Writers on Film

We're at the 45th Giornate del Cinema Muto at Pordenone and I'm talking to American author and academic Allyson Nadia Field about her 20226 book: Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History. Get your copy of the book HERE.

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In its 45 edition, we're at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the international silent film festival in Pordenone, with Mark Fuller -- expert and enthusiast in equal measure.

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Here is the comprehensive, first-ever biography of the award-winning child star, Planet of the Apes movie icon, beloved film legend, and Hollywood renaissance man whose career spanned 60 years.

“This is a beautiful tribute to a very special man. For those who aren’t familiar with Roddy, you’re in for a treat. You will get to know a man who was as kind as he was gifted.” —CAROL BURNETT

The book is available HERE.

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I'LL SETTLE FOR NOTHINGNESS is a brand new book of conversations with Mike Hodges, the legendary British film director of classics such as GET CARTER, FLASH GORDON and THE CROUPIER. Available HERE.

These conversations were conducted with filmmaker Jon Spira over the last years of Hodges' life. they form a personal and candid view of his work, life and philosophy as he meditates on his declining health and thoughts of legacy.

WITH A FOREWORD BY GRIFF RHYS JONES

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Citizen Kane. The Magnificent Ambersons. And the film history forgot.

In July 1939, Orson Welles signed a contract with RKO Pictures granting him complete creative control over his films. Less than three years later, he was thrown off the lot.

At RKO, he made two of the most celebrated films in cinema history. He also made Journey Into Fear, a film that has been debated, dismissed, and misunderstood ever since.

Beneath it all lies the mystery: Who actually directed Journey Into Fear: Welles or credited director Norman Foster? Rumors have persisted for decades that Welles ghost-directed the picture, that the good parts were his and the flaws belonged to Foster. The truth is considerably more complex.

Drawn from studio memos, archival correspondence, and production records, this forensic account of the film’s production history uses Journey Into Fear as a case study to illuminate the broader workings of the Hollywood studio system: how it functioned, how it shaped the films it produced, and how it first empowered Welles before ultimately betraying him.

A case study in genius, compromise, and the machinery of Hollywood.

Order HERE.

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Bilge Ebiri is a film critic writing in New York magazine and Vulture.

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Nicholas Bell from Eye on Cinema and Fish Jelly YouTube channel joins me to talk Ink, Bucking Fastard and Wild Horse Nine, live from the Venice International Film Festival.

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When it came to filmmaking, Richard Fleischer had big shoes to fill. His father, Max, was one of America's most influential animators. However, Richard's own passions led him not to the animator's desk but to the director's chair.

After garnering an Academy Award for Best Documentary with Design for Death (1948), Fleischer became known for an eclectic mix of pictures such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Soylent Green (1973), and Conan the Destroyer (1984), directing such luminaries as Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Joan Collins, Lee Marvin, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In Richard Fleischer: Journeyman, author Jason A. Ney reveals how Fleischer navigated Hollywood's shifting standards, kept a good-humored outlook on his career, and earned lasting appreciation from those who worked with him. In addition to drawing on Fleischer's archived personal papers, Ney conducted original interviews with his family members as well as dozens of his professional collaborators, which gives the book a behind-the-scenes feel.

This comprehensive biography is the story of a genre-spanning director, a son of a pioneering animator, and a multifaceted man whose art continues to influence filmmakers today.

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From one of cinema’s wisest and most penetrating observers, an arresting new perspective on the sweep of film history.

David Thomson has been called “the greatest living writer on the movies.” Here is a career capstone of sorts—a one-volume history of film and screens as illuminating and provocative as his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film. In tracing the progress, from the Lumiere Brothers to the Coens, Thomson glories in the great movies, but admits to increasing unease over what the medium has done to us—promoting fantasy, misleading models of sexual identity, the cult of authority, power, and happy endings.

This revisionist history is as alert to technology and business as it is to art and fun in tracing our pursuit of the lifelike instead of life. By turns trenchant, lyrical, and comic, Thomson uncovers our addiction to voyeurism and villainy, and a habit of passivity that has betrayed our political and cultural identity. In a survey that reaches from Metropolis to Rear Window to Anora, this will redirect ideas about film everywhere. As The New York Times has put it, “Thomson proves anew that he is irreplaceable.”

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KIER-LA JANISSE is an author, critic, film programmer, podcaster, publisher and producer with an emphasis on genre cinema.

Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas referred to her book House of Psychotic Women as one of the 10 “most vital” horror film books of all time, and Ian MacAllister-McDonald of the LA Review of Books called it “the next step in genre theory, as well as the most frightening and heart-rending memoir I’ve read in years.”

Her book on Monte Hellman's infamous film Cockfighter is stunning. Visit her website here for more on her writing, her films and podcasts.

John Bleasdale's Connery A Novel is available to buy NOW.

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