21-23

Ronald Bergan

This fully updated edition of the first biography of the Coen Brothers includes their complete work so far, from Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), with a reassessment of their remarkable career as a whole. Joel and Ethan Coen have pulled off the ultimate balancing act. Despite having their movies financed and distributed by major studios, they have managed to remain true independents, rejecting commercial clichés and never giving up on their own fiercely idiosyncratic vision. While doing so, they have established themselves among the world's leading filmmakers.

From their startling debut, Blood Simple (1984), all of their movies reveal a distinctive stamp: a flamboyant visual style, richly conceived characters, crisp dialogue, and brilliant casting. They have revitalized old Hollywood genres such as noir, screwball, and the western, giving them a contemporary sensibility. In this biography, Ronald Bergan traces the brothers' Jewish roots, their beginnings as film geeks in suburban Minneapolis, their battle to get their first feature made and released, through their early features and the movies of their maturity. He gives blow-by-blow accounts of the making of each movie. New chapters cover all those released since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), with which the first edition of this book ended.

Ronald Bergan

The French New Wave was one of the most seismic events in cinema\'s history, and among its contributors François Truffaut (1932-1984) was a key figure. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and others, Truffaut helped to form the New Wave\'s aesthetics and vision and was the first to conceptualize the auteur theory. He made films that reflected his three professed passions: a love of cinema, an interest in the difficulties of male-female relationships, and a fascination with the problems of children.

As this collection of interviews progresses, we follow Truffaut\'s creative evolution almost as much as we follow his alter-ego Antoine Doinel (actor Jean-Pierre Léaud) through Truffaut\'s semi-autobiographical series that begins with his first feature The 400 Blows (1959) and ends with Love on the Run (1978).

Truffaut, a perceptive film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a director, was able to be objective about his own and other people\'s films. Always concerned with the process as well as the product of his profession, Truffaut maintained his role as critic and commentator throughout his career and remained equally as good an interviewer as an interviewee.

Ronald Bergan is the author of several books on film, including biographies of directors Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Coen brothers.