The beautiful Austrian-born Romy Schneider was one of Europe's most popular film stars and a cult figure from the moment she played 'Sissi' (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) in the hugely popular Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. Although Schneider died in 1982, she continues to be one of the most popular stars in European cinema history. This book analyses her impressive career to place her within a range of European female stars, particularly Germanic and French, who defined cultural...

"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post**"The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' ChoiceOne of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washingto...

From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age ( The New York Times).When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events...

Three decades after its first publication, The New Wave is still considered one of the fundamental texts on the French film movement of the same name. Led by filmmakers as influential as Truffaut and Godard, the New Wave was a seminal moment in cinematic history, and The New Wave has been hailed as the most complete book ever written about it.The New Wave tells the story of the New Wave through examinations of five of the most important directors of the era: Truffaut, Godard, Chabr...

Determined to tread her own path, Austrian film sensation, Romy Schneider was talented, honest, prickly, loving and ultimately tragic. The star of over sixty movies including the cult, "What's New Pussycat? "Bloodline", "The Assassination of Trotsky", "The Cardinal" and "The Victors", at the height of her fame she ranked alongside Bardot, Loren and Cardinale. Reviled by the German Press when she fell in love with Alain Delon and moved to Paris a...

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed producti...

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society.As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a p...

The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forw...

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of histor...

Traditionally, Weimar cinema has been equated with the work of a handful of auteurist filmmakers and a limited number of canonical films. Often a single, limited phenomenon, "expressionist film," has been taken as synonymous with the cinema of the entire period. But in recent decades, such reductive assessments have been challenged by developments in film theory and archival research that highlight the tremendous richness and diversity of Weimar cinema. This widening of focus has ...

Offering portraits of such key figures as the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, he looks at the early pioneers who transformed a fairground novelty into a global industry.The crisis caused by the First World War led France to surrender her position as the world's dominant film-making power, but French cinema forged a new role for itself as a beacon of cinematic possibility and achievement.Producing such distinctive film-makers as Jean Renoir, ...

To a large extent, the story of French filmmaking is the story of moviemaking. From the earliest flickering images of the late nineteenth century through the silent era, Surrealist influences, the Nazi Occupation, the glories of the New Wave, the rebirth of the industry in the 1990s with the exception culturelle, and the present, Rémi Lanzoni examines a considerable number of the world's most beloved films. Building upon his 2004 best-selling edition, the second edition of Fre...