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Alejandro Amenábar has made only five main features over a 15-year period from
1995 to 2009. In 1995 he abandoned his Film Studies degree at Madrid's
Complutense University in order to shoot
This book explores why Jack Clayton had made so few films and why most of them failed to find a large audience. It examines the kind of criticism they generated, sometimes adulatory but sometimes dismissive and even condescending. The book hopes to throw light on certain tendencies and developments within the film industry and of film criticism, the British film industry and film criticism in particular. The fact that Clayton's films fit David Bordwell's paradigm of the art film is one explanation why producers had difficulty with him and why mainstream cinema found his work hard to place and assimilate. Clayton's pictorial eye has sometimes antagonised critics: they often take exception to some aspect of his mise-en-scene. Clayton had come to prominence with Room at the Top, around the time of the British 'Free Cinema' movement and immediately prior to the so-called British 'new-wave' films of the early 1960s from directors such as Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger. Thorold Dickinson's evocation of the Russian atmosphere and, in particular, his use of suspenseful soundtrack to suggest ghostly visitation undoubtedly had an influence on Jack Clayton's style in both The Bespoke Overcoat and The Innocents. The critical controversy concerning the status of Jack Clayton as director and artist is probably at its most intense over The Pumpkin Eater. Clayton stressed the importance of an opening that established right away the situation of 'a woman in crisis' but wanted to delay the Harrods scene so as to build up an atmosphere of suspense.
From its foundation in 1945, the Arts Council of Great Britain (Arts Council hereafter) endorsed cinema as a serious artistic medium, directly supporting and sponsoring art films for almost fifty years. In doing so, even on a much smaller scale by comparison to its support for the traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture, the Arts Council nurtured experiments in film form and shaped the careers of many independent film-makers in a manner that helped to develop a specialised strand of British art cinema from the 1960s onwards
, securing significant roles in shows such as Bless Me Father (LWT, 1979–81) and Potter (BBC, 1979–83). However, his career in cinema remained interesting and generically varied. The fact that Lowe worked in art films, comedies, sex comedies, mysteries and horror films again speaks of the essentially fragmented nature of 1970s British film production. For example, Lowe appears in If... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968); the realist adaptation of a stage play, Spring and Port Wine (Peter Hammond, 1969); the satires The Bed-Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969) and The Rise and Rise of
wonder Clayton found the experience of making it so traumatic. In fact, in trying to define the Clayton style, I was surprised to find how closely it corresponds in many respects to David Bordwell’s classic formulation of the mode of discourse of the art film. 20 Bordwell was writing mainly of what one might call the modernist masters of European cinema – Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean
’ film. What emerges is the notion of a hesitant cinema committed neither to the vigour of popular cinema nor to the sophistication of the ‘art’ film, and unduly dependent upon the traditional and more indigenously respectable cultural forms of literature and theatre for subject matter, themes, performance styles and so on. Certainly, in the 1920s, the powerful exemplars for the direction of cinema came from two broad sources. Firstly, from the abundance of titles produced by the fast-growing Hollywood industry which dominated British screens and provided the typical
The Others began as a small-scale, art film project for the European market. The intended setting was Chile, Amenábar’s birthplace. The ambition was to explore the repressions of his childhood, especially the impact of religious dogma on family life and the education of children. Over time, however, the film was transformed into the most expensive, biggest-grossing, box-office hit in Spanish film
Plates, while also exploring his experimentation with the cinematic genres of thriller and art film in the smaller-scale works Polygraph and Needles and Opium. Tectonic Plates: melodramatic drift Plaques tectoniques/Tectonic Plates, created and toured between 1987 and 1991, was Lepage’s next major group-created show following on from the international success of The Dragon’s Trilogy. It furthered his desire to work with artists from other national backgrounds and to explore themes of travel and the relationships between cultures that were now informed by his own
This book offers an investigative analysis into the post-millennium rise to
global stardom of British actor, Jason Statham.
It presents original ideas
focusing on new notions about film and cult actor stardom and celebrity. Using
in-depth analysis of Statham’s work across a range of multimedia platforms,
including chapters dedicated to his film, pop promo, videogaming and tabloid
persona, each essay will present this British actor as a postmodern phenomenon
in a quickly changing media world.
Chapters include: new ideas about the
reframing of post-millennial British film masculinity; Statham as an anti-hero;
his videogaming work; investigations into his art films; the music of Crank;
Statham’s clothes in his modelling, pop promo and film work; work across a
variety of genres; his ensemble approach in The Expendables, and how he ages in
that franchise; and a personal essay from Statham’s director of Spy – Paul
Feig.
The book is written in a fluid and approachable style but would be of
particular benefit to students of film, stardom, celebrity, gender and social
studies. Its approach will also appeal to the general member of the public and
fan of Jason Statham.
Contributors include Professor Robert Shail (Stanley
Baker and Children’s Film Foundation) Professor James Chapman (James Bond), Dr
Steven Gerrard (Modern British Horror and the Carry On films) and Hollywood film
director Paul Feig.
‘universal’ values of culture and art. This is reflected in the existence of international festivals, where distribution is sought for these films, and where their status as ‘art’ – and as films ‘to be taken seriously’ – is confirmed and re-stated through prizes and awards. Writing in 2013, David Andrews argued that art cinema should be considered a ‘sprawling super-genre [like] mainstream cinema or cult cinema’. 2 He elaborates, writing that this super-genre comprises all ‘traditional art films and (all) avant-garde movies, plus (all) the