A Critical Companion to David Fincher Francis Mickus 9781666939569

The thirteen chapters in this collection analyze David Fincher's development as a filmmaker, from television commercials and music videos to serving as front runner on the series Mindhunter. The contributors explore a variety of characteristics, including Fincher's attitudes toward his audiences, his attention to detail, his Gothic sense of evil, his modernization of film noir, and his reinvention of the serial killer. The diversity of approaches highlights the paradoxes of Fincher's films and style, accentuating the tensions between his innovative methods and storytelling and unpacking the perennial questions of love, life, and death that his films raise. Scholars of film, television, and media will find this book especially salient.

Francis Mickus is a doctoral candidate in history at the Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University.

A Critical Companion to David Fincher captures all the ways in which Fincher's work is interesting and important. Among the book's many strengths, it shows us a variety of methodologies at their best, from art history through fan studies, production histories, genre analysis and up-close textual readings. Showcasing the innovative work of young scholars, this volume maps the full range of Fincher studies and moves the field forward in exciting ways.

A Critical Companion to David Fincher, edited by Francis Mickus, offers a fascinating perspective on the work of one of the most emblematic filmmakers of our time. The multi-disciplinary approaches to the filmmaker's visual aesthetics, his cinematic sources of inspiration, his relationship to genre cinema and technology, his philosophical and moral stance on the representation of evil and violence... provide a comprehensive overview of how David Fincher's cinema questions the nature of cinema in its relationship to reality.