Bücher der Reihe BFI Film Classics

Often hailed as the 'best' James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963) is celebrated for its direction by Terence Young, memorable performances from Sean Connery in his second outing as 007, Pedro Armendáriz as Kerim, Lotte Lenya as the lesbian villain Colonel Rosa Klebb, and Robert Shaw as Red Grant, the sexually ambiguous SPECTRE assassin. And regardless of its place within the longest-running continuous film series in cinema history, it is also an outstanding example of the British spy thriller in its own right.Llewella Chapman's study of the iconic film pinpoints its place within the James Bond film franchise, and its significant cultural value to critics and fans as well as this film's important place within British cinema history more widely. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, Chapman traces the film's development and production history, including its adaptation from Ian Fleming's source novel, as well as its reception and lasting impact. Chapman also considers the film's portrayal of gender politics, with its queer villains counterpoised with the heterosexual couple Bond and his Russian counterpart Tatiana Romanova, the context of Cold War politics, and the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a trainruns across the sea. Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film's delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film's visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki's prior body of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.This edition includes a new foreword by the author in which he considers the world of animated cinema post-Spirited Away, considering its influence on films ranging from del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth to Pixar's Inside Out.

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) tells the story of an aristocratic Sicilian family adjusting to the realities of political and commercial modernity after the unification Italy during the Risorgimento.The film, starring Claudia Cardinale, Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon, met with success upon its initial release, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and having a successful theatrical run in Europe. Despite this, however, it did not do well with English-speaking audiences, and eventually even fell out of favour with Italian audiences, who took issue with the way Risorgimento history was represented. David Weir's study of the film seeks to understand the film's paradoxical place in Italian film history. He argues that Visconti's use of artifice, narrative and history, all aspects that came to be criticised, were in fact, essential to his cinematic art, and can all be understood as strengths of the film. Providing a scene-by-scene analysis of the film, as well as illuminating its relationship to the Lampedusa novel from which it was adapted, Weir suggests that Visconti's film goes beyond mere adaptation, using the form of the novel for cinematic purposes and making The Leopard a cinematic novel in its own right. He goes on to situate the film within Visconti's career, questioning whether the uneven reception of the film reflects the paradox of Visconti's social status as a Marxist aristocrat and his position as an auteur director whose films borrowed heavily from the decadent tradition, while at the same time professing allegiance to the Italian Communist Party.

Ken Loach's 1969 drama Kes, considered one of the finest examples of British social realism, tells the story of Billy, a working class boy who finds escape and meaning when he takes a fledgling kestrel from its nest.David Forrest's study of the film examines the genesis of the original novel, Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), the eventual collaboration that brought it to the screen, and the film's funding and production processes. He provides an in depth analysis of key scenes and draws on archival sources to shed new light on the film's most celebrated moments. He goes on to consider the film's lasting legacy, having influenced films like Ratcatcher (1999) and This is England (2006), both in terms of its contribution to film history and as a document of political and cultural value. He makes a case for the film's renewed relevance in our present era of systemic economic (and regional) inequality, alienated labour, increasingly narrow educational systems, toxic masculinity, and ecological crisis. Kes endures, he argues, because it points towards the possibility for emancipation and fulfilment through a more responsive and nurturing approach to education, a more delicate and symbiotic relationship with landscape and the non-human, and an emotional articulacy and sensitivity shorn of the rigid expectations of gender.

Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931) is a groundbreaking German film that defied established societal norms, showcasing the power of women, both behind and in front of the camera.Adapted from Christa Winsloe's lesbian play, the story follows Manuela, an orphan in a boarding school for impoverished Prussian nobility. When her love for a female teacher is discovered, the oppressive principal punishes her, leading to a desperate suicide attempt.Barbara Mennel's compelling study firmly establishes Mädchen in the Weimar cinema canon. Breaking away from the teleological and over-determined "Caligari to Hitler" approach that has dominated the field since its inception, Mennel examines the film on its own terms within its immediate historical moment. Although it was prohibited viewing for several years, having been banned by the Nazis for its lesbian subtext and anti-authoritarian message, she asserts its central role in articulating feminist film theory in the late 1970s. Analysing its themes of democracy versus tyranny, the collective versus the individual, and expressive desire versus repressive discipline, she underscores the film's timeless impact, and why it continues to resonate with contemporary audiences.

Endlessly fascinating, dark and bright, The Red Shoes (1948) employs every branch of the cinematic arts to sweep the audience off its feet, invigorated by the transcendence of art itself, only to leave them with troubling questions. Representing the climax of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's celebrated run of six exceptional feature films, the film remains a beloved, if unsettling and often divisive, classic.Pamela Hutchinson's study of the film examines its breathtaking use of Technicolor, music, choreography, editing and art direction at the zenith of Powell and Pressburger's capacity for 'composed cinema'. Through a close reading of key scenes, particularly the film's famous extended ballet sequence, she considers the unconventional use of ballet as uncanny spectacle and the feminist implications of the central story of female sacrifice.Hutchinson goes on to consider the film's lasting and wide-reaching influence, tracing its impact on the film musical genre and horror cinema, with filmmakers such as Joanna Hogg, Sally Potter, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma having cited the film as an inspiration.

Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese's third feature film, and the one that confirmed him as a major new talent. On its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the critic Pauline Kael hailed the film as 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal film-making'. The tale of combative friends and small-time crooks is set amid the bars, pool halls, tenements and streets of Manhattan's Little Italy. Scorsese has said of his childhood neighbourhood, 'its very texture was interwoven with organised crime', and this quality would dramatically inform the tone and restless energy of his seminal film.Demetrios Matheou's insightful study considers Mean Streets' production history in the context of the New Hollywood period of American cinema, noting also the key roles played by John Cassavetes and Roger Corman. He analyses the importance of Scorsese's background to the film's characters and themes, including preoccupations with guilt, redemption and criminal subcultures; the development of the director's film-making process and signature style; the way in which he both drew upon and invigorated the crime genre; his relationship with emerging stars Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and the film's reception and legacy. Matheou argues that while Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) are regarded as Scorsese's greatest films of the period, Mean Streets is the more influential achievement. With it, Scorsese not only paved the way for a new kind of crime movie, not least his own GoodFellas (1990), but also inspired generations of independently-minded film-makers.

Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was met with both critical and commercial success upon its release in 1978. However, it was also highly controversial and came to be seen as a powerful statement on the human cost of America's longest war and as a colonialist glorification of anti-Asian violence. Brad Prager's study of the film considers its significance as a war movie and contextualizes its critical reception. Drawing on an archive of contemporaneous materials, as well as an in-depth analysis of the film's lighting, mise-en-scène, multiple cameras and shifting depths of field, Prager examines how the film simultaneously presents itself as a work of cinematic realism, while problematically blurring the lines between fact and fiction. While Cimino felt he had no responsibility to historical truth, depicting a highly stylized version of his own fantasies about the Vietnam War, Prager argues that The Deer Hunter's formal elements were used to bolster his troubling depictions of war and race.Finally, comparing the film with later depictions of US-led intervention such as Albert and Allen Hughes's Dead Presidents (1995) and Spike Lee's Da Five Bloods (2020), Prager illuminates The Deer Hunter's major presumptions, blind spots and omissions, while also presenting a case for its classic status.

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since. Michael Newton's study of the film investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.

A surreal and darkly humorous vision, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s.Claire Henry's study of the film takes us into its netherworld, providing a detailed account of its production history, its exhibition and reception, and its elusive meanings. Using original archival research, she traces how Lynch took his nightmare of Philadelphia to the City of Dreams, infusing his LA-shot film with the industrial cityscapes and sounds of the Callowhill district. Henry then engages with Eraserhead's irresistible inscrutability and advances a fresh interpretation, reframing auteurism to centre Lynch's creative processes as a visual artist and Transcendental Meditation practitioner. Finally, she outlines how Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things' became a model midnight movie and later grew in reputation and influence across broader film culture. From the opening chapter on Eraserhead's famous 'baby' to the final chapter on the film's tentacular influence, Henry's compelling and authoritative account offers illuminating new perspectives on the making and meaning of the film and its legacy. Through an in-depth analysis of the film's rich mise en scène, cinematography, sound and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms the film's significance as Lynch's first feature, but also advances a wider case for appreciating its status as a film classic.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is a classic of Cuban revolutionary culture, and is hailed as a prime example of a radical style of 1960s political filmmaking that became known worldwide as Latin American "new cinema." Darlene J. Sadlier's detailed study approaches this much-written-about film from a new perspective. Her analysis situates the film in its historical context, considering how Cuban political history affected and informed the production of the film, particularly its use of archival footage. She discusses the film as an adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes's novel Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965), exploring how the novel itself is "re-written" in significant ways by the film. Sadlier goes on to analyse the curious opening of the film on an outdoor scene of Afro-Cubans dancing to the "new" music of Pello del Afrokán, arguing that this opening scene prefaces the film's exploration of both class and race. She focuses on the unique style of the film, particularly the use of voiceover, music and documentary footage to show how the themes of ennui, isolation, writing, and remembering are depicted. In doing so, she highlights the film's lasting impact and its role in defining Latin American "new cinema".

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many, extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman - Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony Richardson and his company, Woodfall, it was one of the first films to be made entirely on location, and was shot in an innovative, rough, poetic style by cinematographer Walter Lassally. It was also the launchpad for a new type of young female star in Rita Tushingham. Tushingham plays the young heroine, Jo, who finds she is pregnant after her love affair with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a Black sailor. When Jimmy's ship sails away, Jo is comforted and supported by her gay friend Geoff (Murray Melvin), while her unreliable mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), has her own life to lead. Candid in its treatment of matters of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and motherhood, and highly distinctive in its evocation of place and landscape, A Taste of Honey marked the advent of new possibilities for the telling of working-class stories in British cinema. As such, its rich but complex legacy endures to this day.

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate in philosophy, faces an uncertain professional future, while Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an established celebrity, questions his choices at midlife. Both are distant - emotionally and spatially - from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film's poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation's structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure. She details the complexities of filming (a 27-day shoot with no permits in Tokyo), explores Coppola's allusions to fine art, subtle colour palette and use of music over words, and examines the characters' experiences of the Park Hyatt Tokyo and excursions outside, together and alone. She also re-evaluates the film in relation to Coppola's other features, as the product of an established director with a distinctive cinematic signature: 'Coppolism'. Fundamentally, Ferriss argues that Lost in Translation is not only a cinema classic, but classic Coppola too.

Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations. Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.

This study offers a fresh approach to the remarkable German film The Lives of Others (2006), known for its compelling representation of a Stasi surveillance officer and the moral and ethical turmoil that results when he begins spying on a playwright and his actress lover.Annie Ring analyses the film's cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing, tracing connections with Hollywood movies such as Casablanca and Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in the film's portrayal of an individual rebelling against a brutal dehumanising regime. Drawing on archival sources, including primary research from the Stasi files themselves, as well as Enlightenment philosophies of art and Brecht's theories on theatre dating from his GDR years, she explores the film's strong but much-disputed claims to historical authenticity. She examines the way the film tracks the world-changing political shift that took place at the end of the Cold War - away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the dreams of the private individual, arguing that this is what makes it at once widely appealing and fascinatingly problematic. In doing so, she highlights why The Lives of Others is a crucial film for thinking at the horizon between film and recent world history.

Ozu Yasujiro's moving family drama, Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world. Telling the story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children, the film contrasts the behaviour of their children, who are too busy to pay their parents much attention, and their widowed daughter-in-law who treats them with hospitable kindness. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of postwar Japan. Alastair Phillips combines a close analysis of the film and its key locations - the city of Tokyo, the town of Onomichi and the coastal resort of Atami - with a discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he situates the film within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of Tokyo Story's long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians and family members. The meetings remind us that the modern gangster's success is built upon inside information and on strategic planning. Michael and his father Vito's days resemble those of the legitimate businessmen they aspire or pretend to be. Jon Lewis's study of Coppola's masterpiece provides a close analysis of the film and a discussion of its cinematic and political contexts. It is structured in three sections: "The Sequel," "The Dissolve," and "The Sicilian Thing" - accommodating three avenues of inquiry, respectively: the film's importance in and to Hollywood history, its unique, auteur style and form; and its cultural significance. Of interest, then, is New Hollywood history, mise-en-scene, and a view of the Corleone saga as a cautionary capitalist parable, as a metaphor of the corruption of American power, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate.

Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking.Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American film-making, and its success - as a work of art, as a creative 'property' exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures; and as a model for aspiring auteurist film-makers - changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of The Godfather begins with a close look at the film's audacious visual style (the long, theatrical set pieces; the chiaroscuro lighting, the climactic montage paralleling a family baptism with a series of brutal murders). The analysis of visual style is paired with a discussion of the movie's principal themes: Vito and Michael's attempt to balance the obligations of business and family, their struggle with assimilation, the temptations and pitfalls of capitalist accumulation, and the larger drama of succession from father to son, from one generation to the next. The textual analysis precedes a production history that views The Godfather as a singularly important film in Hollywood's dramatic box-office turnaround in the early 1970s. And then, finally, the book takes a long hard look at the gangster himself both on screen and off. Hollywood publicity attending the gangster film from its inception in the silent era to the present has endeavoured to dull the distinction between the real and movie gangster, insisting that each film has been culled from the day's sordid headlines. Looking at the drama on screen and the production history behind the scenes, Lewis uncovers a series of real gangster backstories, revealing, finally, how millions of dollars of mob money may well have funded the film in the first place, and how, as things played out, The Godfather saved Paramount Studios and the rest of Hollywood as well.

In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa's celebrated film, regarded by many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic that evokes the cultural upheavalbrought on by the collapse of Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time echoes also the sweeping cultural changes occurring in the aftermath of the American Occupation that followed Japan's defeat in the Second World War.The plot is deceptively simple. A village of farmers is beleaguered by a horde of bandits. In desperation, the farmers decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect their crops and people and defeat the bandits. There had never been a Japanese film in which peasants hired samurai, or an evocation of the social transformation that made such an idea credible.There are six samurai and one who is accepted as such. Together they reflect the ideals and values of a noble class near the point of extinction. Seven Samurai may be the greatest action film, a technical masterpiece unmatched in its depiction of movement and violence, but running beneath the sound and fury is a lament for a lost nobility, 'a dirge for the spirit of Japan,' writes Joan Mellen, 'which will never again be so strong.'Mellen's study contextualises Seven Samurai, marking its place in Japanese cinema and in Kurosawa's film-making career. She explores the film's roots in medieval history and, above all, the astonishing visual language in which Kurosawa created his elegiac epic.

John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956) was voted the seventh greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound's most recent poll of critics. Its influence on many of America's most distinguished contemporary filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and John Milius, is enormous. John Wayne's portrait of the vengeful Confederate Ethan Edwards gives the film a truly epic dimension, as does his long and lonely journey into the dark heart of America. Edward Buscombe's insightful study provides a detailed commentary on all aspects of the film, drawing on material in the John Ford archive at Indiana University, including Ford's own memos and the original script, which differs in vital respects from the film he made, to offer new insights into the film's production history.

"Brisk [and] forceful." Sight & Sound"Lucidly argued." Total FilmMargarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Julian Preece considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, in particular in respect of women's cinema and its portrayal of the ordeal of its female lead in a world run by men. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from Heinrich Böll's original novel.Preece analyses how the film continues to resonate with our contemporary moment and has influenced film-makers from the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin to the British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

Released in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the defining films of late twentieth century American cinema. Adapted from the Thomas Harris novel and directed by the late Jonathan Demme, its central characters are now iconic. Jodie Foster is Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee investigating 'Buffalo Bill', a serial killer who flays his victims. Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer and former psychiatrist who assists Starling in exchange for personal details.With its pairing of a perverse, invasive anti-hero and a questing, proto-action heroine, The Silence of the Lambs unfolds as a layered narrative of pursuit. In this study, Yvonne Tasker explores the film's weaving together of gothic, horror and thriller elements in its portrayal of insanity and crime, drawing out the centrality of ideas about gender to the storytelling. She identifies the film as a key genre reference point for tracking late twentieth century interests in police procedural, profiling and serial murder, analysing its key themes of reason and madness, identity and belonging, aspiration and transformation.A new afterword explores the legacies of The Silence of the Lambs and its figuring of crime and investigation in terms of gender disruption and spectacular violence.

"Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable." Sight & SoundCatherine Fowler's study positions Jeanne Dielman as a 'contrary' classic, its contrariness arising from director Chantal Akerman's decision to frame an unliberated housewife through a kind of 'slow looking'. By choosing to stay with Jeanne in the kitchen, the film both 'differences' the canon and diverges from Akerman's liberated early films, which involved the rejection of domestic space, married life and the heterosexual script.Fowler draws on original footage, scripts, unmade and unseen projects, interviews and other documents to painstakingly piece together the making of the film, discovering an alternative origin story which centers upon female alliances, forged through a combination of shared film culture and lived sexism. Those viewers who take up Akerman's invitation to spend time with Jeanne will find their expectations of cinema are changed. Because more than any other film before or since, it reminds us that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for ourselves as much as for its protagonist.

The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski sisters and produced by Joel Silver, was a true end-of-the-millennium movie, a statement of the American zeitgeist, and, as the original film in a blockbusting franchise, a prognosis for the future of big-budget Hollywood film-making. Starring Keanu Reeves as Neo, a computer programmer transformed into a messianic freedom fighter, The Matrix blends science fiction with conspiracy thriller conventions and outlandish martial arts created with groundbreaking digital techniques. A box-office triumph, the film was no populist confection: its blatant allusions to highbrow contemporary philosophy added to its appeal as a mystery to be decoded. In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.

James Naremore's study of Max Ophuls' classic 1948 melodrama, Letter from an Unknown Woman, not only pays tribute to Ophuls but also discusses the backgrounds and typical styles of the film's many contributors--among them Viennese author Stephan Zweig, whose 1922 novella was the source of the picture; producer John Houseman, an ally of Ophuls who nevertheless made questionable changes to what Ophuls had shot; screenwriter Howard Koch; music composer Daniéle Amfitheatrof; designers Alexander Golitzen and Travis Banton; and leading actors Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, whose performances were central to the film's emotional effect. Naremore also traces the film's reception history, from its middling box office success and mixed early reviews, exploring why it has been a work of exceptional interest to subsequent generations of both aesthetic critics and feminist theorists. Lastly, Naremore provides an in-depth critical appreciation of the film, offering nuanced appreciation of specific details of mise-en-scene, camera movement, design, sound, and performances, integrating this close analyses into an overarching analysis of Letter's "recognition plot;" a trope in which the recognition of a character's identity creates dramatic intensity or crisis. Naremore argues that Letter's use of recognition is one of the most powerful in Hollywood cinema, and contrasts it with what we find in Zweig's novella.