Livres d'anglais

Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

Hollywood: The Oral History covers the history of Hollywood from the Silent era up to the 21st century.

Released in 1942, the film won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture and featured unforgettable performances by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
The book offers a rich account of the film’s origins, the myths and realities behind its production, and the reasons it remains so revered today.

Through extensive research and interviews with film-makers, Noah Isenberg explores he ways in which the film continues to dazzle audiences and saturate popular culture 75 years after its release.

Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) – Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema’s
pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work.

John Boorman is one of the cinema’s authentic visionaries, drawn to myths and dreams. The undisputed heir to David Lean, his films, such as Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur, exhibit a continual search for the truth that only art can convey.

In Conclusions Boorman summarises what he has learned about the craft of film-making, and wishes to pass on to the next generation of film-makers. Into this tapestry of cinematic memories, he also weaves the story of his kith and kin, including the death of his cherished elder daughter, and an evocation of the forest of trees that he has planted as his final legacy.

Twelve years ago, Amores Perros erupted in the cinemas across the world and announced the arrival of Mexican film-makers. The film-makers profiled in that book have now come of age and have made a decisive impact on the international cinema scene.

Death is always the issue—in life, and in the Western. Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a movie of six Western stories. In each, our common destination is approached by a different road. Through each, diverse characters hurry for their final appointment: Oregon Trail-travelers, a gold prospector, a motley crew of stagecoach passengers, a high-plains drifting bank robber, even a singing cowboy. These six stories escort them with a care that either respects, or mocks, the dignity of all.
The film stars Tom Waits, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tim Bake Nelson and Zoe Kazan and is shot with the harsh grandeur of the classic John Ford westerns.

‘Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.’ New York Times ‘Best True Crime of 2022’

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England.

In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.

Le Prince’s family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis’s work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince’s own son was dead under suspicious circumstances – and modern Hollywood was being born.

A rare, intimate portrait of Hollywood’s reigning ‘blockbuster auteur’ whose deeply personal billion-dollar movies have established him as the most successful director to come out of the British Isles since Alfred Hitchcock.
More than just the tinkerings of a glass watchmaker, Christopher Nolan’s films have an unerring grasp of the way time makes us feel. Time steals people away in his films, and he takes careful note of the theft. Time is Nolan’s great antagonist, his lifelong nemesis. He seems almost to take it personally.

Following on from the success of his thriller, Ex Machina, Alex Garland returns to cerebral sci-fi with his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s cult novel – a tale of a biologist attempting to uncover the mystery of her husband’s disappearance into a restricted zone.
What she and her fellow scientists discover is a world populated by mysterious life forms that might offer answers, but which exposes them to madness and death.
Beside the screenplay, the book also includes 20 pages of behind-the-scenes photos.