In 1958, Suzuki Seitar? was a 35-year-old, lower-ranking, critically unrec-ognized contract director at Nikkatsu studios, despite the fact that he had already made fifteen feature-length program pictures. When he changed his professional name from “Suzuki Seitar?,” his birth name, to the more flamboyant “Suzuki Seijun,” no one in the press or film industry seems to …
In fact, Oliver Stone’s career was never as outrageously conten-tious as this when it started, neither was it even at the putative height of his artistic and commercial powers in the decade that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. From unlikely writ-ing credits for The Hand (1981), which he also directed, Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 198…
Existing fi lm scholarship that draws from the fi eld of cognitive science has char-acterized commercial fi lmmakers as practical psychologists, who are experts at shaping our senses and ‘preying (usually in a good sense) on our habits of mind in order to produce experiences’ (Bordwell 2011). A skilled fi lmmaker will elicit emotional responses, draw the viewer’s attention to the appropri…