North America, Central America

The legendary Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) had many identities. He first broke into Hollywood as a fresh-faced young actor in the 1950s, redefined himself as a rebel director with Easy Rider in the late …

In the late 1950s, Mike Nichols (1931–2014) and Elaine May (b. 1932) soared to superstar status as a sketch comedy duo in live shows and television. After their 1962 breakup, both went on to long and …

Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible , was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the …

Bertrand Tavernier (1941 – 2021) was widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s in the wake of the New Wave. In just over f …

Lino Brocka (1939–1991) was one of Asia and the Global South’s most celebrated filmmakers. A versatile talent, he was at once a bankable director of genre movies, an internationally acclaimed auteur …

Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school–educated …

In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects nine of Stan Brakhage’s most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks; his theories of vision and sound; the im …

Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) was a founding member of the French New Wave, the group of filmmakers that revolutionized French filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most prolific dire …

Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942) entered the film industry in the only way she could in the 1960s—as an actress. Throughout her career, von Trotta added thirty-two acting credits to her name; however, …

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (b. 1960) is as famous for his remarkable films as for his courageous defiance of Iran’s state censorship. Panahi achieved international recognition with his feature fi …