Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work beyond Hollywood

Michael Atkinson

Mar 2008 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Outside the shrinking American film-culture market there is a vast movie-crazed world where madmen, geniuses, and apostates roam freely, subject to a relatively minimal degree of corporate industry and spin control. In Exile Cinema, prominent film critics profile the oeuvres of working, thriving international filmmakers—from Bela Tarr to Judith Helfand, from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Guy Maddin to Chantal Akerman and Michele Soavi, from Chris Marker to the newest thresholds of contemporary film. These filmmakers battle the greatest odds a modern artist can face: the opposition of mass culture at large and a medium that requires enormous expenditures in every stage of production and distribution. Naturally, the average American moviehead rarely gets a chance to see these marginalized directors' work and often knows about them only through dazzled rumors and rhapsodic hearsay. Whimsical and deeply subjective, the viewpoints and evangelisms in Exile Cinema will serve as salve for the cineaste's lonesome fury.

About the author

Michael Atkinson is Professor of Film at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University and former staff film critic for the Village Voice. His previous books include Flickipedia; Ghosts in the Machine: The Dark Heart of Pop Cinema; Blue Velvet; and a collection of poetry, One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train.