Download or read book John Sayles written by David R. Shumway and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. In this study, David R. Shumway examines the defining characteristic of Sayles's cinema: its realism. Positing the filmmaker as a critical realist, Shumway explores Sayles's attention to narrative in critically acclaimed and popular films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star. The study also details the conditions under which Sayles's films have been produced, distributed, and exhibited, affecting the way in which these films have been understood and appreciated. In the process, Shumway presents Sayles as a teacher who tells historically accurate stories that invite audiences to consider the human world they all inhabit.
Download or read book John Sayles written by John Sayles and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the "Conversations with Filmmakers" series, these interviews span Sayles's 20-year career as a writer, director, and sometimes actor. Photos. Filmography.
Download or read book Sayles Talk written by Diane Carson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His name is synonymous with "independent film," and for more than twenty-five years, filmmaker John Sayles has tackled issues ranging from race and sexuality to the abuses of capitalism and American culture, aspiring to a type of realism that Hollywood can rarely portray. This collection offers unprecedented coverage of Sayles's craft and content, as it deploys a rich variety of critical methods to explore the full scope of his work. Together the essays afford a deeper understanding not only of the individual films-including his 1980 The Return of the Secaucus Seven (named to the National Registry) and the recent Limbo and Men with Guns-but also of Sayles's unusual place in American cinema and his influence worldwide. The focus of Sayles's films is frequently on peoples' lives, not on stories with tidy endings, and often a main goal is to alert viewers of their complicity in the problems at hand. One might assume his style to be content driven, but closer inspection reveals a mix of styles from documentary to postmodern. In this anthology, a set of international scholars addresses these and many other aspects of Sayles's filmmaking as they explore individual works. Their methodological approaches include historical and industry analysis as well as psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, to name a few. Sayles Talk is both an in-depth and wide-ranging tribute to the "father" of independent film. In one volume, readers can find discussions of most of Sayles's films together with a comprehensive introduction to his film practice, an annotated list of existing literature on Sayles, and information on resources for further inquiry into his fiction, film, and television work. Film students as well as seasoned critics will turn to this book time and again to enrich their understanding of one of America's great cinematic innovators and his legacy.
Download or read book Sayles on Sayles written by John Sayles and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with John Sayles who worked on such widely varied projects as The return of the Secaucus seven; Baby, it's you; Brother from another planet; Matewan; Passion fish; Piranha; Alligator; The howling; Apollo 13; City of hope, Lone star; Shannon's deal.
Download or read book John Sayles Filmmaker written by Jack Ryan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1980, art house audience word of mouth about an unusual new movie, Return of the Secaucus Seven, launched the career of director John Sayles and with him the era of the independent filmmaker. Sayles has remained a maverick, writing, directing, editing and even acting in his own films. He has directed such diverse films as The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star, and received two Academy Award nominations. Here is the chronicle of Sayles' career--including the story of his inauspicious beginning as a second-string actor, and his work in fiction, theatre, music videos and television. The author argues that the importance of Sayles' signature plain visual style has been overlooked. A chapter is devoted to each of Sayles' feature films, offering background material on production funding, a plot sketch, an analysis of important characters, and a look at the language, setting, and politics. Each chapter also traces Sayles' technical development--his camera work, editing, musical arrangement and mise-en-scene. The book includes a complete filmography and a bibliography.
Download or read book John Sayles Filmmaker written by Jack Ryan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1980, art house audience word of mouth about an unusual new movie, Return of the Secaucus Seven, launched the career of director John Sayles and with him the era of the independent filmmaker. Sayles has remained a maverick, writing, directing, editing and even acting in his own films. This fully updated revision of the author's 1998 first edition chronicles Sayles' entire career--including the story of his inauspicious beginning as a second-string actor and his work in fiction, theatre, music videos and television. A chapter is devoted to each of Sayles' feature films, offering background material on production funding, a plot sketch, an analysis of important characters, and a look at the language, setting, and politics. Each chapter also traces Sayles' technical development--his camera work, editing, musical arrangement and mise-en-scene. The book includes a complete filmography and a bibliography.
Download or read book A Moment in the Sun written by John Sayles and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights—from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women—Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them—this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.
Download or read book Thinking In Pictures written by John Sayles and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2003-07-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What choices--creative, practical, and technical--make a movie what it is? Here a gifted writer and filmmaker takes us behind the camera and provides a full description of the movie-making process.When John Sayles turned from writing fiction to making movies, he did so with little help from Hollywood: Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles's first movie as director and writer, was produced with 60,000 of his own money. Many films later, he still works outside the studio system and guides every phase of his productions.Now Sayles has written an illuminating book about the complex choices that lie at the heart of every movie. Using the making of his film Matewan as an example, he offers chapters on screenwriting, directing, editing, sound, and more. Photographs, sketches, and the complete shooting script illustrate this engaging account of how Sayles's curiosity about a coal miners' strike in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, became a screenplay--and then a movie.
Download or read book Jane Campion written by John Sayles and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the New Zealand director of The Piano and Portrait of a Lady
Download or read book Yellow Earth written by John Sayles and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit. When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom. Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.
Download or read book To Save the Man written by John Sayles and published by Melville House Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2025-01-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vein of Never Let Me Go and Killers of the Flower Moon, one of America’s greatest storytellers sheds light on an American tragedy: the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the ‘cultural genocide’ experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School . . . In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle school — a military-style boarding school for Indians run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt’s motto, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” is enforced in the classroom as well as the dorm rooms: speak English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white. While the students navigate survival, they hear rumors of a sweeping tribal lands reservations in the west—the “ghost dance,” whereby desperate Native Americans engaged in frenzied dancing and chanting hoping it will cause the buffalo will return, the Indian dead to rise, and the white people to disappear. Local whites panic, and the government sends in troops to keep the reservations under control. When legendary medicine man Sitting Bull is killed by native police working for the government troops, each Carlisle resident is faced with the question: Whose side are you on? And what will you risk to gain your freedom?
Download or read book Thinking in Pictures written by John Sayles and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique book for anyone who has ever wondered how movies really get made, by America's most brilliant independent filmmaker. Sayles gives an illuminating book about the choices that lie at the heart of every movie.
Download or read book John Sayles written by Gerry Molyneaux and published by Renaissance Books. This book was released on 2000-05-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the filmmaker's childhood fascination with movies and examines how his dissatisfaction with corporate-sponsored studios led him to produce, direct, and finance his own films.
Download or read book Union Dues written by John Sayles and published by Nation Books. This book was released on 2005-12-21 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions. His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.
Download or read book The Cinema of John Sayles written by Mark Bould and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through discussion of films such as 'Return of the Secaucus 7', 'The Brother from Another Planet' 'Matewan' and 'Sunshine State', this study uncovers themes of racial and sexual otherness, capitalist excess and the erosion of community in the work of John Sayles.
Download or read book Contemporary American Independent Film written by Chris Holmlund and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology addresses the salient aesthetic, ideological and economic determinants of independent American cinema over the past three decades.
Download or read book Hollywood s West written by Peter C. Rollins and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-11-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the West has been the region that most clearly defines American democracy and the national ethos. Throughout the twentieth century, the "frontier thesis" influenced film and television producers who used the West as a backdrop for an array of dramatic explorations of America's history and the evolution of its culture and values. The common themes found in Westerns distinguish the genre as a quintessentially American form of dramatic art. In Hollywood's West, Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor, and the nation's leading film scholars analyze popular conceptions of the frontier as a fundamental element of American history and culture. This volume examines classic Western films and programs that span nearly a century, from Cimarron (1931) to Turner Network Television's recent made-for-TV movies. Many of the films discussed here are considered among the greatest cinematic landmarks of all time. The essays highlight the ways in which Westerns have both shaped and reflected the dominant social and political concerns of their respective eras. While Cimarron challenged audiences with an innovative, complex narrative, other Westerns of the early sound era such as The Great Meadow (1931) frequently presented nostalgic visions of a simpler frontier era as a temporary diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression. Westerns of the 1950s reveal the profound uncertainty cast by the cold war, whereas later Westerns display heightened violence and cynicism, products of a society marred by wars, assassinations, riots, and political scandals. The volume concludes with a comprehensive filmography and an informative bibliography of scholarly writings on the Western genre. This collection will prove useful to film scholars, historians, and both devoted and casual fans of the Western genre. Hollywood's West makes a significant contribution to the understanding of both the historic American frontier and its innumerable popular representations.
