Sant

This incisive book provides an in-depth critical and biographical study of the artistic range of film director Gus Van Sant. Arranged chronologically, Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema provides a comprehensive overview of the life and art of this talented director, covering his mainstream, commercial, and avant-garde projects. More than a biography, the book examines Van Sant's incredibly diverse body of work, exploring the influence of his open homosexuality; of fine art, literature, and music; and of the range of cinema styles to which he has been exposed. Stressing Van Sant's wide-ranging content, genre, style, and cinematic presentation, author Vincent LoBrutto details the filmmaker's autobiographical tendencies and how he uses the film craft, literature, popular music, and fine arts to create his movies. The book dissects ways in which each of his films reflects Van Sant's sexual orientation, whether the individual film has a gay theme or not. Because of its importance to Van Sant's films, the book also offers a history of gay culture, past and present, covering its influence on art, music, theater, and dance, as well as community, activism, and prejudice.

One of the most talented and imaginative artists of independent cinema, Gus Van Sant established himself with a number of important movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning with Mala Noche, the 1986 gay classic of personal film expression, followed by two key works of the American indie movement, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant films often feature characters on the borders of mainstream society. Subsequent films included hits, misses, and a notorious remake of Psycho. Regardless of the critical or commercial response to his work, Van Sant has maintained a vision that is unique among contemporary filmmakers. Conversations with Gus Van Sant is the first critical study to include both extensive original interviews with the director as well as discussions of his entirebody of work. The exchanges between film scholar Mario Falsetto and the indie filmmaker cover fifteen films directed by Van Sant over a period of thirty years. Throughout these discussions, Van Sant talks candidly about each film’s production history, visual style, editing patterns, and creative soundwork. The director also expounds on his work with actors, the relationship of independent filmmakers to the wider film industry, and many other subjects related to his filmmaking process. The conversations examine the rich thematic explorations of Van Sant’s films, which often revolve around the search for love and community on the margins of society and feature a fascination with death. From experimental films such as Gerry, Last Days, Elephant,and Paranoid Park—where Van Sant rebooted his understanding of cinema and his relationship to the Hollywood film industry—to Milk and Promised Land, this book explores the rich network of meanings in the director’s work. By melding the author’s critical perspective with the filmmaker’s own ideas, Conversations with Gus Van Sant creates a wider perspective on one of the most iconoclastic and imaginative directors of the last thirty years.

Beloved, controversial, influential, the creator of such fascinating and award-winning films as My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, and Milk, Gus Van Sant stands among the great international directors, equally at home in Hollywood and the avant-garde. Examining his films thematically, this book finds consistency of vision in Van Sant's unique approach to cinema, which deploys postmodernist techniques such as appropriation, nonlinear narrative, and queering--not in the service of the chic but to apply an all-inclusive viewpoint to ageless tales of life, love and death. Van Sant's films are viewed through a multi-genre prism, including the work of Bruce Weber and Derek Jarman, the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, the music of the Velvet Underground and Nirvana, the fiction of Sam D'Allesandro, and especially the "cut-up"/collage practice of intertextual authorship pioneered by William Burroughs.

All three books in 'Carl Sant Murder Mysteries', a series of crime fiction by Dan Laughey, now in one volume! Chloe - Lost Girl: A missing student. A gunned-down detective. A woman in fear for her life. All three are connected by something. Detective Inspector Carl Sant gets on the case, but what links the disappearance of an university student, the death of an off-duty police sergeant and a school professor reluctant to help them solve the case? Racing against time, D.I. Carl Sant must find out what's behind the mysterious events - before bodies start piling up. Chloe - Never Forget: A series of cold-case enquiries leads D.I. Sant and his colleagues to investigate a botched assassination plan. The deeper they dig into the case, the more secrets are revealed, including shocking connections to the infamous National Front. Meanwhile, the memory of former P.C. Tanner, survivor of the 1984 shooting, is beginning to recover. D.I. Carl Sant must find out who is behind it all - before his superiors lose their rag and more lives are lost. Chloe - Prime Victim: D.I. Carl Sant has his work cut out keeping the peace, and that’s before a pair of corpses get dumped in a frosty field and the spring turns very chilly indeed. Sant and his fellow detectives go on the hunt for muggers, pimps, lost girls and ruthless killers - business as usual for the police and their troubled lot. But is Inspector Sant still up to the job?

Spine title: Muirhead's Southern Italy.