The Many Lives of a Filmmaker: Approaching Abel Ferrara

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the edited volume ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara, offering a critical survey of Ferrara’s diverse and unconventional career as a filmmaker. It outlines the thematic, stylistic, and industrial trajectories that have shaped Ferrara’s work over more than four decades—ranging from his beginnings in exploitation cinema, through his rise as a key figure in American independent film, to his current position as a transnational auteur regularly featured at major international festivals. Rather than presenting a linear biography, the chapter frames Ferrara’s oeuvre as a series of intersecting artistic lives, shaped by shifting contexts, recurrent collaborations, and an ongoing negotiation between marginality and mainstream visibility. It situates his films within broader debates around genre, authorship, and reception, and addresses the ethical and philosophical questions that underpin his work. By offering this overview, the chapter provides both historical grounding and conceptual orientation for the essays that follow, which explore Ferrara’s cinema through lenses such as gender, genre, spirituality, and authorship.