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  3. Cambridge Film Classics

The Cambridge Film Classics series provides a forum for studies of the classic works of cinema from the perspective of the 'new-auteurism', which recognises that films emerge from a complex interaction of bureaucratic, technological, intellectual, cultural and personal forces. The series consists of concise, cutting-edge reassessments of the canonical works of film study, written by innovative scholars and critics. Each book provides a general introduction to the life and work of a particular director, followed by critical essays on several of the director's most important films.

  • Edited by: Ray Carney, Boston University

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9 results in Cambridge Film Classics

The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni
  • Peter Brunette
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 September 1998
  • The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni provides an overview of the Italian director's life and work, and examines six of his most important and intellectually challenging films. L'avventura, La notte, and L'eclisse, released in the early 1960s, form the trilogy that first brought the director to international attention. Red Desert was his first film in colour. Blow-up, shot in English and set in swinging London, became one of the best-known (and most notorious) films of its era. The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, is the greatest work of his maturity. Rather than emphasizing the stress and alienation of Antonioni's characters, in this book Peter Brunette places the films in the context of the director's ongoing social and political analysis of the Italy of the great postwar economic boom, and demonstrates also how they are formal exercises that depend on painterly abstraction for their expressive effects.

The Films of Mike Leigh
  • Ray Carney, Leonard Quart
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 June 2000
  • The Films of Mike Leigh is the first critical study of one of the most important and eccentric directors of British independent filmmaking. Although active since 1971, Leigh has only come to the attention of an international audience in the 1990s through films such as Secrets and Lies and Career Girls. Like Robert Altman and John Cassevetes, Leigh works improvisationally, beginning with a small group of actors around whom he builds his films during months of private rehearsal. The script is written during this process. Ray Carney examines Leigh's working method and films in the intellectual and social contexts in which they were created. He argues that Leigh cannot be simply considered within the British realist tradition of Osborne and Loach. All of Leigh's major box office successes, including Naked, Life is Sweet and High Hopes, are analyzed, interpreted, and shown to be among the finest examples of cinema.

The Films of Ingmar Bergman
  • Jesse Kalin
  • Published online:
    18 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 October 2003
  • This volume provides a concise overview of the career of one of the modern masters of world cinema. Jesse Kalin defines Bergman's conception of the human condition as a struggle to find meaning in life as it is played out. For Bergman, meaning is achieved independently of any moral absolute and is the result of a process of self-examination. Six existential themes are explored repeatedly in Bergman's films: judgment, abandonment, suffering, shame, a visionary picture, and above all, turning toward or away from others. Kalin examines how Bergman examines these themes cinematically, through close analysis of eight films: well known favorites such as Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Fanny and Alexander; and important but lesser known works, such as Naked Night, Shame, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.

The Films of Joseph Losey
  • James Palmer, Michael Riley
  • Published online:
    16 January 2010
    Print publication:
    25 June 1993
  • The Films of Joseph Losey examines the career of the expatriot director through a close analysis of five of his most important and challenging films. When his leftist politics made him a target of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities in 1951, the blacklisted Losey left America and continued his film career in England. Concerned mainly with the use and abuse of power inherent in intimate relationships, Losey also examined these issues as manifested in institutions and social classes. The book also examines Losey's close working relationships with playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter and actor Dirk Bogarde, his experimental form of storytelling, the psychological complexity of characters acting as narrator of their own stories, and the intricate handling of time in the structure of his films. Close studies of King and Country, The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between, and The Romantic Englishwoman confirm Losey's stature as a director of powerful and compelling films of both moral importance and great formal complexity.

The Films of Woody Allen
  • 2nd edition
  • Sam B. Girgus
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    18 November 2002
  • The Films of Woody Allen was the first full-length work to examine the director as a serious filmmaker and artist. Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness, challenging our notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus argues that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work. The union between Allen's public and private selves that created a special 'aura' about him remains intact despite the director's concerted efforts to separate his private life from his screen image. Allen now assumes a postmodern moral relativism and 'sensual realism' that differs profoundly from the moral sensibility of his earlier work.

The Films of Federico Fellini
  • Peter Bondanella
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    17 January 2002
  • The Films of Federico Fellini examines the career of one of Italy's most renowned filmmakers through close analysis of five masterpieces that span his career: La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and Interview. Providing an overview of Fellini's early career as a cartoonist and scriptwriter for neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini, this study traces the development of Fellini's unique and personal cinematic vision as it transcends Italian neorealism. Rejecting an overtly ideological approach to Fellini's cinema, Bondanella emphasizes the director's interest in fantasy, the irrational and individualism.

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
  • Seeing the Invisible
  • David Sterritt
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 August 1999
  • The Films of Jean-Luc Godard examines the work of one of the most versatile and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. With a career ranging from France's New Wave movement in the early 1960s to a period of political experimentation in the late 1960s and 70s, and, currently, a contemplative period in which Godard has explored issues of spirituality, sexuality, and the aesthetics of sound, image, and montage, the filmmaker's work defies easy categorization. In this study, David Sterritt offers an introductory overview of Godard's work as a filmmaker, critic, and video artist. In subsequent chapters, he traces Godard's visionary ideas through six of his key films, including Breathless, My Life to Live, Weekend, Numéro deux, Hail Mary, and Nouvelle Vague formats. Linking Godard's works to key social and cultural developments, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard explains their importance in modernist and postmodernist art of the last half century.

The Films of Roberto Rossellini
  • Peter Bondanella
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 January 1993
  • The Films of Roberto Rossellini traces the career of one of the most influential Italian filmmakers through close analysis of the seven films that mark important turning points in his evolution: The Man with a Cross (1943), Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Machine to Kill Bad People (1948–52), Voyage in Italy (1953), General della Rovere (1959) and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966). Beginning with Rossellini's work within the fascist cinema, it discusses his invention of neorealism, a new cinematic style that resulted in several classics during the immediate postwar period. Almost immediately, however, Rossellini's continually evolving style moved beyond mere social realism to reveal other aspects of the camera's gaze, as is apparent in the films he made with Ingrid Bergman during the 1950s; though unpopular, these works had a tremendous impact on the French New Wave critics and directors. Rossellini's late career marks a return to his nonrealist period, now critically reexamined, in such works as the commercially successful General della Rovere, and his eventual turn to the creation of didactic films for television.

The Films of Paul Morrissey
  • Maurice Yacowar
  • Published online:
    11 January 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 1993
  • The Films of Paul Morrissey is the first appraisal of one of the major figures of American independent cinema. An innovator in the narrative cinema that emerged from Andy Warhol's Factory, Morrissey, as established in this study, was also the force who shaped the most important films that have up till now been attributed to Warhol. The director's experiments in the use of non-professional actors, controversial subject matter, and language are demonstrated through analysis of his most accomplished achievements, including Mixed Blood, 40 Deuce, and Spike of Bensonhurst. The Films of Paul Morrissey furthermore reveals the director's challenge to the moral, social and political values of contemporary liberalism.