Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood - Hardcover

Gallagher, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292744218 ISBN 13: 9780292744219

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2013

Synopsis

How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh's career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate. Gallagher investigates Soderbergh's work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant!, as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh's role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989's sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.

About this title

Review:

"Gallagher challenges the very methods and ways by which we write, discuss, and think about cinema. In holding Soderbergh up as the preeminent figure for this type of study from contemporary Hollywood, he's also sacrificing the director's auteur status...these efforts also thrillingly problematize that relationship between author and subject, made all the more exhilarating by an interview between the two as the book's coda, which is the most compelling interview (online or print) I've read in 2013."--Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine

About the Author:

Mark Gallagher is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the Department of Culture, Film, and Media at the University of Nottingham and the author of Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives. He is also coeditor of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0292744218
• ISBN 13: 9780292744219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 334