Books in the Contemporary Film Directors series

The premier study of an incomparable American director

Explores the emotional tenor of Terence Davies' work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space.

Reading auteur theory as the new American business theory, the author reveals how Francis Ford Coppola's vision of a new kind of company has transformed the worker into a liberated and well-utilized artist, but has also commodified individual creativity at a level unprecedented in corporate history.

Emir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe's most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works.

An incisive analysis of a popular American filmmaker

Frames Petzold's cinema at the intersection of international art cinema and sophisticated genre cinema.

Inside the shocking cinema of Dario Argento

Films like Zama and The Headless Woman have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Though often allied with mainstream figures and genre frameworks, Martel works within art cinema, and since her 2001 debut The Swamp she has become one of international film's most acclaimed auteurs.Gerd Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience. Martel's focus on sound, touch, taste, and smell challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. By merging of these and other experimental techniques with heightened realism, she invites audiences into film narratives at once unresolved, truncated, and elliptical. Gemünden aligns Martel's filmmaking methods with the work of other international directors who criticizeand pointedly circumventthe high-velocity speeds of today's cinematic storytelling. He also explores how Martel's radical political critique forces viewers to rethink entitlement, race, class, and exploitation of indigenous peoples within Argentinian society and beyond.

Since the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989, Spike Lee has established himself as a cinematic icon. Lee's mostly independent films garner popular audiences while at the same time engaging in substantial political and social commentary. The author argues that Lee uses excess in his films to intervene in issues of philosophy, politics, and art.

Rob White's highly readable book, which includes a major new interview with Todd Haynes, is the first comprehensive study of the director's work.

A consideration of the distinctly independent filmmaker's explicitly political cinema

The first complete study of the protean filmmaker

A searing study of a controversial international auteur

An extended take on the innovator of the French New Wave

A new look at a well-loved director's critical engagement with cinema

Performing the real through the lens of a renowned innovator of documentary filmmaking

Examining a director whose work shrewdly eschews cinematic realism