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      • Robert Lecker Agency

        Robert Lecker Agency is a dynamic literary management and consulting firm devoted to securing and advancing the careers of its client authors. The Agency draws on 30 years of publishing experience to obtain profitable and fair contracts with North America’s fastest growing publishers. Robert Lecker has worked extensively in trade publishing and has an established track record as an editor, coordinator, and subsidiary rights manager. RLA specializes in books about entertainment, music, popular culture, popular science, intellectual and cultural history, food, and travel. However, we are open to any idea that is original and well presented. We are also receptive to books written by academics that can attract a broad range of readers.

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        The Arts
        October 2009

        Alain Resnais

        by Emma Wilson, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Alain Resnais, director of 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) and 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad' (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a concise account of critical discussions of his work in France and beyond. Yet it also offers a highly personal and detailed engagement with individual images and scenes in Resnais' films. A passionate and partial defence of Resnais' work, old and new, this volume stands apart in its attention to the more tangible and moving pleasures of his films, their pathos, rigour and visual beauty. ;

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        The Arts
        April 2007

        Henri-Georges Clouzot

        by Christopher Lloyd, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a film-maker, no full-length study of Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot's achievement, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les Diaboliques, Le Mystère Picasso). Clouzot's films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although his films are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his is an art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment. ;

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        The Arts
        August 2001

        Bertrand Blier

        by Sue Harris, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        The most complete study of Blier's work to date, Harris traces the director's career from the early 1960s until the present. Outlines the forms, themes and style which dominate in Blier's work, and challenges the many labels that have been used to describe both the corpus of films and the man himself. Provides an original and controversial discussion of Blier's alleged 'misogyny', and invites the reader to understand the scatological and corporeal aspects of Blier's filmmaking in terms of long-established traditions of popular dramatic culture. Brings to light the comic mechanisms underpinning Blier's films and identifies strategies which navigate through one of the most entertaining and disconcerting bodies of work of recent years. The first book on Blier published in English. ;

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        The Arts
        February 2007

        Mathieu Kassovitz

        by Will Higbee, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Mathieu Kassovitz is arguably the most important filmmaker to have emerged from French cinema in the past two decades. As a director, his work often engages with highly controversial socio-political issues whilst still managing to attract and connect with a popular audience - and, above all, with a youth audience. He is also one of the few contemporary French filmmakers who is capable of productively engaging with Hollywood, in terms of cinematic style, narrative and genre, yet still retaining his own identity as a French filmmaker. In addition to his directorial successes, Kassovitz has also achieved considerable critical and commercial success in France as a screen actor. His films - whether directed by or acted in, or both - show an astonishing variety, from his early Métisse (1993), his break-through, La Haine (1995) through to Jeunet's Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2000), Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopatre (2002) and Gothika (2003). Will Higbee's study is the first to explore of one of the most fascinating characters in French cinema. ;

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        The Arts
        November 2014

        Jacques Demy

        by Darren Waldron, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Saccharine for some, poignant for others, Jacques Demy's 'enchanted' world is familiar to generations of French audiences accustomed to watching Christmas repeats of his fairytale Peau d'âne (1970) or seeing Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac prance and pirouette in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). Demy achieved international recognition with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1963), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes. However, beneath the apparently sugary coating of his films lie more philosophical reflections on some of the most pressing issues that preoccupy Western societies, including affect, subjectivity, self/other relations and free will. This wide-ranging book addresses many of the key aspects of Demy's cinema, including his associations with the New Wave, his unique approach to musicals, his adaptations of fairytales, his representations of gender and sexuality and his legacy as an iconic director for generations of audiences and filmmakers. ;

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        The Arts
        June 2011

        Alain Robbe-Grillet

        by John Phillips, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Placing Robbe-Grillet's filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique. Ultimately, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet's contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged. ;

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        The Arts
        April 2010

        Jacques Rivette

        by Douglas Morrey, Diana Holmes, Alison Smith, Robert Ingram

        Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinéma team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet his work remains little-known in comparison with his contemporaries, and this study is the first in English to look at the full span of his career. Starting with his decisively influential film criticism of the 1950s, it moves from the New Wave through the complex, experimental films of the 1970s to the challenging, playful dramas which ensured his visibility during the following two decades, and ends in the present, including Rivette's most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007). The book takes a thematic approach, offering detailed discussion of key elements of Rivette's film world, including games, conspiracy and jealousy, as well as a study of what Rivette's cinema adds to our understanding of key theoretical concepts in Film Studies such as narrative, space and adaptation. There are many close analyses of sequences from Rivette's films including Paris nous appartient (1961), Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991). ;

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        The Arts
        January 2019

        Francois Truffaut

        by Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        First in a series designed to situate and explain the films of French directors. A concise, accessible and original reading of Truffaut's films. A timely evaluation of the films of a popular director whose work features on most A-level French syllabuses and on the majority of University French Studies programmes both in the UK and the USA .

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        The Arts
        January 2018

        Laurent Cantet

        by Martin O'Shaughnessy, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        Laurent Cantet is of one France's leading contemporary directors. In a series of important films, including Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South, The Class and Foxfire, he takes stock of the modern world from the workplace, through the schoolroom and the oppressive small town to the world of international sex tourism. His films drive the hidden forces that weigh on individuals and groups into view but also show characters who are capable of reflection and reaction. If the films make their protagonists rethink their place in the world, they also challenge the positions of the viewer and the director. This is what makes them so worthy of study. Combining a fine eye for detail with broad contextual awareness, this book gives an account of all Cantet's works, from the early short films to the major works. Martin O'Shaughnessy is a leading international writer on French cinema, especially in film and politics.

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        The Arts
        July 2012

        Negotiating the auteur

        Dominique Cabrera, Noémie Lvovsky, Laetitia Masson and Marion Vernoux

        by Julia Dobson, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

        This book provides the first detailed analysis of the work of four important contemporary directors whose work falls between the reductive labels of 'auteur cinema' and 'popular cinema'. Their work is contextualised within this timely investigation into the shifting relationship between the privileged status of the auteur and questions of genre, gender and cinematic production in France today. This important contribution to understanding the shifting landscapes of contemporary French film identifies an essential intermediacy in the films of these directors, which works to undo a series of dominant oppositions, generic template and contestation, public collectivity and personal intimacy, to offer a new perspective on the location of the political in contemporary French cinema. The four chapters provide detailed critical analysis of films by Dominique Cabrera, Laetitia Masson, Noémie Lvovsky and Marion Vernoux, and present common thread including the possible construction of social intimacy, the political demystification of romance narratives and the role of nostalgia, to argue that their work uses popular genres in order to challenge dominant cultural representation that resonates beyond the immediate parameters of contemporary French cinema. This book will be of interest to researchers working in French and European cinema, to students of Film Studies and French and Francophone Studies, and to film enthusiasts. ;

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