Directors’ Cuts
W a l l f l o w e r P r e ss
The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz
The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov
Michael N. Goddard
Jeremi Szaniawski
While considered one of the world’s most significant filmmakers, Raúl Ruiz has yet to receive any thorough study in English. This volume maps Ruiz’s cinematic trajectory across more than five decades, up to his death in 2011. Ranging from his earliest work in Chile to his high-budget, “European” costume dramas and culminating in his Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), this critique treats Ruiz’s work, with its surrealist, magicalrealist, pop-cultural, and neo-Baroque sources, as a type of “impossible” cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces and spanning different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. The volume argues that across the phases of Ruiz’s work, key continuities emerge, such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.
One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring such issues as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his fiction feature films (and broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume sees Sokurov’s films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual and sensual, and containing a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity within a network of tensions and paradoxes. The volume therefore offers a new understanding of the lasting appeal of the Russian director’s Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema, a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, present, and future.
Impossible Cartographies
Michael N. Goddard
is senior lecturer in media studies
Figures of Paradox
Jeremi Szaniawski
holds a Ph.D. from Yale University
and is an award-winning independent filmmaker living and
at the University of Salford, U.K. His research centers on
working in Los Angeles. He is also coeditor of Directory of
audiovisual media cultures and media theory.
World Cinema: Belgium.
$25.00 / £17.50 paper 978-0-231-16731-4 $75.00 / £52.00 cloth 978-0-231-16730-7 $24.99 / £17.00 ebook 978-0-231-85050-6
$25.00 / £17.50 paper 978-0-231-16735-2 $75.00 / £52.00 cloth 978-0-231-16734-5 $24.99 / £17.00 ebook 978-0-231-85052-0
S e p t e m b e r 224 pages / 25 b&w illustrations
N o v e m B e r 256 pages / 20 b&w illustrations
f i l m s tu d i e s
f i l m s tu d i e s
All Rights: Columbia University Press
All Rights: Columbia University Press
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