This long-awaited comprehensive monograph on James Nares brings together his paintings and films. Upon his arrival in New York in 1974, British-born James Nares became a central member of the city's vibrant No Wave art scene, making experimental Super 8 films, playing in downtown bands, and staging live performances. The following decade, he turned to painting, using handmade brushes to create monumental strokes that are almost three-dimensional in their detail and depth. Today, Nares continues to employ the mediums of film and paint to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time, as seen in his 2011 video Street, exhibited to great acclaim at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This definitive monograph, produced in close collaboration with the artist, surveys the entirety of Nares's career. Lushly illustrated, including paintings, photographs, and stills that have never before been published, the book features essays by leading film critic Amy Taubin, cultural writer Glenn O'Brien, and innovative film curator Ed Halter in addition to an illuminating conversation between Nares and longtime friend and fellow artist Christopher Wool.

James Nares

Arts & Photography

Halter, Ed

Taubin, Amy

O´Brien, Glenn

History & Criticism

Skira/Rizzoli

Taxi Driver made Martin Scorsese's reputation as a director. This book provides a personal commentary on the film, a brief production history and a detailed filmography. In the "BFI Film Classics" series.

Taxi Driver (BFI Film Classics)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

British Film Institute

Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace: the story was the germ of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976). Executives at Columbia hated the script, but when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who were flying high after the triumphs of Mean Streets (1973) and The Godfather Part II (1974), signed up, Taxi Driver became too good a package to refuse.
Scorsese transformed the script into what is now considered one of the two or three definitive films of the 1970s. De Niro is mesmerising as Travis Bickle – pent-up, bigoted, steadily slipping into psychosis, the personification of American masculinity post-Vietnam. Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster give fine support and Scorsese brought in Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of film composers, to write what turned out to be his last score. Crucially, Scorsese rooted Taxi Driver in its New York locations, tuning the film's violence into the hard reality of the city. Technically thrilling though it is, Taxi Driver is profoundly disturbing – finding, as Amy Taubin shows, racism, misogyny and gun fetishism at the heart of American culture.
In her foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Amy Taubin considers Taxi Driver anew in the context of contemporary politics of race and masculinity in the US, and draws on an exclusive interview with Robert De Niro about his memories of making the film.

Photography & Video

Having entered the New York underground in the 1960s while still a teenager, filmmaker Barbara Rubin (1945–80) quickly became one of its key figures. Her pioneering 1963 double-projection film Christmas on Earth, featuring painted and masked performers engaging in a variety of gay and straight sexual acts, was both aesthetically innovative and sexually provocative. She worked regularly with Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, introduced Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg, and connected Warhol with The Velvet Underground. During an intense period of activity and travel, Rubin wrote passionate letters about film and the underground to Mekas.This special 80th issue of the magazine Film Culture features her previously unpublished letters to Mekas. It also includes interviews and Rubin's script, Christmas on Earth Continued, a planned sequel to her notorious film.

Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin

SMITH, Chuck

Foreman, Richard

Siegel, Marc

Rubin, Barbara

Mekas, Jonas

König, Anne

Cavanaugh, John

Osterweil, Ara

Coleman, Charity

Hiller, Christian

Mekas, Sebastian

Myron, Sarai

Spector Books

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