Neo-Baroque film is a type of film theory that (while the term "neo-baroque" is borrowed from the writings of semiologist Umberto Eco and philosopher Gilles Deleuze) used in film studies to describe certain films, television shows [1] and Hollywood blockbusters characterised by the excessively ornate, carnivalesque fragmentation of the film frame and/or narrative, sometimes to the point of spatial and/or narrative incoherence. [2] [3]
The Cinema of Italy comprises the films made within Italy or by Italian directors. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina, a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. Since its beginning, Italian cinema has influenced film movements worldwide. As of 2018, Italian films have won 14 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film as well as 12 Palmes d'Or, one Academy Award for Best Picture and many Golden Lions and Golden Bears.
Federico Fellini, was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Luc Paul Maurice Besson is a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. He directed or produced the films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), and La Femme Nikita (1990). Besson is associated with the Cinéma du look film movement. He has been nominated for a César Award for Best Director and Best Picture for his films Léon: The Professional and The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. He won Best Director and Best French Director for his sci-fi action film The Fifth Element (1997). He wrote and directed the 2014 sci-fi action film Lucy and the 2017 space opera film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
La Femme Nikita, also called Nikita, is a 1990 action thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson. The film stars Anne Parillaud as the title character, a teen criminal who is handed a life sentence for murdering policemen during an armed pharmacy robbery. Her government handlers fake her death and recruit her as a professional assassin. After intense training, she starts a career as a talented killer, where she struggles to balance her work with her personal life. Her career progresses until a mission in an embassy goes awry.
8+1⁄2 is a 1963 Italian surrealist comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini.
Claire Denis is a French film director and writer. Her feature film Beau Travail (1999) has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s. Other acclaimed works include Trouble Every Day (2001), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), White Material (2009) and High Life (2018).
La strada is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple-minded young woman bought from her mother by Zampanò, a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road.
David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), Making Meaning (1989), and On the History of Film Style (1997).
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 Italian dramatic comedy film directed by Federico Fellini and starring Roberto Benigni, Paolo Villaggio, and Nadia Ottaviani. Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici by Ermano Cavazzoni, and revisiting themes Fellini first explored in La strada (1954), the film is about a fake inspector of wells and a former prefect who wander through the Emilia-Romagna countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual.
Peter Wollen was a film theorist and filmmaker. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodology of structuralism and semiotics. He taught film at a number of universities and was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles at the time of his retirement from academe in 2005.
Cinéma du look was a French film movement of the 1980s and 1990s, analysed, for the first time, by French critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, in which he classified Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as directors of the "look".
In film theory, the term oneiric refers to the depiction of dream-like states or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state in the analysis of a film. The term comes from the Greek Óneiros, the personification of dreams.
Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love. A person with a passionate interest in cinema is called a cinephile, cinemaphile, filmophile, or, informally, a film buff. To a cinephile, a movie is not just a form of entertainment as they see films from a more critical point of view.
Pam Cook is Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton. She was educated at Sir William Perkins's School, Chertsey, Surrey and Birmingham University, where she was taught by Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, Malcolm Bradbury, and David Lodge. Along with Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston, she was a pioneer of 1970s Anglo-American feminist film theory. Her collaboration with Claire Johnston on the work of Hollywood film director Dorothy Arzner provoked debate among feminist film scholars over the following decades.
The arthouse action genre is an emerging film genre in contemporary cinema that traces its roots back to Asian and European films. Characteristics of arthouse action films include stylized action, an arthouse atmosphere, and a disjointed, fragmented narrative with more complexity than the typical action flick. These come together to create a sense of "dreamy surrealism."
John Conomos is an artist, critic and writer, and Associate Professor and Principal Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, the University of Melbourne.
Colin Gardner is a British film and media studies theorist living in Santa Barbara, California.
Maximalist cinema is related to the art of maximalism, a reaction against minimalism.
Modernist film is related to the art and philosophy of modernism.
