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Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. His television career began in the cutting-rooms at Thames Television, and his first directing experience was on the Thames TV documentaries,
already gained some experience as a film journalist, writing for (amongst others) Elle magazine. The Cahiers team were united in their Bazinian respect for a particular kind of realism, their enthusiasm for Hollywood genre films, and their dislike of the kind of cinema that was dominant in France. Within this broad consensus, Truffaut (twenty-one in 1953) tended to adopt a more virulent and uncompromising tone than the rest
Genre, cycles and critical traditions 9 1 Genre, cycles and critical traditions How do we know a romantic comedy when we see one? According to Brian Henderson, ‘definition, even delimitation, is difficult or impossible because all Hollywood films (except some war films) have romance and all have comedy’ (2001: 312). While the pervasive presence of romance and comedy is undeniable, Henderson is conflating different levels of representational convention. All Hollywood genres implicitly belong to the broader traditions of American narrative film (Pye 1975: 31
Meadows, all undeniably distinguished, are much more easily contained by generic descriptors. In this chapter we shall consider what Winterbottom has done with such popular genres as the road movie, the musical and the science-fiction thriller, how far he has adapted their conventions to contemporary film practice and ideology, and whether these films, in reworking Hollywood genres, exhibit any peculiarly
explores some of the socio-political realities affecting contemporary French society (racism, exclusion and violence) by presenting them in a cinematic vernacular that a youth audience can understand and engage with. And while his two most recent features interface more directly (and in some ways disappointingly) with Hollywood genre cinema, all his films display an affnity with an Americanised mass
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
cinema of Álex de la Iglesia as the proof of the poverty of the doxa of art cinema and its aesthetic sidekick, the cine social. It would seem pointless to desecrate one monument only to erect another. Even at this late stage, it might be worth risking the suggestion that the films we analyse in this book do not, on a number of counts, make up a coherent whole. If we want to claim that Acción mutante and El día de la bestia exemplified an exuberant engagement with autochthonous and Hollywood genre cinema and a disenchanted suspicion of modernity at a critical moment
cinema since the early 1990s, such as new realism, the so-called jeune cinéma , as well as the emergence of what we might term a ‘post-look’ spectacular genre cinema – a popular French cinema that looks to Besson and Beineix, Hollywood genres and South-East Asian cinema for its inspiration and modes of production, rather than the more traditional reference points of French realism, the auteur
Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions ig2g-ic)68 (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co), 1968. 2 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act Two. 3 Steve Neale, Genre (London, BFI Publishing), 1980; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York), 1981
, hence the sweetness. The films of the French Nouvelle Vague are Hollywood genre films revisted, reconfigured and, by virtue of this, brought up to date. Prima della rivoluzione is constructed by mirror relations and transformations: of time (past to present), of novel to film, of film to theatre, of theatre to opera. These relations never conclude, never ‘settle’. Since everything is subject to mirrored reflections and nothing stable or certain, the film seems constantly between categories in a nowhere of uncertainty, indecision and restlessness. And, when a decision