Exile Cinema

Filmmakers at Work beyond Hollywood

Edited by Michael Atkinson

Subjects: Film Studies
Series: SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema
Paperback : 9780791473788, 227 pages, March 2008
Hardcover : 9780791473771, 227 pages, March 2008

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Michael Atkinson

Part I. Rockets from East Asia

1. Double Trouble: Tsui Hark & Ching Siu-tung
Howard Hampton

2. Bullet Ballet: Seijun Suzuki
Jonathan Rosenbaum

3. Kuala L'Impure: The Cinema of Amir Muhammad
Dennis Lim

4. A Kurosawa Kiyoshi Kit
B. Kite

5. The Bong Show: Bong Joon-ho
Ed Park

Part II. On the European Outskirts

6. Beyond the Clouds: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Geoff Andrew

7. Pawel Pawlikowski: Dreaming All My Life
Jessica Winter

8. Bela Tarr
Jonathan Romney

9. Blunt Force Trauma: Andrzej Zulawski
Michael Atkinson

10. Sharunas Bartas
Laura Sinagra

Part III. Documentarians and Mad Scientists

11. Ken Jacobs
David Sterritt

12. A Few Moments of Arousal in a Film by Martin Arnold
George Toles

13. Ross McElwee
Godfrey Cheshire

14. Judith Helfand: Secret Stories, Video Diaries, and Toxic Comedy
Patricia Aufderheide

Part IV. Lost between Genre and Myth-Making

15. The Beardo: José Mojica Marins
Guy Maddin

16. Dellamorte Dellamore and Michele Soavi
Maitland McDonagh

17. Guy Maddin
Mark Peranson

18. James Fotopoulos
Ed Halter

19. Christopher Munch: For Those We Have Loved
Graham Fuller

Part V. Defiant Lions of the New Wave Generation

20. Pleasures of the Flesh: Walerian Borowczyk
David Thompson

21. Chris Marker: The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory
Joshua Clover

22. Moebius Dragstrip: Monte Hellman Circles Back
Chuck Stephens

23. The Not-Too-Long Discourses of Chantal Akerman
Stuart Klawans

List of Contributors
Index

Offers a cross section of international fringe cinema.

Description

Outside the shrinking American film-culture market there is a vast movie-crazed world where madmen, geniuses, and apostates roam freely, subject to a relatively minimal degree of corporate industry and spin control. In Exile Cinema, prominent film critics profile the oeuvres of working, thriving international filmmakers—from Bela Tarr to Judith Helfand, from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Guy Maddin to Chantal Akerman and Michele Soavi, from Chris Marker to the newest thresholds of contemporary film. These filmmakers battle the greatest odds a modern artist can face: the opposition of mass culture at large and a medium that requires enormous expenditures in every stage of production and distribution. Naturally, the average American moviehead rarely gets a chance to see these marginalized directors' work and often knows about them only through dazzled rumors and rhapsodic hearsay. Whimsical and deeply subjective, the viewpoints and evangelisms in Exile Cinema will serve as salve for the cineaste's lonesome fury.

Michael Atkinson is Professor of Film at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University and former staff film critic for the Village Voice. His previous books include Flickipedia; Ghosts in the Machine: The Dark Heart of Pop Cinema; Blue Velvet; and a collection of poetry, One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train.

Reviews

"This superb collection represents a 'who's who' of contemporary film criticism that brings the reader into closer contact with some of the most important filmmakers working today. Elegant and erudite, this is a key volume for twenty-first-century film studies, a volume to read again and again with pleasure and wonder." — Wheeler Winston Dixon