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.
A collection of critical essays on Abel Ferrara, one of America’s most unorthodox and distinctive film directors.
Arvustused
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. * Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author 1000 Women in Horror (2020) and Ms. 45 (2017) * 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! * Yannis Tzioumakis, author of American Independent Cinema (2017) *
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. Ferraras 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 Ferraras 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 Cinemas
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
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 schreibenTransgression und avantgardistisches Erbe bei Kathy Acker, 2013) and William S. Burroughs (Control Machines und DispositiveEine 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.
