Cinema Alchemist

For the first time, Oscar-winning production designer and director Roger Christian reveals his life story, from his earliest work in the British film industry to his breakthrough contributions on such iconic science fiction masterpieces as Star Wars, Alien and his own rediscovered Black Angel. This candid biography delves into his relationships with legendary figures, as well as the secrets of his greatest work. The man who built the lightsaber finally speaks!

This book comprises what may be called exercises in ‘comparative cinema’. Its focus on endings, near-endings and ‘late style’ is connected with the author’s argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polański, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

Theorizing Colonial Cinema is a millennial retrospective on the entangled intimacy between film and colonialism from film's global inception to contemporary legacies in and of Asia. The volume engages new perspectives by asking how prior discussions on film form, theory, history, and ideology may be challenged by centering the colonial question rather than relegating it to the periphery. To that end, contributors begin by excavating little-known archives and perspectives from the colonies as a departure from a prevailing focus on Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The collection pinpoints various forms of devaluation and misrecognition both in and beyond the region that continue to relegate local voices to the margins. This pathbreaking study on global film history advances prior scholarship by bringing together an array of established and new interdisciplinary voices from film studies, Asian studies, and postcolonial studies to consider how the present is continually haunted by the colonial past.

This book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It turns to the in-betweens that characterise the cinematic experience to discover how the different elements involved in film and its viewing collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of different forms of screen media, such as films that reassemble archive footage, animations, apps and museum installations, in dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, art critic-cum-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and film phenomenologies. The result is a careful and unique examination of how Holocaust memory can emerge from the relationship between different media, objects and bodies during the film experience. This work challenges the existing concentration on representation in writing about Holocaust films, turning instead to the materials of screen works and the spectatorial experience to highlight the powerful contribution of the cinematic to Holocaust memory.

This work is a critical intervention into the archive of female identity; it reflects on the ways in which the Central and Eastern European female ideal was constructed, represented, and embodied in communist societies and on its transformation resulting from the political, economic, and social changes specific to the post-communist social and political transitions. During the communist period, the female ideal was constituted as a heroic mother and worker, both a revolutionary and a state bureaucrat, which were regarded as key elements in the processes of industrial development and production. She was portrayed as physically strong and with rugged rather than with feminized attributes. After the post-communist regime collapsed, the female ideal’s traits changed and instead took on the feminine attributes that are familiar in the West’s consumer-oriented societies. Each chapter in the volume explores different aspects of these changes and links those changes to national security, nationalism, and relations with Western societies, while focusing on a variety of genres of expression such as films, music, plays, literature, press reports, television talk shows, and ethnographic research. The topics explored in this volume open a space for discussion and reflection about how radical social change intimately affected the lives and identities of women, and their positions in society, resulting in various policy initiatives involving women’s social and political roles. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, comparative politics, Eastern European studies, and cultural studies.

Multiple views of the famed Hungarian filmmaker and installation artist who turns home movies into history

Following a previous international conference at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and the subsequent publication of a volume of studies with the title Film in the Post-Media Age (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), which insisted, citing the words of Jacques Rancière, that the ecosystem of contemporary moving images should be understood not as a unified digital environment, but as a highly diversified, “multisensory milieu,” another conference was organised, focusing this time directly on the “multisensory” nature of moving images. Pairing the keywords “cinema” and “sensation”, an invitation was extended for presentations offering a closer examination of the sensual aspects of moving images in order to identify and map out at least some of the possible new directions perceived as taking shape as “sensuous” film studies. The questions contributors addressed included: What kind of paradigms, authors, and styles can be identified in the practice of a cinema exploring the palpable presence of bodies in film history? How can sensory, audiovisual perception and cognitive knowledge be connected when watching moving images? What does the experience of so-called haptic images entail in film and video art? How does an emphasis on sensations and the body relate to representations of social issues and cultural difference? How are representations of other arts in films, or the filmic image appearing as a painterly tableau perceived? How can new images incorporate a sensation of “old” images? What is the difference between haptic images and “hyper” cinema in the form of 3D movies? How can the new naturalistic trends in contemporary cinema be interpreted? What kind of sensual forms are devised for what is unrepresentable or impalpable? The conference took place between the 25th and 27th of May 2012, with the title The Cinema of Sensations, and attracted researchers from all over the world for what turned out to be three days of presentations on extremely varied subjects and lively discussions conducted in a memorably cheerful atmosphere. The present volume is the palpable outcome of these debates, and publishes a selection of articles that have been written for, or after, this conference.

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures. Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as “other” art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12:08 East of Bucharest Big Tõll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamás Almási, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej ̄u3awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others