Wheeler W. Dixon

Twelve distinguished scholars and critics discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how movies have changed to reflect the new world climate.

Film and Television After 9/11

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

The history of international cinema is now available in a concise, conveniently sized, and affordable volume. Succinct yet comprehensive, A Short History of Film provides an accessible overview of the major movements, directors, studios, and genres from the 1880s to the present. More than 250 rare stills and illustrations accompany the text, bringing readers face to face with many of the key players and films that have marked the industry. Beginning with precursors of what we call moving pictures, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster lead a fast-paced tour through the invention of the kinetoscope, the introduction of sound and color between the two world wars, and ultimately the computer generated imagery of the present day. They detail significant periods in world cinema, including the early major industries in Europe, the dominance of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the French New Wave of the 1960s. Special attention is also given to small independent efforts in developing nations and the corresponding more personal independent film movement that briefly flourished in the United States, the significant filmmakers of all nations, censorship and regulation and how they have affected production everywhere, and a wide range of studios and genres. Along the way, the authors take great care to incorporate the stories of women and other minority filmmakers who have often been overlooked in other texts. Compact and easily readable, this is the best one-stop source for the history of world film available to students, teachers, and general audiences alike.

A Short History of Film

'Visions of the Apocalypse' examines the cinema's fascination with the prospect of nuclear and/or natural annihilation, as seen in such films as We Were Soldiers, The Last War and Tidal Wave. Dixon also discusses such topics as the death of film itself, to be replaced by digital video.

Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema

Visions of the Apocalypse

Explores the ways that stereotypes of heterosexuality are portrayed and constructed in film.

Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema

Straight

In this brief treatment of F.Scott Fitzgerald's last years as a screen writer (1937-40), Dixon suggests that Fitzgerald's screen work, including Three Comrades for which he received his only screen credit, represent a hitherto unrecognized artistic development. By analyzing the screen plays, and Fitzgerald's last three novels, Dixon shows how the novelist mastered the peculiar "grammar" and technique of film, and how they influenced his final, uncompleted novel, the Last Tycoon. With its opening biographical sketch, its linking of fiction and cinematic work, and its overview of this period in Fitzgerald's life, Dixon provides a useful and accessible tool for studying American film and literature. ISBN 0-8357-1701-1 : $44.95.

The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Noted film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon offers a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of both major and marginalized figures who have dynamically transformed the landscape of international cinema in the twentieth century. Fifteen interviews spanning two decades of research are collected here, with many appearing in uncut form for the first time. Dixon's interviewees represent a wide range of cinematic professions (directors, animators, actors, writers, and producers) from several branches of cinema (artistic, avant-garde, and commercial) with Dixon providing an introduction prior to each interview. Purposeful in his selections, Dixon offers up voices from twentieth-century cinema that have never before had the chance to speak at such length and detail, as well as much more well-known figures addressing unique and obscure aspects of their respective careers. Collectively, this volume presents a treasure trove of firsthand information of keen interest to film scholars and movie buffs alike, while providing a glimpse into the future of cinema in the twenty-first century.

Voices from Twentieth-century Cinema

Collected Interviews

Film noir and the cinema of paranoia

Reginald LeBorg

LeBorg, the quintessential Hollywood contract director, worked constantly during the 1940s and 1950s at such studios as Universal, PRC, and Monogram. With stills and a thorough filmography.

Interviews, Essays, and Filmography

The Films of Reginald LeBorg

The 1940s was a watershed decade for American cinema and the nation. Shaking off the grim legacy of the Depression, Hollywood launched an unprecedented wave of production, generating some of its most memorable classics. Featuring essays by a group of respected film scholars and historians, American Cinema of the 1940s brings this dynamic and turbulent decade to life with such films as Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Lady Eve, Sergeant York, How Green Was My Valley, Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, The Road to Morocco, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Kiss of Death, Force of Evil, Caught, and Apology for Murder. Illustrated with many rare stills and filled with provocative insights, the volume will appeal to students, teachers, and to all those interested in cultural history and American film of the twentieth century.

Themes and Variations

American Cinema of the 1940s

In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon offers an overview of all of Godard's work as a filmmaker, including his work for television and his ethnographic work in Africa. Free from the jargon and value judgments that have marred much of what has been written about Godard, this is the only book that covers the entirety of Godard's career.

Films of Jean-Luc Godard, The

Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.

Meditations on the Moving Image

The Transparency of Spectacle

François Truffaut

Before turning to filmmaking, François Truffaut was a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinéma during the 1950s. The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts. Truffaut discusses films by such acknowledged masters as Hitchcock, Huston, Dmytryk, and Lang, but also examines the work of such lesser-known directors as Robert Wise, Don Weis, and Roger Vadim.

The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut

Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992 is a collection of essays on British cinema history and practice. It offers both the casual reader and the film scholar a different view of British filmmaking during the past century. Arranged in chronological order, the book explores those areas of British cinema that have not been fully examined in other works and also offers fresh interpretations of a number of classic films. From the work of Frederic Villiers, the pioneering British newsreel cameraman who at the turn of the century brought home images of battlefield carnage, to essays on the British "B" film and the long-forgotten "Independent Frame" method of film production, to new readings of classics such as The Red Shoes, Passport to Pimlico, and Peeping Tom, the authors offer a look behind the scenes of the British film industry and engage the reader in some of the most compelling interpretational and historical issues of recent film history and critical theory. In addition, the volume contains a number of interviews with such key directors as Stephen Frears, Terence Davies, Wendy Toye, and Lindsay Anderson and also pays particular attention to the work of early twentieth-century British feminist filmmakers whose films have often been ignored by conventional film theory and history. It also offers new material on the British "film noir," the English horror film, and the pioneering gay director Brian Desmond Hurst. Taken as a whole, this book presents an entirely new series of viewpoints on British film practice, theory, and reception and affords a fresh and vibrant view of the British film medium.

Essays and Interviews

Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992

Illustrated throughout with rare stills, and organized so as to provide historical context, this book surveys an array of films that have offered us glimpses of a life that is meaningful, free from strife, devoid of pain and privation, and full of harmony in every sense.

Images of Eden in the Cinema

Visions of Paradise

Freddie Francis

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The Films of Freddie Francis

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard

John Carpenter

Terence Fisher brought the modern Gothic horror film to life in the second half of the twentieth century. As director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes in his introduction, "Terence Fisher and The Curse of Frankenstein was the beginning of it all for the modern horror film..."

The Life and Films of Terence Fisher

The Charm of Evil

This volume provides a comprehensive guide to the long tradition of American avant-garde cinema, from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists. The Reader addresses major movements and key figures of the avant-garde, including filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Isaac Julien and Julie Dash, investigates how underground films have explored issues of gender, sexuality and race, and foreground technical innovations such as the use of Super 8mm and video.

Wheeler W. Dixon

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