Bøker av Ronald Schwartz

In 1931 Antonio Moreno completed Santa, Mexico's first true sound film. In it he established one of the foremost genres of Latin American cinema?the popular melodrama?which continues to this day. Latin American filmmakers came to the fore in the fifties and sixties and, as 1992's Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) showed, Latin American films continue to be a major part of the international film scene. In this work over 300 of the most significant films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and other Latin American countries are covered. Each entry includes the English title, director, year of release, running time, language, country and a detailed plot synopsis. Notes about the production and the filmmakers are also provided for many entries.

When it began, modern Spanish cinema was under strict censorship, forced to conform to the ideological demands of the Nationalist regime. In 1950, the New Spanish Cinema was born as a protest over General Francisco Franco's policies: a new series of directors and films began to move away from the conformist line to offer a bold brand of Spanish realism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, filmmakers such as Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis Garcia Berlanga, and Luis Bunuel expressed a liberal image of Spain to the world in such films as Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), Bienvenido Senor Marshall (Welcome Mr. Marshall), and Viridiana. The emergence of new directors continued into the sixties and seventies with Carlos Saura, Jose Luis Borau, Victor Erice, and others. After Franco's death in 1975, censorship was abolished and films openly explored such formerly taboo subjects as sexuality, drugs, the church, the army, and the Civil War. The Spanish cinema was no longer escapist and entertaining but, at long last, mirrored the society it depicted.While established directors like Saura, Bardem, and Berlanga continued to produce distinguished work, the "e;new wave"e; of Spanish cinema included brilliant films by the likes of Montxo Armendariz (Tasio), Fernando Trueba (First Work), Imanol Uribe (The Death of Mikel), and Pedro Almodovar (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). In the last couple of decades, exciting works by established filmmakers and newcomers alike continue to be produced, including Alejandro Amenabar's Thesis, Jose Luis Garci's The Grandfather, and Almodovar's Talk to Her and Volver.In Great Spanish Films Since 1950, Ronald Schwartz presents a compendium of outstanding Spanish films from the pre-Francoist era through the Spanish New Wave of the 80's and 90's and into the present day. Schwartz provides background, plot, and commentaries of key films from six decades of Spanish cinema. In addition to identifying

Fills a crying need in this inexplicably long-ignored area. Bountifully illustrated, the work is bound to become a standard reference work for anyone interested in cinema from Spain. An invaluable compendium of data not available before to Anglo audiences.

This examniation of the cinematic style of film noir originals and their neo-noir remakes compares thirty-five films, beginning with Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity and concluding with Jim McBride's Breathless.

Film noir is a particularly American stylistic phenomenon (although named by French film critics) that permeated nearly every major, minor and independent Hollywood studio production from 1940 through the early 1960s. The author examines the best noir film from each studio and includes each studio''s history, a meticulous plot outline and information on the careers of each studio''s star roster. He also comments on producers, directors, screenwriters, camera men, composers, art and set directors and presents stills that represent the noir style. The book also has a discussion of independent productions and the second best film noirs of major and minor studios.