A Life in 16 Films

A Life in 16 Films
Author: Steve Waters
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350205257

Steve Waters examines how the very idea of film has defined him as a playwright and a person in this book. Through the the lens of cinema, it provides a cultural and political snapshot of life in Britain from the 2nd part of the 20th century up to the present day. The films spanning almost a century, starting with The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) and moving most recently to Dark Waters (2019), each chapter examines aspects of Waters's journey from his working-class Midlands upbringing to working in professional theatre to living through the Covid epidemic, through the prism of a particular film. From The Wizard of Oz to Code Unknown, from sci-fi to documentary, from queer cinema to world cinema, this honest, comic book offers a view of film as a way of thinking about how we live. In doing so, it illuminates culture and politics in the UK over half a century and provides an intimate insight into drama and writing.

The Film That Changed My Life

The Film That Changed My Life
Author: Robert K. Elder
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1569768285

The movie that inspired filmmakers to direct is like the atomic bomb that went off before their eyes. The Film That Changed My Life captures that epiphany. It explores 30 directors' love of a film they saw at a particularly formative moment, how it influenced their own works, and how it made them think differently. Rebel Without a Cause inspired John Woo to comb his hair and talk like James Dean. For Richard Linklater, “something was simmering in me, but Raging Bull brought it to a boil.” Apocalypse Now inspired Danny Boyle to make larger-than-life films. A single line from The Wizard of Oz--“Who could ever have thought a good little girl like you could destroy all my beautiful wickedness?”--had a direct impact on John Waters. “That line inspired my life,” Waters says. “I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.” In this volume, directors as diverse as John Woo, Peter Bogdanovich, Michel Gondry, and Kevin Smith examine classic movies that inspired them to tell stories. Here are 30 inspired and inspiring discussions of classic films that shaped the careers of today's directors and, in turn, cinema history.

A Life in Movies

A Life in Movies
Author: Michael Powell
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 723
Release: 2000
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780571204311

"Much, much more than the reminiscences of a film director. It's a rich, beautifully detailed history of a time, a place, and a world gone by--the British film industry from the 1920s through the late 1940s, in which every remembrance . . . is filtered through [Powell's] poetic genius . . . as absorbing as any novel".--Martin Scorsese. 30 photos.

A Life in Movies

A Life in Movies
Author: Irwin Winkler
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1683355288

“A lively memoir . . . a first-hand work of cinema history . . . the testament of a pivotal figure in American moviemaking.” —Martin Scorsese The list of films Irwin Winkler has produced in his more-than-fifty-year career is extraordinary: Rocky, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, De-Lovely, The Right Stuff, Creed, and The Irishman. His films have been nominated for fifty-two Academy Awards, including five movies for Best Picture, and have won twelve. In A Life in Movies, his charming and insightful memoir, Winkler tells the stories of his career through his many films as a producer and then as a writer and director, charting the changes in Hollywood over the past decades. Winkler started in the famous William Morris mailroom and made his first film—starring Elvis—in the last days of the old studio system. Beginning in the late 1960s, and then for decades to come, he produced a string of provocative and influential films, making him one of the most critically lauded, prolific, and commercially successful producers of his era. This is an engrossing and candid book, a beguiling exploration of what it means to be a producer, including purchasing rights, developing scripts, casting actors, managing directors, editing film, and winning awards. Filled with tales of legendary and beloved films, as well as some not-so-legendary and forgotten ones, A Life in Movies takes readers behind the scenes and into the history of Hollywood. “Charming and anecdote packed . . . popcorn for movie nerds.” —Newsweek “A deftly written recollection of an eventful and happy life in a precarious and, frankly, insane business; a remarkably clear-eyed look behind the scenes of moviemaking.” —Kevin Kline

The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film

The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film
Author: Pansy Duncan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317355644

Emotion and Postmodernism: is it possible to imagine an odder couple, stranger bedfellows, less bad company? The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film brings this unlikely pair into sustained dialogue, arguing that the interdisciplinary body of scholarship currently emerging under the rubric of "affect theory" may be unexpectedly enriched by an encounter with the field that has become its critical other. Across a series of radical re-reappraisals of canonical postmodern texts, from Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism to David Cronenberg's Crash, Duncan shows that the same postmodern archive that has proven resistant to strongly subject-based and object-oriented emotions, like anger and sadness, proves all too congenial to a series of idiosyncratic, borderline emotions, from knowingness, fascination and bewilderment to boredom and euphoria. The analysis of these emotions, in turn, promises to shake up scholarly consensus on two key counts. On the one hand, it will restructure our sense of the place and role of emotion in a critical enterprise that has long cast it as the stodgy, subjective sister of a supposedly more critically interesting and politically productive affect. On the other, it will transform our perception of postmodernism as a now-historical aesthetic and theoretical moment, teaching us to acknowledge more explicitly and to name more clearly the emotional life that energizes it.

Peter Cushing: A Life in Film

Peter Cushing: A Life in Film
Author: David Miller
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1781162743

Peter Cushing was an unforgettable presence in cult cinema of the fifties, sixties and seventies, and remains one of Britain's best-loved film stars. Cushing made a huge impact in the groundbreaking television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and went on to find international fame as Baron Frankenstein and Doctor Van Helsing in the most acclaimed films from the Hammer studio. During his lengthy career, Cushing also played Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes and Grand Moff Tarkin, the villain of the original Star Wars. Author David Miller has written a definitive guide to the stage and screen career of a legendary star, drawing upon conversations with Cushing's friends and colleagues, archive material held by the BBC and Hammer Film Productions, and previously unpublished correspondence with Cushing himself. This in-depth research forms the basis for a revealing re-assessment of the career and achievements of this much admired and very private actor.

The Films in My Life

The Films in My Life
Author: François Truffaut
Publisher: Diversion Books
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2014-08-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1626813965

From a cinematic grand master, “one of the most readable books of movie criticism, and one of the most instructive” (American Film Institute). An icon. A rebel. A legend. The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. Now, for the first time in eBook, the legendary director shares his own words, as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time examines the art of movie-making through engaging and deeply personal reviews about the movies he loves. Truffaut writes extensively about his heroes, from Hitchcock to Welles, Chaplin to Renoir, Buñuel to Bergman, Clouzot to Cocteau, Capra to Hawks, Guitry to Fellini, sharing analysis and insight as to what made them film legends, and how their work led Truffaut and his fellow directors into classics like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and the French New Wave movement. Articulate and candid, The Films in My Life is for everyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and dreamed. “Truffaut brings the same intelligence and grace to the printed page that he projects onto the screen. The Films in My Life provides a rare knowledgeable look at movies and moviemaking.” —Newsday