Jeremi Szaniawski - Böcker

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature fiction films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and also identifies in them a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity, alongside a pattern of tensions and paradoxes. This book thus offers new keys to understand the lasting and ever-renewed appeal of the Russian director's Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema - a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.

This volume features a set of thought-provoking and long overdue approaches to situating Stanley Kubrick’s films in contemporary debates around gender, race, and age—with a focus on women’s representations.Offering new historical and critical perspectives on Kubrick’s cinema, the book asks how his work should be viewed bearing in mind issues of gender equality, sexual harassment, and abuse. The authors tackle issues such as Kubrick’s at times questionable relationships with his actresses and former wives; the dynamics of power, misogyny, and miscegenation in his films; and auteur "apologism," among others. The selections delineate these complex contours of Kubrick’s work by drawing on archival sources, engaging in close readings of specific films, and exploring Kubrick through unorthodox venture points.With an interdisciplinary scope and social justice-centered focus, this book offers new perspectives on a well-established area of study. It will appeal to scholars and upper-level students of film studies, media studies, gender studies, and visual culture, as well as to fans of the director interested in revisiting his work from a new perspective.

This volume features a set of thought-provoking and long overdue approaches to situating Stanley Kubrick’s films in contemporary debates around gender, race, and age—with a focus on women’s representations.Offering new historical and critical perspectives on Kubrick’s cinema, the book asks how his work should be viewed bearing in mind issues of gender equality, sexual harassment, and abuse. The authors tackle issues such as Kubrick’s at times questionable relationships with his actresses and former wives; the dynamics of power, misogyny, and miscegenation in his films; and auteur "apologism," among others. The selections delineate these complex contours of Kubrick’s work by drawing on archival sources, engaging in close readings of specific films, and exploring Kubrick through unorthodox venture points.With an interdisciplinary scope and social justice-centered focus, this book offers new perspectives on a well-established area of study. It will appeal to scholars and upper-level students of film studies, media studies, gender studies, and visual culture, as well as to fans of the director interested in revisiting his work from a new perspective.

Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden’s Wanda; Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini’s Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women’s films to embrace, shape and question the world.

On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden’s Wanda; Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini’s Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women’s films to embrace, shape and question the world.

Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

Taking at its starting point the idea that Kubrick’s cinema has constituted an intellectual, cerebral, and philosophical maze in which many filmmakers (as well as thinkers and a substantial fringe of the general public) have gotten lost at one point or another, this collection looks at the legacy of Kubrick’s films in the 21st century.The main avenues investigated are as follows: a look at Kubrick’s influence on his most illustrious followers (Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, and Lars von Trier, to name a few); Kubrick in critical reception; Kubrick in stylistic (camera movements, set designs, music), thematic (artificial intelligence, new frontiers— large and small), aesthetic (the question of genre, pastiche, stereoscopy) and political terms (paranoia, democracy and secret societies, conspiracy theories). The contributions coalesce around the concept of a Kubrickian substrate, rich and complex, which permeates our Western cultural landscape very much to this day, informing and sometimes announcing/reflecting it in twisted ways, 21 years after the director’s death.

Taking at its starting point the idea that Kubrick’s cinema has constituted an intellectual, cerebral, and philosophical maze in which many filmmakers (as well as thinkers and a substantial fringe of the general public) have gotten lost at one point or another, this collection looks at the legacy of Kubrick’s films in the 21st century.The main avenues investigated are as follows: a look at Kubrick’s influence on his most illustrious followers (Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, and Lars von Trier, to name a few); Kubrick in critical reception; Kubrick in stylistic (camera movements, set designs, music), thematic (artificial intelligence, new frontiers— large and small), aesthetic (the question of genre, pastiche, stereoscopy) and political terms (paranoia, democracy and secret societies, conspiracy theories). The contributions coalesce around the concept of a Kubrickian substrate, rich and complex, which permeates our Western cultural landscape very much to this day, informing and sometimes announcing/reflecting it in twisted ways, 21 years after the director’s death.

Is there such a thing as a single Belgian cinema? A country that is culturally and linguistically divided between the Dutch-speaking Flanders and the francophone Brussels and Wallonia, Belgium is a contested site, and its fragile unity continues to be challenged by separatists. Nevertheless, the filmic output of this divided country merits serious attention, and Directory of World Cinema: Belgium is the comprehensive guides it richly deserves.Featuring contributions from leading Belgian and international film scholars, the essays here examine the work and careers of the greatest names of Belgian cinema, from its pioneers to its modern age, while also investigating its lesser known productions and intersections with Belgian art, history, literature and culture, as well as the legacies of social documentary, surrealism and magical realism.Small but mighty, Belgium has for the last decade produced an average of forty feature films a year, an extraordinary accomplishment for a country of just ten million. Directory of World Cinema: Belgium will find grateful readers in anyone interested in Belgian culture and identity.

Stanley Kubrick was arguably one of the most influential American directors of the post-World War II era, whose Central European Jewish heritage, though often overlooked, greatly influenced his oeuvre. Kubrick's Mitteleuropa explores this influence in ways that range from his work with Hungarian and Polish composers Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki to the visual inspiration of artists such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and other Central European Modernists. Beyond exploring the Mitteleuropean sensibility in Kubrick's films, the contributions in this volume also provide important commentary on the reception of his films in countries across Eastern Europe.

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.