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the night. His physical presence frames both films, setting them up as a contemporary re-imagining of medieval dream allegory, originating in the mind of the films’ director. In The Last of England , I argue that, while this framing device makes the film appear autobiographical, it is a self-representational act in the character of the dream poet, the purpose of which is to enable his audience to collaborate in the sharp socio-political critique portrayed by the visions in the film. This role changes in The Garden , however, where the dream poet is shown asleep
Renoir felt a strong kinship with fluidity. In his autobiography he equates cinema and navigating rivers as means of liberation: ‘For me, a good film is like being caressed by foliage and vegetation during a rowing outing with a friend’ (Renoir 1974: 60). This notion recurs in his films, but he is not the only silent film director to be fascinated by the aquatic element: as Deleuze remarked, ‘this predilection for running water was common to all the members of the French School’ (1986: 77). One such director was Jean Epstein, who was to make a series of magnificent
dismissing them as ‘bluettes sentimentales’ and ‘de la guimauve’. 3 Her work needs to be understood within the specific context of French cinema and French culture, in which the concept of the auteur , if ostensibly ungendered, remains resolutely masculine, and in which, paradoxically, despite the growing number of women film directors, it is difficult to explore female subjectivity without subscribing to conventional patriarchal
had put the film director ‘severely in his place, demanding of him technical capacity, sensibility to the ideas and characters provided for him by his author, but no independent response to his material, no desire to present it in the light of his own imagination, illuminated by it, or transformed’. 13 However, this did not hold true of Anderson’s contribution to In Celebration where a combination of, first, the intimate
-historical release, is mainly auteurist in nature. While the auteur in this case is not obtainable, as it might be for a more contemporary release, the intentions and activity of the author are situated in the voice of the authoritative ‘expert’ –usually the author of a book on the film, another film director or composer –to promote the authorial reading of the text as an individual one. My concern in this chapter is really the effects of this kind of promotion on the reception or construction of auteurist readings of the film text –in relation to classical Hollywood (given the
the 1990s and 2000s, this chapter suggests they demonstrate how Barker has been more successful as a brand-name auteur across media, rather than as a feature film director. Moreover, it can be argued that the design of the mazes and the philosophy behind them reflect a broader sense of Barker as an artist and producer experimenting with the cinematic horror genre as an immersive form beyond
contemporary antisemitism is the impulse to treat such of the antisemitism as there is acknowledged (by whomever) to be – in Europe, in the Arab world – as a pure epiphenomenon of the Israel–Palestine conflict. One instance of this was the statement by film director Ken Loach * in March 2009 that if there was a rise of antisemitism in Europe this was not surprising: ‘it is perfectly understandable ’ (my emphasis), he was reported as saying, ‘because Israel feeds feelings of antisemitism’. The key word here is ‘understandable’. This might just mean ‘capable of being
Kong–based film director Wong Kar-wai, who served as artistic director, “China: Through the Looking Glass” was hailed as “a From Shanghai to New York by way of conclusion stunning, cinematic journey in which magnificent examples of the haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear are presented alongside masterworks of Chinese art.”5 While signaling the hopeful promises of our increasingly globalized artistic and cultural spheres, the exhibition also registered some of the major problems associated with the global turn in contemporary art: uneven representation
adopt and abandon a variety of roles over the course of a film), and for the unfinished nature of most of these theatrical productions: Rivette frequently films rehearsals, but rarely (except in Va savoir (2001)) finished performances, as though all these productions were constantly evolving. Hence too the uncertain role of the theatre (and so, by extension, the film) director: on the one hand, an ambiguous, impotent observer of
uncomfortably close to the title of the source book written by Derek Humphry the film’s main protagonist.20 It was re-titled as the more ambiguous Act of Love, but Granada then discovered that a 1981 NBC made-for-TV movie had already used this title. The NBC film was sufficiently well-known for this to be a problem. It had Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham in the hit television series Happy Days and now a noted film director), starring and had achieved a 21.7% rating and a 35% audience share when first transmitted. It was also frequently repeated on US television (see Gitlin 1994