The Cinema Of Paul Thomas Anderson
American Apocrypha
Ethan Warren
"This volume will provide a comprehensive critical study of all of Paul Thomas Anderson's feature films, from Hard Eight (1996) to Licorice Pizza (2021), as well as his under-studied short films and music videos. As a filmmaker who came into prominence at the height of the Tarantino-driven Indiewood period, in which major studios gave unprecedented creative freedom to young dir...
Synopsis
"This volume will provide a comprehensive critical study of all of Paul Thomas Anderson's feature films, from Hard Eight (1996) to Licorice Pizza (2021), as well as his under-studied short films and music videos. As a filmmaker who came into prominence at the height of the Tarantino-driven Indiewood period, in which major studios gave unprecedented creative freedom to young directors, Anderson began his career as something of an enfant terrible, a defiant self-anointed auteur who wore his influences on his sleeve with such overstuffed epics as Boogie Nights and Magnolia. As Ethan Warren argues, however, Anderson's maximalist ethos eventual gave way to a more restrained period, in which both his directorial choices (such as camera movement, shot selection, and editing choices) and his characters abruptly switched from the earlier logorrheal mode to one much more restrained. Most recently, Warren sees Anderson as entering a new phases of his career in which elements of both postmodern intensified style and a more classical restraint are combined to plumb greater artist depths than Anderson was able to reach before. Warren covers these three periods of Anderson's career thematically, focusing on key areas of interest, such as the role of place (specifically Anderson's native San Fernando valley), the hyper-masculine conflicts that frequently drive his narratives, and on the director's repeated simplifications and surface-level engagement with history. Interspersed with these critical chapters are ones that deal with other aspects of Anderson's career, including an analysis of his screenwriting methods through readings of early and unpublished or unproduced drafts of his screenplays; his career as a music video director for Fiona Apple and Haim; and a technical analysis of his consistent use of filmic alienation effects"-
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