Since the 1990s, the expropriation of canonical works of cinema has been a fundamental dimension of art-film exploration. Rainer Werner Fassbinder provides an early model of open adaptation of film classics, followed ever more boldly by the Coen Brothers, Chantal Akerman, Alex Carax, Todd Haynes, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Baz Luhrmann, and Olivier Assayas. This book devotes chapters to each of these directors to examine how their films redeploy landmark precursors such as City Lights (1931), Citizen Kane (1941), Rome Open City (1945), All About Eve (1950), and Vertigo (1958) in order to probe our psychological, philosophical, and historical situations in a postmodern société du spectacle. In broadly diverse ways, each of these directors complicates received notions of the past and its representation, while probing the transformative media evolution and dislocation of the present, in film art and in society.

William H. Mooney is Professor of Film and Media at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) in New York City, USA, and Chairperson of the Film, Media, and Performing Arts department. Previous publications include Dashiell Hammett and the Movies (2014).

Introduction.- Part 1: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk.- Chapter 1: The Recreation of All that Heaven Allows as Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974).- Part 2: Derivations and Procedural Challenges.- Chapter 2. The Palimpsestuous Ghost of Rome Open City (1945) in The Lives of Others (2006).- Chapter 3. Clouds of Sils Maria and All about Eve: Adapting a Classic Paradigm.- Chapter 4. Leos Carax: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and City Lights.- Part 3: Nostalgic Adventures and Aesthetic Complications.- Chapter 5. Chantal Akerman in the Labyrinth of Desire: La Captive, Marcel Proust, and Vertigo.- Chapter 6. The Coen Brothers' Retrospective Foreboding.- Chapter 7. Baz Luhrmann's Outsized Ambition: The Great Gatsby and Citizen Kane.- Chapter 8. Conclusion.