Blossoms & Blood

This analysis of the films of P. T. Anderson is “a case study of how even the most self-determined directors are always borne aloft by cultural events” (Cineaste).

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.

Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

“Jason Sperb is not a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s something much better—an intelligent critic trying to discern what’s valuable and what’s not in Anderson’s body of cinematic work.” ―Milwaukee Express

“Sperb has complete mastery of the critical and industrial histories of the films.” —Choice