Offers the first comprehensive academic text to explore Paul Schrader’s film career through analysis of his directing, screenwriting, and film criticism
Contains a chapter-length interview, in which Schrader examines the arc of his career for the first time and revises previous statements about filmmaking and film criticismProvides a valuable update to previous texts on SchraderConsiders Schrader’s overlooked films and provides new insight into their connections with Schrader’s better known filmsContains chapters on Schrader’s work since 2008, the publication date of the last book on his filmmakingPaul Schrader’s unique relationship to the role of the author (as screenwriter, director and critic) has long informed his cinema, and raises complicated questions about the definition of the auteur. This volume of essays – one of the first collections to assess Schrader’s contributions to directing, screenwriting and criticism – includes the first original appraisals of his much-lauded masterpiece First Reformed (2017), as well as a chapter-length interview with Schrader himself, conducted by the editors.
Providing a comprehensive exploration of his groundbreaking achievements in cinema, the book considers Schrader’s more overlooked films and provides new insights to their connection with his celebrated work in direction and screenwriting such as Taxi Driver (1976), Cat People (1982) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990).
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 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.
