by Annette Insdorf (1994)
Long considered the definitive study of this director's genius, Francois Truffaut returns to print in a revised and updated edition. With fresh insights and an extensive section on the director's last five films - Love on the Run, The Green Room, The Last Metro, The Woman Next Door, and Confidentially YoursAnnette Insdorf captures the essence and totality of his work. She discusses his contributions to the French New Wave, his relations with his mentors Hitchcock and Renoir, and the dominant themes of his cinema - women, love, children, language - and she explores his life in relation to his films, from The Four Hundred Blows to The Man Who Loved Women. As warmly human as its subject, Francois Truffaut immortalizes one of the cinema's most popular, prolific, and profound artists.
Donald Spoto
The monumental scope of Hitchcock's work remains unsurpassed by any other movie director, past or present. Psycho, Rear Window, The Birds and Vertigo are only a few of his classics.d his superb analysis--still the Hitchcockian commentary after 15 years in print. Photographs throughout.
Raymond Leslie Williams
Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and on those elsewhere in the world. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them the Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater. In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life, a life that has been centrally concerned with finding and defining the source and character of Latin American culture. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division. . Williams' analysis maps a terrain often left unexplored - the "Spanishness" of Latin American culture - and offers the most in-depth study currently available on Latin America's most prolific living novelist. It will be vital reading for all students of Latin American literature.
Julia Briggs
Presents a comprehensive analysis of the works of twentieth-century English novelist Virginia Woolf using a collection of Woolf's diaries, letters, and original manuscripts.
Tom Shone
Woody Allen is a uniquely innovative performer, writer and director with nearly fifty movies to his credit, from cult slapstick films and romantic comedies to introspective character studies and crime thrillers. In this timely retrospective, Tom Shone reviews Woody Allen's entire career. His informed commentaries are combined with many classic quotes from Allen that define the directors self-deprecating humor and acute thinking about his life and times. Illustrated with more than 250 images, this is a fitting tribute to one of the masters of modern cinema, published to mark Woody Allen's eightieth birthday.