Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers

From Luc Besson to Quentin Tarantino, Fifty Contemporary Film-makers offers an up-to-date guide to the individuals who are shaping modern cinema.

This book provides an accessible overview of each director’s contribution to cinema, incorporating a discussion of their career, major works and impact.

Fifty Hollywood Directors introduces the most important, iconic and influential filmmakers who worked in Hollywood between the end of the silent period and the birth of the blockbuster. By exploring the historical, cultural and technological contexts in which each director was working, this book traces the formative period in commercial cinema when directors went from pioneers to industry heavyweights. Each entry discusses a director’s practices and body of work and features a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. Entries include: Frank Capra Cecil B DeMille John Ford Alfred Hitchcock Fritz Lang Orson Welles DW Griffith King Vidor This is an indispensible guide for anyone interested in film history, Hollywood and the development of the role of the director.

This book is an extensive collection of original interviews with 50 noted filmmakers. Conducted over a seven-year period expressly for this project, the interviews cover various aspects of film production, biographical information, and the interviewees' favorite or most influential films. Filmmakers interviewed include highly respected auteurs (Richard Linklater, Wim Wenders), B-movie greats (Roger Corman, Lloyd Kaufman), and well-renowned documentary directors (D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles). Each entry includes a brief biography and filmography, while dozens of personal photographs, promotional materials, and film stills appear throughout the work.

This study of Mexican film director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu explores his role in moving Mexican filmmaking from a traditional nationalist agenda toward a more global focus. In studying the international scope of Iñárritu's influential films Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, the authors trace common themes such as human suffering and redemption, chance, and accidental encounters. The authors also analyze the director's visual style and his use of multiple characters and a fragmented narrative structure. The book concludes with an interview of Iñárritu that touches on the themes and subject matter of his chief works.

This anthology addresses the salient aesthetic, ideological and economic determinants of independent American cinema over the past three decades.

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.

"Wong Kar-Wai" traces this immensely exciting director's perennial themes of time, love, and loss, and examines the political implications of his films, especially concerning the handover of former British colony Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. This book is the first in any language to cover all of Wong's work, from his first film, As Tears Go By, to his most recent, the still unreleased 2046. It also includes his best'known, highly honored films, "Chungking Express, Happy Together, " and above all, "In the Mood for Love." Most importantly, Peter Brunette describes the ways in which Wong's supremely visual films attempt to create a new form of cinema by relying on stunning, suggestive visual images and audio tracks to tell their story, rather than on traditional notions of character, dialogue, and plot. The question of Wong Kar-wai's use of genre film techniques in art films is also explored in depth. "