Geoffrey Lokke – författare

Since the release of his breakout film Irréversible in 2002, Gaspar Noé (b. 1963) has been labeled the principal provocateur of twenty-first-century French cinema. While many of the filmmaker’s complex and daring works have been reduced by his critics to their (innumerable) depictions of hallucinogens, violence, and unsimulated sexual intercourse—the latter rendered into vertiginous 3D with his film Love—other viewers have remained in steady awe of Noé’s dizzying camerawork, immersive visuality, and expressive editing. Noé’s cinema greets the short attention spans of digital life with works of extremities and endurance for performers and spectators alike.This first-of-its-kind collection of interviews documents Noé’s engagement with the feverish reception of his work and received ideas about his life and politics. Collecting conversations with critics, scholars, and artists, including fellow directors Matthew Barney, Abel Ferrara, and Harmony Korine, Noé speaks about his process as a writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. Also examined are his engagement with developing film technology and his fascination and indebtedness to past filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Eustache, Stanley Kubrick, and Sam Peckinpah. Noé discusses life in Buenos Aires and emigrating to France, his use of irony and melodrama, as well as his interest in documentary practices. Throughout, Noé explores his continuing examination of faith and secularism, body and mind, and the politics of spectatorship. Editor Geoffrey Lokke’s introduction provides a close reading of Noé in conversation, assessing what has changed over the years in terms of the filmmaker’s aesthetics and presentation of self, as well as what Noé is reticent to articulate about his life and art.

Since the release of his breakout film Irréversible in 2002, Gaspar Noé (b. 1963) has been labeled the principal provocateur of twenty-first-century French cinema. While many of the filmmaker’s complex and daring works have been reduced by his critics to their (innumerable) depictions of hallucinogens, violence, and unsimulated sexual intercourse—the latter rendered into vertiginous 3D with his film Love—other viewers have remained in steady awe of Noé’s dizzying camerawork, immersive visuality, and expressive editing. Noé’s cinema greets the short attention spans of digital life with works of extremities and endurance for performers and spectators alike.This first-of-its-kind collection of interviews documents Noé’s engagement with the feverish reception of his work and received ideas about his life and politics. Collecting conversations with critics, scholars, and artists, including fellow directors Matthew Barney, Abel Ferrara, and Harmony Korine, Noé speaks about his process as a writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. Also examined are his engagement with developing film technology and his fascination and indebtedness to past filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Eustache, Stanley Kubrick, and Sam Peckinpah. Noé discusses life in Buenos Aires and emigrating to France, his use of irony and melodrama, as well as his interest in documentary practices. Throughout, Noé explores his continuing examination of faith and secularism, body and mind, and the politics of spectatorship. Editor Geoffrey Lokke’s introduction provides a close reading of Noé in conversation, assessing what has changed over the years in terms of the filmmaker’s aesthetics and presentation of self, as well as what Noé is reticent to articulate about his life and art.

Steve McQueen: Interviews is the first collection of conversations with the acclaimed filmmaker, and one that spans his career to date. Included are McQueen’s discussions with artists, critics, curators, and public intellectuals such as Donna De Salvo, Paul Gilroy, David Olusoga, Tricky, and Cornel West. In these conversations, McQueen (b. 1969) discusses some of his preoccupations and recurring themes throughout his oeuvre including nationalism, martyrdom, and violence; obsession and desire; and the intertwined histories of racism, surveillance, and carceral politics. Most interestingly, he also discusses his love for his fellow artists, past and present, including Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Prince, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Robeson, Jean Vigo, and Andy Warhol.McQueen is one of the most celebrated British filmmakers of his generation, an artist as committed to avant-garde film and lyric forms of documentary as he is to producing landmark historical dramas. A deeply humane artist with a clear ethical drive, McQueen nevertheless explores the sublime sense of scale that cinema affords its viewers in his films.While he remains best known for his feature film 12 Years a Slave—winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture—McQueen has been a fixture of major contemporary museum and gallery exhibitions for decades, beginning with the short experimental works that garnered him the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. His acclaimed installations include the diptychs Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep and Gravesend/Unexploded, works that interrogate film form as they challenge documentary norms, not unlike his recent four-and-half-hour epic Occupied City that investigates the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

Steve McQueen: Interviews is the first collection of conversations with the acclaimed filmmaker, and one that spans his career to date. Included are McQueen’s discussions with artists, critics, curators, and public intellectuals such as Donna De Salvo, Paul Gilroy, David Olusoga, Tricky, and Cornel West. In these conversations, McQueen (b. 1969) discusses some of his preoccupations and recurring themes throughout his oeuvre including nationalism, martyrdom, and violence; obsession and desire; and the intertwined histories of racism, surveillance, and carceral politics. Most interestingly, he also discusses his love for his fellow artists, past and present, including Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Prince, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Robeson, Jean Vigo, and Andy Warhol.McQueen is one of the most celebrated British filmmakers of his generation, an artist as committed to avant-garde film and lyric forms of documentary as he is to producing landmark historical dramas. A deeply humane artist with a clear ethical drive, McQueen nevertheless explores the sublime sense of scale that cinema affords its viewers in his films.While he remains best known for his feature film 12 Years a Slave—winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture—McQueen has been a fixture of major contemporary museum and gallery exhibitions for decades, beginning with the short experimental works that garnered him the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. His acclaimed installations include the diptychs Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep and Gravesend/Unexploded, works that interrogate film form as they challenge documentary norms, not unlike his recent four-and-half-hour epic Occupied City that investigates the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

The American director and producer Robert Drew (1924–2014) was one of the most influential documentary filmmakers of his generation, known for his development of cinema verité (or direct cinema), a mode of observational filmmaking. Following his career at Life magazine, Drew produced a number of landmark "fly-on-the-wall" documentaries in the 1960s, including his acclaimed portraits of John F. Kennedy in Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. The notion of "crisis" is central to Drew’s methods, as he sought to capture human subjects in the throes of a real-life drama, rejecting the semistaged realities of traditional documentary films and the self-conscious reconstructions of everyday life associated with French cinema. Drew’s influence is most easily charted through the careers of his close collaborators. Drew Associates, the documentary film company founded in 1960 by Drew, included the filmmakers Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles, all of whom went on to refashion and popularize Drew’s approach in their own lauded projects. Despite his immediate impact and contemporaneous acclaim, Drew’s oeuvre has been largely overlooked in recent decades. Robert Drew: Interviews helps reestablish the filmmaker’s place within contemporary film studies and details the history of how Drew changed cinema—in his own words. In addition to electoral politics, Drew Associates films are often concerned with race, desegregation, and the civil rights movement and its fallout. Drew produced a number of high-profile documentaries on entertainers and performers—actors, musicians, dancers, and athletes. A pilot himself, Drew also directed—and on occasion photographed for himself—several films on flight and aeronautics. Included in this volume, alongside archival and unpublished interviews, is a three-part essay written for Drew Associates employees in which Drew set out his ideas in both practical and philosophical terms.