The Cinema Of Steven Soderbergh

The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.

Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s ( Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.

Widely regarded as a turning point in American independent cinema, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) launched the career of its twenty-six-year-old director, whose debut film was nominated for an Academy Award and went on to win the Cannes Film Festival's top award, the Palme d'Or. The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh breaks new ground by investigating salient philosophical themes through the unique story lines and innovative approaches to filmmaking that distinguish this celebrated artist. Editors R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders have brought together leading scholars in philosophy and film studies for the first systematic analysis of Soderbergh's entire body of work, offering the first in-depth exploration of the philosophical ideas that form the basis of the work of one of the most commercially successful and consistently inventive filmmakers of our time.

Steven Soderbergh's cinema-making star has blazed with sex, lies, and videotape, sputtered with The Underneath, and flared again with the acclaimed movie Traffic. Steven Soderbergh: Interviews charts the rise and fall and rise of the writer-director-producer's surprising career from 1989 to 2001. From his "flavor of the month" status with his debut film sex, lies, and videotape to his Academy Award-winning feature Traffic, Soderbergh's road to success is fraught with ups and downs. On each and every film, the book details such experiences as his creative crisis surrounding his fourth film, The Underneath, and his rejuvenation with the ultra-low budget free-style Schizopolis, and the mainstream achievements that followed with Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Spanning twelve years, these conversations reveal Soderbergh (b. 1963) to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just starting out. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself. Not only do the interviews provide a glimpse into the filmmaker's aesthetics, but they also offer a history of the U.S. independent film movement in the late 1980s and 1990s--the explosion of "independent films," studios and film festivals, and the Hollywood co-optation of such talents, Soderbergh included. The collection also reveals the increasingly blurred boundaries between independent and mainstream and Soderbergh's commitment to revitalizing cinema from inside the system. Anthony Kaufman is the former senior editor of indieWIRE.com and is currently a Contributing Writer to indieWIRE.com, and is an instructor of film and media journalism at New York University. He has been published in numerous periodicals such as the Village Voice, Cineaste, Time Out New York, and the Independent Film & Video Monthly.

Steven Soderbergh's feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles: from the self-absorption of his breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape to populist social problem films such as Erin Brockovich, and from the modernist discontinuity of Full Frontal and filmed performance art of Gray's Anatomy to a glossy, star-studded action blockbuster such as Ocean's Eleven. Using a combination of realism and expressive stylization of character subjectivity, Soderbergh's films diverge from the contemporary Hollywood mainstream through the statements they offer on issues including political repression, illegal drugs, violence, environmental degradation, the empowering and controlling potential of digital technology, and economic inequality. Arguing that Soderbergh practices an eclectic type of moviemaking indebted both to the European art cinema and the Hollywood genre film, Aaron Baker charts the common thematic and formal patterns present across Soderbergh's oeuvre. Almost every movie centers on an alienated main character, and Soderbergh has repeatedly emphasized place as a major factor in his narratives. Formally, he represents the unconventional thinking of his outsider protagonists through a discontinuous editing style. Including detailed analyses of major films as well as two interviews with the director, this volume illustrates Soderbergh's hybrid flexibility in bringing an independent aesthetic to wide audiences.

La 4e de couv. indique : "The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, he has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, and global blockbusters, as well as atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from a variety of perspectives, analysing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema as well as genre fare, a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker and Hollywood insider. Preoccupied with the detective's role to investigate truth, as well as the criminal's alternative value system, his films tackle social justice in a corporate world, Soderbergh's career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema ; this volume gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth critical analysis it deserves."

A Hollywood director who blends substance with the mainstream Steven Soderbergh's feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles: from the self-absorption of his breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape to populist social problem films such as Erin Brockovich, and from the modernist discontinuity of Full Frontal and filmed performance art of Gray's Anatomy to a glossy, star-studded action blockbuster such as Ocean's Eleven. Using a combination of realism and expressive stylization of character subjectivity, Soderbergh's films diverge from the contemporary Hollywood mainstream through the statements they offer on issues including political repression, illegal drugs, violence, environmental degradation, the empowering and controlling potential of digital technology, and economic inequality. Arguing that Soderbergh practices an eclectic type of moviemaking indebted both to the European art cinema and the Hollywood genre film, Aaron Baker charts the common thematic and formal patterns present across Soderbergh's oeuvre. Almost every movie centers on an alienated main character, and Soderbergh has repeatedly emphasized place as a major factor in his narratives. Formally, he represents the unconventional thinking of his outsider protagonists through a discontinuous editing style. Including detailed analyses of major films as well as two interviews with the director, this volume illustrates Soderbergh's hybrid flexibility in bringing an independent aesthetic to wide audiences.

Like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape presents us with a protagonist who can only connect with others through the lens of a camera. Graham is an enigmatic young man who returns to Baton Rouge from a long road trip, mildly irritating his old lawyer friend John and wholly intriguing John's housebound wife Ann. John is conducting a sneaky and entirely sexual affair with Ann's sister Cynthia. For her part, Ann has lost interest in sex, yet Graham's obscurely charming eccentricity stirs something inside her - until she learns that he is functionally impotent and can manage arousal only with the help of a video camera and an agreeably loose-lipped female. Nevertheless, it's the dragging into the open of Graham's dirty little secret that causes all of these characters to confront their own veiled deceits and hypocrisies. sex, lies and videotape won the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, affirming the arrival of a distinctive new talent and signalling the start of a movement among young independent American film-makers opposed to the values and formats of the Hollywood system. Soderbergh's script is an unerringly elegant, witty and literate study of contemporary perversity.