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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of John Waters

Edited by Michelle E. Moore and Brian Brems

Format

£100.00

In stock

About this book

A major academic study of John Waters’s films from a variety of perspectives covering his work and its intersections with culture

  • Watch Michelle's interview with John Waters
  • Contains a brand new chapter-length interview, in which Waters reflects on his films, influences, impact and life
  • Brings together a diverse collection of essays from a variety of academics who are the first to give serious analytical consideration to Waters’ films
  • Taken as a whole, the book makes a large contribution to film studies by showing how Waters’s films reveal the cohesive point of view of an overlooked filmmaker

The first collected volume of work on cult film director and icon John Waters, which offers a comprehensive study of his work as an important filmmaker and cultural force.

Includes chapters covering important themes in Waters’s work, stylistic tendencies, his relationship to the art world, and interviews reflecting on the impact of Waters’s films on his collaborators and audience. Also features a new retrospective interview with Waters in which he reflects on his career and films.

Reviews

"The unique and often outlandish films of John Waters, including Pink Flamingos, Cry-Baby and Pecker, require a specifically greased lens if they are to be critically examined. Michelle Moore and Brian Brems have marshalled a stellar troupe of contributors who dismantle Waters' films from a variety of angles, from Waters' 'film family' and identity (including his own), to tropes such as comedy, celebrity culture, trash and melodrama. This is a highly enjoyable and smart book that combines intellectual rigor with the necessary flavour and smell that befits Waters' oeuvre.
Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Meeting John Waters
Michelle E. Moore

Part I. Authorial Identity, Aesthetics, and Style

1. Multiple Melodramas: Melodramatic Influences and Their Uses in the Cinema of John Waters
Jamie Hook

2. John Waters in the 1980s: Publication, Performance, and the Redefinition of Authorial Identity
Matt Connolly

3. The Bloodless 1990s: From Serial Mom to Wes Craven’s Scream
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Canela Ailen Rodriguez Fontao

4. Artsy Fartsy: Pecker and the Guilty Pleasures of John Waters’ "Bad" Art Habits
Kristen Galvin

5. “Full of Grace”: John Waters as Auteur with the Semiautobiographical Film Pecker
John P. Bray

6. “Technique Is Failed Style”: John Waters, Style, and Cecil B. Demented
Brian Brems

7. Little Movies: John Waters and the Visual Arts
Nicholas Morgan

Part II. Collaboration, Subversion, and Queering the Family

8. Once Upon A Time in Dreamland: 2015 Recollections and Reflections
Chris Holmlund

9. Family Values: Charles Manson and John Waters’ Cult Cinema
Kate J. Russell

10. Queer Moms, Trash Aesthetics, and Suburban Filth: The Portrayal of Maternal Abject in John Waters’ Cinema
Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

11. Fame! Fortune! Glamour! John Waters Remembers Midcentury TV
Hollis Griffin

12. An Audience with John Waters
Jane Giles

Part III. Interview

13. Interview with John Waters Conducted by Michelle E. Moore and Brian Brems at his Home in Baltimore, November 2 2023

Filmography

Selected Writing by John Waters

Bibliography

Index

About the contributors

Michelle E. Moore

Michelle E. Moore is Professor of English at the College of Dupage, where she teaches courses in film studies and literature. She is the author of Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald in Conflict (2019) and coeditor of Refocus: The Films of Paul Schrader (2020). She has published articles in Faulkner Studies, Cather Studies, and Literature/Film Quarterly, in addition to contributing chapters to Modernism in Wonderland: Legacies of Lewis Carroll, Rape in Art Cinema, and Hemingway in the Digital Age.

Brian Brems

Brian Brems is a Professor of English at the College of DuPage, where he teaches film studies. He is the author of The Films of Walter Hill: Another Time, Another Place (2022) and the co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader (2020), with other publications appearing in several edited collections on Westerns and horror films. He is also a regular contributor to a variety of online publications, including Vague Visages.

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