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The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom
Author(s): Deborah Allison (Author)
- Publisher: Lexington Books
- Publication Date: 16 Nov. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 232 pages
- ISBN-10: 0739125834
- ISBN-13: 9780739125830
Book Description
Acclaimed British director Michael Winterbottom is renowned for the abundance and diversity of his output. His films span a wide range of genres in art house and mainstream cinema alike, from the heritage film to neo-noir. Working with different genres gives Winterbottom a framework in which to explore favored themes, while incorporating new ideas and taking on new challenges. At the same time, his manner of undermining familiar generic qualities and frustrating audience expectations also refreshes the genres he explores. In The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom, Deborah Allison investigates Winterbottom’s contributions to contemporary cinema, using ideas of genre as a critical tool. Focusing on eight films, Allison examines the ways he adopts, inflects, and challenges the main attributes of the films’ associated genres, enriching a highly personal and idiosyncratic style of filmmaking. The potency and integrity of his authorship unites films as generically diverse as the road movie Butterfly Kiss, western drama The Claim, sci-fi romance Code 46, and docudrama The Road to Guantanamo.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Deborah Allison has grasped [Winterbottom’s] distinctive modus operandi, which no other filmmaker would dare imitate, or could afford to. Her tour of Winterbottom’s glorious ups and occasional downs, a mid-career assessment, confirms Winterbottom’s place as the most versatile and prolific director of his generation. The reader can decide whether Winterbottom’s determination to take on so many varied challenges is courageous or crazy, or both.
Michael Winterbottom is terrifically prolific and diverse in his cinematic output. It is difficult to write about someone who is still producing work, and Allison makes no claim to offer definitive statements. It remains to follow Winterbottom’s career in the years ahead, and the growth of critical analysis of his work, to which The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom makes a sterling contribution.
The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom is. . . traditional in terms of methodology, but. . . eloquent and explicit on the question of value.
About the Author
Deborah Allison is a London-based cinema programmer. She holds a doctorate in film studies from the University of East Anglia, and her writing has appeared in more than a dozen books and journals, including Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Screen, Scope and The Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film.
