Wallflower Press The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Directors' Cuts)

The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves. Review [An] excellent book on this maverick, shape-shifting filmmaker.... Immaculately researched and illustrated with frame blowups throughout the text, the volume is an important contribution to the field.... Highly recommended.--Choice About the Author Tom Schatz is a Professor and Chair of the department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas. His books include Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (McGraw Hill, 1981) and The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minnesota 2010).