bizarre attempt at a coup...

The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood productionSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called 'the most...

Stage Directing: A Director's Itinerary, the student of theatrical directing will find a step-by-step guide to directing a production, from choosing a play to opening night. Unlike other directing textbooks, it provides practical advice on organising...

In 1915, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith released a film that went on to become one of the most controversial of all time. Over a century later, The Birth of a Nation continues to stimulate debate on the relationship between Hollywood and racism. This...

Intervening at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and cinema, this book argues that the career of Robert Gudiguian is the result of one of the most original and coherent projects in contemporary French cinema: to make a committed,...

Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Although he is well known for his avant-garde filmmaking, his garden, and his AIDS activism, he is also the author of...

Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel, Alain Guiraudie, Sbastien Lifshitz and Cline Sciamma. The films of these five major French directors exemplify queer cinema in the twenty-first century.Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France...

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world's great filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace...

Fragile yet powerful, macho yet transgressive, Jacques Audiard's films portray disabled, marginalised or otherwise non-normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation. Jacques Audiard is the first book on the cinema of one of...

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most...

Now available in paperback, this is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the three-best known Mexican-born directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Alfonso Cuaron. Deborah Shaw examines the career trajectories of...

Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinema team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet...

Since the early 1950s, Chris Marker has embraced different filmmaking styles as readily as he has new technologies, and has broadened conceptions of the documentary in distinctly personal ways. He has travelled around the world, tracking political...

Humphrey Jennings has been described as the only real poet that British cinema has produced. His documentary films are remarkable records of Britain at peace and war, and his range of representational approaches transcended accepted notions of wartime...

One of the few women pioneers of cinema and a committed feminist, Germaine Dulac strongly believed that the public had a role to play in shaping the history of cinema and the kinds of films that filmmakers could make. This book draws on a wealth of...

This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines...

'Georges Franju' is the fullest study to date of this little-known French director, the co-founder of the Cinematheque francaise, and the first book on him in English since 1967. Born in 1912, but only enjoying his real debut as a director in 1948 with...

Lisa Downing's comprehensive study of the films of Patrice Leconte traces lines of continuity and revision through a body of apparently disparate films whose "messages" often appear both contradictory and controversial. Pursuing a close reading of the...

Alain Resnais, director of 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) and 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad' (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest...

Published on the 50th anniversary of his directorial debut, this is an examination of the work of a man once hailed as the finest film-maker to emerge from the British studio system after World War II. J. Lee Thompson first came to notice as a talented...

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those...