Books by John Orr

Ingmar Bergman's films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman's relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman's critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman's films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through "e;his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy."e;

In a fresh and invigorating look at British cinema that considers film as an art form among other arts, John Orr takes a critical look at the intriguing relationship between romanticism and modernism in British cinema.

aeo This is a controversial study of the development of the modern cinema which analyses film as a distinctive social and cultural form. aeo The book rejects current post--structuralist theories of the cinema and also criticises the concept of postmodernity as a means of exploring developments in cinema.