ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara

by Florian Zappe (Editor)

Overview

Over his four-decade long career, Abel Ferrara has built himself a reputation as one of the most audacious and unconventional filmmakers in contemporary cinema. After his beginnings in the exploitation circuit of the late 1970s he become one of the central figures in the indie wave of the 1980s and 90s and is now an established arthouse director whose versatile oeuvre crosses the boundaries of cult, independent and Hollywood cinema.

ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara offers a comprehensive critical survey of the director’s work. The volume brings together a broad range of methodological, theoretical, historical and philosophical perspectives on Ferrara’s work, and case studies include Ms 45, The Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant, Pasolini and Welcome to New York.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399520096
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2024
Series:	ReFocus: The American Directors Series
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Florian Zappe is a Berlin-based scholar and academic who works in interdisciplinary borderland between literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy. He is the author of books on Kathy Acker (Das Zwischen schreiben—Transgression und avantgardistisches Erbe bei Kathy Acker, 2013) and William S. Burroughs (‘Control Machines’ und ‘Dispositive’—Eine foucaultsche Analyse der Machtstrukturen im Romanwerk von William S. Burroughs zwischen 1959 und 1968, 2008), as well as the co-editor of the essay collections The American Weird: Concept and Medium (2020), Surveillance | Society | Culture (2020) and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (2019). In addition to that, he has published widely on literary and visual culture.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Notes on the Contributors

1. The Many Lives of a Filmmaker: Approaching Abel Ferrara
Florian Zappe

Part I: Art and Authorship

2. The Driller Killer: Artistic Precarity in the Downtown Scene
Gillian McIver

3. Ferrara’s Polarising Critical Reception: Clarity, Coherence, and Incongruity
Matthew Cipa, Ted Nannicelli and Joel Fantini

4. Abel Ferrara, Film Genres and Independent Film: From Horror to Gangsters
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

5. Falling in Love Without Falling in Love: Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel
Steven Shaviro

6. Gestures of Refusal: Abel Ferrara, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Ethos of Authenticity
Florian Zappe

Part II: Sex and Gender

7. The Horny Auteur: Abel Ferrara's Pornographic Debut
Joshua Heaps

8. Embodied Critiques: Welcome to New York, Sexual Crimes, and Cinema’s Unanswerability
Todd Jurgess

Part III: The Sacred and the Profane

9. “What Was She Doing on My Show?”: Abel Ferrara's Mary
Brad Stevens

10. The Italian American Provocateur: Catholicism, Women, and Sexual Violence in the Films of Abel Ferrara
Margherita Sprio

11. Dionysian Acts, Apollonian Pacts: The Anti-Nietzschean Cinema of Abel Ferrara
Amin Haidari

Index

Editorial Reviews

From his pervasive engagement with a signature set of themes and tropes to the multifaceted nature of his own enigmatic public persona, this essential collection dives deep into the strangely captivating cinematic worlds of Abel Ferrara, one of the most complex and consistently fascinating filmmakers of the past half century.

author 1000 Women in Horror (2020) and Ms. 45 (201 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

It's about time for Abel Ferrara to have received the 'ReFocus' treatment. Under the assured editorship of Florian Zappe, a diverse group of established and emerging scholars have done a brilliant job in scrutinising Ferrara's extensive filmography from a multitude of perspectives and making a strong argument about why he is one of the most important and interesting US filmmakers of the past 50 years!

author of American Independent Cinema (2017) Yannis Tzioumakis