The main reason, incidentally, why I haven’t selected any collections in French by André Bazin or Serge Daney is the absence of any fully satisfying volume in the first case and too many possible candidates in the second. The Cave is the first work of film theory, and considerably more readable than most examples of the genre written since.

It’s a book of historiography, reviewing three major trends in understanding the history of film style: the orthodox position that emerged in the 1920s (and still governs most history-writing); a counter-position that emerged with André Bazin’s generation in France during the 1940s and 1950s; and a modernist wave that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, epitomized by the work of Noël Burch. After much internal debate, I’ve opted for this essential collection over the far heftier Farber on Film because this includes the lengthy and indispensable interview Farber and Patricia Patterson gave to Richard Thompson in 1977, whereas the other volume, even though it sports the almost accurate subtitle The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, contains only excerpts from it. Dan Brown avant la lettre for film buffs and those who tolerate their obsessions, Roszak’s novel is the best airport thriller ever, a passionate mythomanic celebration of cinema and its possible secret histories and, incidentally, a prescient forecast of the satanic-brat film-making generation of Gaspar Noé, Harmony Korine, Eli Roth et al. Two volumes of selected film criticism by two inspirational critics, from France and England respectively. Taking him as a director trying to fuse theory and practice, I analyze his theoretical writings and all of his films.Geoff Andrew , Michael Atkinson , Peter Biskind , Edward Buscombe , Michael Chanan , Tom Charity , Ian Christie , Michel Ciment , Kieron Corless , Mark Cousins , Paul Cronin , Chris Darke , Maria Delgado , Richard Dyer , Olaf Möller , Christoph Huber , Lizzie Francke , Philip French , Chris Fujiwara , Graham Fuller , Charlotte Garson , Tom Gunning , Philip Horne , Kevin Jackson , Nick James , Kent Jones , Richard T. S. books relied chiefly on films which had distribution here, forgetting that many outstanding films don’t get access to American audiences. Used books have different signs of use and might not include supplemental materials such as CDs, Dvds, Access Codes, charts or any other extra material.

Not at all professionally involved in film when I bought it, I wanted something to help a London art student get more out of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette. I would restrict my choice to the various editions (the fifth, I believe, is forthcoming) of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film. The best novel I know on the film-making process, set in the 1930s and dealing (as if from the experience of ‘Christopher’ himself) with the career of Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann, whose genius is thrillingly evoked.

Wiseman received permission to film at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, and he acted as sound recordist while his cameraman shot footage in the hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, and auditorium of the institution.

Creating a movie is no easy task and this goes double for monster movies with large CGI/VFX budgets. The fullpage paintings are also glorious and you’ll see a lot of side-by-side comparisons with film stills and the initial production designs. But the whole sweep of Russian cinema up to the years just after Stalin’s death are vividly chronicled by Leyda. Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, as elegantly written as it was groundbreaking, made semiotics exciting and revealed the political and wider aesthetic context of film.The first essay considers the extent to which films of the last thirty years or so have diverged from storytelling models formulated during Hollywood’s studio era. For example, most books didn’t use frame enlargements to illustrate the films but relied instead upon production stills. Leyda spent several years in the USSR in the mid-30s, studying at the world’s first film school, and assisting Eisenstein on his eventually banned film, Bezhin Meadow. This first collection by the most thoughtful, penetrating, and far-reaching of UK film critics ever remains scandalously overlooked and undervalued. By playing up the disparities among the film’s materials, the collage principle permits Makavejev to use film techniques and film form in fresh and provocative ways.

There was only a handful of books on the cinema when I and my contemporaries (now aged 70+) became cinephiles after World War II: Paul Rotha’s seminal The Film Till Now (1930 and never updated by its author); Alistair Cooke’s lively anthology of criticism, Garbo and the Night Watchmen; several theoretical works (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Spottiswoode, Balázs, Arnheim); some dull sociological studies; and Manvell’s Pelican paperback Film. I enjoyed this immensely, though largely because it seemed to me to explain why I didn’t really care much for Hitchcock. Burch has changed his position many times since 1967 (when the chapters first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma), but there is still much to excite in these pages.Film buffs may want to collect this as a piece of history and to dig into the production side of movies. I’ve put together this huge list of the best movie art books featuring the best that cinema art can offer. Sample observation: “Every habitual cinemagoer must have been struck at some time or another by the comparative slowness of perception and understanding of a person not accustomed to the pictures: the newcomer nearly always misses half of what occurs. Certainly not perfect for everyone but definitely worthwhile if you liked Oz or want to learn more about the production side of cinema. full sizeIt was inevitable, once my old friend Noël Carroll came to Madison’s philosophy department in 1991, that we’d wind up collaborating.