Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by David Lynch. Blending psychological horror with film noir, the film stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern, and is named after the 1951 song of the same name. The film concerns a young college student who, returning home to visit his ill father, discovers a severed human ear in a field. The ear then leads him to uncover a vast criminal conspiracy, and enter into a romantic relationship with a troubled lounge singer.
Wings of Desire is a 1987 romantic fantasy film written by Wim Wenders, Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger, and directed by Wenders. The film is about invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of its human inhabitants, comforting the distressed. Even though the city is densely populated, many of the people are isolated or estranged from their loved ones. One of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist, played by Solveig Dommartin. The angel chooses to become mortal so that he can experience human sensory pleasures, ranging from enjoying food to touching a loved one, and so that he can discover human love with the trapeze artist.
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born filmmaker. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is an Iranian film director, writer, film editor, and producer. He has made over 20 feature films, won 50 awards, and been a juror in more than 15 major film festivals. His award-winning films include Kandahar; his latest documentary is The Gardener and latest feature The President.
The Apu Trilogy comprises three Indian Bengali-language drama films directed by Satyajit Ray: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959). The original music for the films was composed by Ravi Shankar.
Bicycle Thieves, also known as The Bicycle Thief, is a 1948 Italian neorealist drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It follows the story of a poor father searching in post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to be the salvation of his young family.
Jack Sargeant is a British writer specializing in cult film, underground film, and independent film, as well as subcultures, true crime, and other aspects of the unusual. In addition he is a film programmer, curator, academic and photographer. He has appeared in underground films and performances. He currently lives in Australia.
Wheeler Winston Dixon is an American filmmaker and scholar. He is an expert on film history, theory and criticism. His scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. He has written extensively on numerous aspects of film, including his books A Short History of Film and A History of Horror. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor, along with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is regarded as a top reviewer of films. In addition, he is notable as an experimental American filmmaker with films made over several decades, and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his works in 2003. He taught at Rutgers University, The New School in New York, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and as of May 2020, is the James E. Ryan professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Linda Ruth Williams is Professor of Film Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. Her special interests include sexuality and censorship in cinema and literature, women in film, psychoanalytic theory and D. H. Lawrence.
Marzieh Meshkini is an Iranian cinematographer, film director and writer. She is married to filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who wrote the script for her debut film The Day I Became a Woman.
Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Alexis Krasilovsky is an American filmmaker, writer and professor. Krasilovsky's first film, End of the Art World documented artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Krasilovsky moved from New York to Los Angeles in the 1970s to pursue her passion for filmmaking, writing and directing films through her company, Rafael Film. She is the writer and director of the global documentary features, Women Behind the Camera and Let Them Eat Cake.
Mark Axelrod is an American writer and academic, who is a professor of Comparative Literature in Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences. For twenty-five years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, which has received five National Endowment for the Arts Grants.
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is a 2015 Canadian-American biographical film. It was written by Denne Bart Petitclerc, and directed by Bob Yari. The film is based on events from Ernest Hemingway's life in Havana, Cuba in the 1950s, and on a friendship that developed there between Hemingway and Petitclerc, who was then a young journalist. The film received generally unfavorable reviews.
Piero Heliczer was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.
Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work beyond Hollywood is a 2009 non-fiction book authored by film critic Michael Atkinson and published by the SUNY Press.
Woody Allen: A Documentary is a 2011 documentary television miniseries directed by Robert B. Weide about the comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen. It premiered as part of the American Masters series on PBS. The film covers Allen's career as a standup comedian, sitcom writer, film director, and film auteur. At the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards, the series received two nominations: for Outstanding Documentary Series and for Directing for a Documentary Program.
