Author: Mike Leigh
Publisher: Faber & Faber Film
ISBN: 9780571353828
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
This new edition updates Mike Leigh's career to his most recent films, Mister Turner and the epic masterpiece Peterloo. Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) - Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema's pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work. In their commingling of bleakness and humor, Leigh's films recreate the tragi-comic world of people whose everyday lives are far from glamorous: a world in which 'the done thing' usually prevails, contrary to our inner hopes, wants or needs. Leigh's work has always reflected its times and entered the vernacular, whether the harsh studies of Meantime and Naked or the humor of the now-legendary Abigail's Party and Nuts in May. Above all, Leigh is an accomplished storyteller, and these films deal with universal themes: births, marriages and deaths, parenthood and failed relationships, families and their secrets and lies. Within these pages Leigh speaks to Amy Raphael more openly than ever before of his life and inimitable working method, revealing himself as passionate, forthright, no sufferer of fools, but the owner of a dry and playful Mancunian wit.
Author: Sean O'Sullivan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093402
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
In this much needed examination of Mike Leigh, Sean O'Sullivan reclaims the British director as a practicing theorist--a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative dimensions. In contrast with Leigh's prevailing reputation as a straightforward crafter of social realist movies, O'Sullivan illuminates the visual tropes and storytelling investigations that position Leigh as an experimental filmmaker who uses the art and artifice of cinema to frame tales of the everyday and the extraordinary alike. O'Sullivan challenges the prevailing characterizations of Leigh's cinema by detailing the complicated constructions of his realism, positing his films not as transparent records of life but as aesthetic transformations of it. Concentrating on the most recent two decades of Leigh's career, the study examines how Naked, Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and other films engage narrative convergence and narrative diffusion, the tension between character and plot, the interplay of coincidence and design, cinema's relationship to other systems of representation, and the filmic rendering of the human figure. The book also spotlights such earlier, less-discussed works as Four Days in July and The Short and Curlies, illustrating the recurring visual and storytelling concerns of Leigh's cinema. With a detailed filmography, this volume also includes key selections from O'Sullivan's several interviews with Leigh.
Author: Raymond Carney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521485180
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Carney examines one of the most important directors of British independent filmmaking.
Author: Bryan Cardinale-Powell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623565642
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 589
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Book Description
Renowned for making films that are at once sly domestic satires and heartbreaking 'social realist' dramas, British writer-director Mike Leigh confronts his viewers with an un-romanticized dramatization of modern-day society in the hopes of inspiring them to strive for greater self-awareness and compassion for others. This collection features new, interdisciplinary essays that cover all phases of the BAFTA-award-winner's film career, from his early made-for-television film work to his theatrical releases, including Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Career Girls (1997), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) and Another Year (2010). With contributions from international scholars from a variety of fields, the essays in this collection cover individual films and the recurring themes and motifs in several films, such as representations of class and gender, and overt social commentary and political subtexts. Also covered are Leigh's visual stylizations and storytelling techniques ranging from explorations of the costume design to set design to the music and camerawork and editing; the collaborative process of 'devising and directing' a Mike Leigh film that involves character-building, world-construction, plotting, improvisations and script-writing; the process of funding and marketing for these seemingly 'uncommercial' projects, and a survey of Leigh's critical reception and the existing writing on his work.
Author: Mike Leigh
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578060689
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Collected interviews with the British filmmaker of High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, and Secrets and Lies
Author: Garry Watson
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764106
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
A keen observer of British manners and mores, Mike Leigh has been hailed as a celebrator of 'ordinary' people. Comparing and contrasting all his films from Bleak Moments and High Hopes through Naked, the Oscar nominated Secrets and Lies and Topsy Turvy to All or Nothing, Garry Watson considers this claim, examining both their influence and their effect. Through careful textual detail and wider social and literary comparison with the works of Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot, he argues ultimately for the aritistic and cultural significance of Leigh's work as one of Britain's most respected film-makers.
Author: Edward Trostle Jones
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820467450
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This critical study of Mike Leigh's cinema is a comprehensive assessment of his thirty plus years in film, including his television features, from the first feature-length Bleak Moments to All or Nothing. Through his own species of tragicomedy and favored thematic content concentrating on relationships, Leigh enlarges the emotional boundaries of cinema for performers and audience alike. His deep and fully realized characters often subvert both decorum and irony traditionally associated with British film and television. Leigh's sense of the reciprocity and interpenetration of the material mundane, the ridiculous, and the humanistic sublime brings respect for the complexity of the ordinary and merits celebration within the democratic and demotic art of film.
Author: Robert Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
No Marketing Blurb
Author: Ivone Margulies
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384612
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Rites of Realism shifts the discussion of cinematic realism away from the usual focus on verisimilitude and faithfulness of record toward a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film scholars propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait film, and documentary. By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main innovators of realist representation. The collection is inspired by André Bazin's theories on film's inherent heterogeneity and unique ability to register contingency (the singular, one-time event). This volume features two new translations: of Bazin's seminal essay "Death Every Afternoon" and Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting Bazin's defense of the long shot as a way to set the stage for a clash or risky confrontation between man and animal. These pieces evince key concerns—particularly the link between cinematic realism and contingency—that the other essays explore further. Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; and Pier Paolo Pasolini's strategies of analogy in his transposition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy. Essays consider the work of filmmakers including Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Mike Leigh, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami. Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang
Author: Samantha Lay
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231501617
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
British Social Realism details and explores the rich tradition of social realism in British cinema from its beginnings in the documentary movement of the 1930s to its more stylistically eclectic and generically hybrid contemporary forms. Samantha Lay examines the movements, moments and cycles of British social realist texts through a detailed consideration of practice, politics, form, style and content, using case studies of key texts including Listen to Britain, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Letter to Brezhnev, and Nil by Mouth. In discussing the work of many prominent realist filmmakers, the book considers the challenges for social realist film practice and production in Britain, now and in the future.
