Kathryn Bigelow. border crossing
by Jérôme d'Estais
Publisher : Deep Red (February 2020)
Language : French
Number of pages : 203 pages
The controversy that accompanied the 2017 release of Detroit in the United States is part of the successive waves of successes and failures, scandals and consecrations that have, for more than forty years, swept the career of Kathryn Bigelow, major filmmaker and yet poorly identified by the press and the public. No doubt because it is both popular and avant-garde, classical as well as experimental, post-feminist and political. By redrawing through ten films (among them, At the borders of dawn , Point Break , Blue Steel , Strange Days , Zero Dark Thirty ) the ethical, physical and sexual borders, the limits between life and death, reality and virtuality, Bigelow blew up film genres. His cinema, dedicated to American nightmares, is by turns claustrophobic and liberating, frontal and visceral, between fresco and spectacle, hyperrealism and abstraction, intimate and collective. This lavishly illustrated French book is the first to focus on the full work of the only director to date to win an Oscar (in 2010 for Minesweepers ).