The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a ...fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave.  In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.
The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following
independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term
"art film" and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state.
In ...this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of
Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of
doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the
most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details
how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications
sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled
by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films
would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn
global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of
exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s,
however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak-the leading
figures of Indian art cinema-became disillusioned with the belief
that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar
contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of
the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet
unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak,
and working through previously unexplored archives of film society
publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian
film history. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures
offers sweeping new insights into film's relationship with the
postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of
the future.
In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan's most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he ...met with modest success in directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki's 49 feature films.
The Barrandov Studios are one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. For more than 80 years so far, the studios have been the location of choice for over 2,500 Czech and International ...films. Barrandov's founding fathers, the Havel brothers Vàclav and Milo. (the grandfather and uncle of later president Vàclav Havel), built the 'Hollywood of Eastern Europe' in the 1930s.
A legendary studio like this - and its story - has so far not been told to an English-speaking readership. This collection aims to correct this, presenting the studio's rich history, its esteemed directors, and their most important films.
Die Berliner Schule gilt als die wichtigste Strömung im deutschen Kino seit den 1970er Jahren. Gleichzeitig kann sie als wesentlicher Teil der globalen New-Wave-Filme verstanden werden, die an den ...traditionellen Rändern des Weltkinos angesiedelt sind. In 15 Essays setzen die Beiträger*innen des Bandes die Berliner Schule mit Beispielen des globalen Kinos in Verbindung - von Europa über Südostasien und den Nahen Osten bis hin zu Süd- und Nordamerika - und laden dazu ein, sie als zentralen Aspekt des Nachwende-Kinos in einem transnationalen Licht zu betrachten. Damit liefern sie zum ersten Mal eine systematische Untersuchung dieser Gattung und stellen sie als eine der wichtigsten Entwicklungen des gegenwärtigen Arthouse-Kinos heraus.
A wide-ranging study which examines the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice. Affords a new optic for ...understanding French New Wave cinema and innovative readings of New Wave films. Offers an inclusive view of the New Wave through discussion of lesser-known directors alongside renowned New Wave filmmakers .
This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. By eschewing the usual tendency to view films like A Kind of Loving and ...The Entertainer collectively and include them in broader debates about class, gender, and ideology, this book presents a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films. For each film, a re-distribution of existing critical emphasis also allows the problematic relationship between these films and the question of realism to be reconsidered. Drawing upon existing sources and returning to long-standing and unchallenged assumptions about these films, this book offers the opportunity for the reader to return to the British New Wave and decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the films.
Suzuki Seijun’s extensive filmography cuts across such a wide range of genres and styles that only his most extravagant films have typically stood out to Western programmers and audiences. The absurd ...and comical excesses of films such as Tokyo Drifter (Tōkyō nagaremono, 1966) and Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967) have led to an image of Suzuki as primarily a purveyor of idiosyncratic provocations. His position within the annals of postwar Japanese cinema has perhaps been further complicated by his extensive genre work for studio Nikkatsu, despite the richness of many of these films; when placed alongside contemporaneous directors who were more explicitly experimental, political, or poetic, Suzuki’s filmography has seemingly proven more challenging to assemble under a coherent authorial identity. William Carroll’s Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema offers an effective re-evaluation of Suzuki’s career, presenting a lucid study of the work of a director who has often been dismissed as a “formally inventive but frivolous and nonsensical filmmaker”, one whose innovations within a rigid studio system conflated genre filmmaking with avant-garde experimentation, and whose dismissal by his studio galvanised a politically agitated Left into active protest (128).
