The magic of the silent screen, illuminated by the recollections of those who created it.A narrative and photographic history of the early days of the movies, combining fact, anecdote, and reminiscence in a critical survey of films, actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, technicians, and other participants and hangers-on.

    Screenplay for the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

    His delightful biography conveys the warmth and humor of the much-loved duo whose hilarious escapades convulsed a generation of movie-goers and have now won a new world-wide audience on the TV screen.

    Sarris's The American Cinema, the bible of auteur studies, is a history of American film in the form of a lively guide to the work of two hundred film directors, from Griffith, Chaplin, and von Sternberg to Mike Nichols, Stanley Kubrick, and Jerry Lewis. In addition, the book includes a chronology of the most important American films, an alphabetical list of over 6000 films with their directors and years of release, and the seminal essays "Toward a Theory of Film History" and "The Auteur Theory Revisited." Over twenty-five years after its initial publication, The American Cinema remains perhaps the most influential book ever written on the subject.

    

    Critical study of the great director & surrealist. Covers his films from his early collaboration with Salvador Dali up to Belle De Jour. Illustrated throughout with memorable stills. Includes filmography and bibliography.

    The book, Tarzan of the Apes, was an immediate sensation and paved its author's way to subsequent wealth and fame as the creator of this tree-swinging jungle man. On January 27, 1918, the film version of Tarzan of the Apes opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York with Elmo Lincoln starring as Tarzan, and another immediate success was scored. There have since been forty Tarzan films produced, and fourteen different actors have donned the loincloth to appear as Tarzan in the movies. A fifteenth Tarzan, Ron Ely, now appears in the Tarzan television serial. Tarzan of the Movies is the exciting account of these Tarzan films, which have amassed a gross of over five hundred million dollars during their more than fifty years of existence. The volume is a history in depth of the Tarzan epic, and reveals the backstage machinations in the production of each Tarzan pictures; the rivalry between various film-makers for film rights to the Apeman; and the sometimes hilarious, and sometimes tragic, events that took place during production; there are profiles of all the actors who have essayed the role of Apeman and comparisons of their approaches to the role. More than four hundred pictures, some of them extremely rare, appear throughout the text. Tarzan of the Movies may be read for pure pleasure or studied by film buffs as an invaluable record of an aspect of a half-century of film-making."

    

    Richard Roud's seminal study of the director Jean-Luc Godard places the director in the context of modern European cinema, on which Godard's work has been hugely influential, and considers Godard's 'political' cinema, including the ferocious masterpiece 'Weekend'.  This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Temple.

    The film-makers were two teenagers (18 and 16) and they started out with no budget and a borrowed 16 mm camera. The project took 8 years to complete. Part of the book is a humorous and detailed account of how the boys overcame all the practical and financial hurdles of amateur film making and saw the project through to completion and national release. This in itself would qualify the book as a thoroughly entertaining read and a sound basis for a course in film making or media studies of any kind. But this was no ordinary film. Kevin and his co-director Andrew Mollo took as their theme the "what if?" idea of a conquered and occupied England, after a hypothetical defeat and invasion following the Dunkirk retreat. As they grew up with the project and developed their own political understanding the film departed from its "war adventure" origins and developed into a low key and terrifying Orwellian fantasy confronting its audience with the detailed reality of life under Fascism, darkened by all the moral compromise that is forced on everyone who wants to survive under such a regime. It Happened Here is a provocative and challenging film that demands of everyone who sees it "What would I have done?." The British people had never before been able to imagine with such clarity the fate that they had so narrowly (some would say, unaccountably) avoided. A nation lulled by Churchillian rhetoric into complacent self-satisfaction was shaken more than anyone could have foreseen by this vision of what might havebeen. But in telling his story Kevin had allowed genuine British Fascists to speak their mind, and therein lies the starting point of the second part of the book, the battle to confront the misunderstanding and hostility of Jewish organisations and other well-meaning people who had failed to appreciate the irony of Kevin's allowing the Fascists to be themselves in front of his camera. The six minute sequence became more famous than the film itself, a symbol of every serious artist's struggle with the forces of censorship and narrow-mindedness. The story of Kevin's attempts to overcome the wall of misunderstanding that stood between the completed film and its general release touch on just about every issue of artistic freedom and will serve as an inspiration to anybody who believes in free speech and the other things that distinguish England as it is from England as it might have been. Arguably Kevin and his film have never been fully accepted and his career has never completely recovered from this early brush with the arbiters of artistic good taste and the boundary setters of what we may and may not say. But what he did say was profoundly worth saying. Almost thirty-five years after its initial publication this book has lost none of its impact, freshness and relevance. And none of its quietly understated humour. The UKA Press is privileged to be entrusted with its re-issue. (The book contains almost 100 pictures, mostly stills from the film, and an introduction by David Robinson)