Exile Cinema

Book excerpt: Outside the shrinking American film-culture market there is a vast movie-crazed world where madmen, geniuses, and apostates roam freely, subject to a relatively minimal degree of corporate industry and spin control. In Exile Cinema, prominent film critics profile the oeuvres of working, thriving international filmmakers—from Bela Tarr to Judith Helfand, from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Guy Maddin to Chantal Akerman and Michele Soavi, from Chris Marker to the newest thresholds of contemporary film. These filmmakers battle the greatest odds a modern artist can face: the opposition of mass culture at large and a medium that requires enormous expenditures in every stage of production and distribution. Naturally, the average American moviehead rarely gets a chance to see these marginalized directors' work and often knows about them only through dazzled rumors and rhapsodic hearsay. Whimsical and deeply subjective, the viewpoints and evangelisms in Exile Cinema will serve as salve for the cineaste's lonesome fury.