The Best Books About Film

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Gary Tooze
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#1 Post by Gary Tooze » Mon Dec 20, 2004 3:18 am

At DVDBeaver we have started a 'library' listing many of the books mentioned here... and others... (Amazon links - click on the covers)

Best,
Gary

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davida2
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#2 Post by davida2 » Thu Dec 23, 2004 3:27 am

Satyajit Ray Our Films Their Films, published by Hyperion in the US - it's an excellent anthology of his criticism, along with some journal/work notes - tons of very rigorous commentary on Bollywood, along with very insightful pieces on Kurosawa, Italian neo-realism, Truffaut, French new-wave, Chaplin and others...

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oldsheperd
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#3 Post by oldsheperd » Thu Dec 23, 2004 1:58 pm

Movie Made America by Robert Sklar
Savage Cinema by Stephen Prince
Scorsese on Scorsese

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ando
Bringing Out El Duende
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#4 Post by ando » Wed Dec 29, 2004 5:36 pm

Hollywood voices; interviews with film directors by Andrew Sarris

It's the best collection of film interviews (with some of the greatest directors) that I've ever read. It's also out of print but used copies are out there.

ando

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the dancing kid
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#5 Post by the dancing kid » Wed Dec 29, 2004 9:11 pm

I'm a big fan of Robin Wood's Hollywood: from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond. Maybe it's just because I share his interest in unappreciated films, eras and genres, but I found a lot of really interesting insights within the pages, and it even changed my opinion a few films and directors. There's some great stuff about Romero (particularly Day of the Dead), De Palma and Cohen, and even though he's pretty rough on Fincher, I somehow gained a new interest in his films from reading Wood's interpretations.

filmfan
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#6 Post by filmfan » Thu Dec 30, 2004 4:03 pm

Just found a softcover copy of "The Parade's Gone By" by Kevin Brownlow ! INCREDIBLE book about early Film history all over the world.

Another find was the excellent and very out of print "WC Fields By Himself". It's a collection of letters script extracts, memorabilia all held together by actual segments of an unpublished autobiography written by Fields himself...about himself. Even those who don't like Fields will love this book.

Picked up "John Ford..The Complete Films" edited by Scott Eyman and Paul Duncan (Tascen, Gmbh).

It's one of those picture books and I was pleasantly surprised by the great attention to detail, thougtfulness, and LOTS of rare pictures, some of them behind the camera and in color. Top shelf for $19.99 and ESSENTIAL !

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Cobalt60
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#7 Post by Cobalt60 » Wed Jun 08, 2005 9:26 am

filmfan wrote:Just found a softcover copy of "The Parade's Gone By" by Kevin Brownlow ! INCREDIBLE book about early Film history all over the world.
I whole wholeheartedly agree with your mention of "The Parades Gone By". Its the most interesting book on silent film that I've yet read. Since it was written in 1963 (I think) most of the interviews where done specifically for that book. There are also something like 600 pictures. The only think it lacked for me was that it didn't feature anything on silent horror.

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GringoTex
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#8 Post by GringoTex » Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:00 pm

I've mentioned this book elsewhere on the forum and will do so again: there is a correct away of analyzing film form and it's detailed in David Bordwell's "On the History of Film Style."

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King of Kong
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#9 Post by King of Kong » Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:25 pm

David Bordwell and (his wife) Kristin Thompson's Film History: An Introduction has been my bible for all things cinema for quite some time. It is pricey - but worth every cent.

yoshimori
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#10 Post by yoshimori » Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:27 pm

Barry Salt, Film Style & Technology: History & Analysis. Bordwell + rigor, clarity, and encyclopedic detail.

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Steven H
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#11 Post by Steven H » Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:52 pm

King of Kong wrote:David Bordwell and (his wife) Kristin Thompson's Film History: An Introduction has been my bible for all things cinema for quite some time. It is pricey - but worth every cent.
It's not pricey. Just get a non-current edition for ten bucks. Bordwell's new Figures Traced in Light is definitely worth $26 for you Mizoguchi/Angelopolous/Hou/Feuillade fans (he covers many more filmmakers.) The annotations alone are more incisive and interesting than most books you'll find. His book on Ozu is indispensable (though pricey, I found one in a local library and photocopied pages a little at a time til I got through it, saved $70 though.)

David Desser's Eros Plus Massacre is flat out *great*. Interesting commentary on the Japanese New Wave (and when it strays from that topic it's just as interesting.)

Cassavettes on Cassavettes is a good read as well (there's a lot of bowtied Carney filler though.) Bfi's L'argent, by Kent Jones and the Cinemateque Ontario book edited by Quandt about Bresson is easily the most comprehensive written about one of the world's best directors. Cook's Narrative History of Film is great and I managed to read the whole thing... twice. Its like an unedited film bible.

My question is what's the best Film magazine? I'm leading towards Film Quarterly, but Film Comment has some great pieces on completely unheard of directors, and is bi-monthly compared to the former. Paste *can* have a decent film section, but most of it seems like filler to me. I wish Cahiers du cinema was translated to english...

Anonymous

#12 Post by Anonymous » Fri Jun 10, 2005 1:46 am

Any recommendations for critical books on Scorsese, other than the following:

Scorsese on Scorsese
The Cinema of Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver: BFI

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Godot
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#13 Post by Godot » Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:33 am

Steven wrote:My question is what's the best Film magazine?

This is always an interesting topic for me. I think it depends on the editorial board, their focus, the writers they employ, and these all change over time. For example, I enjoyed many of the Richard Corliss-era Film Comment issues, which were broad enough in scope to cover Hitchcock and Hawks alongside features on Joe Bob Briggs and MST3K. Although Gavin Smith's current run is noticeably more global in tone, I find a great deal of interest and learn something in every issue I read (plus they still allow for occasional lowbrow articles like Kevin Smith's take on the new Star Wars episodes). Sight and Sound is wildly uneven but very entertaining when it's a topic I appreciate (Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick, Fight Club, Kiarostami). I don't understand many of the Film Quarterly issues, but I was not a film student (caveat emptor). Literature and Film Quarterly is usually way over my head, but they have had a few articles in the last few years that particularly enlightened me. My two favorite current periodicals would be Cineaste and CineAction (Robin Wood's Canadian 3-per-year magazine).

I happened to shop for new issues today, leaving behind Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound (no interest in any of the articles or writers) while picking up Film Comment (J.Hoberman on Schwartzenegger, K.Jones on Sarris, R.Combs on Michael Powell), Cineaste (Fujiwara on Testament of Dr. Mabuse, book reviews on film noir and Orson Welles, DVD reviews of Boris Barnet and Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe), and CineAction (A.I., Metropolis, Big Sleep, Topaz, music in Renoir).

As a final note, I found this interesting in Wood's editorial "Questions of Value" in the current CineAction Issue 66:
I intended a challenge to what has been for the past few decades the dominant modes and concerns of academic film study, specifically its overwhelming emphasis on theory. I believe that our primary concern should be with the specific work, its meaning, the kind and degree of its achievement, its place within the history of our culture, in short its value. If theory can help us towards this end, well and good, but it should accept its role as relatively humble and supportive. One consequence of its dominance has been in my view disastrous: it has been responsible for finally destroying the always precarious continuity between academia and a more general readership, a wider public with a serious interest in the arts and specifically in film. In effect it has left criticism to the weekly reviewers.

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Jun-Dai
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#14 Post by Jun-Dai » Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:44 am

I've yet to find a film magazine that I've liked. The only one I've ever subscribed to, AC, has gone steadily downhill, and is now pretty much nothing but a Hollywood promotion rag (not that it has been terrible much more than that for as long as I've known it). Occasionally interesting from a technical perspective, it treats Tomb Raider, any TV miniseries, and Wong Kar-Wai with the same sort of reverence, as though each was a great film. Occasionally I like articles in Sight & Sound.

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Andre Jurieu
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#15 Post by Andre Jurieu » Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:12 pm

Over the past year, I've found I visit the Bright Lights Film Journal site with less frequency, and it's somewhat due to the fact that I don't care to suffer through any more of Vanneman's writing. He's far too deliberately dismissive of everything and it often feels as if he's writing just to make the most crude and juvenile comments.

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duane hall
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#16 Post by duane hall » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:36 pm

In response to Godot's incitement of discussion on that Robin Wood snippet...

Discussing specific works is great, but I feel that such discussions should be a jumping off point for examining more pervasive cultural issues. Some theory is necessary to elucidate the ways in which a particular film acts on the viewer as a piece of media in today’s culture. And the latter dynamic is, to me, the most important element we can consider. I want accessible analysis of works of art to be a means of discussing theories of culture and mediation. Yes, aesthetics has consistently been the prime criterion for analysis, but the cultural urgency I feel is now preventing me from simply being able to immerse myself in total aesthetic (Tarantino, for instance) without regarding the cultural value of my act. (Yes, I’m kind of going crazy.)

I haven’t read a ton of theory, film or otherwise, but from the general pulse I gather that a kind of scholarly gamesmanship reigns supreme, eliminating most of the critic’s regard for that more general readership to which Wood refers.

Then again, just reading some of the summaries for seminal film theory essays contained in the anthology Film Theory and Criticism (ed. Braudy and Cohen) gets me extremely excited. I’m anxious to jump into them.

Do you have a link to the full article or is it print only? I’d like to get a more specific idea of the type of theory Wood laments.

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GringoTex
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#17 Post by GringoTex » Sat Jun 11, 2005 7:27 am

I intended a challenge to what has been for the past few decades the dominant modes and concerns of academic film study, specifically its overwhelming emphasis on theory. I believe that our primary concern should be with the specific work, its meaning, the kind and degree of its achievement, its place within the history of our culture, in short its value. If theory can help us towards this end, well and good, but it should accept its role as relatively humble and supportive. One consequence of its dominance has been in my view disastrous: it has been responsible for finally destroying the always precarious continuity between academia and a more general readership, a wider public with a serious interest in the arts and specifically in film. In effect it has left criticism to the weekly reviewers.
Good for Robin Wood. I knew him back in the mid-90s when he was on the fence regarding current academic film study, and am glad he decided to jump down firmly on the rights side with both feet.
duane hall wrote:In response to Godot's incitement of discussion on that Robin Wood snippet...

Discussing specific works is great, but I feel that such discussions should be a jumping off point for examining more pervasive cultural issues. Some theory is necessary to elucidate the ways in which a particular film acts on the viewer as a piece of media in today?s culture. And the latter dynamic is, to me, the most important element we can consider.
Of course cinema studies must necessarily relate to culture at large, but why treat it as a subsidiary of general media theory? What's happened in film studies departments at most universities is that textual analysis, canon-building, and film history has all but disappeared. They are graduating students who can wax poetic about the grand ideological effect of cinema reception in a mass capitalism setting without having the slightest clue about why Griffith invented the close-up.
duane hall wrote:I want accessible analysis of works of art to be a means of discussing theories of culture and mediation.
This approach is fine but it doesn't belong in the cinema studies department. That's why other departments (English, Liberal Arts, Japanese, German, etc.) offer film courses- so that cinema can be studied in the context of some broader cultural concern. But film departments should concentrate on cinema as a specific medium. They should be educating students to be film experts- not critical/cultural experts.
duane hall wrote:Do you have a link to the full article or is it print only? I?d like to get a more specific idea of the type of theory Wood laments.
Check out Film Quarterly, Bright Lights Film Journal, or Cinema Journal for they type of theory Wood is lamenting.

For a brilliant attack on this type of theory, check out Bordell and Carroll's Post-Theory.

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#18 Post by leo goldsmith » Sat Jun 11, 2005 10:31 am

Langlois68 wrote:Good for Robin Wood. I knew him back in the mid-90s when he was on the fence regarding current academic film study, and am glad he decided to jump down firmly on the rights side with both feet.
This has really been the tendency in cinema studies for a long time now, though. Wood is hardly proposing a radical new direction for cinema studies. At the recent cinema studies conference in London in March of this year, only a very small percentage of the papers presented were theory papers, where in the past they would have been the majority.
Langlois68 wrote:What's happened in film studies departments at most universities is that textual analysis, canon-building, and film history has all but disappeared.
I don't think this is true, at least not widely. Textual analysis and film history are surely emphasized; canon-building, for whatever that's worth, is regarded suspiciously (as it should be), but mostly tacitly accepted.
Langlois68 wrote:This approach is fine but it doesn't belong in the cinema studies department. That's why other departments (English, Liberal Arts, Japanese, German, etc.) offer film courses- so that cinema can be studied in the context of some broader cultural concern. But film departments should concentrate on cinema as a specific medium. They should be educating students to be film experts- not critical/cultural experts.
I think they need to do both. For my money (and indeed I am paying a lot for my education), textual analysis on its own isn't worth very much without a broader cultural/historical perspective. In order to understand in any fundamental way the meaning, impact, and importance of a certain period of, say, Chinese cinema, or even a single Chinese film, one has to understand the broader cultural and historical context in which that film or set of films was made. This is not say that one can throw any and every cultural theory from the last hundred years at it, but rather that one approaches texts through research and scholarship that is sensitive to the particularities of the texts themselves. This is generally the direction that cinema studies has taken in the last few years and I think it's mostly the right one.

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GringoTex
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#19 Post by GringoTex » Sat Jun 11, 2005 11:14 am

leo goldsmith wrote: At the recent cinema studies conference in London in March of this year, only a very small percentage of the papers presented were theory papers, where in the past they would have been the majority.

I don't think this is true, at least not widely. Textual analysis and film history are surely emphasized; canon-building, for whatever that's worth, is regarded suspiciously (as it should be), but mostly tacitly accepted.
That's good news. I left film academia in 1998, and Grand Theory (along with reception studies) was dominant. I'm glad to hear that it's swung back the other way.

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Gregory
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#20 Post by Gregory » Thu Jun 16, 2005 10:23 am

Some comments about Robin Wood, CineAction, and the question of theory in film writing:
Wood is probably my favorite film critic. His writing has explored with great insight and depth the social/political dimension that I believe is vital to really understanding most films and the context in which they were made, which is so lacking or undeveloped in the writings of so many others. And perhaps more importantly for his readers, his writing is stimulating, accessible, clear, and contains infectious enthusiasm and personal feeling. I can't help feeling a bit dismayed that in his endeavor to write novels (none of which have seen print) he chose to stop writing film books altogether at the very peak of his powers. I hope the publishers at BFI will be able to coax a few more extended essays from him for their series, at the least.

CineAction isn't "Wood's," it's an entire collective of which he is just one part. Sometimes he contributes several articles to a single issue, but usually he is not the predominating influence. Unfortunately, it's not an easy magazine to find. (Some Borders stores might have it; I don't shop there.) The articles are not available free online anywhere. Most libraries are unlikely to have it, even university libraries unless they have some kind of film studies program. For those who have read it and liked it, the best ways to keep getting it are probably to subscribe or urge local libraries to order it. I'm convinced that it's accessible and thought-provoking enough that it could develop really significant readership if more people knew about it and had access to it.

Finally, I think the question about theory is: to what extent can theory be explored without introducing so much esoteric language that people outside of specialized academic programs are shut out? I believe that all writing, and thus all film writing, contains theory. It's just that most of the time the writer doesn't bring it to the surface or explore it, and may not even have a conscious understanding of it. Most film reviewers, for example, make all sorts of theoretical assumptions that often result in very tedious viewpoints and arguments that are so loosely structured that if you touch them they fall apart. The best film critics have a solid understanding of whatever theory is in their view most relevant to theit subject and will explore it as needed in the aid of a broader project of conveying something more fundamentally important to readers in terms that will be meaningful to them. The writing can be accessible because it contains some theory but is not about the theory. This is what I believe many academic film scholars have failed to do. Perhaps there used to be a time when the more esoteric writing by scholars provided a topos or "place" from which more accesible writers (critics and reviewers) could approach films for different but related purposes. However, it seems to me that in the last couple of decades, there has been a huge gulf between the two areas of writing. This is part of a more general trend toward specialization and esotericism in the Anglo-American humanities and social sciences, which in my view was largely a result of the vast influences of continental theory.

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duane hall
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#21 Post by duane hall » Thu Jun 16, 2005 3:35 pm

Excellent post, Gregory. I should check out Wood, especially after hearing of his "infectious enthusiasm and personal feeling," characteristics unfortunately absent from so much serious writing (perhaps because those warm elements doesn't convey the sense of detached Cool too many writers require of themselves), and characteristics I'd like to permeate my own writing and conversation. And I agree that theory needs not be alienating, so long as it is treated as means to more comprehensive understanding and not an end in itself. Hell, we all seem to agree on that in this thread! It's really up to intelligent writers with an appreciation for theory to introduce the ideas of theory more accessibly since, given the exclusiveness of high academia, the writers brought up in such esoteric schools are not going to "dumb down" (as they may unfortunately see it) to a more general readership. It's great to hear others concerned about this.

Also, thanks Langlois and Leo for filling in some of the gaps in my conception of these film theory debates.

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#22 Post by swingo » Thu Jun 16, 2005 5:12 pm

I for one, always go back to "L'Homme a la Camera" by Néstor Almendros, one of the greatest DP's of all time. and for Cinema History in Spanish,I found excellent the Román Gubern's "Historia Del Cine", very concise thoughtful book.

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Gregory
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#23 Post by Gregory » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:10 pm

After lavishing such praise on Wood, I want to point out that having a favorite anything can be limiting. I'm very skeptical of gurus and idols, so I'd never want to be a Wood acolyte. I couldn't be one anyway because I disagree with him about many of the things he writes and believes. Furthermore, there are many films I love, even entire traditions of film and regions of the film-producing world that I am fascinated by but in which he has expressed no interest or appreciation.
Anyway, I don't like to read any analysis of a film until I've seen it and thought it through for myself. I also seek out as many differing analyses as I can and read them charitably. Still, having done all that and in spite of the differences I've cited, I usually find myself not only agreeing with Wood's views but feeling in some ways an affinity for the way he thinks and writes. In other ways, again, we differ quite a bit.

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zedz
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#24 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:24 pm

Gregory wrote:However, it seems to me that in the last couple of decades, there has been a huge gulf between the two areas of writing. This is part of a more general trend toward specialization and esotericism in the Anglo-American humanities and social sciences, which in my view was largely a result of the vast influences of continental theory.
I think that the primary function of far too much literary and film theory nowadays is not to illuminate the ostensible object of study, but to perpetuate the theory (and, moreover, to perpetuate the academic careers fuelled by the theory).

For me, theory ceases to be of any interest once it ceases to operate as a useful tool for understanding actual works. Partly that's to do with the conceptual content, but partly that's to do with language - if the vocabulary of the theory has become so esoteric that its meaning can no longer be communicated to the uninitiated, the chances of it actually being able to perform its supposed explicatory function is remote. Of course, the use of exclusionary language is another tried-and-true strategy for perpetuating academic careers.

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duane hall
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#25 Post by duane hall » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:50 pm

No worries, Gregory. I'm sure none of us equated your enthusiasm for Wood with unconditional fanboyishness. What's most important, of course, is not that we agree with everything a critic purports, but that the writing encourages and deepens our engagement with the medium or specific work. And that idea certainly came across in your post.

And Zedz, that was an eloquent of summation of what's been on more than a few of our minds.

I don't mean to sound like a cheerleader, I'm just encouraged by a kind of synergy of sensibility I've felt recently among some of my friends and now here with some of you in this thread.

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