Jerry Lewis

An American Dream; A Structural Cinema; The Performance of Identity; Saying No to No; Oedipus Is No Problem; How to Undo Things with Words; Lewisian Space; The Frame and Its Obstructions; Lewisian Time; Sound; The Total Filmmaker; An Interview with Jerry Lewis; Filmography; Bibliography; Index

''Absolutely brilliant. Fujiwara powerfully gives body and coherence to Lewis's work with identity, image, sound, space, and time, and the interview with Lewis is pure gold: the finest and most probing interview with the director I have ever read in any language.'' Adrian Martin, coeditor of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia ''...Fujiwara notes that, rather than improving his reputation in the United States, the effect of Lewis' growing standing and popularity in France was to make him a figure of mockery, the subject of ''countless lazy and patronising jokes [...] gibes whose ideological nature has become unmistakeable and more obnoxious than ever in a period of U.S. history that has witnessed the rebranding of Freedom Fries''... Identity is the subject of the largest section, revealing a complicating factor in how Fujiwara has approached Lewis' films. He demonstrates that they are often intensely personal in their protagonists' quests for a sense of belonging and purpose. In raising the question of the separation of textual meaning from biographical meaning, he underlines the importance of the concise treatment of biographical details in the introduction.'' - Adam Jones, Scope, Issue 24, October 2012