The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts. He posited three primary types of space in fiction cinema: the field of the screen, the psychological space of the actor, and the area of experience and geography that the film covers. This book brings together five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guediguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. It proposes that people think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Dumont's attraction to real settings and locality suggests a commitment to realism. New forms and surfaces of spectatorship provoke new sensations and engender new kinds of perception, as well as new ways of understanding and feeling space. The book interrogates Guediguian's obsessive portrayal of one particular city, Marseilles. Entering into the spaces of work and non-work in Cantet's films, it asks what constitutes space and place within the contemporary field of social relations. The book also engages with cultural space as the site of social integration and metissage in the work of Kechiche, his dialogues with diasporic communities and highly contested urban locales. Denis's film work contains continually shifting points of passage between inside and outside, objective and subjective, in the restless flux.
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The cinema of Oliver Stone
Art, authorship and activism
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This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone’s personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Stone’s life and work in terms of war, politics, money, love and corporations. This allows the authors both to provide a synthesis of earlier and later film work as well as locate that work within Stone’s developing critique of government. The book explores the development of aesthetic changes in Stone’s filmmaking and locates those changes within ongoing academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider debates about Hollywood and the film industry. All of this is explored with detailed reference to the films themselves and related to a set of wider concerns that Stone has sought to grapple with -the American Century, exceptionalism and the American Dream, global empire, government surveillance and corporate accountability. The book concludes with a perspective on Stone’s ‘brand’ as not just an auteur and commercially viable independent filmmaker but as an activist arguing for a very distinct kind of American exceptionalism that seeks a positive role for the US globally whilst eschewing military adventurism.
‘A wonderful, bracing book, Scott and Thompson have brought exemplary clarity and thoroughness to the complex and multifaceted career of Oliver Stone. Dividing Stone's work into major themes such as War, Money, and Love, the authors provide a focused exploration of the critical intelligence that permeates all of the filmmaker's work -- and the political thinking that informs it. Full of insights, this beautifully written book is a major contribution to the literature of film.'
Robert Burgoyne
Chair in Film Studies, University of St Andrews. Author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History
August 2016
‘Oliver Stone has cast greater light on late-twentieth and early twenty-first century America than any other movie-maker. In this incisive, erudite, and very well conceived volume, Ian Scott and Henry Thompson offer a nuanced and thematic analysis of Stone's cinematic importance and with the benefit of their numerous interviews with him – his understanding of the United States and its place in the world. Well-written and deeply researched, this fine book is a major contribution to film studies and should also be read by anyone interested in America's recent past and current politics.'
Iwan Morgan
Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, University College London. Author of Reagan: American Icon
August 2016
‘The Cinema of Oliver Stone is a fascinating examination of one of the most important political filmmakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Ian Scott and Henry Thompson offer telling insights into how Stone's films altered the ways in which audiences have thought about war, politics, money, love and corporations. This is must reading for anyone interested in the intersection of Hollywood and politics.'
Steven J. Ross author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics.
September 2016
‘The Cinema of Oliver Stone: Art, Authorship and Activism is a remarkable and timely book on one of the key American directors of the second half of the twentieth century. With its unparalleled access to the film-maker and his archive, its lucid and comprehensive engagement with both the films and the political context in which they were made, the project emerges as not only the definitive book on Oliver Stone but also one of the most compelling books on American film in the last decade.'
Terence McSweeney
Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Author of The 'War on Terror' and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second
August 2016
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The life of mise-en-scène
Visual style and British film criticism, 1946–78
This book explores the role of mise-en-scene in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. Mise-en-scene, and other ways of conceiving visual style, has been central to so many important debates that the writing examined in the book shaped the field in enduring ways. The book provides a cross-section of the British culture and its attitudes to film. It also considers a range of important contexts, from material conditions of film viewing (and therefore criticism) to the cultural and political shifts of 1956. The book further investigates the frequently asserted connection between literary criticism and the approaches developed in Movie. It identifies the range of different approaches to interpreting mise-en-scene advanced in Movie, drawing out sections on action, camera movement and placing, connections between different parts of the film, and a range of further debates. 'Tales of Sound and Fury' is an extraordinary article, and Elsaesser's appreciation of the plastic and expressive qualities of domestic melodrama and the broader melodramatic tradition is exemplary. In the early 1970s, writing on melodrama provided some of the richest expressions of mise-en-scene criticism. The book embodies a number of approaches which were to undermine the emergent interest in the interpretation of the film style. Melodrama criticism is a crucial focus for shifts in film criticism and theory, and for this history.
In the full-length treatment of the child in Spanish cinema, this book explores the ways that the cinematic child comes to represent 'prosthetic memory'. The cinematic children in the book retain traces of their mechanical origins: thus they are dolls, ventriloquists' dummies, cyborgs or automata. Moreover, by developing the monstrous undertones evoked by these mechanical traces (cinema such as 'Frankensteinian dream'), these films, in different ways, return repeatedly to a central motif. The central motif is the child's confrontation with a monster and, derivatively, the theme of the monstrous child. Through their obsessive recreation over time, the themes of the child and the monster and the monstrous child come to stand in metonymically for the confrontation of the self with the horrors of Spain's recent past. The book focuses on the cine religioso (religious cinema), in particular, Marcelino, pan y vino. The children of cine religioso appear like automata, programmed to love unconditionally an absent mother. The book then examines the Marisol's films from the 1960s and the way she was groomed by her creators to respond and engineer the economic and cultural changes of the consumerist Spain of the 1960s. It further deals with Victor Erice's El espiritu de la colmena and works through cinematic memories of this film in later works such as El laberinto del fauno, El orfanato and El espinazo del diablo. The films are seen to gesture towards the imaginary creation of a missing child.