Wendy Everett - Böcker

Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This is the first ever book-length study of his work, combining detailed analysis of all his films with a persuasive and stimulating investigation of key filmic issues of time and memory, identity and selfhood, and the nature of literary adaptation, as well as a previously unpublished interview with Davies himself.The book demonstrates that Davies's films successfully subvert traditional division between 'popular' culture and 'art-house' cinema. Gardner explores not only Davies's debt to social realism, the British Documentary movement, and Ealing comedies, but equally to the European auteur tradition and to the great Hollywood musicals and melodramas that continue to inspire him. It provides fresh insight into the centrality of music in Davies's work, and into his conviction that film itself is closer to music than to any other art form.

Exile is the dominant theme of our times. It can be found in the forced migration of populations but also in the temporal, cultural and physical alienation of the individual's experiences of the postmodern world. This is a world of unstable, shifting identities dominated, and perhaps most acutely expressed by, the fluidity of the visual image. The essays in this volume examine issues such as remembering and forgetting trauma and nostalgia, time and space, social and sexual exclusion in relation to visual media and new technologies, cinema and the visual arts. The multi-facetted and interdisciplinary exploration of exile and displacement — whether geographical, temporal, corporeal or performative — provides an important analysis of a significant and fascinating aspect of contemporary culture.

The identity of European cinema, like the identity of Europe itself, is multiple, complex, and fascinating. Providing both a general survey of contemporary European cinema production, distribution and exhibition and detailed critical analysis of specific films, directors, and national cinemas, this volume offers a stimulating and thought-provoking contribution to current film debate.While the book’s critical essays offer keen insight into the complex identities of European cinema, its combination of breadth and detail, and its interdisciplinary focus and background ensure its wider relevance to anyone interested in questions of contemporary culture and European affairs in general. Its stylistic clarity and freedom from jargon make it readable and accessible. The essays have been written by respected academics working in a number of disciplines including Film and Media Studies, Modern Languages, and Cultural Studies.Topics include questions of memory and identity; filmic autobiography and first-person narration; cultural identity; peripheral voices; popular film and political film. Individual directors, and different national cinemas, including those of France, Germany, Northern Ireland, Russia, Scotland and Spain, are viewed in a wider pan- European context.

From Brigitte Bardot in her bikini at the Cannes Film Festival, to François Ozon’s intimate portrayals of grief and loss, some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with the beach. Cinema at the Shore argues that the Parisian cityscape is not the only significant definition of space in French cinema and instead explores the industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach. Examining a range of films from the 1950s to the present day – including popular comedies by Jacques Tati and Patrice Leconte, the lively and ruminative documentaries of Agnès Varda, the classicism of Eric Rohmer, and the provocations of Catherine Breillat – this book showcases the dynamism and importance of the beach as a site for the reconfiguration of French cinematic identity itself. The beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space and time. In its constant mobility, its close, yet distinctive, relationship with nature, and its paradoxical centrality in the French cultural imaginary as a site of relaxation and holidays, the beachscape, re-framed and re-imaged by the camera, offers new ways of conceiving of the spatial politics of French cinema.

French film design throughout the 1930s was not just descriptive, but also expressive: sets were not merely part of the background, but were vital components of a film’s overall atmosphere, impact and critical afterlife. This was a period when sets were ‘ripped open’, as painted backdrops were replaced by three-dimensional constructions to ensure greater proximity to reality. Accomplished set designers such as Alexandre Trauner, Jacques Krauss and Eugène Lourié crafted a series of designs both realist and expressionistic that brought out the underlying themes of a film’s narrative and helped create an exportable vision of ‘Frenchness’ that influenced other European and American film design practices.This book details the elaborate paraphrasing tendencies of French film design in the 1930s. The author explores the crucial role of the set designer in the film’s evolutionary process and charts how the rapid development of studio practices enabled designers to become progressively more ambitious. The book examines key films such as Quatorze juillet (1932), Un Carnet de bal (1937), La Grande illusion (1937) and Le Jour se lève (1939) to demonstrate how set design works at establishing time and place, generating audience familiarity and recognition and underpinning each film’s visual style.

Pictures of the Mind is the first integrated study of Surrealist photography and film, assessing the impact of early experimental practice and theoretical discourse on prominent post-war trends in art house cinema. Roland Barthes’s interpretation of the photographic image, alongside Jacques Derrida’s concepts of spectrality and trace, underscore an exploration of the recurrent references to the phantomatic aspect of photography and film in Surrealist theoretical writings and practice. The analysis uses Derrida’s account of the uncanny to shed light on the Surrealist conception of photographic and film images as mental constructs, or pictures of the mind, rather than mere visual representations. This leads to a consideration of the similarities between the Surrealist conception of beauty as fixed-explosive and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image as applied to Luis Buñuel’s films. Ultimately, the impact of Surrealism on post-war cinema is assessed as part of a wider consideration of the status of photographic and filmic images in the age of digital cinema. The elaboration of an aesthetics of spectrality in early Surrealism is shown to have had lasting implications for a range of post-war filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Maya Deren, Nelly Kaplan, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Svankmajer, Akira Kurosawa, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Guillermo del Toro, Guy Maddin, Terry Gilliam and David Lynch.