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Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.

At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works. Filling this void, this book focuses on women's film production in Brazil from the mid-1970s to the current era. The book explains how women's filmmaking contributed to the reformulation of sexual, cultural, and political citizenship during Brazil's fight for the return and expansion of civil rights during the 1970s and 1980s and the recent questioning of the quality of democracy in the 1990s and 2000s. It interprets key films by Ana Carolina and Tizuka Yamasaki, documentaries with social themes, and independent videos supported by archival research and extensive interviews with Brazilian women filmmakers. Despite changes in production contexts, recent Brazilian women's films have furthered feminist debates regarding citizenship while raising concerns about the quality of the emergent democracy. This book offers a unique view of how women's audiovisual production has intersected with the reconfigurations of gender and female sexuality put forth by the women's movements in Brazil and continuing demands for greater social, cultural, and political inclusion.

This is the first biography of the important but long-forgotten American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins (1867–1934). The book documents the life of Jenkins from his childhood in Indiana and early life in the West to his work as a prolific inventor whose productivity was cut short by an early death. Jenkins was an inventor who made a difference. As one of America's greatest independent inventors, Jenkins' passion was to meet the needs of his day and the future. In 1895 he produced the first film projector able to show a motion picture on a large screen, coincidentally igniting the first film boycott among his Quaker viewers when the film he screened showed a woman's ankle. Jenkins produced the first American television pictures in 1923, and developed the only fully operating broadcast television station in Washington, D.C. transmitting to ham operators from coast to coast as well as programming for his local audience. This biography raises the profile of C. Francis Jenkins from his former place in the footnotes to his rightful position as a true pioneer of today's film and television. Along the way, it provides a window into the earliest days of both motion pictures and television as well as the now-vanished world of the independent inventor.

In eleven feature films across two decades, Christian Petzold has established himself as the most critically celebrated director in contemporary Germany. The best-known and most influential member of the Berlin School, Petzold's career reflects the trajectory of German film from 1970s New German Cinema to more popular fare in the 1990s and back again to critically engaged and politically committed filmmaking. His combination of critical celebration and popular success underscores Petzold's singular cinematic achievement: the deliberate and shrewd negotiation of art cinema and popular Hollywood genre. This book frames Petzold's cinema at the intersection of international art cinema and sophisticated genre cinema. This approach places his work in the context of global cinema and invites comparisons to the work of directors like Pedro Almodovar and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who repeatedly deploy and reconfigure genre cinema to their own ends. These generic aspects constitute a cosmopolitan gesture in Petzold's work as he interprets and elaborates on cult genre films and popular genres, including horror, film noir, and melodrama. The book explores these popular genres while injecting them with themes like terrorism, globalization, and immigration, central issues for European art cinema. The volume also includes an extended original interview with the director about his work.

Studies of “Classic Hollywood” typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. This book complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, the book breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases. The book's analysis follows Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the “Transition Era” and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. The book's analysis is set apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. The book views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is a synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era.

The rise of the New Romanian Cinema in a postcommunist country without a particularly vigorous film tradition has puzzled critics and audiences alike. Its roots have been traced to Cristi Puiu’s rebellion against his compatriots’ outdated assumption that cinema is an instrument of propaganda, denunciation, or entertainment. A detailed analysis of Puiu’s work, this book underscores the gradual evolution of his approach to cinema as a form of silent witnessing and a means of personal investigation and revelation. Each chapter revolves around one film, exploring the historical, cultural, and biographical circumstances that have inspired it, its thematic and aesthetic texture, and the director’s dynamic artistic philosophy. Working through the past, the emergence of the precariat classes and the perils they face, the troubled relationship between fathers and sons, or the question of authorship are important narrative threads. The book’s central argument is that Puiu’s preference for observational cinema derives both from his personal experience as a historical subject and from his deep conviction that the image on screen can trigger viewers’ epiphany of a sacred dimension of earthly existence. Cinema is a form of testimony/confession that can underscore people’s strong bonds to each other. The only condition is that the camera should remain faithful to the observed reality and reveal its own subjectivity.

This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D. A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career spanning decades, Pennebaker's many projects have included avant-garde experiments (Daybreak Express), ground-breaking television documentaries (Primary), celebrity films (Don't Look Back), concert films (Monterey Pop), and innovative fusions of documentary and fiction (Maidstone). Exploring the concept of “performing the real,” the book's analysis interprets the ways in which Pennebaker's presentation of unscripted everyday performances is informed by connections between documentary filmmaking and other experimental movements such as the New American Cinema. Through his collaborations with such various artists as Richard Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Luc Godard, Pennebaker has continually reworked and redefined the forms of documentary filmmaking. This book also includes a recent interview with the director and a full filmography.

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. The book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, the book places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock. It reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch's work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynch's plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynch's films and signature mise-en-scène, the book argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynch's films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to Lynch's art, and the prime matter of Lynch's strange picture of the human organism. The book offers striking new readings of Lynch's major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing Lynch's experimentalism within the aesthetic traditions of modernism and the avant-garde; the genres of melodrama, film noir, and art cinema; architecture and design history; and contemporary debates about cinematic ontology in the wake of the digital. This inventive study argues that Lynch's plastic concept of life—supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world—is more alive today than ever.

Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history is enjoying a period of dynamic growth. A broadening of scope and interests encompasses not only different kinds of filmmaking (mainstream fiction, experimental, and documentary) but also practices (publicity, journalism, distribution and exhibition) seldom explored in the past. Cutting-edge and inclusive, this book addresses women's filmmaking in Europe and the United States while also moving beyond to explore the influence of women on the cinemas of India, Chile, Turkey, Russia, and Australia. The book grapples with historiographic questions that cover film history from the pioneering era to the present day. Yet it also addresses the very mission of practicing scholarship. Chapters explore essential issues like identifying women's participation in their cinema cultures, locating previously unconsidered sources of evidence, developing methodologies and analytical concepts to reveal the impact of gender on film production, distribution and reception, and reframing women's film history to accommodate new questions and approaches.