The film company Merchant Ivory Productions, founded in 1961 by Ivory, Merchant and Jhabvala, is best known for its period pieces and the range of locations in which its movies have been shot: Delhi, Bombay, and Benares; London, Paris and Florence; New York, New England and Texas. Merchant Ivory films have been praised for their visual beauty, mature and intelligent themes, and the shrewd casting and fine acting from which they derive their unique power.
Ivory was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Direction for A Room with a View (1985), Howard's End (1992), and Remains of the Day (1993). He has also directed six different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Vanessa Redgrave, Denholm Elliot, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Hopkins.
Bio
James Ivory
James Ivory is an award-winning American film director, best known for the results of his long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, which included both Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Their films won six Academy Awards.
Adam Lowenstein
Adam Lowenstein works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, the construction of national cinemas, and the politics of spectatorship, with particular attention to American, British, Canadian, French, and Japanese cases.
He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005). His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Critical Quarterly, and Post Script, as well as the anthologies Hitchcock: Past and Future (ed. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzáles, 2004), Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, 2004) and British Cinema, Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, 2000). He is an interviewed scholar in The American Nightmare (2000), a documentary investigation of 1960's and 1970's American horror films directed by Adam Simon and co-produced by Colin MacCabe for The Independent Film Channel.
(born June 7, 1928, Berkeley, Calif., U.S.) U.S. film director. While directing a documentary on India in the 1960s, he met a local producer, Ismail N. Merchant (1936–2005), beginning cinema's longest-lasting partnership. They made several films written by Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala before their first international success, Shakespeare Wallah (1965). It was followed by a series of well-received adaptations of noted literary works, including The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1986, Academy Award), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993). Ivory's films were noted for their attention to period detail and excellent acting.
member. 
