Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films

Filmmakers and cinema industries across the globe invest more time, money and creative energy in projects and ideas that never get produced than in the movies that actually make it to the screens. Thousands of projects are abandoned in pre-production, halted, cut short, or even made and never distributed – a “shadow cinema” that exists only in the archives. This collection of essays by leading scholars and researchers opens those archives to draw on a wealth of previously unexamined scripts, correspondence and production material, reconstructing many of the hidden histories of the last hundred years of world cinema. Highlighting the fact that the movies we see are actually the exception to the rule, this study uncovers the myriad reasons why ‘failures’ occur and considers how understanding those failures can transform the disciplines of film and media history. The first survey of this new area of empirical study across transnational borders, Shadow Cinema is a vital and fascinating demonstration of the importance of the unmade, unseen, and unknown history of cinema.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Producers and production companies 1. A production strategy of overdevelopment: Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions and the unproduced Viva Gringo! James Fenwick 2. Gone with the winds that never were: The David O. Selznick Archive and unmade historical cinema David Eldridge 3. Parting the Iron Curtain: Michael Klinger’s attempt to make A Man and a Half Andrew Spicer Part II: Directors and auteurs 4. Unfinished business: Godard, cinema and theatre in the 1960s Michael Witt 5. Ken Russell’s unfinished projects and unmade films, 1956-1968: The BBC years Matthew Melia 6. Ghatak in the shadows: Films that struggled Sanghita Sen Part III: Questioning the unmade 7. Herding Cats; or, the possibilities of unproduction studies Peter C. Kunze 8. Assembling Frankenstein Kieran Foster 9. Burning bright: Samuel Fuller’s Tigrero and accidental ethnography Andrew Howe 10. Clouzot’s L’Enfer Lucy Mazdon 11. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its shadow: Rescue and resistance Sue Vice Part IV: Reconstructing the unmade 12. The never Alice: Marilyn Manson, gothic girlhoods, and Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 13. The movie producer, the feminists and the serial killer: UK feminist activism, misogynist 70s film culture and the (non) filming of the Yorkshire Ripper Murders Hannah Hamad 14. The unmade undead: A post-mortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle Todd K. Platts Index

About the Author :
James Fenwick is a senior lecturer in Media and Communications at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020) and Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021). Kieran Foster is an AHRC funded PhD student at De Montfort University, UK. His research focuses on the British Company Hammer’s Films unmade projects. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, with an piece on Hammer’s failed adaptation Vlad the Impaler appearing in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. David Eldridge is a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull, UK. He is the author of Hollywood’s History Films (2008) and is currently working on a monograph concerning the impact that censorship has had on the American film industry’s representations of the past.

Review :
This important volume will help to consolidate a rapidly growing area of research in Film Studies and related disciplines. The authors do not only provide outlines of individual films that could have been, but, more fundamentally, investigate the financial, legal, creative, political and logistical difficulties of getting films into production and onto screens. Their chapters deal, often in a wholly surprising manner, with familiar names (ranging from David O’Selznick and Hammer Films to Jean-Luc Godard and Ritwik Ghatak) and also with a wealth of lesser known personnel and companies.