Cinema at the Margins

“Cinema at the Margins” is a collection that aims to highlight some of the lesser-known films and filmmakers of the past that are being marginalized and forgotten in today’s reductive popular memory of movie history.

More and more, just a few canonical classics, such as Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942) or Victor Fleming’s “Gone With The Wind” (1939), are representing the entire film output of an era, to a new generation that knows little of the past, and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal present. What will happen to the rest of the films that enchanted, informed and transported audiences in the 1930s, 1940s, and even as recently as the 1960s? This collection of essays aims to highlight some of the lesser-known treasures of the past – those titles that have been pushed aside by today’s wave of cinema amnesia.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; PART I. GENRE: 1. The Future Catches Up with the Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s “Targets”; 2. Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci; 3. “Flash Gordon” and the 1930s and ’40s Science Fiction Serial; 4. Just the Facts, Man: The Complicated Genesis of Television’s Dragnet; 5. The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky; PART II. HISTORY: 6. Fast Worker: The Films of Sam Newfield; 7. The Power of Resistance: “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne”; 8. Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema; 9. Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film; PART III. INTERVIEWS: 10. “Let the Sleepers Sleep and the Haters Hate”: An Interview with Dale “Rage” Resteghini; 11. “Margin Call”: An Interview with J. C. Chandor; 12. “All My Films Are Personal”: An Interview with Pat Jackson; 13. Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara; 14. Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals; 15. Pop Star, Director, Actor: An Interview with Michael Sarne; Works Cited and Consulted; About the Author; Index