Another Steven Soderbergh Experience

Cover

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p. c-c

Title Page, Copyright Page

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pp. i-vi

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-x

Like Soderbergh’s work, this book represents a collaboration with many talented and generous people. Thanks to my irreplaceable colleagues in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham, in particular Paul Grainge, Roberta Pearson, Julian Stringer, Luke Robinson, Gianluca Sergi, and Paul McDonald. Many ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-16

Across his nearly thirty-year career as a screen-industry professional, dynamic figures in the U.S. film industry, a prolific director and produc-er of blockbuster entertainments, idiosyncratic art films, low-budget video experiments, and television series. We can see the characteristic diversity of his work by bracketing an interval of his career. For the ...

Part One. Soderbergh and American Cinema

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pp. 17-18

1. Sex, Lies, and Independent Film

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pp. 19-44

The success of sex, lies, and videotape at the Cannes and U.S. (a.k.a. Sundance) film festivals and in commercial release earned Soderbergh indelible associations with the discourses and institutions of U.S. independent cinema on a global stage. Measured in terms of commer-cial visibility, Soderbergh’s career floundered for much of the 1990s. ...

2. Hollywood Authorship and Transhistorical Taste Cultures

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pp. 45-72

Through investigation of Soderbergh’s 1990s activity, the preceding porary filmmakers who gesture toward historical eras and modes to articulate their creative sensibilities and mobilize interest in their work. Some filmmakers gravitate repeatedly to particular movements and modes, as evident, for example, in Peter Bogdanovich’s multiple ...

Part Two. Authoring and Authorization

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pp. 73-74

3. Authorial Practice, Collaboration, and Location Production

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pp. 75-108

While forging artistic affiliations with a range of historical forebears in U.S. and global cinema, Soderbergh has since early in his career sought to maintain professional partnerships with many of his contemporaries as well. In Soderbergh’s work world, as other chapters of this book demonstrate, discursive affiliations repeatedly evolve into collabora-...

4. Critical Reception and the Soderbergh Imprint

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pp. 109-134

To better understand the many voices involved in the manufacture of film authorship, this chapter interrogates a sample of critical reception of Soderbergh’s directorial efforts, focusing on four features released from 2006 to 2009 that bridge numerous production, textual, and exhibition categories. While film studies has identified the role ...

Part Three. Soderbergh and Textuality

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pp. 135-136

5. Reading Soderbergh: Textuality and Representation

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pp. 137-167

This book thus far has sought to distinguish responsibilities for par- ticular creative tasks in films directed by Soderbergh and to map the construction of his wider authorial profile across film texts and surrounding film-cultural discourses. Many viewers are drawn to Soderbergh’s films for their textual features, particularly those features ...

6. Intertextual Conversations: Genre, Adaptations, and Remakes

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pp. 168-194

Soderbergh’s many adaptations of novels and other preexisting texts, as well as his direction of numerous remakes of earlier Hollywood and international films, represent a core component of his diffuse artistic imprint. His diverse creative work in screen and print media consti-tutes a series of dialogues—with collaborators on particular screen ...

Part Four. Soderbergh and Screen Industries

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pp. 195-196

7. Soderbergh and Television

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pp. 197-212

Following on from the intertextual contexts of Soderbergh-directed feature films, this chapter examines his limited work on television series, a format routinely distinguished from cinema in its textual characteristics and mode of authorship. Soderbergh’s work in television affords the opportunity to consider a different range of critical issues. The ...

8. Boutique Cinema, Section Eight, and DVD

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pp. 213-234

As argued in the previous chapter, Soderbergh’s television work further exemplifies a creative practice attuned to topical discourses such as politics and current events as well as to formal experimentation in the parafictional mode. The execution of this creative sensibility involves a range of practitioners across different projects. The output, mean-...

Conclusion

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pp. 235-248

Between 2009 and 2011, interviews with Soderbergh and some collaborators suggested that he would soon retire from filmmaking. “I feel like I’ll hit the ceiling of my imagination,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, on the eve of the release of The Girlfriend Experience.1 At the end of 2010, interviewed during production of the Soderbergh-directed Contagion, Matt Damon discussed Soderbergh’s ...

Appendix. Interview with Steven Soderbergh: New York City, Saturday, July 23, 2011

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pp. 249-278

Notes

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pp. 279-299

Bibliography

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pp. 300-317

Index

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pp. 318-326