Cruising

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenio Ercolani ◽  
Marcus Stiglegger
Keyword(s):  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Male Sexuality ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Distorted Image ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Auteur Cinema

When William Friedkin’s psycho thriller Cruising was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and hit cinemas worldwide in 1980 it was mainly misunderstood: the upcoming gay scene dismissed it as an offence to their efforts to open up to society and a distorted image of homosexuality, prompting the distributors to add a disclaimer that preceded the picture: Genre audiences were confused about the idea of a sexualized cop thriller with procedural drama that frequently turns into a horror film with the identity of the killer changing with each murder. Seen from today’s perspective, Friedkin’s film turned out to be an enduring cult classic documenting the gay leather scene of the late 1970s as well as providing a stunning image of identity crisis and an examination of male sexuality in general. In the fading years of the New Hollywood era (1967–1976), William Friedkin—the ‘New Hollywood Wunderkind’, with an Academy Award for his cop drama, The French Connection (1971), and following the tremendous success of his horror film, The Exorcist (1973)—proves once more the strength of his unique approach in combining genre and auteur cinema to create a fascinating film that turns 40 in 2020. This book dives into the phenomenon that is Cruising: it examines its creative context and its protagonists, as well as explaining its ongoing popularity.

Halloween: How It Came into the World

Halloween ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder ◽  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Large Role ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Initial Release ◽  
The World ◽  
Film Producer

This chapter discusses how Halloween (1978) was developed and created. John Carpenter's name appears above the title on Halloween, but the project existed before he came on board. Independent film producer Irwin Yablans rightly claims the mantle of ‘The Man Who Created Halloween’, the title of his 2012 autobiography. The project reached Carpenter with the tentative title The Babysitter Murders before it became Halloween shortly thereafter; but Carpenter is still quick to credit Yablans for conceiving the title and the concept. Yablans' marketing and distribution ingenuity played a large role in securing Halloween's success but it went far beyond anyone's expectations, reportedly making back its original budget sixty-fold in its initial release alone. It seems apparent that Halloween was uniquely positioned to benefit from overlapping currents in the New Hollywood, the American independent cinema, ‘youth cinema’, and the horror film. Halloween was also well positioned to benefit from a new wave of academic interest in the horror film.

scholarly journals The New Vicissitudes of Auteur Cinema

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Stojanova
Keyword(s):  
Life Time ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Achievement Award ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Grand Hotel ◽  
At Home

THE NEW VICISSITUDES OF AUTEUR CINEMA: KARLOVY VARY 2010 The Festival and its Ambiance     The Karlovy Vary Film Festival is a place where everyone feels at home - from the brightest stars of world cinema and Hollywood staying at Grand Hotel Pupp, to the student back-packers, who arrive in numbers every year and, in anticipation of some last minute ticket availability, squat in the hallways of Hotel Thermal, housing the festival headquarters as well as five festival film theatres. This unassuming hospitality was elegantly emphasized in the festival film vignettes, shown before each screening. Witty animation tributes to the festival president Jií Bartoška and its artistic director Eva Zaoralová, inspired by the Pink Panther and Iakov Protazanov's Aelita respectively, were paired with a series of black-and-white shorts, starring some of the most illustrious recipients of the festival's Life-Time Achievement Award, the Crystal Globe, and featuring the statuette's mostly...

scholarly journals KAJIAN KOMPARATIF HISTORIS FILM 'PENGABDI SETAN'

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-202
Author(s):  
Garcia Iktia
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Research ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Made In

Indonesian films experience development over time. In the beginning film in Indonesia served as a massmobilizer and propaganda, then suspended animation. Now Indonesian films are taken into account to internationalfestivals, especially the horror film genre. The object to be analyzed in this study is a horror film, entitled 'PengabdiSetan' by director Rudi Sudjarwo produced in 2017 which is also nominated for the Indonesian Film Festival. Researchthrough the analysis of historical studies with comparative research methods, literature study of two films that have beenadapted to the same genre, namely the horror genre. Both films have good unity in the story and cinematography, but inthe film “Pengabdi Setan” made in 2017 the audience is treated to a different cinematography than the one made in 1980and the many cinematographic developments in the Indonesian film horror genre.

François Truffaut

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Iconic Figure

François Truffaut (b. 1932–d. 1984) is renowned both for the originality and the enduring popularity of his films, being considered an iconic figure of the French New Wave, a movement for which he was an aggressive and controversial spokesman. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut was a critic and film theorist, contributing to the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Notorious for his ferocious attack on traditional French “quality cinema,” he also asserted that the director is the true author of a film, on the grounds that a director’s stylistic and thematic choices reveal his identity as surely as fingerprints. Having turned to filmmaking, Truffaut achieved instant success with his first feature film, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups), which gained a prize at the Cannes Festival in 1959 and was universally acclaimed. Thereafter, he regularly produced a film every two years, accumulating an oeuvre of twenty-five films, a number of which, such as Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973) and The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro, 1980), were highly successful both in France and abroad. Subsequently, Truffaut’s reputation suffered a decline as his popularity grew with the incorporation of elements of genre cinema into his films, which caused certain of his fellow filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, to see him as betraying the ideals of the New Wave for the sake of achieving commercial success. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Truffaut, reflected in several retrospectives of his films, and the discovery of complexities in his work that have modified earlier appraisals of him as a sentimental, lightweight filmmaker. Indisputably, Truffaut has exerted an enormous influence on subsequent filmmaking in France and elsewhere, his influence being most evident in the auteur cinema of le Jeune Cinéma Français (Young French Cinema) of the 1990s and 2000s, the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, recent American “indie” movies, and various “New Waves” in a number of national cinemas such as those of Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Arnaud Desplechin, and Tsai Ming Liang have freely confessed their debt to Truffaut, leaving little doubt that Truffaut is emerging as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Tragically, Truffaut’s career was cut short by his death from a brain tumor in 1984, leaving a number of foreshadowed projects unrealized.

French writer Jean-Claude Carrière’s creative life has encompassed novels, plays, cartoons, poems, and short films. But it is his screenplays that have most assuredly cemented his position as one of the century’s great writers. Receiving his start in cinema in the mid-1950s by writing book adaptations of director Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), Carrière eventually teamed up with comic filmmaker Pierre Étaix on two short films, including the Oscar-winning Happy Anniversary (1962). From there, he began a long and fruitful collaboration with director Luis Buñuel, a 13-year partnership that resulted in six films: Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Belle de Jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). He has proved equally confident with original screenplays and adapted works, and he has received three Academy Award nominations for his scripts. Highlights of his filmography include The Tin Drum (1979), which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), which earned him and co-writer Daniel Vigne a César for Best Original Screenplay, his adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and his acclaimed Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) with Gérard Depardieu. A recipient of the Laurel Award for Achievement from the Writers Guild Of America, Carrière remains a prolific writer, contributing to the screenplays of both Birth (2004) and The White Ribbon (2009), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. “I’m writing every day,” he says at age 80. “When I’m not working on a script or on a play or on a book, I’m writing notes in the subway or in taxis. I’m working constantly.”

2013 ◽  
pp. 61-62
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Milky Way ◽  
Original Screenplay ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Luis Bunuel ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Cyrano De Bergerac ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Creative Life

Heralded as a playwright, screenwriter, and director, Sir David Hare has enjoyed a professional career that has stretched across more than 40 years. His time in the theater has been marked by several triumphs, including Plenty, The Blue Room, and Stuff Happens, and in 2011 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for his thought-provoking and politically engaging oeuvre. Hare’s transition to film began in earnest in the 1980s when he wrote and directed Wetherby (1985), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Paris by Night (1988), and Strapless (1989). But a growing dissatisfaction with his films inspired him to refocus on theater, where he wrote his celebrated trilogy of plays about British life—Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War—in the early 1990s. Thankfully, Hare returned to screenplays with his terrific script for Louis Malle’s Damage (1992), a portrait of obsessive, doomed love based on Josephine Hart’s novel. More recently, he has received Academy Award nominations for his adapted screenplays for The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008), which won, respectively, Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet the Oscar for Best Actress. He also worked to adapt author Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, into a feature film. His plays Plenty and The Secret Rapture have been adapted into films, and in 2011 he wrote and directed the conspiracy thriller Page Eight, which starred Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, and Michael Gambon.

2013 ◽  
pp. 107-108
Keyword(s):  
Film Festival ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Academy Award

When screenwriter, novelist, and director Guillermo Arriaga was 10 years old, he practiced giving acceptance speeches with a Coke bottle. The reason, he explained to his parents, was because he was convinced he would win an Oscar, a Nobel Prize, or an award at the Cannes Film Festival. He’s already achieved one of those goals—he was honored at Cannes with Best Screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which also won Best Actor for director Tommy Lee Jones—and he’s been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Babel (2006). Born in Mexico City, Arriaga is at the forefront of Mexican artists who have brought his country’s cinema to the attention of worldwide audiences in the 21st century. With director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel, films that were praised for their unflinching view of humanity’s darkness while at the same time offering hope in the form of community and individual compassion. Arriaga directed his first feature in 2008: The Burning Plain—which starred Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, and Jennifer Lawrence— and continued his passion for nonlinear stories and complicated, compelling characters. Throughout his work, Arriaga has explored how different languages, cultures, and borders can divide people—but as well how those divisions can be broken down in unexpectedly moving or terrifying ways. A celebrated short-story writer and sports enthusiast, he is also the author of the novels The Night Buffalo and A Sweet Scent of Death.

2013 ◽  
pp. 25-27
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Original Screenplay ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Guillermo Arriaga ◽  
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

John Cassavetes

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cirrhosis Of The Liver ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Independent Films ◽  
Comprehensive Listing ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Number Of Authors

John Cassavetes (b. 1929–d. 1989) was an American actor and filmmaker who wrote, directed, and acted in a catalogue of independent films he made over a forty-year career. Cassavetes directed twelve films—thirteen if one considers Shadows (1958) and Shadows (1959) as distinct works. With a close group of actors and crew, his works often featured Gena Rowlands (b. 1930), Seymour Cassel (b. 1935), Peter Falk (b. 1927–d. 2011), and Ben Gazzara (b. 1930–d. 2012). Despite early praise of Shadows (1958) by writers such as Jonas Mekas, reviewers were often unfavorable, uninterested, and/or unkind to the majority of Cassavetes’s films. Cassavetes won no major awards in the United States, though Rowlands, his chief collaborator and his wife, was nominated for an Academy Award twice, for her performances in his films A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980). Cassavetes did receive a steady run of accolades near the end of his life. At that point, scholars and critics began to consider his works more expansively in terms of their aesthetics—including oft-cited characteristics of a certain brand of realism, naturalism, and echoes of cinéma vérité. The last three films of his career included two made within the studio system—Gloria (1980) and Big Trouble (1986). Released between these, Love Streams (1984), Cassavetes’s last independent film, was also well received in the United States, and it won first place in the Berlin Film Festival. He died in 1989 of cirrhosis of the liver. For the most part, scholarly writings about the films of John Cassavetes did not appear until the 1980s and 1990s. They have been in large part spearheaded and expanded upon by a small number of authors. Prominent among those writers is Ray Carney. This article began under Carney’s advisorship, and his early input (2011–2012) helped shape its scale and scope. It is not a comprehensive listing and annotation of the writings, but it represents a selection highlighting major trends and directions of response and examination.

Ruined Abjection and Allegory in Deadgirl

Screen Bodies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-24
Author(s):  
Sol Neely
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Representation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Sex Slave

Deadgirl (2008) is a horror film that gained notoriety on the film festival circuit for its disturbing premise: when a group of teenage social outcasts discover a naked female zombie strapped to a gurney in the basement of an abandoned asylum, they decide “to keep her” as a sex slave. Accordingly, two sites of monstrosity are staged—one with the monstrous-feminine and the other with monstrous masculinities. Insofar as the film explicitly exploits images of abjection to engender its perverse pleasures, it would seem to invite “abject criticism” in the tradition of Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, and colleagues. However, in light of recent critical appraisals about the limitations of “abjection criticism,” this article reads Deadgirl as a cultural artifact that demands we reassess how abjection is critically referenced, arguing that—instead of reading abjection in terms of tropes and themes—we should read it in diachronic, allegorical ways, which do not reify into cultural representation.

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